The Barefoot Believers (13 page)

“Of course I fell.” Kate pulled the covers up higher to protect against the chill of the damp fall air. “Why else would you think Vince would pick me up and carry me in here?”

“Oh, I could think of a few other reasons.” Jo bit her lip and looked at Vince all moon-eyed and silly.

“Jo,” Kate said flatly.

“What?” Jo's answer came back from a flirtatious fog.

“Go shut the door.” Kate flung her arm out to point the way.

“Why?” Belligerence colored Jo's curt reply.

Kate didn't know if that came from not wanting to carry out the command or the mere fact that
Kate
had issued it. She didn't try to overanalyze it, just pointed more emphatically.

“Why should I shut the door? He's going right back out of it so he can get us something to eat, right?”

Vince looked from Kate to Jo then back to Kate again. “What's the deal here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Kate said, still piecing together the reality of him here in the living room of their cottage once again. “In fact, I could ask you a million things.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Me, too. To you, that is.”

“Dazzle us with your eloquence later.” Jo prodded Vince's shoulder to get him up. “Fetch food for us,
now.
Please.”

“How's Gentry?” Kate asked, knowing full well that after Vince had gone she would not recall a thing he had told her, only his eyes.

And his smile.

And her regrets.

“Good. Gentry's…good. He's like six-two now and—”

“And does he have a driver's license?”

Vince looked up at Jo as if he only now remembered she was still in the room. “Of course he does.”

“Then give me his number and let me call him to do a grocery run.” Jo plunked down on the arm of the couch and stretched out to retrieve her cell phone. “Unless he's at work and can't be bothered?”

“He's between opportunities right now. He stays pretty busy, though.” The answer came too fast, too practiced and what did it mean, anyway?

Between opportunities?

Kate knew what it meant. The kid couldn't hold a job. And Vince wouldn't even make him responsible for a simple thing like running an errand for an old friend. “It's Wa Hoo all over again.”

“Hmm?” Vince frowned at her.

Kate probably frowned back. She wasn't sure. She only knew she had not smiled or in any way shown that she accepted the flimsy excuse he made on his son's behalf.

“Wa Hoo? We don't have time for games, now, Kate. I'm hungry,” Jo protested.

“What's the problem?” Vince asked Kate, not Jo.

Kate, always Kate. As though she were the only one in the room. In this house. In his world.

Her reservations about his relationship with his son fell to the side.

“Your cupboards bare? Your bank account empty? Your car broken down?”

“The cupboards are bare and so are our feet.” Kate moved her cast as much as she dared. And she dared too much. She winced in pain.

“The lady who takes care of the cottage for us said she would send someone over with some food,” Jo dove in, offering her own tightly wrapped ankle as evidence as she added, “Neither of us can drive.”

“The lady?” Vince frowned.

“Ms. Weatherby?” Kate prompted.

“Oh, you mean Moxie!”

“Moxie?” Jo gave the same kind of look she usually saved for when Kate wore arch-supporting sneakers with a dress. “What kind of name is that?”

“Nick,” ol' eloquent Vince supplied.

Jo's frown deepened. “Her name is Nick?”

“Pain has definitely affected your ability to think, Jo.” Kate shook her head.

“Pain and hunger,” Jo snapped.

“Actually all the information on the accounts says M. Weatherby so—”

“Yeah.” Vince nodded. “It's the same person.”

“I figured.” Kate smiled. Probably a big, goofy, inappropriately dreamy smile given the mundane topic and yet, she didn't care. Vince Merchant was in Santa Sofia. Their paths had crossed again. And after she had prayed for the Lord to grant her good neighbors. She couldn't help grinning like an idiot. “And she, this M. Weatherby, said she'd send someone over. So when we saw your truck drive up across the street, we just thought—”

“Never fear! Your local beach preacher slash one-man welcoming committee slash amazin' aluminum crutch fairy is here!”

Vince looked from Travis Brandt standing in the doorway brandishing a pair of crepe-paper-wrapped metal crutches to Kate. “Friend of yours?”

“He's a friend of
mine,
” Jo claimed even as she propelled herself upward and began hopping straight at the poor unsuspecting man. “And I don't plan on letting him rocket out of here again unless he takes me along for the ride.”

T
ravis Brandt stood in the doorway.

Her
doorway. The family home's doorway, Jo corrected, though she had already come to think of the quaint cottage with great bones and good fixer-upper potential as “hers.”

There he stood. Tall and…tall. Nothing else about him seemed to stand out now, not the way it had when he had been a sports-and-media darling. His once rich brown hair now looked muddied by too much sun, giving it reddish highlights that did not mix well with the coarse gray curls that licked at his ears and the collar of his simple button-down orange-sherbet-colored shirt. The shirt itself was rumpled. Not unkempt but as if he had ironed it a few days ago, worn it once briefly since then and hung it carefully on the doorknob of his closet. He'd thrown it on today, thinking, as men do, that since he could still see the lines of what had once been crisp creases, it was as good as putting on a shirt straight from the dry cleaners.

Jo tried not to find that probable sequence of events too endearing. Just as she tried not to notice that his white baggy pants were not so much pressed as flattened down the front of the legs. The backs of the knees, though? Crushed fabric in a half-dozen fan-like lines. A sure sign of a man realizing at the last minute he wanted to look more presentable and using an iron on just the parts he could see in the mirror—or that he could reach with the pants still on his body.

He came from a background of everyone hanging on your every word, so many women laughing at even your lamest jokes in hopes that you would notice and flirt with them, after all.

Flirt? Had Jo just flirted
with a minister?

He shook his head and laughed, too.

Travis Brandt,
the minister,
was not allowed to flirt. Or invite anyone to flirt with him, even the harmless kind of flirting. Not the way that Travis Brandt the sports guy had, right? He had to think of his position in the community.

She laughed some more, knowing that
some
more was already way more than anyone in the room believed the moment called for.

Travis quirked his lips up on one side, still appearing amused. Or perhaps befuddled.

Had she befuddled him with her phony reaction? That only seemed fair since the very notion of what this man had done befuddled her.

To have gone from being
somebody
to serving just anybody. Jo wasn't sure how one made that kind of leap. Or why.

And she didn't plan on exploring the shift in the man's priorities today. She had her own priorities. First and foremost those included making the most of this guy showing up out of the blue by getting him alone and pressing him for information to help her sell the cottage.

“But I did stop by the church emergency supply closet and pick these up.” Travis offered the decorated crutches to Jo. “For you.”

“Me?” Travis Brandt had taken the time to do something kind for
her?
Not for Kate. Not in expectation of what he could get out of the good deed, but simply because he saw her, noticed what she needed and acted. “You did that for
me?
”

Jo didn't know what to make of that.

“You were the one with the towel over her head when I dropped by earlier, right?”

Jo thrust her fingers into her choppy, chin-length hair. It must look awful.

He pulled the crutches making a big, teasing pretense of glancing all around the cottage. “You don't have another sister hidden away, do you?”

“No.” And her clothes, her ankle, her bare-faced face!

“No, that wasn't you?”

She thought for a moment of denying it. Bare-faced or not, she could not lie. “No, that was me.”

“Shouldn't that be yes that was me?”

“Yes, that was me.” She reached for the crutches. “No, I don't have another sister.”

He withheld them. “Hey, I've read about this kind of thing. I'm not turning loose of these babies until I'm sure I'm giving them to the right girl.”

Jo opened her mouth to say…Well, what
would
one say to that?

“Cinderella! Cinderella?” he called out, craning his neck to act as if he were searching and listening for the third sister to come rushing out from wherever Kate and Jo had imprisoned her.

“It's me.” Jo held back the urge to laugh, which she knew would come off as too nervous and too much again.

“You're Cinderella?”

I wish. Cinderella whose prince has finally…

She blinked and dragged her thoughts back from that pointless little fantasy. “No, actually I'm the ugly towel-head sister.”

She bent her head and ruffled her hands through her hair to demonstrate and to keep from looking too smug when his eyes went all dreamy and he said…

“Yeah, now I see it.”

“You were supposed to say that I'm not ugly.” She threw a pout in his direction.

“Why? You obviously already knew that. You aren't the shallow type who needs a man to lavish empty praise on you, are you?”

From across the room, Kate scoffed loud enough to make them both look her way.

Jo shot heat rays from her eyes at her sister. Or she would have if she had been endowed with the power to shoot heat rays. Which, given the way people were treating her this afternoon, she suddenly wished she did.

“Let's start over.” She pulled herself together and strove to keep her tone cordial, not pouty, not shallow, and definitely not superhero hot under the collar. “I'm the one with the sprained ankle you spoke to earlier.”

He extended his arms, putting the crutches within her reach at last. “Then these must be for you.”

“Thank you,” she said. Or squeaked, actually. The kindness of the gesture and the cuteness of the gesture-
er
had the emotional effect of tightening her throat and raising the pitch of her voice. And that was only what the others could tell.

She stood on one foot and put her hands on the bars of the crutches.

“Not so fast. If I read my fairy tales right, you can't claim these until we make sure they fit.”

“Fit?”

He moved around behind her. “Slide them under your arms and I'll make sure they're at the right height.”

Jo fought to put on the outward appearance of calm and control. Despite that effort, she couldn't quell the sensation of an electrical current running just below the surface of her skin, raising her pulse, probably her blood pressure and elevating the whole scene to a big deal in her mind.

“Want some help?” Kate asked, pushing aside the mangled pile of covers to scoot to the edge of the couch she had all but laid claim to when they had first arrived.

“Thanks, but I've done this more than a time or two,” Travis said.

“Silly me. Should have thought of that.” Kate tapped her finger against her head. “Lots of football injuries?”

“More like Frisbee injuries,” he muttered, his focus more on the position of the equipment than on Kate's interested questioning.

“What?” Kate turned her attention to Vince.

Jo made no pretense of not knowing that was exactly where Kate wanted her attention to fix.

“And volleyball injuries.” Vince pointed to his knee.

“Oh?” Kate followed his movements.

“And stepping on everything from glass to hot coals injuries.” He stuck out one foot. “Oh, and a surprising number of twisted ankles from getting tangled up in a leash while trying to walk a dog on the beach.”

“That's right.” Travis looked their way for a moment. “With Traveler's Wayside Chapel right on the beach, we have people wandering in asking for crutches once a week or so—you know, something just to get them to the urgent treatment center. I have the process down.”

“Next to sunburn, tourists are most likely to suffer leg or foot injuries,” Vince said, the way a kid throws in a piece of trivia to impress others.

“Cool.” It certainly seemed to impress Kate.

“You think people hurting themselves is cool?” Vince folded his arms and leaned back.

“In a way, yes.” Kate laughed. “It's my business to think it's cool.”

Both Vince and Travis seemed intrigued by that statement.

That was why Jo had to act fast, to keep them from asking Kate about her work and having her go on and on about feet and toes and ankles and…

And leave Jo standing there watching yet again while everyone in her limited little world down here decided that Dr. Kate Cromwell hung the moon.

“Well, it's my business to make sure my sister has enough to eat so she can take her medicine and get better.” So that they could sell this house, bail herself out and not have to worry about their mother living all the way down here in Florida with her daughters in Georgia.

Where did that last bit come from? Jo chose not to dwell on it. The first part had been enough to draw Travis's attention back to his task and that was all that mattered.

Jo only wanted to get on with the process so that she could get on with her plans to get Travis Brandt alone. To
talk.

Just talk.

The mutual sharing of information.

Maybe planting a few seeds, shoveling on a little bit of…plant food, as it were…to help nurture those seeds to grow into fruitful ideas.

Fruit.
Jo sighed.

Her stomach grumbled.

Talk
and
food, that was all she wanted from this man.

She wasn't being manipulative. Her business had a long history of dancing around the edge of a deal over a meal. And ministers were not slouches in that area, either. Luncheons, banquets, coffee and doughnuts in the fellowship hall.

Just a little pragmatic networking, that was all she was thinking about.

Travis knelt beside Jo and fiddled with the locking tab system, raising and lowering the pegs until he had the crutches just so. “How's that?”

She leaned forward, testing her weight on them. They wobbled slightly. Still, that offered an improvement over her current system of hopping from piece of furniture to piece of furniture for support. And she was in an awful hurry to get going. So, she wiggled them into a position she thought would give her the least discomfort and said, “Okay.”

“‘Okay' is not good enough.” He went back to work, this time not just tinkering with the pegs but also standing up to make sure the pads didn't jab Jo under her arms.

He had to stand close to do this.

Not improperly close but close enough that she could smell the reassuring scents of beach and church on him. Beach smelling of the Gulf wind in his hair and sunscreen, even on a cloudy day, on his face and neck. That harder to describe church smell, she decided, reminded her of a hymnal opened for the first time after a week of sitting in a freshly lemon-oiled wooden pew rack. She liked them both.

“We don't want to settle for anything but the maximum comfort and security here.”

Comfort and security.
For a split second she thought of adding that to the list of things she wanted from Travis.

Her whole life she'd never felt those two things without reservation. Her mother offered comfort but, with her own hurts and issues to deal with, very little security. Jo's job also afforded her certain comforts but as her current situation proved, she could not rely on her work for a real sense of security. And Kate?

She looked at her sister quietly watching the goings-on, her fingers digging into the fat arm of the couch to keep herself from charging in and doing the job for Travis herself. Kate was all about security.

No matter what, Jo knew she could count on Kate.

It was one of the things that made her craziest about her sister. And one of the things that made it imperative that she get Travis alone. She needed to do her homework before she presented anything about selling the cottage to Kate. She owed her sister that much.

“There.” Travis touched her lightly on the back and left his hand there. “How's that?”

“That's terrific.” The heat from his warm palm sank into the tense muscles between her shoulder blades. She looked into his eyes and had to fight to keep her knees from going all weak and making him think she wasn't strong enough to go out. “Terrific.”

Jo had come to Florida with a clearly defined objective in mind. She had to make use of every contact, every opportunity to advance that objective. Or else, in a little less than three weeks now, she would face certain disaster.

Unless, of course, something here changed all that for her.

Travis smiled.

The so-called electrical current that had been merely a low buzz under the surface of her skin throughout his working on the crutches suddenly surged. It took all of Jo's composure not to blow a fuse on the spot. Blow a fuse or overheat and melt into a puddle. So much for using this contact to advance her professional objectives.