Barefoot Brides by Annie Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

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Chapter Five
    â€œM ay 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œKate?”
    â€œHmm.” 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?”
    â€œWhat gave you that idea? Oh!” He laughed again. “No. No, no Bait Shack tonight. Tonight we’re having dinner someplace very special.”
    â€œOh?” 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?”
    â€œChez 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.”
    â€œMy place?”
    â€œOh! 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