True Love (42 page)

Alix got the blanket and spread it out, then ran to the bathroom to get some wet cloths. All this to change one messy diaper? she wondered.

When she got back to the living room, Jared had Tyler’s shorts off and Alix saw that they weren’t clean. She rummaged in the bag and got out a diaper, then sat on the arm of the couch and watched. Tyler was laughing as Jared held him down with one hand and removed his very dirty diaper with the other.

Alix’s first thought was how could someone so small produce that much? Jared used the diaper and the cloths to clean him but…

“Look,” Alix said. When Tyler rolled over, she saw that it was all the way up his back, almost to his hair.

“Okay, buddy,” Jared said, “let’s get you into the shower.”

“Wouldn’t a tub be better?” Alix asked.

“You want to clean it?”

“No, thanks.”

With Jared holding the half-naked boy at arm’s length, they went to the master bath. Alix was going to get the blanket and shorts up, but Jared called for her.

“Help me undress, would you?” he said as he reached in and turned on the shower. “I can’t let him loose or he’ll spread it all over the house, so I’m going to get in with him.” With his arm securely around Tyler, Jared bent so Alix could pull his shirt off over his head.

When Alix started to help with Jared’s jeans, the child almost
escaped, but Jared caught him. Unfortunately, the mess on Tyler was now also down the front of Jared’s bare chest.

Alix couldn’t help laughing.

“Don’t encourage him,” Jared said, but he was smiling. Still holding Tyler, he got into the shower with the boy and grabbed a bar of soap.

Alix looked at the two of them, both naked, both beautiful. Never in her life had she seen a sight that affected her more. No building on the face of the earth equaled the perfection of this man with this child. The tenderness, the kindness, the love between them seemed to create a glow around them.

For a moment she had to hold on to the sink to keep from collapsing. “I’ll …” she began. “I’ll get the …” Vaguely, she pointed toward the living room.

“No eating the soap,” Jared told Tyler. “And keep your eyes closed. I have to shampoo your entire body.”

Alix left the room to get the blanket and clothes in the washer, and put the diaper in the outside trash.

When she got back to the bathroom, Jared held a wet and slippery Tyler out to her. “He’s yours to dress. I’ve got to wash my hair.”

“I don’t know how—” Alix began, but Jared wasn’t listening. Grabbing a towel off the rack, she took the boy.

Tyler didn’t like having his diaper changed but he
hated
being put back into clothes. Alix managed to get him onto the bed where he promptly rolled off and ran for the door. She caught him, put him back on the bed, and held him down with one hand on his chest while she got clothes out of the diaper bag.

Tyler was laughing hilariously as he struggled to free himself from Alix’s grasp. Figuring out how to put on a diaper while holding him down wasn’t easy. As soon as she’d get the diaper under him, he’d roll away and she’d pull him back. She got the diaper in place, then the sticky tab glued itself to her left thumb and she couldn’t get it off. She had to get the other tab in place before the first one gave way.

When she finally had it on, Tyler looked at her with eyes of mischief, but she caught him before he made another run for it. “Oh, no, you don’t. Now come the clothes!” She made a cackling sound like an evil witch—which made Tyler go into hysterics with laughter.

When Alix finally got him into his shirt and shorts, she looked at him in triumph. “There, now. Doesn’t it feel good to be clean? Let’s get your sandals on.”

Seeing an opening, Tyler did a lightning-fast roll and was off the bed in less than a second. He ran past Jared, who was standing in the doorway. He wore only his jeans with a towel around his neck.

Alix sat on the edge of the bed, then flopped back onto it, her arms spread wide. “I am
exhausted
.”

Too bad Tyler didn’t feel the same way. Jared nabbed him as he ran out of the room, then tossed him onto the bed beside Alix. When Jared stretched out on the other side of them, Tyler immediately began yelling, “Press! Press!”

Jared groaned. “He only knows about six words, so why does that have to be one of them?”

“What does it mean? Is it someone’s name?”

“I should be so lucky,” Jared said as he began to stack pillows on top of each other then lay down on them.

Alix watched as Jared stretched out on the pillows so his body was a foot above the bed. With a howl of laughter, Tyler flopped across Jared’s chest and stiffened his sturdy little body. Jared began to bench press the boy. The pillows were for Jared’s arms to go down by his ribs.

“I think I’ll go make dinner,” Alix said, laughing as she got up and left the room.

When Jared and Tyler got to the kitchen, with Jared saying his arms were aching, Alix was stirring shrimp and rice in one of Dilys’s big skillets. Jared fastened Tyler into a sturdy wooden high chair that he said had been made by his great-grandfather, and began to feed the child cheese and crackers.

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 away. “Okay, where’s my laptop?”

Alix already had it in her hand. It took a while to print out a copy of the map. Dilys had a new printer and they couldn’t find the disk for it, which meant that they had to download the driver—and of course the first two times they tried it didn’t work. Alix had already learned that she was much better at computers than Jared was, and she was the one who found the upgrade that made it work. By the time they were able to print out the map, they’d drunk two glasses of wine each, it was nearly midnight, and they were yawning.