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Toby told of Graydon asking his grandparents to raid the palace closets.
“Sounds like he’s rather involved in your life. Have you been to bed with him yet?”
“Yes and no,” Toby said. “Kissing, rolling around on the bed, but no sex.”
“Sounds like high school.”
“Yeah, doesn’t it? What about you?”
“No, of course not. This is business. I have to go,” Lexie said. “Toby, hang in there and let me know if anything, you know, happens.”
“Same with you and Roger.”
“There won’t be anything. He and I—” She broke off because Toby was laughing and when Lexie joined her, Toby knew her friend was tempted.
Still laughing, they said goodbye and hung up.
Toby put her phone away and realized she felt much better. She walked to the florist shop where she worked and talked to her boss. Maybe next week she’d go back to her job. No more hanging out with Lanconians and trying to understand their ways.
But her boss didn’t need her. The young woman Victoria had found to replace Toby was doing exceptionally well. What he didn’t tell Toby was that he’d made a deal with Victoria that all her wedding flowers would come through him if he didn’t rehire Toby until September.
“Sorry,” he said and he was. All of them liked Toby and her work was excellent.
Toby spent some time with her coworkers, sharing hugs and stories of the work they’d been doing, but when she began to feel in the way, she left and walked to Jetties Beach. But it was where she and Graydon had walked together and there were too many memories.
She took herself to Arno’s for lunch, then went shopping at Zero Main. Noël and her staff always made Toby feel better.
At five she started home. She knew she’d made some decisions, and she planned to stick with them. The first thing was that she was going to stop disparaging Graydon’s country. It wasn’t any of her business what they did. She was an American and had different views, but that didn’t make them the only way or even a better way. It was Graydon’s life and if he wanted to marry a woman he didn’t love, he had that right.
The main thing Toby knew was that she needed to protect herself. She’d laughed about it to Lexie, but the way Toby was going, she was going to fall in love with Graydon. Then what? She’d kiss him goodbye as he went off to marry someone else? No, she wasn’t going to do that.
By the time she got back to the house, she was smiling.
“Where have you been?” Graydon demanded as soon as she stepped inside. His hair was rumpled and his eyes were red. A deep frown creased his forehead.
She put her shopping bags on the floor and her handbag on the little table in the hall. “How did it go with your Russian businessman?”
Graydon stepped forward, his arms extended, as though he meant to pull her into them. But Toby took a step back, her body stiff, and her face wore what Lexie called the don’t-touch-me look.
Graydon dropped his arms. “I apologize for what I said.” His voice was so soft only she could hear him. “We Lanconians are too inflexible. We—”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Different countries; different ways. I had no right to criticize you or your country.”
He smiled at her. “Shall we kiss and make up?”
“No,” she said firmly, then took her shopping bags and went upstairs.
It was early morning on Saturday, the day of the dinner party, and Graydon was looking out the upstairs window as Toby watered the garden. It was cool and foggy, perfect Nantucket weather, and he would have liked to be with her, but he knew that things had changed between them. Ever since he’d explained to Toby why Daire couldn’t possibly marry someone like Lorcan, it was as though she had closed a door on him.
She seemed to have left their private little world for two and returned to her life on Nantucket. Twice she’d been out to lunch with her girlfriends. At six one morning he saw her outside cutting flowers for a wedding. Graydon had asked if she needed help but Toby had politely told him no. No teasing or laughing, just her extreme courtesy—and it was getting him down. Every sentence she addressed to him was polite. She smiled at him, made small talk, and was always endlessly courteous.
“I don’t know what you did to her,” Daire said after a few days, “but if I were you, I’d be afraid to close my eyes.”
The truth was that Graydon had no idea what he’d done to make her go from … well, almost loving to smiling at him as though she’d just met him that morning.
Twice he’d tried to talk to her. Both times he’d used his most patient—and certainly most charming—voice to explain his country and hers. He’d talked of how his homeland was very old and that it was based on centuries of tradition. He’d smiled as he told her that her country was so young that it couldn’t understand having customs that went back hundreds of years.
She’d seemed to be listening—until he reached out to take her hand in his.
