Barefoot Brides by Annie Jones Page A

very short chaperone who goes to bed early, and doesn’t know enough words to tell everyone in town our business yet.”
    â€œOh.” She eased out a long breath and scooted her chair back under the desk. “We’re babysitting Fabiola.”
    â€œGentry 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
    V ince’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.
    â€œDid 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.
    â€œJust 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.”
    â€œDid 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.”
    â€œWe’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