Barefoot Brides Page 5

  Chapter Five

  “May not be much of a journalist, but you’ve got to respect his style.” Vince chuckled softly as he leaned against the doorway of her mostly empty office in the Urgent Care Clinic. He’d come by a little early to pick up Kate from her shift and had invited her to dinner.

  Though she had closed her practice in Atlanta, signed the contracts and written the check to make herself a partner in the lone emergency medical facility in town, Kate had not started to work at the place full-time. With possible surgeries pending, it seemed best to only keep part-time hours for a while. So she just filled in now and then for Lionel or the residents from the hospital in nearby Waverly, earning a few extra bucks.

  “You should have seen the look on Moxie’s face.” Vince shook his head, still smiling. “I love your little sister like, well, a little sister, but when she gets worked up over something—or worked up over almost nothing at all, like today—she is her father’s daughter. Billy J’s daughter, I mean.”

  Kate nodded. Moxie. Sister. Billy J. She pretended it all registered, when in fact she used the time he was talking to study the deep lines fanning out from the corners of Vince’s compelling eyes.

  She had seen the beginnings of those lines nearly twenty years ago when they had first fallen in love. She found it funny in a not-laugh-out-loud, not-quite-peculiar way to see the way time had treated the man without the benefit of experiencing all that time with him. It had the effect of a before-and-after photo, or maybe more like when a favorite old TV show from childhood gathered the “old gang” for a reunion show.

  She hated those shows. She hated the idea of having lost out on so much time then being expected to pick up and care about those characters again as if they had always been there in TV Land going on with their lives. But she fell for it every time. Probably because it was the one thing she wanted most in her own life—a second chance to get it right.

  “Kate?”

  “Hmm.” She shook her head. Hearing her name snapped her back to the present. The conversation replayed quickly in her mind. Vince had told her a story about Moxie and the Bait Shack because…“We’re not eating at the Bait Shack tonight, are we?”

  “What gave you that idea? Oh!” He laughed again. “No. No, no Bait Shack tonight. Tonight we’re having dinner someplace very special.”

  “Oh?” Dinner? Special? A mental red flag went up. If this were one of those cheesy reunion shows, that would mean something. That would mean something in the very most meaningful of ways, she thought to herself in her old reliable Scat-Kat Katie way, careful to avoid even the hint of a mention of possible commitment and the prospect of making a future together. “That’s nice.”

  Pause. Remain poised. Don’t read too much into this. She fussed with a stack of forms on her desk before looking up at him again and trying to sound totally devoid of any expectation as she said, “Where…”

  Her uncharacteristically high-pitched voice broke. She blushed and cleared her throat, then tried again. “Where do you plan to take me for dinner?”

  “Chez Merchant.”

  She’d been absent from Santa Sofia for a long time but it was a small enough place that she had learned every eatery in it and in Waverly, a town forty miles away, in the two months since her return. She crinkled up her nose. “I don’t know that.”

  “My place?”

  “Oh! Your…We’re eating dinner at your place. Um, eating in at your place. Your house. Your home.”

  Kate hadn’t been to his house. He’d always come up to hers, which made sense, what with Kate’s injured foot limiting her mobility and comfort levels. Besides, Vince’s son Gentry and his family lived right across the street.

  Vince’s house. It felt like a big move forward in their relationship. A good move. Her stomach did a little flip-flop. She reined in her reaction and went back to shuffling those forms. “Yeah, okay, sounds great.”

  “Glad you like it.”

  Another shuffle through. Her whole body tingled with the urge to ask him why he wanted to take her to his home now. Why tonight? And what made it special? What she asked instead was, “What’s to eat?”

  “Uh…I hadn’t…It’s a…It’s a surprise.”

  “A surprise?” For her or him? He obviously didn’t want to tell her so she tried another approach that might give her a clue about the evening. “What inspired this?”

  He looked at her as though she had just walked into the conversation. “Your sister.”

  Kate felt as though she’d just walked into the conversation. “Jo?”

  “Moxie.”

  “Moxie told you to have me over for dinner?”

  “No, she spoiled my lunch.”

  “What?”

  “The story I just told you? About her showing up at the Bait Shack? Then this Hunt fellow horns in, too? Tells her if she doesn’t like his story to write her own? If she wants to talk about it further to see him at his office because he’s on lunch break? Any of this ringing a bell?”

  “Most of it.” She didn’t want to admit she’d only been half listening to what he was saying because she’d been too busy admiring the lines in his face, daydreaming about old TV shows and obsessing about whether or not he would ever propose to her again. “But I don’t see what it has to do with eating at your place.”

  “You left out two important words. Eating in peace at my place. This relationship between us is so…” He raised his hand.

  It was a good hand. Calloused and tanned. Rugged and a little scarred, but with short, clean nails that showed his attention to detail. Kate liked those hands. She’d like them better if there was a wedding ring on the third finger of the left one.

  Wait.

  This relationship between us is so…

  What? She’d gotten so distracted looking at the man she had lost track of listening to him.

  He tilted his raised hand back and forth rather than say more. So, before she could stop herself, she said more. “So what? Rocky? Unsteady? Iffy?”

  The second the words came out she regretted them and slapped her hand over her mouth as if she could push them back inside and trap them there.

  That only made Vince laugh again. Then he shook his head and said, “None of the above, but still, I don’t want to leave it open to public scrutiny—and in a town this size, there isn’t anywhere to go that’s not ‘public’ or anything better for people to do than scrutinize.”

  She sat back in her seat. “And you think the two of us spending the evening at your house won’t set people talking?”

  He tapped the side of his head. “I’ve thought of a way to elevate it above all that.”

  That piqued her curiosity. An engagement announcement, or that golden wedding band, would both be excellent ways to quell any idle talk. She folded her hands on top of her desk. Cool, collected and coy, she used all her communication skills to say, “Oh?”

  His grin broke slowly but spread to include a glint in his eyes and to bring out those laugh lines in full force.

  Kate could barely contain herself. The man might just throw his plans out the window and propose right here and now. She pivoted her chair around just in case he wanted to drop to his knee in front of her.

  He pushed away from the door frame and took a step toward her, then said, “We’ll have a chaperone.”

  “A…what?” She almost fell forward at that and had to grab the edge of the desk to keep from swiveling herself around to face the back wall.

  “A very short chaperone who goes to bed early, and doesn’t know enough words to tell everyone in town our business yet.”

  “Oh.” She eased out a long breath and scooted her chair back under the desk. “We’re babysitting Fabiola.”

  “Gentry is dropping her off at six-thirty. They have some kind of dinner with a relative of Esperanza’s from Miami. Do you mind?”

  An evening at home with Vince and the darling grandchild he adored. It wasn’t what she had envisioned, but compared to all the evenings
she had spent alone or on dates or business dinners when she couldn’t wait to be alone again? “It sounds wonderful. I can’t wait.”

  So maybe she wouldn’t have her proposal tonight. It would still be sweet to share an evening of domestic tranquility with Vince. Just the two of them…and his grandchild…and the great, unspoken, unsettled question that she didn’t dare broach and he didn’t seem ready to ask hovering in the air all around them.

  Oh, yeah, tonight was going to be wonderful indeed.

  Chapter Six

  Vince’s house was small. It had probably once been a vacation home, built as little more than a place to sleep and change and eat, if that eating didn’t require any fancy maneuvers or large appliances in the kitchen. It still had that feel to it. As if whoever occupied it had never really made it home. As if, at the end of a long tourist season, or if, given any reason at all to move along, whoever lived in the place could pack up and go in a matter of hours.

  Yet Vince had clearly lived here a very long time.

  Kate could tell that with just a glance through the living room. The coatrack hung inside the door at the perfect height for Vince to hang his handyman’s tool belt when he came home after work. The furniture was clean but worn, a sure sign of a single dad now living alone who did not entertain much.

  Then, there was the kitchen. Too small for a larger family to have put up with for very long, the door frame bore the marks of Gentry’s growth year by year. Starting at age six.

  Kate held her breath for a moment. Six. She’d known him at that age, at the size indicated by the mark on the door frame.

  “Did you move into this place just after—” She cut herself off suddenly, embarrassingly aware what she blurted out next might stir up a whole hornets’ nest of hard feelings.

  “Just after you ran off?” he finished for her.

  Ouch. She dipped her head slightly and stared at her paper plate piled with fried samplings from the Bait Shack—Vince’s “surprise” dinner arrangements. “I was going to say after we broke up.”

  “Did we break up, Kate?” He pushed away his own plate, now just picked-over slaw, a corncob and grease stains. He appeared more thoughtful than anything else, but there was an edge to his words that challenged her. “That’s not how I remember it.”

  “We’ve gone over this before, Vince.” She took up his plate and laid it on top of hers, literally signaling an end to the meal and figuratively trying to tell him she had had enough of this conversation.

  What was there to talk about anyway?

  It had all happened so fast. Over the course of one long summer when Kate had come to stay at her family’s summer cottage after college. Vince was older, already a father and widowed since six-year-old Gentry had been an infant.

  He doted on the boy then. Still did, and he indulged and overprotected him. A habit he had only just committed to stop as he now saw it had done the kid more harm than good.

  The romance between Kate and Vince had been brief but intense and before the summer had ended not only had Vince proposed but Gentry had begun to look to her as a mother figure.

  A mother! Kate? Good ol’ Scat-Kat Katie? The girl who had always blamed herself for not telling her mother immediately the night the girl’s father had kidnapped baby Moxie? No way. She wasn’t ready. Not to make that kind of leap for a relationship so new, so untried.

  No, Kate was unprepared to accept the responsibility of marriage and motherhood. She feared her own shortcomings would bring more pain and disappointment to those she loved and that another child, Gentry, would suffer heartbreak and disappointment if she failed. Or rather, if she failed again.

  That seemed a lifetime ago. Certainly most of Gentry’s lifetime. If only Vince could move past it. If only he could believe how much she had grown.

  “I can’t keep going over the past. We can’t. Not if we hope to build any kind of future together.”

  “We can’t fool ourselves and pretend it never happened, either, Kate. I don’t know about you but I can’t watch every word I say to try to skirt around the truth, and I don’t think I can have a relationship where that is a requirement before we can build a future together.”

  Kate raised her chin, ready to protest that she did not intend for them to skirt around the truth. Then she recalled how they had gotten into this conversation, when she had kept herself from stirring up the past. She bowed her head, shaking it, and laughed at the irony of it all.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked, his smile tentative but encouraging as he lowered his own head to try to duck down and find her gaze.

  “I am,” she said. “This is.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really,” she admitted. “It’s just, you have to laugh sometimes, don’t you? At all of this? At how hard we try not to hurt one another’s feelings by not bringing up how much we hurt one another’s feelings?”

  “Did I hurt your feelings, Kate?” He tipped his head to one side as though honestly struggling to remember a specific incident or transgression. “You never told me that before. All those years ago, was it something I said? Something I did?”

  “Yes.” They had been through this before, but not quite like this. Not in a quiet moment, just the two of them sitting over a dinner table talking like old friends. Talking as if whatever they said would not come between them but was just part of who they were, who they had been, who they hoped to be.

  “What, Kate?” He reached out and took her hand in his, turning it over so that the palm rested upward. “What did I say? What did I do?”

  “You said you loved me and you asked me to marry you.”

  “I remember.” He stared at her a moment and when she didn’t say more he stroked her hand from her wrist to her fingertips then looked her deep in the eyes and asked, “And that hurt your feelings and sent you running?”

  “No.” She closed her hand and gave his strong fingers a squeeze. “That scared me witless and that sent me running.”

  He held her gaze.

  “I sent myself running,” she confessed. “I grew up in a family where nothing, not even love, it seemed, was permanent. I’d seen the devastation of a failed marriage and felt the anguish of losing one parent who left and losing a part of the parent who stayed behind.”

  “You thought our marriage would fail?”

  “It all felt so rushed.”

  “You could have asked me for more time.”

  “What about Gentry? Could I have asked him for more time? Could I have asked a six-year-old to hold his feelings in check, to not get his hopes up that he’d finally have his dream of a regular family until I was sure things would work out between us?”

  Vince looked away at last.

  He couldn’t argue with that. The man had all but ordered his entire life around taking care of his son. He could not find fault with her for having done the same, no matter how much it had cost them both.

  “But that was then.” She reached out and took his hand in both of hers. “And Gentry is a grownup with a baby of his own and I’m—”

  “Anyone home? Dad? Your favorite grandbaby is in the house!” Gentry’s voice startled them both.

  Kate jerked her hands away.

  Vince jumped up out of his seat. “We’re in the kitchen. Come on in!”

  He took a step toward the door, in a hurry to get to his son and grandchild, then paused, turned back, took Kate’s hand again and kissed it. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?”

  It wasn’t until she nodded and mouthed “okay” back to him that he let go of her and went through the door and into the living room to greet Gentry and Fabbie.

  “Later,” she whispered. They would talk later. They would resolve old issues later. He would propose…when?

  “Soon.” Kate lifted her eyes to heaven and poured her heart into the simplest and most sincere prayer she could offer. “Please?”

  “Look who’s here, Fabbie!” Vince came back through the door carrying the dark-haired little g
irl who called him “Paw-Paw.”

  “Hi, princess!” Kate gave the girl a wave. She would have liked to have taken the girl in her arms but because of her injured foot, they had all agreed they would teach the baby not to cling to, climb over or be held by Kate for now. It killed Kate, but Vince didn’t seem to mind getting to hold the child whenever Kate was around.

  To say he adored Fabbie would be totally undervaluing the concept of adoration.

  “Hi, Gentry.” Kate leaned over and extended her wave to the young man she had, until a couple of months ago, always seen as a kid with big brown eyes, curly hair and a fragile heart she didn’t dare break.

  “Hey, Kate! If we’d have known Dad planned to drag you into this, we’d have made him come to our house to put less stress on you.”

  Vince gave his son a nudge. “Having dinner with me at my house hardly qualifies as a stressful event.”

  “I meant less stress on her foot because we’d just be across the street from her house.” Gentry laughed then gave his dad a wary look. “Though now that you mention it, you didn’t cook, did you?”

  “Bait Shack takeout.” Kate lifted the edge of one of the paper plates.

  “Ah. Then, yeah, our house would have definitely caused less stress for Kate, for sure.” Another look to his dad, this time less wary and more wise to his old man’s ways. “We actually have some real food in our fridge.”

  It did her good to see the two of them together, and with little Fabbie grinning in delight between them.

  Yes, Vince had mistakenly lived his life for Gentry and she had not helped that by running away instead of staying and dealing with her issues. But she was back now. Vince loved her, and she loved him. They could talk about their past and they would find a way to get beyond it, she just knew it.

  “Anyway, I guess it’s a good thing you guys are both here.” Gentry shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He looked down.

  Vince tensed.

  But then everything Gentry did seemed to make Vince tense, as though he must stand always at the ready to rush in to the kid’s rescue.