True Love (Nantucket Brides 1)

“Amid the portable toilets,” Glenn said.

As Alix joined the laughter, she turned to look at Jared in question and he seemed to understand. Could they build the chapel on the land Jared had shown her?

Jared shook his head. “It can’t be done. The permits would take weeks, if not months. We Nantucketers are fierce about what we allow to be built on our island.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Too bad. It would have been nice for Izzy to get married in …”

“Something of architectural significance?” Jared asked. “A building created by her best friend who is about to set the world on fire with her designs?”

“And built by the world’s greatest living architect,” she said, smiling at him with adoring eyes.

“I’m going to be ill,” Izzy said as she leaned over to kiss Glenn’s cheek. “I’m glad you and I don’t act like that.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Alix said. “I remember the night after your third date with Glenn. You were so mad about him that you—” She kept talking, delighting in the telling of Izzy and Glenn’s story—and deflecting attention away from her and Jared. It was much too soon for them to even think of discussing the future.

Alix was so engrossed in her story that she didn’t notice the way Jared and her father looked at each other over her head. Based on many years of time spent together, they easily communicated silently. All Jared had to do was raise his eyebrows and Ken nodded. Before anything was built on Nantucket it had to pass the HDC, the Historic District Commission—and Dilys was on that committee.

When Alix finished her story of Izzy and Glenn dating, Jare

d and Ken were smiling extraordinarily widely. They had just made a plan and they were going to do everything they could to make it happen.

Now Ken was smiling at Jared and Alix. They were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, the floor before them littered with papers. Over the last weeks, the three of them had been using the office in the guesthouse to draw the plans for the remodel of Jared’s cousin’s house in town.

Years ago, the office had been Ken’s. He’d set it up when he’d arrived on Nantucket and it was where he’d taught Jared how to use a triangle and T-square. It had made him feel good to see Jared and Alix bent over the big drafting table.

Each of them had a story about the old-fashioned office. Ken told what he’d gone through to get Addy to lend him the mermaid that had once been a ship’s masthead.

“There it was, sitting in the attic amid all those old trunks, covered in dust, and she acted like I wanted to take it out and use it for firewood.”

“So what did you have to do to get her to let you move it over here?” Jared asked.

“I tried logic, but that didn’t budge her. Finally, I told her I was in love with the memory of the woman who’d sat for it back in the eighteenth century. That worked.”

Alix had nearly choked on her drink in laughter, then she embellished her story of how Izzy and she had broken into the place. “But that was before we knew you were a real person,” she told Jared.

He gave her a serious look. “I have to admit that there’s a part of me that misses that student admiration.”

“I know just what you mean,” Ken said with a pointed look at Jared.

They all laughed together.

Jared’s story was simple. He had never allowed anyone into the room except the two of them.

Ken smiled. Coming from Jared, the statement meant so very much.

As Ken was smiling at the two of them, thinking that life was good, outside there was a quick flash of lightning, startling them with its ferocity. Seconds later came a huge crash.

They looked at one another. As people involved in the building trade, they knew what that sound was. They nearly tumbled over each other as they ran toward the kitchen and out the back door.

Outside it was dark and raining hard. Jared had grabbed a big flashlight from a drawer and he shone it around the garden. When he came to the rose arbor, he stopped.

The arbor, still covered in prickly stems, had fallen to the ground—and it had taken the rose bushes with it. Where there had once been a beautiful covered archway was now a mess of broken wood and uprooted plants. The ground was muddy and grassless.

“Oh, no!” Alix shouted over the rain. “How can Izzy use that?” She looked up at Jared. “Izzy will be so disappointed. You can fix it, right?”

With rain running down his face, Jared smiled at her. She was looking at him as though she thought he could do anything. If there was a hole in the earth, she seemed to think he could repair it. Reaching out, he put his arm around her and drew her to him. When he did, he glanced upward and saw his grandfather at the upstairs window.

Suddenly, Jared knew without a doubt in the world that, somehow, his grandfather had done this. From getting Alix to design a chapel, to this strong, sturdy cedar arbor lying in the mud, to the wedding, he knew that Caleb Kingsley had done it all.