True Love (Nantucket Brides 1)

“Never heard of the place.” He turned and walked down the corridor.

Alix stood still for a moment, shaking her head, then she followed him upstairs to see the room he’d designed to look like a ship captain’s quarters.

Chapter Eleven

As they were leaving the house, Alix tripped on the porch and fell into Jared’s arms. She had taken over fifty photos of the room he’d designed—it was charming—and she was looking at them in the viewfinder of the camera. She was so absorbed in the photos that she wasn’t paying attention to where she was walking and didn’t notice when she got to the edge of the porch.

Jared must have seen what was going to happen, or else he had the reflexes of a cobra. His arms went out and he grabbed her before she fell facedown onto the ground.

For a moment they stood there, Jared holding her with her feet off the ground, both his arms around her. Alix had the camera in one hand and the other was on his back.

The only thing certain in her life was that she wanted him to kiss her. Her eyes went to that bottom lip of his and words from her poem like “succulent” and “tip of my tongue” and “draw it in” came to her mind. Words and anticipated sensations floated through her mind and seemed to run through her body.

She felt his breath on her lips. Mingling breaths, she thought. She couldn’t help moving her face closer to his until their lips were no more than a quarter inch apart. She looked up into his eyes and they were like blue fire, like an explosion about to happen.

Had he been anyone else she would have closed the tiny gap between their lips, but with this man she had doubts.

A seagull screeched nearby and the trance was broken.

Jared set her down on the ground with such a thunk that Alix’s teeth clicked together. The second they were disentangled, he turned and quickly walked toward the sea.

Alix took a step back and sat on the edge of the porch. If he’d slapped her, he couldn’t have hurt her more. She buried her face in her hands and tried to calm her wildly pounding heart.

A conversation she’d overheard a few years ago between her father and a friend of his came to her. “The real joy of youth is that you’re desirable to everyone,” her father’s friend said. “When you get to be our age every year cuts that number in half.”

“So where are we now? Down to fifteen percent of the population?”

“You always were an optimist.”

Both men had laughed together.

When Alix had heard that she’d been about twenty, which made her father close to fifty. She didn’t think that now, at twenty-six, she was old, but she was realizing that she wasn’t desirable to every man. And definitely not to Jared Montgomery Kingsley the Seventh.

As she stood up, she took some breaths. She could not continu

e to carry a torch for someone who didn’t want her. The sooner she stopped her lunacy of imagining something between her and this famous man, the better.

She looked toward the water and saw him standing with his shoulders raised as though fighting off an attack. His self-protective stance made her feel bad. She reminded herself that this island was his home, a place where he could get away from eager students pouncing on him.

It took courage on her part, but she walked the few feet and stopped just behind him. He didn’t turn around. “I apologize for that,” she said softly. “It won’t happen again.”

He kept his face turned away from her but he gave a sigh, as though in relief.

Alix couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for him. How horrible it must have been for him to be in an auditorium full of students, all of them wanting something from him. “Friends?” she said and held out her hand to shake.

When he turned to look at her, Alix drew in her breath. She’d expected sadness in his eyes, but instead she again saw that blue fire. Raging hot. So fiery that she had to work not to step back from it.

It was gone as quickly as it came. In the next second, he was smiling as though nothing had happened.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m starving. Want to go to Lexie’s house for lunch?” He started walking toward the antique truck.

“Does this mean I get to meet the angelic Toby?” Alix asked as she hurried after him. She was hoping that they could return to the easy camaraderie they’d enjoyed these last few days.

He stopped with his hand on the door handle of the old truck. “On one condition.”

Alix quit breathing. Was he going to ask her to promise to keep her hands off him? “What’s that?”

“That you help me with that house in L.A. that I’m late on. Tim emailed me again. They want a plan yesterday.”