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.
Jared held up the piece of paper. “All that for this.” It was just a simple sketch, drawn with a quill pen by a young woman writing home to her family. It vaguely showed the whereabouts of the North Shore house and three outbuildings. “Why didn’t she get a cartographer to do the coordinates? There were certainly enough men on Nantucket at that time who could have made a proper map. Any first mate worth his salt could have charted it for her. How’s anyone supposed to find anything with this thing?”
Alix took it out of his hand and put it on the table. “Parthenia drew it for her family. She didn’t think that someone was going to need it two hundred years in the future. Come on, let’s go to bed. You can complain about women and maps all day tomorrow when we go to the site and try to find where the washhouse was.”
“Maybe we should wait on that, and I’m not complaining. I’m—”
She stood on tiptoe to kiss him to make him stop doing what he said he wasn’t doing, then led him into the bedroom. It took only seconds for Jared to strip down to his underwear and for Alix to pull on one of his big T-shirts. She didn’t have any of her own clothes and she was too tired to think of rummaging through Dilys’s closet.
“Now, where were we?” Alix began as she started to kiss him, but she drew back and looked at him. There was no blue fire in his eyes. In fact, it was more like a hazy bluish-gray fog. But he was putting his arm around her as though he was about to make love to her. Gently, Alix pushed him back down on the bed, tucked the quilt around him, and kissed his forehead.
“Thank you,” he whispered and was asleep instantly. Before Alix fell asleep she couldn’t help but think that this snuggling was even more romantic, more intimate, than all their lovemaking.
Chapter Twenty-three
Alix awoke when a small hand hit her in the mouth. At first she didn’t remember where she was. As the sleep cleared from her mind, she saw that sometime during the night Tyler had escaped the confines of his crib and climbed into bed with them. He was in the middle of the two adults, sideways, so his body was over both of them. Jared was on his side, facing Alix, his arms out, encasing both her and the child, as though he were protecting them.
Smiling, Alix carefully extricated herself, then stood for a moment looking at them. They looked so sweet together that she picked up her phone and snapped a photo. She made her way to the kitchen, pulled one of Dilys’s cookbooks off a shelf, found a recipe for biscuits, and set about making them.
She patted out the fluffy dough. Even through her pleasant thoughts about where she was and who she was with, she couldn’t help feeling frustrated. She had so much to tell Jared about what Caleb had told her and what she’d seen, but she couldn’t seem to find a time. But then Jared wasn’t making it easy for her. Every time she mentioned Caleb, it was as though a shutter closed on Jared. His expression became distant, as though he was refusing to listen to what she had to say.
But she knew it was important. If the family considered Valentina’s disappearance significant enough that the house was willed to an off-islander for a whole year, then what Alix knew needed to be told.
And besides, Alix had a lot of questions she’d like to have answered. Number one was, Who was Caleb? Why hadn’t she been introduced to him? He looked enough like Jared that he was obviously a close relation, but she’d not heard him mentioned. Did he live on the island?
The big question was, Why hadn’t Caleb told his family what he knew? Jared hadn’t been told that Valentina kept a journal and that Caleb might know where it was hidden. Nor did Jared know about Parthenia’s map. Why had Caleb told all this to Alix, an outsider? Was there some family feud? But if that were true, Caleb wouldn’t have felt free to wander about Kingsley House. Or did he show up because he’d known Jared was away?
If Alix hadn’t been so absorbed in the old documents the morning after she met Caleb, she would have called Lexie and found out more of the particulars. As it was, the first chance Alix got, she was going to bombard Jared with every question running through her mind. She needed answers!
By the time the biscuits were done, Alix had strengthened her resolve to force Jared to answer her questions. The will said that Alix was to look for Valentina and doing that had to include Caleb.