True Love

Alix was eager to tell Jared what Caleb had told her about Valentina’s journal. At the end, just as the rain stopped and the sun started to come out, Caleb had told her where it was probably hidden. A minute later, Caleb had glanced toward the attic window and said he had to leave.

  “Are you a vampire and the sun makes you sparkle?” she’d asked, teasing.

  “Something like that.” After Caleb left, the attic no longer seemed magical. It was just big and full of too many boxes filled with too many secrets. For a moment Alix sat on the little couch wishing the candlelight and music would return. The ladies at the party had looked so beautiful in their long dresses.

  Not long after, hunger drove Alix downstairs. As she ate at the kitchen table, she thought of all she’d seen and heard. And as the hours went by, the idea that it had all been real faded. She began to remember the experience as though it were a movie she’d seen.

  “Caleb said Valentina kept a journal,” Alix said to Jared as she stirred the rice.

  “Did she?” Jared asked but didn’t seem interested. “Pass me that box, will you?”

  Alix handed him the water crackers. Jealousy was one thing, but this was information that needed to be told, so she kept on. “Caleb said he believes Valentina’s journal was hidden in an oven in the basement of the washhouse where she used to make her soap. He said that building burned down when the house did.”

  “I never heard of any outbuildings there.”

  Alix spooned the shrimp and rice onto a plate. “Caleb said that Parthenia drew a map of the property that shows where the washhouse was. That’s what I was trying to find in those boxes I lugged downstairs to the living room. If I can find Parthenia’s map maybe we could excavate the journal and the mystery of Valentina would be solved. But it’s going to take weeks to go through all that material in those boxes. I was thinking that maybe you could help me.”

  “Could you watch Tyler a sec and make sure he doesn’t leap out of that chair?”

  “Sure,” Alix said as Jared got up. “Where are you going?”

  But he didn’t answer. Instead, he returned with his laptop and opened it. “Maybe Parthenia drew a map to show the people in Warbrooke and maybe it’s in the letters Jilly has.”

  “What a good idea,” Alix said, smiling at even the prospect of being relieved of having to go through all those old boxes.

  Jared sent an email to Ken to ask Jilly about a map. He closed the computer and looked at Alix. “So now maybe we can stop talking about Caleb for a while?”

  “Sure,” Alix said, but she turned away to hide her frown.

  After dinner, Tyler’s mother called and asked if they would please, please keep Tyler overnight. “It’s fine with me,” Jared said, “but let me ask Alix.” He told her of the request and Alix readily agreed. She was becoming attached to the happy little boy.

  “I had no idea,” Alix said, looking out at the water. They’d put Tyler down for the night in a crib that Jared took out of a closet. Every door and window of the house was open so if he made a sound they could hear him. She was leaning against an old wooden rowboat, one of three turned upside down in the sandy backyard. Jared’s head was in her lap and she was stroking his hair. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired in my life,” she said.

  “Good tired or bad?” he asked.

  “Very, very good.” She looked at the back of the house and again marveled at the beauty of a Jared Montgomery design. “How did it happen that you were given the remodel of this house to design? You were so young.”

  Jared kept his eyes closed as he smiled in memory. “For years my father complained about our old house falling apart, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it. Add onto the side? Or go up a floor? Hire an architect? He liked that idea the least because it would cost too much.”

  “But he had you.”

  “I don’t know what made him say it, but one day he turned to me and said, ‘Seven, why don’t you save me a truckload of money and you design the addition?’ He was only joking, but I took him seriously.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eleven,” he said as he looked up at Alix.

  She knew what his eyes were saying. It was the year before his father died. “What did you do?” she asked softly.

  “I became obsessed with the idea. Didn’t sleep for three days. I didn’t know how to draw or measure, nothing—but I started making sketches.”

  “It was all there inside your brain.”

  “I guess it was. Mom knew I wasn’t sleeping and that I was hardly eating, but she didn’t tell on me to Dad. Instead, on the fourth day she made our favorite dinner of scallops and grilled corn on the cob, then she told me to show Dad what I’d drawn.”

  “Were you nervous?” She couldn’t help thinking of how she’d felt when she’d first shown him her chapel model: thrilled but also scared.

  “Very nervous. I knew I was doing an adult thing and I don’t know what I would have done if he’d laughed at my primitive drawings.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “No. Dad thought they were great and he said that next year we’d start building it. But …” Jared shrugged.

  Neither of them had to say what they were thinking, that Jared’s father had died and the house wasn’t remodeled until years later when Ken showed up.

  When she looked back at him, his eyes seemed to bore into hers with that blaze of blue fire, but this time it wasn’t lust that she was seeing. “What?” she asked, not understanding exactly what he was trying to tell her.

  “It’s just that sometimes things are right and you know it. This old house was little more than a shack but I could see it as it was in the future. All I did was draw what I could see. Does that make sense?”

  “Perfect sense,” she said, but he seemed to be leading somewhere else, and she didn’t know where.

  He closed his eyes. “I’ve had a lot of girlfriends,” he said softly.

  Alix drew in her breath. Was this story really about them? About her?

  When he looked at her, his eyes were so intense that the hair on the back of her neck stood up. “Sometimes you just know. You know about buildings and you know about people.”

  “Yes, you do,” Alix whispered.

  She didn’t know what would have happened next if Tyler hadn’t let out a scream.

  Jared was on his feet and running inside, Alix right behind him. In the bedroom, she stood back as Jared picked up the boy and soothed him.

  “Bad dreams, little man?”

  Tyler pushed back from Jared, looked at him as though he’d never seen him before, then fell to the side. He wanted Alix to hold him.

  “Ah, the comfort of women,” Jared said. “I understand perfectly. There’s a big rocker in the living room. He’s not too heavy for you?”

  “Not at all,” Alix said, loving the way the heavy child clung to her.

  When she and Tyler were settled in the chair, Jared stepped back and looked at them snuggled together. “Can I take it that you want kids?”

  Alix’s first thought was to sidestep that question, to make a joke about it. Usually men asked something like that in an attempt to trap a woman. If she said she wanted children someday, he took it to mean that she was after him. But Jared wasn’t like the boys she’d dated. He was a man, one who didn’t run from responsibility, wasn’t afraid of being an adult. She took a breath. “Once I have my license and a job, I think I would like to jump on the baby wagon.”

  He didn’t say anything but she saw his smile as he turned away.

  It was over an hour before they got Tyler back to sleep. Jared took him from her and carried him back to bed. It wasn’t really late and Alix had visions of glasses of wine and lovemaking, but the light on her cell was flashing. It was her dad and she read his message as Jared came back into the room. “Dad says Jilly sent you a copy of the map.”

  “Did she?” Jared said. “In the morning I’ll …” He trailed off as he looked at Alix’s face. She wanted to see it right
away. “Okay, where’s my laptop?”

  Alix already had it in her hand. It took a while to print out a copy of the map. Dilys had a new printer and they couldn’t find the disk for it, which meant that they had to download the driver—and of course the first two times they tried it didn’t work. Alix had already learned that she was much better at computers than Jared was, and she was the one who found the upgrade that made it work. By the time they were able to print out the map, they’d drunk two glasses of wine each, it was nearly midnight, and they were yawning.

  Jared held up the piece of paper. “All that for this.” It was just a simple sketch, drawn with a quill pen by a young woman writing home to her family. It vaguely showed the whereabouts of the North Shore house and three outbuildings. “Why didn’t she get a cartographer to do the coordinates? There were certainly enough men on Nantucket at that time who could have made a proper map. Any first mate worth his salt could have charted it for her. How’s anyone supposed to find anything with this thing?”

  Alix took it out of his hand and put it on the table. “Parthenia drew it for her family. She didn’t think that someone was going to need it two hundred years in the future. Come on, let’s go to bed. You can complain about women and maps all day tomorrow when we go to the site and try to find where the washhouse was.”

  “Maybe we should wait on that, and I’m not complaining. I’m—”

  She stood on tiptoe to kiss him to make him stop doing what he said he wasn’t doing, then led him into the bedroom. It took only seconds for Jared to strip down to his underwear and for Alix to pull on one of his big T-shirts. She didn’t have any of her own clothes and she was too tired to think of rummaging through Dilys’s closet.

  “Now, where were we?” Alix began as she started to kiss him, but she drew back and looked at him. There was no blue fire in his eyes. In fact, it was more like a hazy bluish-gray fog. But he was putting his arm around her as though he was about to make love to her. Gently, Alix pushed him back down on the bed, tucked the quilt around him, and kissed his forehead.

  “Thank you,” he whispered and was asleep instantly. Before Alix fell asleep she couldn’t help but think that this snuggling was even more romantic, more intimate, than all their lovemaking.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Alix awoke when a small hand hit her in the mouth. At first she didn’t remember where she was. As the sleep cleared from her mind, she saw that sometime during the night Tyler had escaped the confines of his crib and climbed into bed with them. He was in the middle of the two adults, sideways, so his body was over both of them. Jared was on his side, facing Alix, his arms out, encasing both her and the child, as though he were protecting them.

  Smiling, Alix carefully extricated herself, then stood for a moment looking at them. They looked so sweet together that she picked up her phone and snapped a photo. She made her way to the kitchen, pulled one of Dilys’s cookbooks off a shelf, found a recipe for biscuits, and set about making them.

  She patted out the fluffy dough. Even through her pleasant thoughts about where she was and who she was with, she couldn’t help feeling frustrated. She had so much to tell Jared about what Caleb had told her and what she’d seen, but she couldn’t seem to find a time. But then Jared wasn’t making it easy for her. Every time she mentioned Caleb, it was as though a shutter closed on Jared. His expression became distant, as though he was refusing to listen to what she had to say.

  But she knew it was important. If the family considered Valentina’s disappearance significant enough that the house was willed to an off-islander for a whole year, then what Alix knew needed to be told.

  And besides, Alix had a lot of questions she’d like to have answered. Number one was, Who was Caleb? Why hadn’t she been introduced to him? He looked enough like Jared that he was obviously a close relation, but she’d not heard him mentioned. Did he live on the island?

  The big question was, Why hadn’t Caleb told his family what he knew? Jared hadn’t been told that Valentina kept a journal and that Caleb might know where it was hidden. Nor did Jared know about Parthenia’s map. Why had Caleb told all this to Alix, an outsider? Was there some family feud? But if that were true, Caleb wouldn’t have felt free to wander about Kingsley House. Or did he show up because he’d known Jared was away?

  If Alix hadn’t been so absorbed in the old documents the morning after she met Caleb, she would have called Lexie and found out more of the particulars. As it was, the first chance Alix got, she was going to bombard Jared with every question running through her mind. She needed answers!

  By the time the biscuits were done, Alix had strengthened her resolve to force Jared to answer her questions. The will said that Alix was to look for Valentina and doing that had to include Caleb.

  As she removed the biscuits from the oven, she looked up to see Jared, shirtless, with a sleepy Tyler snuggled against him. It was a truly beautiful sight.

  “The smell woke us,” Jared said. “At first I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

  At the sight of the two of them, Alix’s steely resolve left her. Feeding a child was more important than Caleb and his mysteries. “Think Tyler eats bacon and eggs?”

  Jared was putting the boy into the high chair. “From the heft of what he put in his diaper yesterday, I think he eats whole roast rhinos for breakfast.” He took a biscuit off the sheet, tossed it from hand to hand to cool it, broke it apart, buttered it, and gave it to Tyler. After the first bite the boy laughed and banged his heels in appreciation.

  “That’s the way I feel too,” Jared said as he sat down and took another hot biscuit. “I was thinking,” he said as he slathered it in Dilys’s homemade strawberry jam, “that you and I ought to drive up to Warbrooke and spend a few days there. We could even go before Izzy’s wedding. We need to take a look at that old Montgomery house and get its floor plan on paper. I could send some of the kids from the office up there, but …”

  What he was saying sounded so wonderful—especially his frequent use of “we”—that Caleb and Valentina seemed to fly out of Alix’s mind. “But you’d like to get to know your new relatives.”

  “I would. Mike Taggert and I hit it off, and I told you that his twin brother, Kane, is married to Cale Anderson.”

  “Don’t tell Mom, but I love her books.”

  “Okay, but only if you promise not to tell Lexie I met her. She’d be hysterical. One time Lex made a trip to Hyannis just to get Cale’s latest novel on the day it came out.”

  “What’s she like in person?”

  “Smart, funny, perceptive. She’s little and her husband is the size of a bear. All the Taggerts are big, heavy men while the Montgomerys are like me.”

  “Tall, lanky, and beautiful?”

  Jared laughed. “You didn’t think that yesterday when I was covered in the offerings of young Tyler here.”

  “Especially then. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sight.”

  “Yeah?” That blue fire returned to his eyes—but then Tyler laughed and threw a chunk of buttered biscuit, hitting Jared on the nose. “Talk about a mood killer!”

  Alix walked over and kissed Jared long and lingeringly. “It didn’t kill my mood.”

  Jared looked at Tyler and shook his head. “You’re going to learn that any man who says he understands women is a liar.” He looked back at Alix. “You ready to go find Valentina’s journal?”

  Alix’s smile was deep. He had been thinking about Caleb. “Give me about ten minutes. I thought we’d take a whole package of diapers. Think it’ll be enough?”

  “Are you kidding? Those packs are so big that if I run my truck into the sea it’ll float.”

  “True, but will it be enough for Tyler?”

  They looked at him, at the egg, milk, jam, and buttered biscuit on his face, in his hair, and down the front of him.

  “We’ll take the second pack just to be safe,” he said.

  “I’m on it and I’ll get some towels too.”


  “Great idea,” Jared said as he pulled the child out of the chair and headed for the kitchen sink. “Can you get him a clean shirt?” he called to Alix.

  But she was ahead of him and handed him one before he finished speaking.

  “Thanks, Mom,” he said as he kissed her forehead.

  Alix went away smiling.

  It took longer to get all the things needed for Tyler into the truck than it did to drive to the site. They decided that figuring out how to strap in the car seat required a degree in engineering.

  “I used to think my education was worth something,” Alix said as she stood on the ground and leaned across the truck seat to hold the safety belt for Jared. Tyler was trying to start the engine.

  “There were too many long-legged girls in school for me to think mine mattered.”

  “Give me a break!” Alix said, groaning. “Tyler, sweetie, don’t eat that.”

  Jared pulled the boy away from the gas pedal, put him in the car seat, and fastened it. “Everybody ready?” he asked as Alix got in and shut the door.

  “All of us long-legged creatures are ready to go. Right, Tyler?”

  He laughed, kicked his stubby little legs, and said, “Go! Go!”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Jared said and pulled out of the driveway.

  When they got to the North Shore, Twig’s men were there working. Right away, two of them gathered a stack of scrap wood, put it in the shade, and Tyler ran to it.

  Alix hadn’t seen the chapel for a while and she stood there transfixed. To see her own design come to life was almost more than she could bear. The structure wasn’t yet complete, but enough of the chapel was done that she could envision the finished product. The exterior, the windows, the doors, the steeple, were all just as she’d seen them in her mind.

  “Like it?” Jared asked from behind her.

  “Very much.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed. As a fellow architect, he knew how she felt.

  “Okay,” he said, “enough daydreaming. Let’s get to work.” He was holding Parthenia’s map. “Not that anyone could find anything from this thing, but—”