True Love Read online

  Victoria wanted to know if Jared was temporarily using her daughter or was serious about her. As for Alix, was she starstruck or could she see past Jared’s fame in the architecture world?

  A little after noon, Victoria heard the back door open and her heart soared. They were here! She took a step forward, but then her cell rang. There was only one person whose call she’d take even if it meant postponing seeing her daughter and that was her editor. The ID said it was.

  “I have to take this,” Victoria called out and headed up the stairs. She needed quiet to be able to formulate her lies to her editor. She wasn’t about to tell the truth, that she hadn’t even started her overdue novel. At least this time she could say she was “almost” finished and it wouldn’t be a total lie. After she’d spent a month reading Valentina’s journal and writing the detailed outline, she would be on her way to turning in a finished product. “Almost” was a relative term.

  Victoria spent twenty minutes exaggerating everything to her editor—not quite lying, but not honest either. She used words like “complicated” and “best I’ve ever written” and “dealing with deep emotions in this book.” They were phrases editors loved to hear.

  When she got off the phone, her first impulse was to run to tell Addy about it. She would have laughed hysterically.

  A tear came to Victoria’s eye, but she wiped it away. She couldn’t tell Addy, but she did have her dear daughter. Alix had always loved her mother’s stories.

  Smiling, Victoria went down the stairs to the dining room, preparing to make a grand entrance. But they weren’t sitting at the table. Alix’s cardigan was folded across the back of a chair and Victoria picked it up as she went toward the front of the house.

  She found Jared and Alix sitting side by side on the little couch, leaning toward each other, just their fingertips touching. Victoria was about to announce her presence, but didn’t. Instead, she stood and watched in shock.

  Since Alix had been on Nantucket they’d talked on the phone often, and her daughter had riddled her conversation with what Jared said and did. Victoria had known that Alix was beginning her first real love and she’d been glad of it.

  But Victoria was not prepared for this. Alix and Jared were looking at each other as though only they existed. There were no other people in the world, just the two of them.

  Victoria stepped back out of the doorway, leaned against the wall, and closed her eyes. It was the way she’d always wanted a man to look at her. There’d been hundreds of men through her life as she’d attracted them, but she’d always held back. They looked at her as a prize to be won, something to conquer. And if she let them get too near, they ran away. Victoria wasn’t at all helpless, as they’d assumed.

  She peered around the doorway. They were kissing now. Sweetly and gently, smiling, utterly content to be together, needing no one else. Certainly not a mother who wanted to tell them about some novel she was trying to write.

  Victoria was still holding Alix’s sweater and she buried her face in it. She had lost her daughter! As completely and totally as though Alix had flown away to another planet, she was gone.

  Victoria knew she had to calm herself before she appeared. Quietly, she went back up the stairs, but she didn’t go to her own room. She went to Alix’s bedroom—what had once been Addy’s. That one of Jared’s shirts was on a chair seemed to drive a nail into Victoria’s heart.

  She put Alix’s sweater on the foot of the bed. I can stand this, she thought, but then she looked at the big portrait of Captain Caleb and went to sit on that side of the bed. Was the man’s ghost really in the house or was it something Addy had made up?

  “Now what do I do?” Victoria whispered as she looked at the portrait and more tears came to her eyes. “Do I help them? Do I make it easier for them to leave me?” She took a tissue out of the box on the bedside table and blew her nose.

  “Ken just met this woman Jilly but already her eyes light up when she sees him. And he was ready to do battle to protect her. Alix and Jared … those two look like they’ve merged into one being. My daughter …” The tears came stronger. “My beautiful, precious daughter is leaving me. How do I live without her? She keeps me sane; she is always there. She is …” Victoria swallowed.

  “She is his.”

  She looked at the portrait. “What do I do? I need some advice. Do I go back to my big empty house and learn how to bake cookies in hope that I’ll get a grandchild soon? Do I …?” She took a breath. “Do I now get old? Is that what’s left for me? To sit on a porch and grow old alone? Where is my True Love?” She was crying hard.

  Suddenly, Victoria was overwhelmed with sleepiness, and it was as though someone was gently pushing her down on the bed. The bed was so very comfortable and the instant her head touched the pillow, she fell asleep.

  When she awoke, it was an hour later and she was smiling. She knew what she had to do. It was almost as though someone had instructed her while she was sleeping. It was a man’s voice and it sounded very familiar. “You have to help them,” the voice said. “Now is not the time to think of yourself. Love can’t be selfish; it can’t be one-sided. This is Alix’s time and Jared’s, and you’re going to give it to them.”

  Smiling, she got up and went to the bedroom door, but then she turned back and looked at the portrait of Captain Caleb. “If you want to show yourself to me, please do. I may not be your Valentina, but I could use some of what you gave to her.”

  She left the room, closing the door behind her. She had a plan, and the very first thing she was going to do was call Izzy. Everything depended on being able to persuade her.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Jared had never been so frustrated in his life. He was frustrated mentally, physically, psychologically—any way it could be thought of, he was feeling it.

  He’d always liked Victoria. Well, maybe not that first summer, but back then he’d hated nearly everyone. Since then he’d enjoyed her visits. But right now he wanted to wring her neck.

  In the nearly two weeks since Victoria arrived, Jared had hardly seen Alix. They’d gone from living together extremely comfortably to not being together at all. In the past this wouldn’t have bothered him; he would have just gone fishing. But he’d found that working, babysitting, socializing, everything he did had been easier and certainly more pleasant with Alix around.

  Yesterday his business partner, Tim, had called and said that he’d had enough of Jared’s absence and he needed him to get back to New York. “Everybody in the office likes me so much they’re standing around the watercooler and chatting. Sharing. Making playdates with one another. Since you left, two office romances have started and I can hardly wait for everyone to take sides when they break up.”

  “Tell them to go back to work,” Jared said, but there was no real interest or conviction in his voice.

  “I tell them, but they pat me on the shoulder and show me their kids’ photos. And Stanley! Without you here, he doesn’t have enough to do. Last week he sent out a memo saying that from now on all files were to be color coded.”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Jared said.

  “You think not? Stanley has twenty-one categories and twenty-one colors. What the hell color is cerise? Jared! You have to return and put this place back in order. I’m the money guy, remember? You’re the tyrant.”

  Jared snorted. “If I’m a tyrant, how come I’m being run over by a little woman in high heels?”

  “Do you mean Alix?”

  “Hell, no! I never even see Alix. It’s her mother who’s driving me insane.”

  Tim rolled his eyes. “I know about girls’ mothers. Before I got married my mother-in-law was a monster. Now she’s … Actually, she’s still a snake. I bought a book about a tribe that doesn’t allow the wife’s mother to speak to her daughter’s husband. Want me to send you a copy?”

  “No, thanks,” Jared said. “After Izzy’s wedding, I’ll return. It’s less than a week away now.”

  “Are you planning t