For All Time (Nantucket Brides 2)

It was as though some memory was stirring inside her. This wasn’t the first time, she thought. This man, his breath, his face, his body were familiar to her. She knew him. She knew how he worried about living up to the heavy responsibilities that had been placed on his shoulders. He worried about her and her family, about whether she would love him as much as he did her. If anything happened to her, she knew his soul would go with hers. “Tabby, don’t leave me,” she seemed to hear inside her head. Or had Graydon said that?

She pulled back to look at him and for a moment she thought she saw tears in his eyes, but surely it was a trick of the moonlight.

He rolled onto his back and pushed her head down onto his chest. “Sleep, my lovely one,” he whispered.

“Don’t leave me,” she said as she clung to him.

“I’m not sure that I can,” he said.

They fell asleep together, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Toward morning, Toby began to dream.

“I can’t marry you! Do you not understand that? I have too many people depending on me. Silas can help support us. He will—”

“I’ll burn his store down before I let you marry him!”

Tabby drew in her breath. The houses on Nantucket were close together and nearly all of them were wooden. Fire was a very dangerous threat. “You wouldn’t,” she whispered.

“How can you think I would?” Garrett grabbed her upper arms. “Tabby, you must marry me. I love you more than life.”

“More than the sea?”

When he moved away from her, his face was filled with anguish. “I have to make a living and the sea is what I know. Would you have me open a store like that truck-bellied, brocky Silas Osborne? Is that what you want of me? To emasculate me? Would you cut off the parts of me that make me a man?”

“I don’t know,” Tabby said. “I don’t know what to do.”

The ringing of a phone woke Toby, and for a few seconds she was disoriented. Was she with Garrett wearing a long brown dress or was she in Nantucket in her nightgown?

She looked at the other side of the bed and saw the indentation where Graydon had slept—or had that been part of her dream? When she sat up, her head hurt, her mouth was dry, and her stomach was queasy.

The phone stopped, and she pul

led on jeans and a T-shirt, but when she left the bathroom, it started ringing again. It was Graydon’s phone and there was a photo of a crown as the ID. Probably Rory, she thought. “Hello?” Her voice was hoarse.

There were some unintelligible words spoken by a woman and Toby recognized the Lanconian language. “Sorry,” she said, her hand to her aching head. “He isn’t here right now.”

The woman’s voice changed from strident to sweet, from Lanconian to English. “Oh, my goodness, you sound as though my son has given you a difficult night.”

Toby could feel the blood leaving her face. She was talking to Graydon’s mother—who was a queen. Toby was glad she hadn’t said Graydon’s name and exposed the exchange.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I mean, no, ma’am. He …” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Well, dear,” the queen said, “perhaps you could find my son and give him the phone. I doubt he’s very far from your side.”

“Of course,” Toby said. As much as it hurt, she started running, the phone held tightly in her hand. When she heard the shower she went into Lexie’s, now Graydon’s, bedroom. The bathroom door was open and she peeped in. He was behind the foggy curtain, steam rolling upward.

Toby started to say his name but couldn’t. Graydon was supposed to be Rory. “Your mother is on the phone,” she said as loudly as she could without being heard all the way to Lanconia.

Instantly, Graydon shut the water off and put his head and arm around the curtain. Toby started to hand him the phone but he shook his head. He was too wet. She turned it on speaker and held it up for him.

“Hello, Mother,” Graydon said formally, sounding as though he were in a tuxedo at a formal reception.

The sweet-voiced woman who’d spoken to Toby was gone. “Roderick,” she said in English, her voice as sharp as a whiplash. “I have something important to say to you, and for once in your life I want you to listen to me.”

“Yes, ma’am, I will.”

“I assume you have been told of your brother’s heroic act in saving your father.” Graydon nodded toward a towel hanging on the rack. Toby reached for it with one hand, phone in the other. He took it from her, wrapped it around his waist, and stepped out of the tub and from behind the shower curtain.