True Love Read online

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