True Love (15 page)

“Great,” Wes said. “How about going to the Daffodil Festival with me this weekend? We’ll ride in my dad’s old car for the parade, then later we can go to ’Sconset for a tailgate picnic.”

“What do I bring?”

“Just your pretty self. My mom and sister will do the cooking.”

“Keep it in the family, I guess,” she said, remembering that Wes had said he was a cousin to the Kingsley family.

“Doing that would include half the island. I’m going out on my boat today. Want to go with me?”

“I’d—”

“She and I are going to see Dilys,” Jared said, his voice firm. “And we have some things to do around town.”

Alix kept her eyes on Wes. “And Mr. Kingsley and I have a lot of things to talk about.”

“On second thought,” Jared said. “Maybe she could go with you.”

Alix turned and gave Jared a warm smile. “You’re my host and I think we should get to know each other, don’t you?”

“I came here for breakfast, so maybe I could join you two,” Wes said. “And I haven’t seen Dilys in weeks.”

“We’re finished.” Jared stood up and put money on the table. Downyflake didn’t take credit cards.

“See you Saturday,” Alix said to Wes as she left, Jared right behind her.

They got into his truck and he had the job of maneuvering out of the close parking lot, which he did with ease.

“So why does my mother want
me
here?” Alix asked as soon as they were on the road.

“I have no idea,” he said.

She heard the honesty in his voice.

“Look, this whole thing is a shock to me,” he said. “My aunt Addy died and I was told that she’d left our family’s house—which should have gone to me—to Victoria’s daughter for a year. I will admit that I was quite angry when I was told.” He looked at her to see how she’d take that.

“I don’t blame you. I would be too. Why did my mother come here?”

“For inspiration?” he asked, trying to sound innocent. “Aren’t her books set in a seaside town?”

“You haven’t read them?”

“No.” He didn’t say that he hadn’t because he knew they were based on his ancestors. Who wanted to read that his great-great-grandmother had affairs? Or that a distant cousin probably murdered his brother-in-law?

“Why didn’t she tell me she came here? Every August she sent me to stay with Dad. Mom said she went to her cabin in the Colorado mountains to think and plot her novels.”

She spent that month reading my family’s journals, one by one, Jared thought but didn’t say.

“How often did she come here instead of going to Colorado?”

“She’s come here every August since I was fourteen.”

Alix opened her month to speak, then closed it. Did this mean the whole cabin-in-Colorado was a myth? “Why did she lie to me all these years?”

Jared wished none of this had started; it wasn’t his business to tell any of it. “Maybe you were too close to my aunt,” he said softly. Both his grandfather and his mother had told him how Aunt Addy went to her bed for weeks after Alix was taken from her that first summer. She’d been through the deaths of most of her family, but she’d always been strong. She’d been the one to give comfort to the grieving.

But that summer had been different. After Ken had found his wife and his business partner in a compromising situation, his orderly, easy life had turned upside down. In the ensuing turmoil, Victoria had taken four-year-old Alix and run away to give him time to calm down. She ended up on the island of Nantucket, broke and with no discernible skills. She took a job as a housekeeper-cook for Miss Adelaide Kingsley. Even though Victoria couldn’t so much as turn on the old stove, and she refused to clean anything, Addy put up with her because she and little Alix became inseparable. It was after Victoria found the journals and began to rewrite the first story that Addy began to hope that Victoria and Alix would stay.

It might have happened except for Victoria’s insistence on secrecy. When she took little four-year-old Alix off the island, it had nearly killed Addy. And only Jared could see how it had affected his grandfather. His mother, not a Kingsley, couldn’t see Caleb, but Jared could. Even the death of Jared’s father had not upset his grandfather so much.

“Why would she take her away?” Caleb had whispered to Jared. “Alix belongs here. She always has.”

Jared couldn’t get his grandfather to say any more, but by that time Alix’s father was there and Jared’s life changed dramatically.

“I think that could be true,” Alix said in reply to his comment. “My mother does have a bit of a problem with jealousy.”

“What about you?”

“Yes, she’s always been jealous of anyone who got close to me. In high school I could hardly have a boy over or she’d—”

“No, I mean, do you have a problem with jealousy?”

“A month ago I would have said no, but recently my boyfriend, Eric, dumped me and took up with someone else. I wanted to shoot him.”

“Not her?”

“She was too dumb to know what was going on.”

Jared laughed, and Alix couldn’t help smiling.

“It’s too soon to laugh about!” she said. “On the way here on the ferry I was crying and eating lots of chocolate.”

“Were you?” Jared asked. “Is that a usual female remedy for being thrown over?” He put as much innocence in his voice as he could muster.

“In my case, it was.”

“That was just a few days ago. What brought you out of it?”

“I saw—” She broke off. She’d come close to saying “I saw your lower lip.” Instead, she looked out the window of the truck. They were in a rural area now, the houses farther apart, but still sided in that unfinished gray cedar that made a person aware that it was Nantucket.

“I thought maybe you did some work that took your mind off your problems,” he said.

She thought of the chapel model hidden away in the cabinet downstairs. With the way the man sauntered in and out of the house at will, she knew she needed to move the model and the papers so he didn’t accidentally see them. “Nothing important,” she said. “So tell me who Dilys is.”

Chapter Seven

T
hey turned down a little road that was close to the water, and pulled into a driveway beside a house that Alix could have picked out as having been designed by Jared Montgomery. Tall windows peeped out of the roof, doors were recessed, and there were angles that no one expected. The trademarks of his designs were all there.

He sat in the truck, watching her, as though waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t. She was determined to keep to her bargain. Here on Nantucket he was Kingsley, not Montgomery.

A short, gray-haired woman, sixtyish, came around the house. She had skin that had spent a lot of time exposed to sun and salt water, but her eyes were exactly like Jared’s. And like Captain Caleb’s, Alix thought.

Jared practically jumped out of the truck and ran to his cousin, picked her up, and twirled her around.

“My goodness, Jared, what a greeting. I just saw you a few days ago.”

“Don’t mention Ken,” he said. “You never met him. Victoria is fine, but Ken no.”

Dilys looked around him at Alix, whom she’d already heard a lot about. Lexie had called with an extraordinary story about Jared showing up at night asking for flowers. “I’m not to mention her own father?” Dilys asked as Jared set her down.

“You never heard of him. I’ll tell you why later.”

Dilys nodded as she pulled away to go to Alix. “Welcome to Nantucket. Won’t you come in? I have tea made.”

Jared was at the truck getting the cooler out of the back. “She’d rather have rum.”

“I would not!” Alix said, afraid Dilys would think she had a drinking problem.

“Don’t let her innocent look fool you. She packs away the rum like a Kingsley sailor.”

As he took the cooler into the house, Alix stood there with a red face. “I really don’t drink very much. I—”

Dilys laughed. “He gave you a compliment. Come inside and look around. I hear you’re a student of architecture.”

“Yes,” she said and went inside—then drew in her breath. The inside of the house was glorious. There were huge windows that looked out on the sea, a tall cathedral ceiling, a splendidly equipped galley kitchen, a built-in banquet. Old meets new. It was part beach house, part modern convenience—and all of it was pure Jared Montgomery. But Alix knew that this house had never been photographed and put in a book.

As she turned in a circle to look at all of it, she glimpsed Jared’s face as he unpacked the cooler. Smug, she thought. He knew just what she was thinking—and he was waiting for her praise.

“I can see that the architect Jared Montgomery did this,” Alix said rather loudly. “It’s early, but it’s his. The windows, the way this room flows into the other—they give it away. It’s his work; I’d recognize it anywhere.” She looked at him. “Mr. Kingsley, do you and Dilys mind if I look at the rest of the house?”

“Please do,” he said, and Alix walked down a hallway.

Dilys’s eyes were wide. “Doesn’t she know that
you
are Montgomery?”

“She does,” Jared said, smiling.

“Oh.” Dilys didn’t understand. “Why does she call you Mr. Kingsley?”

“I think that’s what the lawyer called me, so she keeps doing it.”

“Have you told her to call you Jared?”

“Naw.” He smiled. “I kind of like it. It’s a sign of respect.”

“Or age,” Dilys said.

“What is it about my age that everyone’s harping on today?”

“I don’t know. Do you think it could be your ZZ Top beard and hair?”

Jared paused, fish package in his hand, and blinked at her.

“Shall I call Trish and make you an appointment?” Dilys asked. “Three today okay?”

Jared nodded.

“You fit in here so well it’s difficult to imagine that you’ve ever lived anywhere else,” Alix said. “Did you want to leave the island?”

Jared was on his back, stretched out on the grass, while Alix was sitting up, and they were both staring at the water. Behind them was his house. He’d given her a tour of his childhood home, telling her how it had been when he was a kid, dark and dank, little more than a fisherman’s cottage. “But I fixed it,” he said, looking at her. “It was the first house I ever worked on.”

She’d wanted to comment on the brilliance of his remodel, but she was afraid she’d start gushing so she kept quiet. He told her the house had been remodeled when he was fourteen, and seemed to think that was significant, but Alix didn’t know why.

After the tour Dilys had shoved them out, saying she needed to make lunch and that Jared should show Alix his old neighborhood.

They’d walked for over an hour and, just as in the restaurant, Jared knew everyone. Alix had been introduced to all the people they encountered by her first name, and she’d been invited on boating trips, to come by for scallops, and to visit gardens.

Two older couples asked Jared to look at something that wasn’t working in their houses and he promised that he would. No one even came close to treating him as though he were anything but the grown-up version of a boy who used to live down the road.

They were back now, and again Dilys had sent them outside. Jared took his time in responding to her question. “After my father died I was angry, furious,” he said, “and I had a lot of energy pent up inside me. I wanted to beat the world at its own game. To do that I had to leave the island, first to study and get my degree, then to go to work.”

“Did you work hard in school and get rid of the energy that way? Wait. Sorry. I’m not supposed to ask that.”

He ignored the last part. “Actually, I didn’t really. School was rather easy for me.”

Alix groaned. “I have just decided that I hate you.”

“Come on, school couldn’t be too difficult for you. You’re Victoria’s daughter.”

“It’s been more my father’s perseverance that I inherited that got me through than my mother’s … What should I call it?”

“Charisma?” Jared asked. “Charm? Joie de vivre?”

“All of that. Her job is so easy for her. She goes away for a month every year and—” She looked at him. “But I guess you know that better than I do. Anyway, she goes away and plots her novels, then
returns home and writes them. She has a daily quota of pages and she never falters from her original plot. I change my mind fifty times before I decide what I want to do.”