True Love Read online

  “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.”

  “Do you change your mind or do you look at what you’ve drawn, see what’s wrong with it, then fix it?”

  “That’s exactly what I do!” she said, smiling.

  “To be able to see the flaws in your own work is a gift.”

  “I guess it is. I’d never thought of it that way. I know that Eric thought every design he made was perfect.”

  “The fiancé, Eric?”

  “Don’t elevate him. He was merely a boyfriend. Now an ex.” For a moment they looked at each other and Alix wanted to ask him if all his girlfriends were exes, but he looked away and the moment was lost.

  “What are you working on now?” he asked.

  She thought of her little chapel, but it was insignificant compared to the magnificent structures he’d designed. “Nothing important. I need to study for the coming tests and plan my final project.”

  “Are you going to build it?” he asked, eyes twinkling.

  She laughed. “That trick was done by someone else.”

  “It could bear repeating, couldn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so. I—” She broke off because Dilys called them in to lunch.

  Minutes later they were sitting at the table in the beautiful house eating fried fish and coleslaw and homemade pickled beach plums. Dilys and Jared were on one side, Alix across from them.

  “Alix makes great hush puppies,” Jared said.

  “Did your mother teach you how?” Dilys asked.

  “My mother—” Alix began, then saw the laughter in Dilys’s eyes. “I can see that you know her well. By the time I was six I could dial every restaurant in our area that delivered.”

  “Victoria may have faults, but it’s a party wherever she is,” Dilys said. “What we loved was that your mother could get Addy to leave the house.”

  “I didn’t know she was a recluse,” Alix said. “I remember tea parties and lots of guests.”

  “Oh, yes, Addy invited people to her home, but she didn’t go out very often.”

  “She was agoraphobic?” Alix asked.

  Dilys leaned forward as though in conspiracy. “My grandmother used to say that Addy had a ghost lover.”

  “Anyone want more slaw?” Jared asked. “There’s plenty left.”

  Both women ignored him.

  “It had to have been Captain Caleb,” Alix said. “My memory is that Aunt Addy—as she told me to call her—and I used to lie in her bed and look at his portrait and she’d tell me mermaid stories. I thought it was all madly romantic.”

  “You remember that?” Dilys asked. “But you were only four.”

  “She knows where everything in the house is,” Jared said.

  Dilys smiled. “That’s because she used to search through the drawers and cabinets to find things to use for her buildings. If you hadn’t given her those Legos she m