True Love Read online

  Outside it was dark and raining hard. Jared had grabbed a big flashlight from a drawer and he shone it around the garden. When he came to the rose arbor, he stopped.

  The arbor, still covered in prickly stems, had fallen to the ground—and it had taken the rose bushes with it. Where there had once been a beautiful covered archway was now a mess of broken wood and uprooted plants. The ground was muddy and grassless.

  “Oh, no!” Alix shouted over the rain. “How can Izzy use that?” She looked up at Jared. “Izzy will be so disappointed. You can fix it, right?”

  With rain running down his face, Jared smiled at her. She was looking at him as though she thought he could do anything. If there was a hole in the earth, she seemed to think he could repair it. Reaching out, he put his arm around her and drew her to him. When he did, he glanced upward and saw his grandfather at the upstairs window.

  Suddenly, Jared knew without a doubt in the world that, somehow, his grandfather had done this. From getting Alix to design a chapel, to this strong, sturdy cedar arbor lying in the mud, to the wedding, he knew that Caleb Kingsley had done it all.

  “Come on,” Jared said to Alix. “Let’s get you inside. You’re wet and you don’t have on any shoes.”

  “I’m just concerned about—”

  He kissed her forehead. “I’ll fix it. Okay?”

  She nodded and they went back inside the house, while Ken went to the guesthouse to dry off.

  Once they were inside, Jared told Alix to go upstairs and fill the bathtub with hot water. “I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  It would have been a sexy invitation except that Jared was frowning deeply.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked. Her teeth were beginning to chatter.

  “Yes,” he said. “I just need to … to get some towels. Go on, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Alix wanted to ask him what was going on, but she was too cold to think clearly, and her mind was on Izzy’s wedding. What were they going to do now? Of course they’d rebuild, replant, and drape cut roses everywhere. It could be done. She ran up the stairs to her bathroom—their bathroom, she thought—and began filling the tub.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jared went straight to the stairs that led up to the attic. He knew from experience that his grandfather was strongest at the top of the house. The large attic room was packed with trunks and boxes and old furniture, some of them containing items that had been owned by his grandfather. These earthly connections, here and in the front parlor, made Caleb more visible.

  Jared also knew that his anger would draw his grandfather to him. Sure enough, when he opened the door to the attic and pulled the string to the overhead lightbulb, there his grandfather stood, hands clasped behind his back, fully ready for the coming argument.

  “You did it, didn’t you?” Jared said, his jaw clenched. “You made the arbor collapse.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Don’t evade my question,” Jared snapped.

  “I thought you had perfected question-evading.”

  Jared glared at him, but then his face changed. All his life he’d seen the shadowy figure of his grandfather. One of his earliest memories was of seeing him bending over his childhood crib and smiling. Jared had never thought it was strange that he could see through the man. It was years before he realized that semitransparent men weren’t part of other people’s lives.

  But right now he couldn’t see through his grandfather. At least not totally. He was clearer than Jared had ever seen him before. “What’s going on?” The anger was gone from his voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  Jared knew his grandfather understood him, but he motioned his hand up and down his body. “Why do you look like that?”

  Caleb took his time in answering. “On the twenty-third of June I’m going to leave this earth.”

  It took Jared a moment to understand what his grandfather was saying. “Leave?” he whispered. “As in die?” For all that Jared often made cracks about his grandfather finally leaving the earth, he couldn’t imagine a life without him. “I … I …” Jared began but couldn’t go on.

  “You’ll be all right,” Caleb said gently. “You have a family now.”

  “Of course I’ll be okay.” Jared was doing his best to recover from the shock. “And you’ll be … be happier.”

  “Depends on where they send me.” Caleb’s eyes were twinkling.

  Jared didn’t smile. “Why on Izzy’s wedding date?” Jared’s head came up. “Or did you make her set it then?”

  “Yes, I did. I seem to be able to do more … things than I could. And I know considerably more. Something is going to happen. It’s …” He trailed off.

  “What?!” Jared half yelled.

  “I don’t know. It’s just that I can feel things changing. Every day I get stronger.” He held out his hand. “I can see my own body. Yesterday I saw myself in a mirror. I’d forgotten how handsome I am.”

  Jared still didn’t smile. “What is going to happen?”

  “I told you that I don’t know, but I feel … a sense of anticipation. I just know that my life … your life … the lives of all of us are going to change soon. You need to tell Alix what you and Ken have been plotting. You can build it in time for the wedding.”

  “I’m not sure,” Jared said. “There’s not enough time.”

  “You need to do it!” Caleb said, his voice adamant, fierce. “You know where her chapel goes, don’t you?”

  “On the old house site.”

  “Yes, you have it right.” Caleb listened. “Alix has the bathtub full. Go to her.” Caleb’s body was beginning to fade away. Not disappear in an instant as usual, but more like the sun beginning to set. “You need to find—”

  “I know!” Jared said impatiently. “I’m supposed to find out what happened to Valentina.”

  Caleb’s body was little more than a shadow. “I think that before you can find her, you should look for Parthenia.” He was gone.

  Jared stood there a moment staring into the dim length of the attic. “Who the hell is Parthenia?” he muttered.

  Shaking his head, he pulled the light string and went down the stairs. When he got to the bathroom, Alix was already in a tub full of hot water, six-inch-deep bubbles across the surface, her head just peeping above. She gave Jared a smile of invitation, but when he didn’t seem to notice, she sat up straighter in the tub. “What happened?”

  Distracted, Jared removed his cold, wet clothing and put a leg into the water. “Damn! But this water is hot.”

  “I think you need it. You’re white as a glacier.” As soon as he was in the tub she moved between his legs, her back to his front. “Tell me what’s bothering you. And don’t even think of saying that nothing is.”

  Jared took a while before he spoke. Even though his life had been one of secrets and keeping things to himself, right now he wanted to tell Alix what his grandfather had told him. On Izzy’s wedding day, Captain Caleb Jared Kingsley, who’d died over two hundred years ago, was at last departing this earth. It would not be a joyous day for Jared.

  He couldn’t tell Alix that. But what he could tell her was what he and her father had been secretly working on for the last two weeks.

  “I think we can build your chapel,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ken and I’ve been working on this in secret and he should get building approval very soon. It hasn’t been easy.”

  Alix was silent as she listened to Jared tell what they had accomplished. Her father had taken measurements from Alix’s sketches and her model, and he’d spent an all-nighter drawing a floor plan and elevations.

  “Then he sent them to New York to be made into blueprints. Stanley rushed it all through.”

  “Your assistant,” Alix said.

  “Sometimes I think Stanley is the boss.”

  She turned to look up at him. “Now, why do I doubt that?”

  He kissed her and