True Love

She was glad that he was back to teasing her and that the tension between them was gone. “You have any photos of the land?”

  “I have a 3-D of the terrain of the twelve-acre plot, including existing trees and a big rock formation. I was thinking—”

  “Of making one wall part of the stone?” she asked.

  He had his arm over the back of the seat as he reversed the truck, but he paused to look at her—and the look he gave her was just as her father used to do when she’d done something that pleased him.

  “You had the same thought?” she asked.

  “Exactly. But I can’t decide about the entrance. What do I do to match the stone wall? Maybe—” He broke off when Alix’s cell phone rang.

  She pulled it out of her bag and looked at the ID. “It says ‘Unknown Caller,’ ” she said. She was always cautious about such calls.

  “It could be your friend.”

  Alix pushed the button. “Hello?”

  “I’m so sorry!” Izzy said. “So, so sorry I just disappeared, but Glenn threw a fit. It was wonderful! I was never so in love with him in my life. I thought he and his father were going to start slugging each other, but Glenn stood his ground and his mother stopped pestering me about who had to be in my wedding.”

  Alix looked across the seat at Jared and nodded that it was Izzy. At her look of happiness, he smiled. “What about your mom?”

  “My dad took care of her,” Izzy said. “He was hilarious. He said that my young knight scared him half to death and that even though Mom also scared him, Glenn was bigger.”

  “That sounds like your dad.”

  “And your father too. Did you know that he called my dad and said …? Well, I don’t know what he said, but it started everything and— Oh, Alix, I’ve just talked about me. How are you doing?”

  “I’m great,” she said, “but I’m afraid I haven’t done much about your wedding.”

  “That’s okay. I have and I’ll email you all about it. Did you know that Glenn and I are in the Virgin Islands right now?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “It was your dad’s idea, but both our parents paid for it.”

  “My father helped?” Alix looked at Jared, who lifted his eyebrows.

  “Yes, he did. And when my phone didn’t work here, they had this one sent to the hotel.”

  “Actually, that was—”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “What?” Alix said.

  “That’s why I was crying so much on Nantucket. Hormones, I guess. And now all I do is throw up. I—” She stopped because Alix gave a scream of happiness.

  “You’re sure?”

  Jared looked at Alix in question and she gestured a big curve over her stomach.

  “Yes, yes,” Izzy said. “But only you and Glenn know.”

  “You told him first?! Before me?” Alix said. “What kind of BFF are you?”

  Izzy laughed. “I already miss you. Have you met him yet?”

  “Jared is right here. Would you like to talk to him?” Alix held the phone up to Jared’s ear.

  “Congratulations, Izzy,” Jared said. “Sorry I was eavesdropping but we’re in a truck together so I couldn’t help hearing.” He waited in silence but there was no response. He looked at Alix and shrugged.

  She took the phone back. “Izzy?”

  No reply.

  “Izzy? Are you there?”

  Silence.

  Alix looked at the phone. “I think we got cut off.”

  “I’m here.”

  Alix put the phone back to her ear. “You’re there? Did you hear what Jared said?”

  “J …” Izzy managed to whisper the J sound but that’s all.

  “Jared,” Alix said. “Jared Kingsley at home. Jared Montgomery to off-islanders, but they don’t count.”

  He gave her a smile of approval.

  “You’re in a truck with him now? This minute?” Izzy’s voice was so low Alix could hardly hear it.

  “Yes. It’s an old one. Thirties?” She looked at Jared in question.

  “Nineteen thirty-six Ford,” he said.

  “That’s him talking now?” Izzy whispered.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Are you two a couple?” Izzy asked.

  “Friends,” Alix said. “Colleagues. A few minutes ago Jared asked me to help him design a house that he has a commission for. He and I are going to try to use a rock that’s on the land as part of the structure.”

  “You and … and …?”

  “Jared,” Alix said. “Or just Kingsley. But I think he’s sometimes called Seven.” She looked at him in question and he nodded.

  “I think I’m going to have to lie down,” Izzy said. “This is too much for me to take in. Alix?”

  “Yes?”

  “How is the plumbing in that old house?”

  She remembered Izzy’s fantasy of the pipes bursting and Alix and Jared being drenched with water. “The plumbing is fine, and there is absolutely no danger of any pipes bursting.” As she said it she couldn’t help glancing at Jared’s body. He was turning a corner, his face away from her. He certainly did keep in shape! Flat stomach, heavy thighs. He straightened the wheel and Alix looked away.

  “Alix,” Izzy said, “sometimes old pipes can be made to burst if they have pressure put on them.”

  “Yeah, but pressure can also cause them to explode and blow the whole house apart. Izzy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I told Jared I was worried about you, so he had his assistant call your mother to find out about you. And it was Jared who had the phone sent to your hotel and he paid for it.”

  For a moment Izzy was silent. When she spoke, her voice was that of a commander. “Alixandra!” Izzy said sternly. “That man is a keeper. If you have to use a sledgehammer on those pipes, do it! I have to go. I’m going to throw up.”

  Alix turned off her phone, then was silent as she looked out the windshield and thought about what Izzy had told her.

  “Happy for your friend?” Jared asked.

  “Very. Izzy was born to be someone’s mother. When I’m down, she’s always there with chocolate and a listening ear. You couldn’t be a better friend than that.”

  “Is she still planning on having the wedding here?”

  “I think so, but it’ll be fairly soon—if she plans to still fit into the dress we bought, that is.”

  “You can spend the afternoon talking to Toby about what you need.” He glanced at her. “You okay?”

  “Sure. Fine.” She knew she needed to adjust to this new development. Her friend was not only getting married but she was going to have a baby, while Alix … “It’s just that I’m still getting over a breakup. You ever go through that?” She waited for his answer with her breath held. It was the first really personal question she’d asked him.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Every single one of them eventually said, ‘You love your work more than you will ever love me.’ After that, I always knew the end was near.”

  “That’s kind of what Eric told me,” Alix said. “Not about love, but that I paid more attention to work than I did to him. I couldn’t make him understand that buildings have always been a big part of my life.”

  “I can vouch for that,” Jared said. “You used to build three-foot-tall towers when you were just a kid. You and Granddad—” He stopped. His grandfather used to oversee little Alix in her placement of objects. And he told her where things in the house were. Under Caleb’s direction, she’d pulled pieces of scrimshaw and little enamel boxes, and even coins from places where they’d been hiding for a century or more.

  “Your grandfather and I did what?” Alix asked.

  He knew she meant his most recent grandfather, but he’d died not long after Jared’s birth. His mother’s father had died before that. When Jared was a toddler, he’d made his father laugh when he’d been shocked that one of his friends had a grandfather everyone could actually see.

  “Sorry. Mixed up. You and Aunt Addy used t
o spend hours building things.”

  Alix looked away for a moment as she felt like he wasn’t telling the truth. She didn’t remember Aunt Addy sitting on the floor and stacking things. But Alix wasn’t going to push it. She was learning that if she persisted she could get whatever she wanted to know out of him. But if she asked directly, he changed the subject. “So what’s Lexie’s house like?”

  Jared dropped his shoulders, which he’d unconsciously raised to protect himself against her onslaught of questions. He gave her a dazzling smile. “It’s a new purchase, only been in my family for about seventy-five years.”

  “Downright modern,” she said and they smiled at each other. He talked of the history of the house until they got back to Kingsley House, where he parked the old truck. They walked toward Main Street to Lexie’s.

  Alix couldn’t help feeling nervous. What if the three women didn’t like one another?

  Walking beside her, Jared must have picked up on her thoughts. “Anybody gives you any problems, let me know.”

  She smiled at him in gratitude.

  Chapter Twelve

  “They’re coming up the walk now,” Lexie said as she peeked out through the dining room windows.

  Toby was making sandwiches for their guests. She and Lexie had been up early to start cooking for tomorrow’s picnic, so they’d already eaten. When Jared had sent his text that he and Alix were on their way, the two women had dropped everything and scurried to prepare.

  “They look good together,” Lexie said. “She’s tall enough for him and he’s always liked red hair. I can see Victoria in her face, but she’s built like Ken.”

  “Remember!” Toby said.

  “I know. Don’t mention Ken. I think I’ll call him and tell him how annoying keeping this secret is. Better yet, I’ll let you call him.”

  Toby smiled. Lexie could sometimes be rather abrupt. “What’s taking them so long?”

  “Jared is hovering over her like he’s afraid someone’s going to run up and snatch her away. Now he’s pointing at the house and talking. I hope he’s not boring her with words like ‘crossbeams’ and ‘angles’ and … and whatever else he goes on and on about.”

  “Alix is a student of architecture so maybe she likes that,” Toby said as she put her homemade sliced pickles on the sandwiches. She didn’t really know what either of them liked to eat so she put some of all of it on the bread.

  “I’d feel better if he were telling her about her eyes,” Lexie said.

  “That they’re like liquid pools of moonlight?” Toby suggested.

  “Perfect!” Lexie said. “Uh-oh. She’s frowning. Please, I hope he’s not telling her about those little beetles that eat the wood. That’s a death knell to romance.”

  Toby put the plated sandwiches on the dining table. “Why are you so determined to match Jared up with this young woman?”

  “He needs someone,” Lexie said. “Jared has had too many deaths around him. Aunt Addy was the only constant he had left, and now she’s gone.”

  “There’s you and all his other relatives, and he’s friends with most of the island,” Toby said.

  Lexie let the curtain fall back into place. “But he’s split in half. Part of him lives in America and part of him is here. Did I ever tell you that I met one of his girlfriends in New York?”

  “No,” Toby said. “What was she like?”

  “Tall, thin, beautiful, intelligent.”

  “That sounds wonderful.”

  “I couldn’t see her on a Nantucket fishing boat and I certainly couldn’t imagine her in an old house with that green stove. What would she do if Jared Kingsley slapped down twenty striped bass and told her to clean them?”

  Toby sighed. “Fall in love with an elegant Montgomery and find yourself married to a sea-salt Kingsley. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them.”

  “And then there’s Jared’s work habits. I can’t tell you how many times Ken or Aunt Addy sent me upstairs to wake him up and I found him in bed surrounded by a dozen rolled-up drawings.”

  “Rather like Alix on the couch?” Toby asked.

  “Exactly like that.” The two women smiled at each other. “What I want to know,” Lexie said as she walked to the front door, “is how Alix feels about him.”

  “Let’s see if we can find out,” Toby said.

  Lexie opened the front door.

  Alix took the seat that Lexie pointed to at the beautiful old dining table. Jared was next to her while the two young women sat across from them.

  When Lexie and Jared started talking about things Alix had never heard of, she looked at her sandwich. It had Swiss cheese on it, something she’d never liked. Dry old stuff. And when she tasted a bit of turkey, it was smoked, another thing she didn’t like.

  While Lexie, Toby, and Jared talked, Alix pulled his plate next to hers and fixed the two sandwiches. She gave him the cheese and the smoked turkey, which she knew he loved, and she took his pickles and cheddar cheese. She took the olives off his plate and gave him her chips.

  When the sandwich fillings and condiments were properly distributed, she cut each one diagonally and gave him back his plate. She switched drinks so she had the lemonade and he had the iced tea.

  When Alix looked up, both Toby and Lexie were staring at her in silence.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I missed what you were saying.”

  “Nothing of interest,” Jared said as he looked at Toby. “You have any hot mustard? Alix likes that.”

  “We do.” Toby got up to retrieve it from the kitchen.

  Lexie was looking at Alix with great intensity. The resemblance between Jared and his cousin was evident: the strong jawline, the eyes that seemed to see through a person. Alix decided she wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of Lexie’s temper—something she was sure the woman had.

  As for Toby, she wasn’t at all as Alix had imagined. From what Jared had said, Alix had envisioned some hippie earth mother in handwoven cotton and sandals made out of old tires. But Toby was quietly elegant, very pretty but in an old-fashioned way, rather like a medieval painting of a Madonna. She wore a lovely dress that Alix thought might have come from the same store where Izzy had shopped.

  “Zero Main?” Alix asked, naming the shop.

  “Yes,” Toby said, smiling. “My father visits me every few months, takes me there, and the owner, Noël, dresses me. Isn’t that one of her tops you have on?”

  “Yes, it is,” Alix said.

  “If you ladies are going to talk about Petticoat Row, I think it’s time for me to go,” Jared said.

  Alix looked at him to explain that term, but Lexie answered. “When the men were at sea, the women ran the island, and where their shops were was called Petticoat Row.”

  “Still is,” Jared said as he stood up.

  “That’s because the women did such a fabulous job of running everything, and still do.” Lexie looked up at him. “I want you to check the heater in the greenhouse, and there are rats burrowing under a couple of the flower beds.”

  “Rats?” Alix asked.

  Jared looked at her. “Thanks to our illustrious ancestors’ world travels, we have an extraordinary variety of rats on the island.”

  They were all looking at Alix to see how she’d take this. Would she cringe and squeal in distaste?

  “A rodent Galapagos,” she said.

  “Right.” Jared smiled at her so warmly that Alix blushed. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll leave you girls to it. It smells good in here. Alix is a great cook and she has a wedding to plan and …”

  Lexie and Toby were gazing at him in curiosity.

  He looked down at Alix. “If you need anything, let me know.”

  Alix stood up. “I will. You’ll be outside?”

  “Yes, but after I fix the heater and wire out the rats, I’ll go home.”

  “Big or little house?”

  “Your choice,” he said.

  “Big. I’ll wrap the last two fish in rosemary. I saw some growin
g in the back. Maybe you could put a couple of potatoes in the oven. Two fifty. Slow bake.”

  “Okay.”

  They stood there looking at each other, neither of them seeming to want to move.

  Lexie and Toby sat across from them, watching Jared and Alix just standing there, gazing into each other’s eyes and saying nothing. They didn’t seem to know how to separate.

  Shaking her head in disbelief, Lexie stood and threw up her hands. “I think I’m going to be sick. Jared! Go fix the heater. Alix! Go to the kitchen and help Toby stuff some mushrooms or whatever.”

  Jared looked away from Alix to give his cousin a half grin. “And what are you going to do, Miss Dictator?”

  “Pop over to the church to give thanks that I am still sane.”

  “What does that mean?” Jared asked.

  Still shaking her head at him, Lexie went around the table, reached up to put her hands on his shoulders, and shoved him through the kitchen to the back door. “Go outside. Breathe. I promise that Toby and I won’t hurt her.”

  “Really, Lexie!” Jared said. “This is—” He cut off because she shut the door in his face.

  Lexie went back through the pretty little sitting room into the kitchen, where Toby was at the counter. Alix was standing in the doorway looking like she wanted to run away.

  “Lexie,” Toby said softly, “why don’t you walk down to Grand Union and get us some limes?”

  Lexie grinned. “Want to get rid of me?”

  “Yes,” Toby said.

  Laughing, Lexie left the room and they heard the front door close behind her.

  “Sorry for that,” Toby said. “Would you like to sit down?” The kitchen was a long galley type but on one wall a part of the counter had a couple of stools.

  “I apologize if Jared and I were …” Alix didn’t know what to say. “He’s the only person I know on Nantucket and we’ve spent most of the time I’ve been here together. Well, not together-together, but …”

  “You know how to zest citrus?” Toby asked.

  “I’m not as good a cook as Jared said I was, but I can do that.”

  Toby nodded to a bowl full of lemons, limes, and oranges. “I need a quarter cup of each one.” She held out the little multi-holed zester.