Heartwishes Read online

  At twelve-thirty, she got a text from Joce.

  Did you hear Sara’s news?

  She typed back that she hadn’t heard anything about Sara.

  Joce wrote back:

  Call me or come over and I’ll give you lunch and tell all.

  It was the break Gemma needed. She practically ran to her car and was at Joce’s beautiful old house five minutes later. The door was ajar, so she pushed it open. She very much wanted a tour of the house, but from the cacophony it seemed that both babies were crying.

  Joce looked exhausted and frantic. “They’re dirty at both ends,” she said.

  Gemma didn’t reply, just took a baby and stripped him/her—it turned out to be a him—and plunked him down in a sink full of warm water. Like magic, he got quiet.

  Joce looked at her in awe.

  “My sister taught me how to do this.”

  For the next few hours, she and Joce worked like a team, with washing babies, feeding them, then washing again, and redressing. Joce never stopped telling Gemma thanks. When the babies were ready to go down for their second nap, it was three hours later.

  “Why don’t you lie down and take a nap yourself?” Gemma said to Joce. “I’ll listen for the babies and look after the house.”

  “I couldn’t allow that,” Joce said. “You’ve done too much already.”

  Gemma had to practically push her up the stairs, with Joce saying thanks at every step.

  While they slept, Gemma toured the house on her own and got the laundry done, cleaned up the kitchen, and put the living room back in order. When everyone was still asleep, she checked the fridge and found ingredients to make a meat loaf. She smiled as she worked, remembering Colin teasing her about her meat loaf, which she’d never made for him.

  At a little after five Joce came downstairs with two smiling babies in her arms. Gemma took one.

  “I can’t thank you enough for this,” Joce said as she looked in the oven window. “Sometimes I get so overwhelmed I can’t think. If it weren’t for friends like you I don’t know how I’d manage. I don’t know how Sara is going to cope. She knows so few people outside of Edilean.”

  “Are you saying she had her baby?”

  “Good heavens! You came over to hear the news and I forgot to tell you. Last night Sara had an emergency C-section and delivered twins.”

  Gemma quit bouncing the baby and stared at Joce. “Twins? Didn’t she have a sonogram so she knew how many kids she was having? Or did she just not tell anyone?”

  “She didn’t know. The second baby was positioned behind the front one in such a way that no one saw it on the sonograms.”

  Gemma was having trouble collecting her thoughts. “At the barbecue, Sara wished for . . .”

  “I know. She wished for twins.”

  Gemma sat down at the kitchen table, the baby held firmly to her. “Boy or girl?”

  “Two boys. Mike said he’s already ordered martial arts gear for them.”

  “How is he?”

  “Excited. Bewildered. Scared out of his mind.”

  “I wish—” Gemma began, then swallowed. “I mean, I hope that they come back here and live.”

  “Me too, but Mike has a couple more years to go before he can retire. Now that his friend Frank is going to be living here, he really wants to be here too.” Joce looked at Gemma. “You don’t think there really is anything to this Heartwishes Stone, do you?”

  “No, of course not,” Gemma said, but she didn’t sound convincing. She glanced at the wall clock. It was five-forty-five. “I have to go. I have a date with Tris at six.”

  “Date? But Colin—?”

  “Not that kind of date,” Gemma said. “A date to gain information.” She put the baby in her high chair and kissed her.

  “Let me know what you find out,” Joce called as Gemma ran to the front door. “And I’ll never be able to thank you enough for today. I feel like a new woman.”

  In his office, Tris greeted Gemma warmly, his hands on her shoulders as he kissed her cheek. He was wearing his white doctor’s coat and looked very professional.

  Four women were there, all of them looking at her in speculation—and as though they were ready to fight to protect Tristan.

  He led her back to his office and closed the door behind her.

  “Are they your harem?”

  “Pretty much,” he said as he took off his white coat. “At least they think they are. And besides, they think you’re stepping out on Colin.”

  “Or are they angry that I’m going out with you?”

  Tris chuckled. “Would you like to go to my house for dinner? I have a refrigerator full of food.”

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  As they left his office, she couldn’t help being glad when Tris told the women who worked for him that if he was needed, he’d be at home. “With Gemma,” he added.

  When they were outside, she said, “This is going to be all over town.” Somehow, that didn’t bother her. “Should I follow you in my car?”

  “Sure,” he said as he got out his keys.

  As Gemma followed Tristan in her car, she couldn’t help but be curious about where he lived. They went down a road she’d never seen before that seemed to go into the nature preserve that surrounded Edilean. They left the paved road and turned onto gravel, but when she still didn’t see a house, she began to wonder if he lived in a tent on vacant land. There was another turn, then they came to cattle bars, and he drove over them.

  To her left, through the thickly wooded area around them, she saw a sparkling blue lake with ducks swimming about. Ahead of her was the house. It wasn’t large, but it was lovely. Better yet, it was in an idyllic setting, with the lake directly in front of it.

  She stopped behind Tris and got out of her car. It was wonderfully quiet, with only the sound of birds and the wind in the trees. “This is gorgeous,” she said. “Have you lived here long?”

  “All my life, and my dad grew up here too. It’s called the Aldredge House and part of it is old. Not old by Edilean standards, no eighteenth century, but it was built in the 1840s.”

  “For that time period, shouldn’t it be a modified Colonial?”

  “I think it was, but generations of Aldredges changed it.”

  She walked toward the lake to look up at the house. It was two stories, with windows all along the front, and she saw a chimney above the roofline. She could imagine sitting by a fire on snowy days. On the far left was a low-roofed room that seemed to be all glass. “Is that a conservatory?”

  “Yes,” Tris said. “My ancestor who built the house was a master gardener.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve been known to frequent a nursery now and then. Come inside and I’ll show you the rest of it. You have to tell me what’s old and what’s new.”

  “Ah! A challenge,” she said as she followed him in a side door. They went into a large hallway, with a tile floor and an oak staircase at the end.

  “Old,” she said, then nodded toward the door to the right, silently asking if she could open it. It was a large family room, with bookcases and a big TV, very cozy. It took only a glance to see that the room was newer than the hall and she told him so.

  Across the hall she opened a door to a long room that was wide on the right but narrowed at the other end where she saw the kitchen with its dark cherry cabinets. “This is old and I don’t think it’s always been one room. So how’d I do?”

  “Perfect,” he said. “My mother had the walls torn out on this side. Right after Addy was born, Mom told my dad that she wasn’t going to be stuck alone in the kitchen, and that if he wanted dinner on the table he damn well better let her see what her kids were up to. Two days later, the walls were down.”

  “I think I like your mother.”

  “Me too,” Tris said. “Can I make you a drink?”

  “Can’t. I’m driving, but if you have it, I’ll take a tonic water with lots of lime juice.”

  “Comi