True Love by Jude Deveraux Page B

schooling?”
    “You and Victoria did.”
    “Right! Alix’s father and her mother,” Ken said. “Yet you made our daughter cry?! Is that how you repay us?”
    “I don’t know what I did to make her cry,” Jared said honestly.
    “You don’t know?” Ken took a breath. “Do you think my daughter is stupid? Is that what you think?”
    “No, sir, I never thought that.”
    “She knows who you are. She saw you on the day she arrived and she recognized you right away. Heaven help me, but you’re some sort of hero to her.”
    “Oh, Lord,” Jared said. “I didn’t know. I thought …”
    “Thought what?!” Ken half yelled, then calmed somewhat. “Look, Jared, I understand that she’s just a student and that someone like you might see her as a pest, but I’ll be damned if you’re going to treat her like one.”
    “I didn’t mean to,” Jared said.
    Ken took a couple of breaths. “My daughter only agreed to go to Nantucket so she could spend the time there assembling a portfolio of designs. Right now it’s hard for me to stomach the idea, but she wants to apply for a job at your firm. But tonight you—” He had to pause for a moment. “So help me, Jared Montgomery Kingsley the bloody Seventh, if you ever again make my daughter cry I’ll make you regret it. You understand me?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And if you do spend any time with my daughter I don’t want your usual shenanigans you pull with women. This is my daughter and I want her treated with respect. You get what I mean?”
    “Yes, sir, I do.”
    “Do you think you can be nice to a girl and leave her clothes on? Is that possible with you?”
    “I’ll try,” Jared said.
    “Do more than try, do it!” Ken clicked off the phone.
    Jared just stood there, feeling like he had when he was a teenager and Ken, the man who’d been a second father to him, had bawled him out. Again. Just like old times.
    Jared went downstairs, started to reach for the rum, but knew that wouldn’t calm him down. He found a bottle of tequila, and hadtwo shots before he allowed himself to think about what had happened tonight.
    He went into the living room and sat down and his mind went back to when he was, as Ken had said, a fourteen-year-old juvenile delinquent.
    As Aunt Addy and Ken later told Jared, Kenneth Madsen had come to the island to find his wife—who he thought would be living in abject poverty and therefore glad to see him—to let her know that he’d think about taking her back. He might even forgive her for her one-night stand with his business partner, followed by her flight to Nantucket with their small daughter, Alix. Eventually.
    The truth was that he missed her and his daughter so much he could hardly function.
    But what he found on Nantucket wasn’t what he’d expected. His wife had written a novel, it had been accepted for publication, and she was planning to divorce him.
    She was fabulously happy; he was fabulously depressed.
    After Victoria took little Alix and left the island, Addy suggested that Ken stay in the guesthouse until he recovered from his melancholia. After he’d been there a couple of months and showed no signs of going back to his architecture business or even of coming back to life, she said he could renovate an old house owned by the Kingsley family.
    “But I can’t afford to pay you ,” she said. “I can just afford materials.”
    “That’s all right,” Ken said, “my former business partner is footing my bills. He owes me big time.”
    Addy waited for him to continue but Ken didn’t say any more about why his partner owed him. “You can hire workmen on the island, but you’ll have to pay them. On the other hand, my nephew Jared is young and inexperienced, but he’ll work for free. But then it doesn’t matter because I don’t think you can handle him.” She looked Ken up and down in a way that said he wasn’t man enough to deal with the boy.
    Ken’d had enough of being treated like less than a man. He said