True Love (Nantucket Brides 1)

“So give her an apprenticeship,” his grandfather snapped. “After all, you owe her parents for your entire life.”

“Yes, I do, and that’s another reason why I can’t stay. How can I hide all these secrets from her? How do I keep what Victoria did while she was here on this island from her own daughter?” Jared asked, his voice showing his frustration. “Do you realize what a position my aunt’s idiot will has put me in? Not only am I supposed to guard the secrets of people I owe my life to, but my firm is in New York and this girl is a student of architecture. It is an impossible situation!”

Caleb ignored the first part of that rant. “Why should her studies bother you?”

Jared grimaced. “She’ll want me to teach her, to look at her drawings, to analyze and critique them. She’ll want to hear about my contacts, my … my everything.”

“Sounds to me like a fine thing.”

“It isn’t!” Jared said. “I don’t want to be the bait that gets fed on. And I like to do, not teach.”

“So what glorious deeds do you plan to do”—he emphasized the word—“while she’s here? Will it involve any of those floozies you parade past the windows?”

Jared gave a sigh of exasperation. “Just because girls today wear fewer clothes doesn’t mean they have low morals. We’ve been over this a thousand times.”

“Are you referring to last night? How were that one’s morals? Where did you meet her?”

Jared rolled his eyes. “Captain Jonas’s.” It was a bar near the wharf and it wasn’t known for its decorum.

“I daren’t ask what ship he captained. But who are the parents of this young woman? Where did she grow up? What is her name?”

“I have no idea,” Jared said. “Betty or Becky, I don’t remember. She left on the ferry this morning, but she might be back later this summer.”

“You are thirty-six years old with no wife, no children. Is the Kingsley line going to die out with you?”

Jared couldn’t help mumbling, “Better that than an architecture student to deal with.”

Although Jared was taller, his grandfather managed to look down his nose at his grandson. “I don’t believe you need to worry about her attraction to you. If your sainted mother were alive, even she wouldn’t recognize you as you are now.”

Jared stood where he was by the window and ran his hand over his beard. His grandfather had told him this would be Aunt Addy’s last year alive, so he’d rearranged his architectural firm to spend the final months with her on the island. He’d moved into the guesthouse and spent as much time as he could with Aunt Addy. And she was an understanding woman. She’d always warned him when she was going to have a tea party so he could go out on his boat. She never mentioned the women who occasionally came home with him. And most of all, she pretended that she had no idea why he was there.

In their last weeks together they’d shared a lot. Aunt Addy had told him stories about her life, and as the days passed she began to mention Caleb. At first she explained who he was. “He’s your fifth great-grandfather,” she said.

“I’ve had five of them?” he teased.

She was serious. “No. Caleb is your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.”

“And he’s still alive?” Jared had asked, playing dumb as he refilled her glass with rum. All the Kingsley women had a remarkable capacity for rum. “Sailors’ blood in them,” his grandfather said.

Jared saw the way his aunt got slower every day. “She’s getting closer to me,” his grandfather had said to Jared, and Caleb began to stay with her every night. They had lived together for many years. “The long

est of any of them,” Caleb said and there were tears in those eyes that never aged. Caleb Kingsley was thirty-three when he died, and over two hundred years later he still looked thirty-three.

But for all that Jared had shared with his aunt, he never came close to telling her that he too could see, talk, and argue with his grandfather. All the Kingsley men had been able to, but they didn’t tell the women in their lives. “Let them think Caleb belongs to them,” his father told Jared when he was a boy. “Besides, it emasculates a man for it to be known that he spends his evenings with a dead man. It’s better to let the women worry that you’re having a flirtation.” Jared wasn’t sure of that philosophy, but he’d maintained the code of silence. All seven of the Jared Montgomery Kingsleys could see Caleb’s ghost, and most of the daughters and a few of the younger sons could. Jared thought the truth was that Caleb could let people see him or not, but the old man would never clarify the matter.

To say it was odd that this young woman, this Alix Madsen, could see the Kingsley ghost was a great understatement.

His grandfather Caleb was frowning at him now. “You need to go to a barber and remove that beard from off your face, and your hair is much too long.”

Jared turned to look in a mirror. Caleb had chosen the mirror in China on that last disastrous voyage so long ago. Jared saw that he did indeed look bad. Since his aunt’s death, he’d hardly been off his boat. He’d not shaved or cut his hair for months. There were gray streaks in his beard and strands of gray in his hair, which now reached down the back of his neck. “I don’t look like my New York self, do I?” Jared said thoughtfully. If in the next year he couldn’t stay away from his beloved island, it would be better if he was unrecognizable.

“I do not care for what you’re thinking,” Caleb said.

Jared turned back to smile at his grandfather. “I’d think you’d be proud of me. Unlike you, I’m not trying to make some innocent girl fall in love with me.” That was another statement guaranteed to take the smile off his grandfather’s face.

The explosion was instant. “I have never made a woman—”

“I know, I know,” Jared said, taking pity on the handsome ghost. “Your motives are pure and clean. You’re waiting for the return—or the reincarnation, whatever—of the woman you love, your precious Valentina. And you’ve always been faithful to her. I’ve heard it all before. Heard it all my life. You’ll know her when you see her, then you two will go off into the sunset together. Which means that either she dies or you come back to life.”