True Love (49 page)

As she moved about, she kept looking out the window, as nervous as Jilly watching for Ken. It hadn’t been easy for her since Alix went to college. Leaving her writing studio to return to an empty house had sometimes left her dizzy with yearning. There were always invitations and Victoria was good at throwing parties, but she still missed her daughter.

When Alix came home, it was as though the world could start turning again. They talked and talked, with Victoria telling her about her books, people she’d seen, places she’d traveled. She was well aware that Alix often left out tidbits about her own life, but Victoria knew how to get them out of Ken. All she had to do was
start a sentence with, “I’m worried about Alix,” and Ken blabbed his guts out. But then Victoria had never thought it was fair that their daughter told him more than she did her.

Victoria got everything ready for lunch, setting the big old dining table up beautifully. She and Addy had put on many dinner parties there. Victoria had been the one to scour the closets and even the attic for beautiful old china and tablecloths. Addy had made up the guest list. “No, no,” she’d say. “Those two hate each other. Their great-grandfathers were in love with the same woman.” Or “Who knows about them? Their family only moved to the island in the 1920s.” Sometimes she’d say, “They’re summer people, but they’re still respectable.”

As for the food, someone else cooked it and they poured it into the eighteenth-century Chinese import dishes that Captain Caleb had brought back.

So now Victoria set the table for Alix and Jared, two people she loved very much.

That first summer when she’d met Addy’s nephew, she’d seen a tall, surly boy who was so angry he was a bit frightening. That summer Victoria’d had her mind full of the journals and had stayed away from him. Besides, he’d made it clear that he didn’t like an outsider in his family home.

But the next summer she’d seen a different person. There were still vestiges of that first boy, but Jared had spent most of a year under the tutelage of a very angry Ken. It had taken some work on her part but she’d managed to elicit a few smiles from the boy.

By the time Jared graduated from high school, he was completely changed, and when Ken approached Victoria about helping pay to educate him, she’d readily agreed.

Sometimes Victoria had felt bad about keeping Alix from knowing about Nantucket, but she also knew it was for the best. Early on, Ken had shown her that Jared had a talent for architecture, and Alix had been scribbling pictures of houses since she could pick up a crayon.

That first summer, one afternoon Victoria had walked into the big family room to find a fourteen-year-old Jared and a four-year-old Alix sitting on the floor building some great, tall structure out of Legos. Alix was looking at the boy with eyes filled with stars, while Jared saw her as a kid.

In an instant, Victoria saw Alix’s future: She’d crush on the big, handsome boy so hard that she’d forego her own life. Victoria wanted more for her daughter. She didn’t want Alix to do what she’d done, marrying too young and taking on responsibilities too soon. And when you were settled with a man you had to deal with his family, something Victoria had been too young to handle. No, Victoria wanted her daughter to find out about herself first, then later, if she met Jared again and they liked each other, that was another matter.

All this led Victoria to her present worry. For all that she’d used Jared to goad Ken into an argument, she was concerned about how Jared felt about Alix. When it came to women, he really was a bit of a scoundrel. Every August they’d laughed about his girlfriends. He never had time for them—and he kept his work life separate from his personal one. “Half of them don’t know what I do for a living,” he’d said just two summers ago. “And the other half don’t care.”

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

J
ared 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 to bring your new girl back here with you?”

“Alix is not just my ‘new girl,’ ” Jared half shouted. “She’s more than that.”

“Don’t take my head off! Save it for the kids around the watercooler. Maybe I should start handing out balloons when they do their work correctly. Think that will inspire them?”

“I get your point. The wedding is this Saturday. I’ll be in the office on Monday.”

“Is that a pinky promise?”

“Go count your coins,” Jared growled and clicked off.

After that call Jared felt worse—which he wouldn’t have thought possible. At first he’d been amused by what Victoria was doing. Ken had arrived at the chapel site with Jilly and he was in a fury over what Victoria had tried to do.

“She wanted to use Jilly as her maid! Can you imagine that?” Ken was steaming in anger.

“And your solution was to move Jilly in with you?” Jared asked.

“I had to protect her, didn’t I?”

Jared had turned away to hide his smile, but the next day he was frowning. Victoria had banished him from Alix’s room. At the time it hadn’t bothered him as he thought he’d go up the secret staircase later, but he’d underestimated Victoria. She’d locked the downstairs door from the inside. It was annoying that she knew the house so well, and he wished he could let his aunt Addy know what he thought of her telling an outsider about that staircase. That Jared had shown it to Alix, and that Ken had been allowed to help repair it didn’t matter to him.