True Love (Nantucket Brides 1)
“I’ve seen this before,” Alix said.
“Maybe you remember the place from when you were four.”
“Not likely, but …” Alix was looking around her. Across the road was a beautiful white wooden building with dark green window-frames across its front. On one side was painted a map that showed the distance from Nantucket to other parts of the world. Hong Kong was 10,453 miles away.
“ ‘We are the center of everything,’ ” Alix quoted. “That’s what I hear someone saying when I look at that map. ‘Nantucket is the epicenter of the earth.’ I must have heard that when I was four. I had never heard that word before, but in a funny way, I knew what it meant. Does that make se
nse?”
“Actually, it does,” Izzy said, smiling. It looked like she was going to be able to leave soon. She could tell by Alix’s tone that her friend remembered more about Nantucket than she thought she did. And even better, she was beginning to feel like Nantucket was home. If Victoria and the late Miss Kingsley had planned all this so Alix could meet the famous Jared Montgomery, it seemed to be working.
“Let’s go in here,” Izzy said. “We need to celebrate.” It was Murray’s Beverage store and inside were rows of wine, beer, and liquor. Izzy felt that they needed something cold and fizzy so she headed to the refrigerator against the back wall.
But Alix went to the old-fashioned wooden counter and looked at the shelves behind it. “I want rum,” she said to the woman behind the counter.
“Rum?” Izzy asked. “I didn’t know you liked that.”
“Me neither. I think I’ve had one rum and Coke in my life. But here on Nantucket I want rum.”
“It is a local tradition,” the woman said. “Which one do you want?”
“That one.” Alix pointed to a bottle of seven-year-old Flor de Caña.
“No rotgut for you,” Izzy said as she put a bottle of champagne on the counter.
Alix pulled her cell out of her bag and checked past emails. Her mother had given her directions to Kingsley House but in her upset over Eric, Alix hadn’t printed out a map. But then her mother’s directions were rather cryptic—which wasn’t uncommon. Her mother thought and wrote like a novelist, and she liked mystery.
Alix looked at the woman behind the counter. “I’m staying at a house here on Nantucket and my mother said it’s walking distance from the ferry. It’s number twenty-three Kingsley Lane and she said”—Alix checked her phone—“the lane turns beside West Brick. I don’t know what that means. How do I find West Brick Road?”
The woman, very used to tourists, smiled. “I bet it says the West Brick.”
“It does, actually,” Alix said. “I thought it was a typo.”
“You must mean Addy’s house,” the woman said.
“Yes. Did you know her?”
“Everyone did, and we all miss her a lot. So you’re the one who’s going to live there for a year?”
Alix was a bit shocked that the woman knew that. “Yes,” she said hesitantly.
“Good for you! And don’t let Jared bully you. He may be my cousin but I can still tell you to stand up to him.”
Alix could only blink at her. To her mind, Jared Montgomery slash Kingsley was a person to be revered, a god in the world of architecture where Alix lived and worked. But no one on Nantucket seemed in awe of him.
Izzy stepped forward. “We already met a man who says he’s … uh, Mr. Kingsley’s cousin. Are there many more?”
The woman smiled again. “A lot of us are descended from the men and women who first settled on this island, and we’re related one way or another.” She went to the register and rang up their purchases. “At the bank, go left. That’s Main Street. Up the road on the right are three brick houses that are just alike. Kingsley Lane turns to the right beside the last of the three brick houses.”
“The West Brick,” Alix said.
“You got it.”
They paid, said thanks, and left the store.
“Now all we have to do is find the bank,” Izzy said.
But Alix had gone back into her trance of looking at the town. Across the road was a building that stopped Alix in her tracks. A two-story center flanked by one-story additions with low, slanted roofs. A half-moon window above, a louvered octagon above that.