True Love (10 page)

“You must miss her a lot,” Alix said softly.

“I do. I spent the last three months of her life with her. She was a grand lady.” For a moment he looked at Alix. “You know how to fillet fish, but do you know how to cook them?”

“I’m no chef but I do know how to fry bass. And I can make hush puppies.”

“With beer or milk?”

“Beer.”

“And cayenne pepper in the batter?”

“Of course.”

“There isn’t much food in this kitchen, but I have onions and cornmeal in the guesthouse.”

Alix realized that he was asking her to dinner. “Why don’t you go get them and I’ll …” She shrugged.

“That sounds good.”

The instant he was out the door, Alix ran up the stairs to her bedroom. Her suitcases had arrived but she hadn’t unpacked them. And the bags of clothes Izzy had bought for her were on the floor. But it would be too much to change clothes. Too obvious, too eager.

She ran to the bathroom to put on a little mascara and a blot of lipstick. Why was her face so shiny?! She used the pretty compact her mother had given her and toned down her skin.

She got back to the kitchen just as he opened the door. Their eyes met, but Alix turned away, her heart seeming to flutter. Too soon, she told herself. Too soon after Eric, too soon after meeting this illustrious man, too soon for everything.

He had a paper bag full of exactly what she needed to make hush puppies the way her father had taught her. It was interesting that he
had the ingredients in his kitchen. Self-rising cornmeal and self-rising flour weren’t usually to be found in a bachelor’s kitchen.

Without thinking what she was doing, she reached up and pulled a big porcelain bowl out of the cabinet, then took a wooden spoon from a drawer.

“For someone who doesn’t remember when she was four, you do seem to know where things are.”

“I do,” she said. “Izzy said it was creepy so I’ve kept quiet.”

“I’m not easily creeped out,” he said as he handed her an egg.

“Are you sure? What about horror movies? Or ghost stories?”

“Horror movies, especially ones with chain saws, turn me into a whimpering jellyfish, but ghost stories make me laugh.”

Alix was pouring oil into a deep saucepan. “Laugh? Don’t you believe in ghosts?”

“I believe in real ones, not the chain-rattling kind. So tell me what you do remember. Places? Things? People?” He was watching her intently as she mixed the batter.

“Some of all of it, I guess. I remember this kitchen well. I think I used to sit—” She put the bowl down and went to the table with its built-in seat. Beneath it was a drawer and she opened it. Inside was a thick tablet of drawing paper and an old cigar box that she knew was full of crayons. He peered over her shoulder as she lifted the cover of the pad.

The drawings Alix had done as a child were still there—and each one was of a building. Houses, barns, windmills, a rose arbor, a potting shed.

“It looks like I haven’t changed,” she said and turned to look at him. But he had walked away, and his back was to her. Again he was making sure she knew that he wanted nothing to do with her as a lowly student of architecture.

Part of her wanted to say that she knew who he was, but the bigger part didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that she knew. If he wanted to think he was anonymous, so be it. She went back to the stove.

“Do you remember any people?” he asked, not looking at her as he put fish in a hot skillet. They were standing quite close together, not touching, but she could feel the warmth of him.

“Mainly just the older woman, who I assume was Miss Kingsley,” Alix said. “And the longer I’m here, the more I seem to remember about her. She and I walked on a beach and I collected shells. Is it possible that I called her Aunt Addy?”

“Probably. It’s what all the younger relatives called her. I did. Was anyone else with you? Not on the beach, but here in the house.”

Alix held her hand above the pot of oil to see if it was hot enough before she began to drop in globs of batter. “Sometimes I …”

“Sometimes you what?”

“I remember hearing a man laugh. A very deep laugh and I liked it.”

“That’s all?”

“Sorry, Mr. Kingsley, but that is all I remember.” She glanced up at him, her eyes asking him to invite her to use his first name, but he didn’t respond. “What about you?”

“No,” he said, then seemed to come out of his trance. “My laugh is high pitched, breaks glass, not deep at all.”

She smiled at his self-deprecation. “I meant, who do you remember? Did you grow up on Nantucket?”

“Yes, but not in this house.”

“Who gets it after my year is up?”

“Me,” he said. “It nearly always goes to the eldest Kingsley son.”

“Then I’m taking away your inheritance.”

“Postponing it. Are these done?”

“Yes,” Alix said as she took the hush puppies out and drained them on paper towels.

“What china do you want to use?”

“The wildflowers,” she said without thinking, then looked at him in surprise. “Before I came here I told Izzy I didn’t remember anything about being here. But it seems that I even remember the china patterns.”

He was reaching up to a top cabinet and pulling down dishes that Alix knew she’d always liked.

“Maybe something bad happened later that made you forget.”

“Possibly. I know my parents were separating then, so that could have traumatized me as a child. My dad and I have always been close. He and I have traveled all around the world to see the most magnificent buildings. Have you ever seen—?”

“There’s salad in the bag if you want some.”

Alix had to turn away to hide a flush of anger that she knew was showing on her face. She wanted to say, “Okay, I get it. You’re a famous architect and I’m a nobody student. You don’t have to rub it in.” She went to the liquor cabinet and busied herself with making a drink from one of the rum recipes taped on the back of the door. She didn’t bother asking him what he liked.

Jared put the dishes and the hush puppies on the table, dumped salad in a bowl, and put out a bottle of dressing. Then he sat down and watched Alix at the liquor cabinet as she made some fruity drink. He liked her. He liked that she’d pitched in and cleaned the fish. Liked her ease at whipping up the batter for the bread. He liked the way she drank the rum. No giggles, no flirtiness. Just straightforward and good company.

Most of all, he liked how attracted he was to her. He hadn’t expected that. He remembered her as an intense little girl sitting on the rug in the family room and piling up things his ancestors had brought home from their voyages around the world.

Back then he’d been unaware of how valuable the objects were. To him they were just things he’d seen all his life. Jared still remembered all those years ago how Dr. Huntley, the young man who’d recently been made the head of the NHS, the Nantucket Historical Society, had nearly passed out the first time he’d visited Aunt Addy and seen little Alix sitting on the floor.

“That child is playing with …” He’d had to sit down to get his breath. “That candlestick is early nineteenth century.”

“Perhaps earlier,” Aunt Addy had said calmly. “The Kingsley
family lived on Nantucket long before this house was built and I’m sure they used candles.”

The director was still pale. “She shouldn’t be allowed to play with those things. She—”

Aunt Addy had just smiled at him.

“Where did you live?” Alix asked as she set two drinks on the table.

“What? Oh. Sorry, I was miles away. My mother and I lived in Madaket, on the water.”

“I don’t mean to be nosy, but why didn’t you grow up in Kingsley House?”

Jared gave a little chuckle. “When Aunt Addy was a girl she found the man she was to marry in a compromising situation, knickers down, knees up, that sort of thing. My dad told me that she used her father’s sympathy to get him to change his will to leave the house to her instead of to his son. Everyone thought that he would eventually come to his senses and change it back, but there was an accident and he died young, so Aunt Addy got the house instead of her brother.”

“Was the family angry about that?”

“No. They were relieved. Her brother probably would have sold the place. He wasn’t good with money and didn’t care about the house. He would have let the roof cave in.” What Jared wasn’t telling her was that Caleb had worked with Addy to make it all happen. It was because of the two of them that Kingsley House had stayed in the family all these years.

“But now the house is to come back to a son who is very good with roofs.”

“I like to think so,” Jared said, smiling.

Alix could see the pride in his eyes and she thought about what he must have felt when he was told that his ownership was to be postponed for a whole year. “Is where you grew up a town?”

“Not like you mean. Madaket is more of a place than an actual town. But there’s a restaurant there and of course there’s the mall.”

“A mall? What stores does it have?”

He smiled. “It’s commonly referred to as a dump, but we have a big take-it-or-leave-it area and …” He shrugged. “It’s Nantucket.”

They ate in silence for a while and Alix began to think of the reality of being alone in a place where she knew no one. “What are the wedding facilities like on the island?”

He paused with a fork on the way to his mouth. “You’re getting married?”

“No. My friend is, and …” She trailed off, her face red with embarrassment.

“What’s wrong?”

“I told her she could have the wedding in the garden here. I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t own this house, you do. It was presumptuous of me.”

Jared bit into another hush puppy. “These are good.” He found he rather enjoyed the way she was looking at him in question, waiting for his answer. “You have my permission to have the wedding here. This house could use some music and laughter.”

Alix smiled at him so warmly that he leaned his head toward her, almost as though he expected a kiss in thanks. But she turned away.

Jared pulled back. “I’ll get Jose and his guys to clean the place up for you.”

“They’re the gardeners? I was worried that I’d have to mow and rake and everything else. Not that I couldn’t do it, but I don’t think I’d be good at it. I want to spend this summer working.” She waited for him to be polite and ask what she’d be working on, but he said nothing.

Suddenly, Alix had had enough. It was clear that he didn’t think the two of them shared a love of land and buildings. To him, she wasn’t even worthy of telling the truth about his profession.

She knew he was physically attracted to her—a woman always knew that—but as sexy as he was, she wasn’t interested. She didn’t want to be just another one of the Great Jared Montgomery’s conquests. Bottom lip or not, she liked a man as a whole. Not just a piece of him.

She stood up. “I’m sorry to leave you with cleanup detail, but I’m very tired and I want to go to bed. If I don’t see you again, thank you for dinner, Mr. Kingsley.” She said his name pointedly.

He stood up, looking as though he meant to shake her hand or kiss her cheek, but Alix turned away and left the room.

For a moment Jared stood there staring after her. He knew he couldn’t be right, but it was almost as though he’d made her angry. How? By asking her about his aunt? That didn’t make any sense.

He sat back down and picked up the pineapple and rum drink she’d made. It wasn’t to his taste, but it reminded him of his great-aunt. As he poured himself a shot of very old rum to sip, he expected his grandfather to appear in the room and bawl him out, but there was only silence. It was just like the old man not to warn him that Alix Madsen was in the house, that she’d arrived early—and that she’d been “working.” Designing some fanciful structure that a person would need a magic wand to be able to build?

As he leaned back in the chair with the drink, he ate the rest of the hush puppies. They were the best he’d ever had.

He knew it was thoroughly stupid of him to be attracted to his aunt Addy’s beloved Alix. When she’d first been here, she was four and he was fourteen. She was a cute little girl who liked to sit on the family room floor and build things. After the NHS president had nearly come unglued to see the child piling up valuable scrimshaw, antique tea caddies from China, and netsuke from Japan, Jared had gone home and rummaged through the attic until he found his old box of Legos. His mother had insisted on running them through the dishwasher. He remembered how pleased she’d been that he was doing such a kind thing for a little girl. But back then, Jared hadn’t exactly been a model son. His father, the sixth Jared, had died just two years before and he was still very angry about it. His mother had made him personally take the Legos to Alix.

The little girl had never seen the building blocks and had no idea what they were, so Jared got down on the rug and showed her how to use them. She’d been so pleased that when he was leaving, she
threw her arms around his neck. Aunt Addy, sitting on the couch and watching her beloved Alix, said, “Jared, someday you’re going to make an excellent father.”

His grandfather Caleb, hovering in the background, snorted and said, “But he’ll make a bad husband.” Back then his grandfather didn’t have much faith that Jared would do anything but spend his life in jail. As Jared had learned to do, he didn’t react to his grandfather’s comments when his aunt was near.

But Alix, who’d heard it all, looked up at Jared with serious eyes and said, “I would marry you.” That had made Jared jump up, his face red, and Caleb had given his great bellow of a laugh.

Later, Jared saw the intricate Lego structure Alix had made, and he was impressed. Caleb said that Jared had never made anything that good when he was four years old. Alix gave him a bunch of flowers from Aunt Addy’s garden to thank him for his gift. That night Jared went out with his buddies, got drunk, and ended up spending the night in jail—which wasn’t unusual for him back then. He never saw little Alix again, as soon afterward her mother’s first novel was accepted for publication. Victoria had immediately taken her daughter away, and never brought her back to Nantucket.