“I think I will.”
“Anyway,” Luke said, “she said that she and Miss Edi talked a lot about me, about my writing, my dead marriage, about how I used to spend so much time alone with her grumpy ol’ father-in law. You know what? That time Grampa Joe sneaked me out of the house to go fishing? Mom knew all about it. She said I always got along better with old people.”
“Me too,” Jocelyn said. “My mother’s…” She hadn’t had time to think about the people she’d loved so much but who had never told her about the adoption. “Those grandparents, then Miss Edi.” Joce looked at him. “What about Ramsey?”
“Everyone knows he and Tess—”
“No! I mean in her will.” Joce put her head in her hands. “Now I understand. Miss Edi knew I hated being told who to date. She fixed me up with some really nice men, but I went out with them with the idea that I’d hate them. I was awful! I refused to laugh at their jokes. Everything they said or did, I didn’t like…” She looked back at Luke. “I think maybe Miss Edi told me Ramsey was the man for me because she didn’t want me to have him.”
Luke looked at her in wonder. “And my mother told me to stay away from you. She knows I can’t resist the forbidden.”
“Do you think they were working together? Is it possible that you and I have been manipulated?”
They looked at each other. “No,” Luke said.
“Too diabolical,” Joce said.
“Too conniving. Too—”
“Right,” Joce said.
“Certainly not,” he agreed.
After a moment, Luke said, “You can have Ramsey if you want him.”
“No,” she said, smiling as she reached across the table and put her hand on his. “I’ve decided that I’ll follow the tradition of my female ancestors and stick with men who work with their hands.”
Luke’s eyes warmed. “Why don’t you come over here, sit on my lap, and let me show you how well I can work with my hands?”
“Yes, please,” Jocelyn said as she got up and walked into his open arms.
Please turn the page for an excerpt of
Heartwishes
1
ALL GEMMA KNEW for sure was that she wanted the job so much she would have murdered to get it.
Well, maybe not killed anyone, but certainly broken a few arms or legs.
She stood beside Mrs. Frazier and stared at the storage room full of dirty old boxes stacked neatly on new wooden shelves, and knew she’d never seen anything so beautiful in her life. “Original sources” screamed in her head. She was looking at containers full of documents that no one had touched in hundreds of years.
Mrs. Frazier, tall and majestic-looking, was gazing down her nose at Gemma and obviously waiting for her to say something. But how could Gemma put what she was feeling into words? How could she describe her lifetime fascination with history? Could she tell of the adventure of discovery that these documents represented to her? Or the excitement of the hunt to find new information, new—
“Perhaps it is all a bit overwhelming,” Mrs. Frazier said as she flipped off the light switch, a sure sign that Gemma was to leave the precious boxes and their mysterious contents. Reluctantly, Gemma followed her into the cozy living room. Even the guesthouse that was to be used by whomever got the job was lovely. It had a large living room with a kitchen at one end, a big bedroom with a private bath, and the storage room they’d just seen. At the front of the house was an extraordinarily beautiful and spacious office with double French doors that opened out onto acres of lawn and flowers. Outside, just beyond a covered carport, was a three-car garage that was filled floor to ceiling with many more boxes full of uncataloged documents.
Gemma’s mind was reeling with the enormity of the task the job entailed. When her adviser for her doctorate in history e-mailed her that he’d managed to get her an interview for a temporary job in the tiny town of Edilean, Virginia, Gemma had been pleased. But then he’d explained that their university was the alma mater of a woman who wanted to hire someone to go through her family’s papers and write a history. Gemma had scoffed at the idea. What did that mean? Great-granny and Ellis Island? Too, too boring.
Later that day she’d stopped by his office to give him the courtesy of a personal reply. Gemma told him sorry, but now that her course work was done, she needed to work on her dissertation so she could finish her Ph.D.
“I think you should look at this.” Her adviser handed her a letter printed on expensive, heavy vellum. It said that Mrs. Peregrine Frazier had purchased from her husband’s family’s estate in England several hundred boxes full of documents that dated back to the sixteenth century. She was offering a job to someone to catalog them and write a history from what was found.
Gemma looked across the desk at her adviser. “Sixteenth century” and “several hundred boxes” weren’t exactly the normal genealogy. “Who else has seen these papers?”
“Rats, mice,” her adviser said as he held up a fatly stuffed envelope. “It’s all in here. The papers have been in the attic of a house in England since the place was built back around Elizabeth the First’s time. The family—” He pulled a page from the envelope and glanced at it. “They were the earls of Rypton. They sold the house about the time of the American Revolution, but a generation later the family managed to buy it back. Just recently the old place was sold again, but this time the house went to a corporation that wanted the attics cleared, so they held an auction.”
Gemma sat down. Actually, she half collapsed onto the chair in front of the man’s desk. “So this Mrs. Frazier . . .”