True Love Read online

  True Love is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Deveraux, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Deveraux, Jude.

  True love / Jude Deveraux.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-345-54180-2

  1. Love stories. I. Title.

  PS3554.E9273T78 2013

  813’.54—dc23 2013010230

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Title-page photograph: © iStockphoto.com

  Cover design: Lynn Andreozzi

  Cover photograph: © Maria Karas /Glasshouse Images

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Jared Montgomery Kingsley

  NANTUCKET

  “She’s coming on Friday,” Jared said in answer to his grandfather Caleb’s question, “so I’m leaving before then—and I think it’ll be better if I stay away the whole time she’s here. I’ll get someone to pick her up at the ferry. Wes owes me for drawing the plans for his garage, so he can do it.” Jared ran his hand over his face. “If someone doesn’t meet her, she’ll probably wander down an alley and never be seen again. Some ghostly figure might carry her off.”

  “You always did have too much imagination,” Caleb said. “But perhaps in this instance you could imagine less and try for some kindness. Or has that become an outmoded commodity in your generation?”

  “Kindness?” Jared said, suppressing his anger. “This woman is going to take over my house for an entire year and force me out. My house. And why? Because as a kid she could see a ghost. That’s it. My house is being confiscated because now, as an adult, she might possibly be able to see someone other people can’t.” His tone conveyed his disgust at the whole arrangement.

  “It’s a little more complicated than that, and you know it,” his grandfather said calmly.

  “Oh, right. I can’t very well forget all the secrets, now can I? First of all, there’s the girl’s mother, Victoria, who is hiding twenty years of visits to this island from her own daughter. And of course there’s the Great Kingsley Mystery that needs to be solved. It’s the two-hundred-year-old unanswered question that has plagued our family since—”

  “Two hundred and two.”

  “What?”

  “For two hundred and two years it’s been unsolved.”

  “Right.” Sighing, Jared sat down on one of the old chairs in the house his family had owned since it was built in 1805. “A mystery that no one has been able to solve for two hundred and two years, but for some unfathomable reason this outsider is supposed to be able to figure it all out.”

  Caleb stood with his hands clasped behind his back and looked out the window. It was early in the summer season, yet traffic was already increasing. Soon the cars would be bumper to bumper even on their quiet lane. “Perhaps the mystery hasn’t been solved because no one has truly looked into it. No one has really tried to find … her.”

  Jared closed his eyes for a moment. After his great-aunt Addy died it had taken months to sort out the ridiculous will she’d left. The will said that a young woman, Alixandra Madsen, who hadn’t been in the house since she was four years old, was to live in it for one year. During that time she was to try to solve the family mystery—if she wanted to, that is. Aunt Addy’s will clearly stated that if she didn’t want to do any searching, she didn’t have to. Instead, she could spend her time sailing or whale watching or doing any of the thousands of things that Nantucketers came up with to occupy the god-awful number of tourists who invaded their island every summer.

  If that was the only secret involved, Jared could have handled it, but concealing a lifetime of people and events was too much to ask of him. He knew it would make him crazy to try to keep this young woman from discovering that her mother, Victoria Madsen, had spent a month each summer at his aunt Addy’s house in order to research her bestselling historical novels. Jared took a breath. Maybe he should change tack. “I don’t see why an off-islander was given this job. You can’t throw a harpoon without hitting someone whose family has been here for centuries. If one of them was given the job of researching, this girl wouldn’t need to come here. The researchers could solve the mystery, and the secrets Victoria insists on keeping would be safe.”

  His grandfather’s look stopped his words. There wasn’t anything that hadn’t already been said.

  “You’ve made your point,” Jared said. “One year and that’s all, then this girl leaves here and everything goes back to normal. I will get my family home and my life back.”

  “Except maybe by then we’ll know what happened to Valentina,” Caleb said softly.

  It was annoying to Jared that he was so angry and the old man was so calm. But he knew how to even out the playing field. “So tell me again why dear Aunt Addy didn’t look for your precious Valentina.”

  His grandfather’s handsome face immediately changed to stormy. Like at sea. His shoulders went even farther back, his chest out. “Cowardice!” he bellowed, a sound that had frightened shiploads of men. But Jared had been hearing it all his life and was unperturbed. “Pure cowardice! Adelaide was afraid of what would happen if she did find out the truth.”

  “Meaning that her beloved ghost might disappear and leave her all alone in this big old house,” Jared said, grimacing. “And besides, people thought she was a spinster lady with money inherited from Kingsley Soap. The soap money was long gone, but you and Aunt Addy and Victoria figured out a way to keep a roof over this house, didn’t you? That it involved airing our ancestors’ dirty laundry to the world seems to have bothered only me.”

  His grandfather looked back out the window. “You are worse than your father. You have no respect for your elders. And you must know that I advised Adelaide in the matter of the will.”

  “Of course you did,” Jared said. “And everything was done without consulting me.”

  “We knew you would say no, so why should we have asked?”

  When Jared failed to answer, his grandfather turned to look at him. “What are you smiling about?”r />
  “You’re hoping this girl will fall in love with the romance of the Kingsley ghost, aren’t you? That’s your plan.”

  “Of course not! She knows about that world thing, that … What’s it called?”

  “Why ask me? I’m not consulted about anything.”

  “Spiders … No, that’s not it. Web. That’s it. She knows about the Web and can look on there.”

  “For your information I also know about the Web, the Internet, and I can assure you that the Valentina Montgomery you’re looking for isn’t on there.”

  “It was all a very long time ago.”

  Jared got up from the chair and walked to the window to stand by his grandfather and look out at the tourists who were already beginning to arrive. They were as different from Nantucketers as dolphins from whales. However, it was amusing to watch them stumble across the cobblestones in their high-heeled shoes.

  “How is this girl going to find what we can’t?” Jared asked, his voice calm.

  “I don’t know. It’s just something that I can feel.”

  Jared knew from long experience that his grandfather was lying, or leaving out information. There was a great deal more about why Alix Madsen was being given possession of Kingsley House for one whole year, but Caleb wasn’t telling. And Jared knew that he’d never hear the full story until Caleb was ready to tell it.

  But Jared wasn’t giving up. Not yet. “There are things about her that you don’t know.”

  “Then you must tell me all.”

  “I talked to her father last week, and he said his daughter is in a bad way right now.”

  “And why is that?”

  “She was engaged to be married, or something, but they recently broke it off.”

  “Then she will enjoy being here,” his grandfather said. “Her mother has always loved this island.”

  “Is that the mother she doesn’t know was here every year?!” Jared was having difficulty getting his anger under control. He waved his hand. “Forget that. This girl just broke up with her boyfriend or her fiancé—one of them, I don’t know. You know what that means, don’t you? She’ll be all weepy and miserable and stuffing herself with chocolate, then she’ll see …”

  “A ghost.”

  “Yes,” Jared said. “A tall, handsome, never-aging ghost who is so very sympathetic, so courteous, so charming, and she’ll fall in love with him.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “This isn’t a joke,” Jared said. “She’d be a woman from yet another generation to give up her real life for an empty one.”

  His grandfather frowned. “Adelaide never wanted to get married, and her life was far from empty.”

  “If you call four tea parties a week fulfilling, then no, her life wasn’t empty at all.”

  Caleb looked at his grandson with a face full of fury.

  “All right,” Jared said as he threw his hands up in the air. “So I’m off base about Aunt Addy. You know how much I loved her. This whole island did and it wouldn’t be half what it is today if it weren’t for my dear aunt’s hard work.” He took a breath. “It’s just that this girl is different. She’s not from our family. She’s not used to ghosts and family mysteries and two-hundred-and-two-year-old legends. She’s not even used to creaky old houses or islands where you can buy a thousand-dollar jacket but no store carries cotton underwear.”

  “She’ll learn.” His grandfather turned to him with a smile. “Why don’t you teach her?”

  A look of dread went across Jared’s face. “You know what she is and what she would want from me. You know that she’s training to be … to be an …”

  “Get it out, boy!” his grandfather yelled. “What is she training for?”

  “To be an architect.”

  His grandfather knew this but he didn’t understand Jared’s dislike of the subject. “Isn’t that what you are?”

  “Yes,” Jared said. “That’s exactly what I am. But I have an office. I have—I am—”

  “Oh,” Caleb said. “I see. You’re the master and she’s the cabin boy. She’ll want to learn from you.”

  “Not that you have any reason to know this, but there’s a recession going on right now. A collapse in the housing market. One of the jobs hardest hit has been the architect’s. No one is hiring. It makes recent graduates desperate and aggressive. They’re sharks feeding on one another.”

  “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 lo
ngest 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.”