For All Time (Nantucket Brides 2)

“Martha?” Toby asked. “Is that … Martha Stewart?”

“Heavens, no! I mean the real Martha. Pullen, of course. The Queen of Sewing. She has all my measurements and she can make anything. I have to go. Send the photos today.” She hung up.

Toby clicked off her phone and looked at Lorcan, but she was already on the Internet. She’d found Martha Pullen’s website of products, history, and exquisitely crafted garments.

“Now we just have to find a gown beautiful enough to please Victoria,” Toby said. An hour later, using two laptops, they’d copied and pasted a file of twenty-two dresses from museum sites, each of them breathtaking.

“Here goes,” Toby said as she saved the photos onto a flash drive. Later she’d deliver them to Victoria.

“I’ll wager on the green one,” Graydon said.

“In that case, I’ll take the blue,” she responded.

“The one with the red ribbons,” Daire said.

“The pure white gown for maidenly virtue,” Lorcan said, and they all looked at her for a moment before bursting into laughter.

All in all, it would have been a very pleasant week—except for two things. Toby continued to have lightning quick visions of herself with Graydon, and he did some rather odd things.

Sometimes Toby would look at Graydon and “see” him in Regency dress. She’d seen him in those clothes at the dinner party and he’d worn them well, but her brief visions were different. Instead of the elegant little slippers that he’d worn at the dinner party, he had on tall leather boots. And the clothes didn’t look like a costume but like something he was used to wearing. One night Graydon was standing by the fireplace and she suddenly saw him in just the shirt, the skintight breeches, and those tall boots. The sight was so erotic that it had made Toby feel downright dizzy.

There were numerous other quick visions of food, of a big bed with rose petals on it, of rows of leather-bound books, and Graydon saying, “Shall we hide all the books under the floorboards and dig them out two hundred years from now?”

One morning before she was fully awake, she reached out for Graydon and was disappointed when he wasn’t in the bed beside her.

She hid all the visions from Graydon. Nor did she tell Alix about them. And when she talked to Lexie on the phone she didn’t mention them. But then, all Lexie could talk about was Roger Plymouth and all they were doing on their long car trip. “I thought he’d insist that we stay at five-star hotels,” Lexie said, “and there I’d be in jeans and a T-shirt looking like the worst of the American tourists. But we stop at places that have only three or four bedrooms and usually the food is grown and cooked by the owners. It’s all wonderful! But how are you doing? Been to bed with him yet?”

“Not for sex, no,” Toby said. “What about you?”

When Lexie hesitated, Toby gasped. “You have been to bed with him, haven’t you?”

“It just happened,” Lexie said. “Too much wine, too much moonlight. But it was just sex, no love. And you?”

“I think my problem may be the opposite: love but no sex.”

“Yeow!” Lexie said. “Tell me everything.”

“Not yet,” Toby said, “but I will later.”

With promises to each other, they hung up.

Besides the visions, Graydon was acting very strangely. One day he invited her on a walk, then took her to a Nantucket church that Toby had decorated for several weddings. At first she thought he just wanted to see the beautiful old building, but no, he’d wanted her to envision the church as it probably was in 1806.

Toby didn’t understand his meaning. Since it was the year she was using for the wedding, that’s what she thought he meant. “Victoria wants to be married in the chapel Alix designed, not here.”

Graydon gave a great sigh, as though she’d disappointed him, and took her out to lunch.

Over the week he’d played some very old-sounding music for her, cooked some unusual dishes, and said he should give up the sea to run the Kingsley family. He’d asked her what made Regency women swoon. He’d ordered a big book of slick photographs on Japanese tattoos and asked Toby to look at it with him.

By Saturday she was so tired of his strange actions that she got Lorcan and Daire to agree to go on a cruise around the island—knowing that Graydon had business in Lanconia and couldn’t go with them. The enthusiasm of their agreement made her think they too were glad to get away from Graydon.

They left early in the morning, all of them hurrying out the door, leaving a very sad-looking prince behind.

Graydon knew he was trying too hard to make Toby remember their time together. And he also knew that he shouldn’t do it. It was better that she didn’t remember. Better that she wasn’t going through what he was, being tortured daily by vivid, clear, relentless memories.

At first he tried to make himself believe it had all been a dream. A product of his imagination. He had lusted for Toby for so long that he’d dreamed about her. And with all the planning for a historic wedding, it was understandable that his dream would have ladies in semitransparent dresses. Since Toby remembered nothing, surely it was his fantasy alone.

But he didn’t believe it. Inside of him was the soul-deep knowledge that what was in his mind had actually happened. But how to prove it?