Barefoot Brides (9 page)

“I'll stop and take your feelings into account before I do anything like that again.” Dodie gave Moxie a hug.

For the first time since she'd begun feeling hemmed in by this new situation, Moxie returned the gesture. Tentatively but without reservation. “That means a lot to me.”

Moxie let go and started to step away.

Dodie kept holding her.

Mom.
The woman clearly wanted Moxie to say, “That means a lot to me,
Mom.
”

Moxie wanted to comply but then stopped herself. Calling Dodie
Mom
was not something she could do lightly. It was, in essence, acknowledging a bond had formed between them. One of the greatest bonds in all human nature. Mother and daughter. Was Moxie ready for that?

She didn't know. That was answer enough to keep her from blurting it out just to free herself from the awkwardness of the moment.

She had promised herself she would set boundaries. She had begun that work by letting Dodie know how much her thoughtless exclusion of Moxie had hurt. The Cromwells respected her in a totally new way now. No more running roughshod over her emotions based on their own notions of family and the proper pecking order.

That made Moxie smile, her conviction that Kate and Jo and Dodie would back off a little now. They would give her room to breathe. Allow her to take her time to sort out what she wanted and how she wanted to approach things.

“Okay. Kate concurs with my diagnosis of pneumonia.” Lionel stepped into the hallway, clapping his hands together. “I'm sending him to be checked out at the hospital. Have you decided how you want to get him there?”

Moxie opened her mouth.

“I'll take him,” Dodie volunteered. “I have the most comfortable car. Y'all can come along, too. Plenty of room.”

No, there's not!
Moxie held her breath to keep from shouting it right there in the hallway. There was not enough room in the whole state of Florida if this was how Dodie planned to do things—to promise to back off and defer to Moxie one minute then the first time a decision must be made she up and says—

“Hello? I'm here.” A strong, masculine voice with a Northern accent rang out from the lobby. “Have an appointment to talk to the doctor about doing some advertising with the
Sun Times?
”

“Great!” Moxie recognized the voice and the accent immediately. Just what she needed to put the cherry on the top of this rancid ice-cream sundae of a day.

“I'll tell him you need to reschedule,” Vince said to Lionel.

“We'll all go.” Dodie turned to lead the way. “Then we can hop in our cars and caravan to the hospital.”

The whole group turned and hurried down the hallway.

Moxie looked at Lionel. “They're doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Crowding me out of my own dad's life.”

“They are just trying to be helpful.” Lionel gave her a smirk then shook his head. “You have to get your dad to the hospital and you can't use your truck. Who else are you going to rely on if not your family?”

Moxie shut her eyes. She could just imagine her old truck stalled in the road, needing help, having to rely on who knew what kind of character to…

“Leave that to me, Lionel. I have a great idea.” She hurried to cut the group off before they reached the lobby. Boundary setting in the most primitive but effective way. “Well, not a
great
idea, but it's going to have to do.”

“T
he Bait Shack does not need to run no full-page ad in the
Sun Times
to draw in customers.”

“Shh, Daddy.” Moxie gave the heavyset sixty-something man a push toward the white Mustang convertible in the parking lot. “Think of it as a goodwill gesture to thank our patrons and show support for our local paper.”

“Graft is what you mean. You offered that new editor an ad in exchange for the favor.”

“That's not exactly how I look at it.” Moxie meant that. The truth was she had always thought her father had skimped on marketing and failed to spread his success among other local businesses. “Now, do you want to sit in the front or backseat?”

Billy J jerked his arm away from Moxie's guiding hand, yanked open the door and lumbered into the backseat.

“Now I see how I came by my ‘does not play well with others' attitude toward family members,” she muttered.

“No.” Billy J held his hand up to stop her cold as she tried to climb in behind him. “I'm fine. I don't need you to ride alongside me and hold my hand like I was some tantrum-throwing kid.”

Moxie chuckled to herself, then leaned in and planted a big smacking kiss on his warm, ruddy cheek. “If I stop treating you like a tantrum-prone kid, you might stop acting like a kid, Daddy. Where would be the fun in life for me in that?”

He turned his head and smiled sweetly, his voice husky from both his sickness and sentiment as he said, “We have had a lot of fun together, haven't we, girl?”

“We sure have, Dad.”

“And nothing in the world is going to change that, right?” he asked.

“Change?” Just that quickly, Moxie realized she wasn't the only one feeling more than a little displaced by the recent Cromwell invasion. “No, Daddy, nothing in the world will ever change how I feel about you.”

“How we feel about each other,” he corrected.

She kissed his cheek again, then made sure he was buckled in before she closed the back door. She gave a wave to the cluster of people each trying to get an eyeful of her exit from behind the glass door of the clinic.

Moxie practically hopped into the front passenger seat, only to find the
Santa Sofia Sun Times
's new editor behind the steering wheel, staring at her.

“What?” she asked as she ran her curved fingers through her thick, blond hair.

“Nothing.” R. Hunt Diamante shook his head. His dark eyes—strike that, she gave herself a mental directive—his
warm brown
eyes glinted in ill-disguised delight. Charmed, no doubt, by the endearing father-daughter interaction. Or was it something more?

He probably regretted the shoddy way he'd written about her, about all of them in his haphazard article.

Moxie was a great believer in confession being good for the soul. Far be it from her then to deny the poor guy a shot at clearing his conscience and grabbing the small but satisfying slice of inner peace that would come with it.

“Aw, c'mon. It's not nothing,” she prodded. “I can tell, you've got something on your mind. You don't have to be afraid to share it with me.”

“Afraid?” The warmth in his eyes cooled considerably.

Moxie had obviously hit a nerve.

He reached for the key and started to turn it in the ignition. “Only thing I'm afraid of, sister—”

“I am not your sister.” She had hit a nerve in him and he had hit one right back in her. “I'm not sure I want to be
anybody's
sister, buddy.”

She glanced up. Her entire family stood with their noses practically pressed against the glass door like puppies in a pet-store window.

“I just wanted to make the point that—”

“Can you make your point and drive at the same time?” She slumped down in her seat and motioned toward the road. “In case you're forgotten, my father is very ill and you agreed to take him to the hospital.”

“Agreed?” Billy J practically yelped the word, then fell into a short bout of shallow coughing before he managed to rage on. “That's a pile of big, fat—”

“Daddy.”

“Parrot feathers,” he concluded. “You bargained for this service at the exorbitant rate of a full-page ad in his struggling weekly paper. I just hope he runs that paper better than he honors his commitment to drive me to the hospital.”

“Is that what you're waiting for?” She motioned to the road again. “You want payment in full up front before you'll budge an inch?”

“I wouldn't be moved a fraction of a sliver of a centimeter for all the money in the world.”

“Is that right?”

“That's right. I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do.” He backed up that claim by pulling out of the parking spot at last, handling the steering wheel with deftness and power. When he stopped to shift gears, Hunt narrowed his eyes on her. “Which, by the way, was the same reason I got out of my car to see if you needed help when I found you seemingly stranded at that stop sign the other day.”

She drew a breath, ready to give as good as she got. “What are you talking about?”

“That day, I got out to help you and you drove off, then when we crossed paths later, you treated me like some kind of…” He searched for the right word.

“Road Rage Pharaoh?” she suggested timidly.

“What?”

She touched her finger to her chin on the spot that correlated to the place on his face where he sported facial hair. “The second I saw you I thought you looked like the picture of Pharaoh from Sunday school.”

“Yeah?” Hunt smiled slightly at that.

She nodded.

His smile started to broaden, then froze. “Was Pharaoh a good guy or a bad guy?”

“Wel-l-l-l…” For a second she felt torn between giving him a quick Bible lesson and asking him outright why he didn't know. The truth was, she wanted him to know. His little speech about taking them to the hospital because it was the right thing to do was all good and well but if he wasn't a man of faith, she couldn't imagine how he would fit into her world.

“What are you two going on about?” Billy J slapped his hand on the back of the seat. “Pharaoh? Don't you know your Bible, boy?”

“I, um, I haven't been in a Bible study in a few years.” He gave one of those looks that said he knew he should know more about the Bible and get to church more often. “I just wanted a little clarification.”

“Only clarification you need is clarifying to me and my daughter whether or not you are ever going to get this car heading to the hospital.”

“I am,” Hunt assured him, gunning the motor. “And if you don't really want that ad—”

“We don't!” Billy J sputtered through another round of coughing.

“The ad stays.” Moxie said it as much for her dad as she did for Hunt.

“It won't make a bit of difference.” Hunt looked only at her. “I'll still drive you.”

“I know,” she said quietly.

He took off. When she had first asked him to take them, he had assured her he knew exactly where they were going. He proved it now by heading for the highway leading west out of Santa Sofia.

Moxie eased her shoulders back against the black leather seat. The very act of leaving Santa Sofia, even under these shaky circumstances, seemed to lift a weight off her shoulders.

The sleepy town, once a tourist haven, had been the only home she had known. It held all her happiest memories, and her most painful ones. Now it seemed only to hold problems. And her new family.

They were one and the same.

She put her head in her hands. “Why does everything always come back to them?”

“Excuse me?” Hunt glanced her way.

She shook her head. The man did not care enough about her family to get the details of their story right. He certainly didn't want to spend the whole time he was doing her a favor hearing her go on and on about them.

In fact, he'd heard quite enough out of her. She thought of their confrontation at the Bait Shack. Heat rose in her cheeks. It didn't matter whether the ancient pharaohs were good or bad, this guy was definitely the good variety. She sighed, laid her head back then rolled it to the side to look at him. “Thanks.”

“S'all right. I know you're worried about your dad. I'll get you to the hospital, no problem.”

“Thanks for that, too.”

“Too?”

“The first thanks was for stopping to help me in my truck.”

“Thanks for…the thanks.” He laughed.

She liked it when he laughed. “And I promise, we will take out that full-page ad. Right, Daddy?”

Z-zno-o-o-orp.

A great, shuddering snore came from the backseat.

“He fell asleep.” She looked at the man behind the wheel.

“He's sick.”

“He must be awfully sick.” Once Lionel had released her dad and the old guy had acted his normal ornery self, she had put out of her mind how delicate her father's condition might be. “He didn't even hang in the argument long enough to give up and tell me the Weatherby family motto.”

“Motto?”

She swallowed hard to try to keep her tears at bay. “When the going gets tough, the Weatherbys go fishing.”

He smiled. “I think I like your dad.”

“Then do me a favor and get him to the hospital as fast as you can.”