“I don’t want to hear the excuses—” Alix began.
“Go straight ahead to the store, bear left, and there’s a bridge to the beach. Walk.”
Alix gave a nod and hurried forward. It wasn’t difficult to find the tall bridge, go down the stairs, then out to the beach. The cool weather meant there weren’t many people about and she was glad of it. The water and the sand calmed her.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood there. Her thoughts wouldn’t come in an orderly fashion but seemed to float around in a mixed-up way. Visions of her and Jared drifted before her, laughing and eating and creating together. And through it all, he’d made it clear that there was to be nothing sexual between them. She’d assumed it was because he didn’t feel that way about her.
But that kiss! As electric as a bolt of lightning. She saw that he’d felt it too, so why had he pulled away? Why had he looked at her so coldly? There didn’t seem to be someone else in his life, so what was his problem?
When a shiver went through her, she rubbed her arms and turned around. Not far away, Jared was sitting on the sand in the shade. Just sitting there, waiting. He looked as though he was worried about something.
But she had no sympathy for him. She walked to stand in front of him. “I’d like to go …” She couldn’t call Kingsley House “home.” “Back,” she finished.
He didn’t stand up. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go, but first I’d like to tell you the truth.”
“That would make for a change,” she said.
He took off his jacket and held it out to her, but she didn’t take it. “Please,” he said. “Give me twenty minutes, and if you still want to leave me or Nantucket or whatever you want, I’ll arrange it.”
Reluctantly, she sat down on the sand a few feet away from him and when he started to put his jacket around her, she flinched. “You’ll get cold.”
“Not when you’re shooting laser rays at me, I won’t,” he said.
She didn’t smile, but she did let him put the jacket around her shoulders.
“I don’t know where to begin,” he said. “If it were up to me I’d tell you everything, but I can’t.”
She turned to glare at him. “Then why am I here?”
“I don’t know!” Jared said in exasperation. “I know about five percent more than you do and I don’t understand any of it. I do know that people have been keeping secrets from you all your life.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you that. I wish I could, but I can’t. All I can say is that I owe people for my entire life. I wouldn’t have been anything but maybe a criminal if it hadn’t been for … for some people who helped me.”
Alix looked out at the sea and tried to figure out what he was telling her. “I know you didn’t want me to come here.”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t. I told you that I was angry at my aunt. I saw her will as a betrayal of me. If you hadn’t come early, I would have been gone, and we never would have met.”
“But you stayed,” she said.
“Because I liked you,” he said.
“Past tense?”
He took his time answering. “I’ve never before met anyone who fit into both my worlds, a woman who could clean a fish and argue about subflooring too.”
“I know,” Alix said softly. “We’re on our way to becoming great friends.”
“No,” he said. “Tim, my business partner, and I are friends. He hates fishing, thinks all dirt paths should be covered with concrete, and endlessly bellyaches about money. But we’re good friends.”
“And you and I aren’t?” Alix asked. Damn! She could feel tears beginning to form in her eyes.
“As much as I care about Tim, I have no desire to tear his clothes off. I’ve not wanted to make love to him for however long it takes until this gnawing hunger inside me is fed. I haven’t stayed awake thinking about his lips or his thighs or anything else he has.”
Alix was staring at him. “Yet you don’t touch me.”
“I made a promise to someone I owe,” he said softly.