Barefoot Brides (18 page)

Suddenly Kate didn't care about the stares, either.

“Oh, Vince!” She threw her arms around him.

“Is that a yes?” the same person wanted to know.

“Yes,” she murmured into his ear for him alone before she pulled away from him and shouted for all to hear, “Yes!”

A cheer went up.

The pianist played the opening chords of “The Wedding March.”

Travis held his hands up to get everyone's attention. “Before we sing our opening hymn, let's all join in a moment of prayer for the happy couple.”

The happy couple. At last.

They prayed together and when they raised their voices to sing, Kate looked up at Vince.

He slipped his arm around her waist and smiled at her.

She stole a peek at Moxie and mouthed a thank-you.

Moxie touched two fingers to her lips and blew her a kiss just the way an adoring kid sister would to her big sister.

Kate grinned and when her gaze fell on Travis she thought of Jo. Then she thought of Moxie and their mom wanting to find a way to reach out to the middle Cromwell sister and hopefully bring her home. Suddenly Kate wanted that, too, more than anything.

And she had an idea how to nudge that along.

T
he open house started in less than an hour.

Jo had planned to arrive much earlier but when she got up this morning she'd felt the tug to go to church. Her intellect kept nagging: too much to do, too little time. But her heart listened to another voice. That voice convinced her with the reminder that she could never hope to make a fresh start if she fell back into serving her old priorities.

So she made time to attend her former church and trusted the rest of her dealings, with debt, Mike Powers and the house, would wait.

After that, she had made a quick stop at a grocery store to pick up a tube of cookie dough. It was an old Realtor trick and one she normally didn't employ, but with the house devoid of anything but the basic furnishings that she could beg or borrow on short notice, she really needed something to give the place a homey touch.

Of course in doing all this she had forgotten about Atlanta traffic, which wasn't too awfully bad on a Sunday, and hadn't accounted for the distance. She'd spent the past two months living in a small town that only took a matter of minutes to move through and had lost her edge for driving in a real city.

Jo pulled to a stop by the large sign at the entrance to the subdivision. She'd just get the signage up to advertise the open house then get down to the property to bake the cookies and see to any last-minute…

“Balloons?” Jo pulled up short just inches shy of tripping over the familiar Mike Powers Realty open house sign. The sign that had not been there when she finally dragged herself away from working on the house at 2:00 a.m. this morning. She had neither placed it there nor authorized anyone else to put it in the common area to lead people to the house she so needed to sell.

“This can't be right.” She stood back to check the street address again. It was her house all right. “What's going on here?”

She didn't know, but the suspicions it aroused in her made her stomach hurt.

She hurried back to her car and wound her way back through the upscale new subdivision to the house where she had spent almost every waking hour since returning to Atlanta. She parked in front and took a cautious look around before getting out from behind the wheel.

No cars in the drive. No sign of anyone on the premises. Nothing amiss at all, except…

Jo squinted at the door. She was sure she had locked up using the standard key box that Powers Realty kept on all its houses. Someone must have come by, posted the sign, gone in the house and left it unlocked.

“Not good.” She took out her phone. Maybe Mike could clear things up. Though, if Mike knew anything, surely he'd have let her know. “Not good at all.”

She glanced at her phone and hoped she'd find an explanation waiting for her in her messages.

She pushed the button and all thoughts of explanations fell away.

“Travis,” she whispered. One. Two. Three. Four. Five missed calls but only one voice mail.

“Hey, Jo. Just wanted to call and tell you…I miss you. I mean, I…I really miss you.”

She bit her lower lip but she could not rein in a broad, spontaneous smile.

“Anyway, there's more than just that but it's not ‘leave a message and get back to me' kind of stuff. I'll try to call again. I can't wait to talk to you.”

She brushed her fingertip down the face of her phone. “I can't wait to talk to you, either.”

Which made it all the more imperative that she get this house sold and get back to her real life. She put her hand on the driver's-side door handle and paused long enough to check her phone for any other messages. Not a one.

She got out of the car, fished her supplies out of the backseat and marched up to the door. She had a spare key but for her own satisfaction she had to try to turn the handle. It would be locked. She knew it.

The handle turned without a hint of resistance.

Jo gasped.

The heavy door swung open.

She held her phone up, trying to think who to call for help, or
if
she should call for help.

A shaft of sunlight hit the gleaming tile floor and created an almost-blinding glare into which stepped…

“Oh!”

“What are you doing opening the door at my open house?”

“I thought you were Brittney,” the young girl explained.

“I thought
you
were Brittney.” Jo didn't know
which
Brittney but she felt certain it was one of Mike's eager young protégés.

“I
am,
” the girl explained. “I thought you were the other Brittney.”

“Why in the world would you think that?” Jo asked.

“Because
I'm
here.”
Duh.
She didn't say that, or whatever young women her age said now to make it clear they are less than impressed with someone, but her expression got the point across.

Jo folded her arms. She'd gone through too much, paid far too many dues in this business to find herself cowed by a younger, less polite version of herself circa ten years ago. She stepped over the threshold. “Just tell me why you're here.”

“Mike set it up for us. He said we could use the practice.” Brittney gave the door a push and it closed with a bang. “We've done all the prep work and Brittney will be here any minute with our handouts on this place.”

“First, you did not do all the prep work on this house. I have been here nonstop since I got here.” Jo winced. Even Brittney had to know what she'd meant by that.

“Oh, yeah? Well…” Jo imagined hearing the little marble that rolled along the tracks of the kid's train of thought sliding from one side of her brain to the other. “Yeah, well, so have I,” Brittney insisted.

If Jo had had a free hand she'd have rubbed her forehead. Not that the action would ease the slow throbbing beginning to build behind her eyes but it might send a signal to the girl that she had reached the end of her patience. The stress of all this had definitely begun to get to her.

“Only I got here first.” Yes, it came out sounding childish, but Jo didn't care. She did not miss a step, just swept onward clutching her grocery bag and satchel in one hand and her keys and phone in the other. She still had so much left to do before people started showing up.
If
people started showing up.

She had worked so hard, spending money she didn't really have in order to get this place ready, but with no promise she would have any interest at all any time soon. Still, she had to try. She had to take care of things. She glanced down at the phone again then at Brittney, tagging along behind her. “Mike's arrangements for you to practice on this open house were made before I came back. Now—”

“No, they weren't.”

Jo froze. “What do you mean?”

“Brittney and I talked to him this morning and Mike said we should come ahead and do the open house. He mentioned you were all religious and wouldn't work on a Sunday so it wouldn't step on your toes.”

“Step on my toes?”

“Yeah, I thought that was a weird thing to say, too. I mean, if you aren't even here, how could we step on your…Hey, great shoes!”

Jo glanced down at the peep-toe black with white trim Italian leather pumps she had slipped on just to give her a confidence boost for this open house. She'd found them among her things in the storage unit she and Kate and their mom had rented for things they hadn't been able to get to Santa Sofia yet. She hadn't gone there looking for shoes or for remnants of her life in Atlanta. She'd gone to see what she could make use of to decorate the house, but when she'd seen the neat little stacks of boxes, all sporting the labels of really expensive shoes, she'd given into temptation and donned a pair.

“Thank you,” she murmured, not above pointing her toe and rolling her ankle to one side to show every angle of her prized footwear.

“You must have made a ton of money doing this.” Brittney's eyes glittered with newfound respect.

“Uh-huh.” She let out a nervous but pleased-with-herself laugh. No harm in taking credit for years of hard work, she thought.

“Then why'd you leave?”

Jo pulled her foot in, took a breath and reached for her satchel. “Because while I may have made a ton of money, I lost a whole lot more than that.”

“Yeah, the stories about
this
money pit are, like, legendary.” The girl retreated to clear the way for Jo to walk past.

Jo stopped and met this Brittney eye to eye. “When I said I lost more I didn't mean money. Oh, not that I didn't lose a lot of that. Technically, because I'm in debt, I'm still losing money on this property.”

“That's lousy luck.”

“I don't believe in luck, Brittney. Everyone thinks I was blindsided by the foundering housing market, but I got in this mess all by myself.”

“Talk around the office is there are others you could blame.”

“No.” Jo shook her head. “I have to take responsibility. I got greedy, and not for money. I got greedy to
be
somebody.”

“You?” She looked completely baffled by the revelation. “You are somebody. You were, like, in magazines and on billboards.”

“That wasn't me, Brittney.”

“It wasn't?”

“Not the real me.” Jo put her hand to her chest. “The real me is a geeky, lonely kid who just wanted people to like her. If not like her then at least
notice
her.” She put her hand on the shoulder of the pretty young woman. “Not that I think you'll understand that.”

The girl's whole demeanor softened toward Jo. Her gaze dropped for a second, she fiddled with her hair before looking Jo in the eyes and saying, “Oh, I understand.”

“You do?”

“I worked as a receptionist for a competing Realty company ever since I got out of high school. When you're a receptionist you kind of become invisible to people, especially successful people and stressed-out people. You probably don't know how
that
feels.”

Jo couldn't recall ever feeling any other way. Oh, wait, yes, she could.

When Travis looked at her.

“You'd be surprised what I know, Brittney.” She gave the girl's shoulder a squeeze then dropped her hand.

She smiled a bit shyly then raised one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “Anyway, when you're invisible like that, people say things in front of you like you weren't even there.”

Jo nodded.

“You see their mail. You know who calls them and how often.” She licked her lips and glanced out the still-open front door nervously. “You figure out things.”

“Ah.” She was trying to tell Jo something. She suddenly felt bad about her private joke about that lone marble. “What have you figured out, Brittney?”

“That you'd better watch out for Mr. Powers.”

That sent a chill through Jo from her scalp to her peep-toed toes. “What do you—”

“Hey, what's going on?” The other Brittney came in with her own grocery bag dangling from her arm.

“Turn around,” the Brittney in front of Jo told the Brittney behind her. “We're not staying.”

“We're not? Why not?” The other one wanted to know.

“Because it's not our house to show.” Brittney pointed firmly toward the door.

“But this was going to be our lucky break.” The protest came back over the sound of a plastic grocery sack crinkling.

“I don't believe in luck.” Brittney looked directly at Jo. “We were sent out here for some reason that had nothing to do with getting a break. In fact, I think we've been used, Britt.”

“So? That's part of the game, right?”

“If we want to get into real estate, we should take responsibility for ourselves and do this right.”

“We did it right.” The protest took on a whiny tone.

“Oh, come on!” Brittney put her hands on her slender hips. “I worked six weeks as a receptionist for Powers Realty then the big boss says he thinks I can do more, he hires you and two weeks later with only a few hours of training we're showing the business's biggest problem property?”

The other girl's eyes narrowed. She tipped her heart-shaped chin up. “He said we could be somebody.”

Jo looked at the girl in front of her and smiled. “Does he have that printed on his business cards?”

Brittney giggled.

“Thanks, kiddo.” Jo set her things on the floor, stepped forward and gave the young woman a quick hug. “I won't ask you to tell me more. You still need a job in the morning.”

“I will. But that doesn't mean I won't start looking for another one as soon as I can.” Brittney hugged her back.

“If you need shoes to give you confidence for the job hunt, give me a call.”