The Dream (Crosslyn Rise Trilogy) Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Author Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Teaser

  Also by Barbara Delinsky

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Picture a grand old Colonial home standing proudly on a hill. Picture five generations of a family loving every one of its seventeen rooms and the nearby pine grove, meadow, and duck pond. Picture the glory of a rolling front lawn that spills down to the sea.

  That, my friend, is Crosslyn Rise. Or was. Now age has crept up, along with taxes and the cost of repairs, and the sole family member living there can barely afford to heat the place, much less replace broken-down plumbing and electrical systems.

  But Jessica Crosslyn is nothing if not driven by love. Determined to save her ancestral home, she conceives of a way to develop it commercially while still preserving its glory and charm. For this, though, she needs a consortium, and to get a consortium, she needs beautifully drawn plans.

  Enter Carter Malloy. Son of the mansion’s one-time housekeeper and gardener, he spent more time at Crosslyn Rise than he dares to recall—years as an unhappy child who lived to vent his misery on others. Jessica abhorred him then and has no desire to work with him now. But he is an architect and, perhaps, the one person in the world who might care what happens to the Rise.

  The Dream is the first of a trilogy that I wrote in 1990. It was and is a romance—a love story, actually, between two people, the home they both want, and each other. As one of the last of my category romances, its style isn’t very different from that of my more recent books. Oh yeah, there are no cell phones, and Jessica can’t Google Carter to learn what he’s done since he left the Rise. Left? Was driven out of town, more like. Is he redeemable? I leave that to you to decide.

  Have fun!

  Barbara

  1

  Jessica Crosslyn lowered herself to the upholstered chair opposite the desk, smoothed the gracefully flowing challis skirt over her legs and straightened her round-rimmed spectacles. Slowly and reluctantly she met Gordon Hale’s expectant gaze.

  “I can’t do it,” she said softly. There was defeat in that softness and on her delicate features. “I’ve tried, Gordon. I’ve tried to juggle and balance. I’ve closed off everything but the few rooms I need. I keep the thermostat low to the point of freezing in winter. I’ve done only the most crucial of repairs, I’ve gone with the lowest bidders, and even then I’ve budgeted payments—” She caught in her breath. Her shoulders sagged slightly under the weight of disappointment. “But I can’t do it. I just can’t do it.”

  Gordon was quiet for a minute. He’d known Jessica from birth, had known her parents far longer than that. For better than forty years, he had been banker to the Crosslyns, which meant that he wasn’t as emotionally removed as he should have been. He was deeply aware of the fight Jessica had been waging, and his heart went out to her.

  “I warned Jed, you know,” he said crossly. “I told him that he hadn’t made adequate arrangements, but he just brushed my warnings aside. He was never the same after your mother died, never as clearheaded.”

  Jessica couldn’t help but smile. It was an affectionate smile, a sad one as she remembered her father. “He was never clearheaded. Be honest, Gordon. My father wrote some brilliant scientific treatises in his day, but he was an eccentric old geezer. He never knew much about the workings of the everyday world. Mom was the one who took care of all that, and I tried to take over when she died, but things were pretty far gone by then.”

  “A fine woman, your mother.”

  “But no financial whiz, either, and so enamored with Dad that she was frightened of him. Even if she saw the financial problems, I doubt she’d have said a word to him about it. She wouldn’t have wanted to upset him. She wouldn’t have wanted to sully the creative mind with mention of something as mundane as money.”

  Gordon arched a bushy gray brow. “So now you’re the one left to suffer the sullying.”

  “No,” Jessica cautioned. She knew what he was thinking. “My mind isn’t creative like Dad’s was.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute. You have a Ph.D. in linguistics. You’re fluent in Russian and German. You teach at Harvard. And you’re published. You’re as much of a scholar as Jed was any day.”

  “If I’m a scholar, it’s simply because I love learning. But what I do isn’t anything like what Dad did. My mind isn’t like his. I can’t look off into space and conjure up incredibly complex scientific theories. I can’t dream up ideas. What I do is studied. It’s orderly and pragmatic. I’m a foreign language teacher. I also read literature in the languages I teach, and since I’ve had access to certain Russian works that no one else has had, I was a cinch to write about them. So I’m published.”

  “You should be proud of that.”

  “I am, but if my book sells a thousand copies, I’ll be lucky, which means that it won’t save Crosslyn Rise. Nor will my salary.” She gave a rueful chuckle. “Dad and I were alike in that, I’m afraid.”

  “But Crosslyn Rise was his responsibility,” Gordon argued. “It’s been in the family for five generations. Jed spent his entire life there. He owed it to all those who came before, as much as to you, to keep it up. If he’d done that, you wouldn’t be in the bind you are now. But he let it deteriorate. I told him things would be bleak if he didn’t keep on top of the repairs, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  Jessica sighed. “That’s water over the dam. The thing is that on top of everything else, I’m having plumbing and electrical problems. Up to now, I’ve settled for patches here and there, but that won’t work any longer. I’ve been told—and I’ve had second and third opinions on it—that I need new systems for both. And given the size and nature of Crosslyn Rise…”

  She didn’t have to finish. Gordon knew the size and nature of Crosslyn Rise all too well. When one talked about installing new plumbing and electrical systems in a home that consisted of seventeen rooms and eight bathrooms spread over nearly eighty-five hundred square feet, the prospect was daunting. The prospect was even more daunting when one considered that a myriad of unexpected woes usually popped up when renovating a house that old.

  Shifting several papers that lay neatly on his desk, Gordon said in a tentative voice, “I could loan you a little.”

  “A little more, you mean.” She gave a tiny shake of her head and chided, “I’m having trouble meeting the payments I already have. You know that.”

  “Yes, but I’d do it, Jessica. I knew your family, and I know you. I’m the president of this bank, humble though it may be. If I can’t pull a few strings, give a little extra for special people, who can I do it for?”

  She was touched, and the smile she sent him told him so. But his generosity didn’t change the facts. Again she shook her head, this time slowly and with resignation. “Thanks, Gordon. I do appreciate the offer, but if I was to accept it, I’d only be getting myself in deeper. Let’s face it. I love my career, but it won’t ever bring me big money. I could hurry out another book or two, maybe take on another course next semester, but I’d
still come up way short of what I need.”

  “What you need,” Gordon remarked, “is to marry a wealthy old codger who’d like nothing more than to live in a place like Crosslyn Rise.”

  Jessica didn’t flinch, but her cheeks went paler than they’d been moments before. “I did that once.”

  “Chandler wasn’t wealthy or old.”

  “But he wanted the Rise,” she said with a look that went from wry to pained in the matter of a blink. “I wouldn’t go through that again even if Crosslyn Rise were made of solid gold.”

  “If it were made of solid gold, you wouldn’t have to go through anything,” Gordon quipped, but he regretted mentioning Tom Chandler. Jessica’s memories of the brief marriage weren’t happy ones. Sitting forward, he folded his hands on his desk. “So what are your options?”

  “There aren’t many.” And she’d been agonizing about those few for months.

  “Is there someone who can help you—a relative who may have even a distant stake in the Rise?”

  “Stake? No. The Rise was Dad’s. He outlived a brother who stood to inherit if Dad had died first, but they were never on the best of terms. Dad wasn’t a great communicator, if you know what I mean.”

  Gordon knew what she meant and nodded.

  “And, anyway, now Dad’s dead. Since I’m an only child, the Rise is mine, which means that no one else in the family has what you’d call a ‘stake’ in it.”

  “How about a fascination? Are there any aunts, uncles or cousins who’ve been intrigued by it over the years to the point where they’d pitch in to keep it alive?”

  “No aunts or uncles, but there’s a cousin. She’s Dad’s brother’s oldest daughter, and if I called her she’d be out on the next plane from Chicago to give me advice.”

  Gordon studied her face. It told her thoughts with a surprising lack of guile, given that her early years had been spent, thanks to her mother, among the North Shore’s well-to-do, who were anything but guileless. “I take it you know what that advice would be?”

  “Oh, yes. Felicia would raze the house, divide the twenty-three acres into lots and sell each to the highest bidder. She told me that when she came for Dad’s funeral, which was amusing in and of itself because she hadn’t seen him since she was eighteen. Needless to say, she was here for the Rise.”

  “But the Rise is yours.”

  “And Felicia knew we were having trouble with the upkeep and that the trouble would only increase with Dad gone. She knew I’d never agree to raze the house, so her next plan was to pay me for the land around it. She figured that would give me enough money to renovate and support the house. In turn, she’d quadruple her investment by selling off small parcels of the land.”

  “That she would,” Gordon agreed. “Crosslyn Rise stands on prime oceanfront land. Fifteen miles north of Boston, in a wealthy, well-run town with a good school system, fine municipal services, excellent public transportation … She’d quadruple her investment or better.” His eyes narrowed. “Unless you were to charge her a hefty sum for the land.”

  “I wouldn’t sell her the land for any sum,” Jessica vowed. Rising from her seat, she moved toward the window. “I don’t want to sell the land at all, but if I have to, the last person I’d sell to would be her. She’s a witch.”

  Gordon cleared his throat. “Not quite the scholarly assessment I’d expected.”

  With a sheepish half smile, Jessica turned. “No. But it’s hard to be scholarly when people evoke the kind of visceral response Felicia does.” She slipped her hands into the pockets of her skirt, feeling more anchored that way. “Felicia and I are a year apart in age, so she used to visit when we were kids. She aspired to greatness. Being at the Rise made her feel she was on her way. She always joked that if I didn’t want the Rise, she’d take it, but it was the kind of joking that wasn’t really joking, if you know what I mean.” When Gordon nodded, she went on. “By the time she graduated from high school, she realized that her greatness wasn’t going to come from the Rise. So she went looking in other directions. I’m thirty-three now, so she’s thirty-four. She’s been married three times, each time to someone rich enough to settle a large lump sum on her to get out of the marriage.”

  “So she’s a wealthy woman. But has she achieved that greatness?”

  Wearing a slightly smug what-do-you-think look, Jessica gave a slow head shake. “She’s got lots of money with nowhere to go.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t offer to buy Crosslyn Rise from you outright.”

  “Oh, she did. When Dad was barely in his grave.” Her shoulders went straighter, giving a regal lift to her five-foot-six-inch frame. “I refused just as bluntly as she offered. There’s no way I’d let her have the Rise. She’d have it sold or subdivided within a year.” She paused, took a breath, turned back to the window and said in a quiet voice, “I can’t let that happen.”

  They were back to her options. Gordon knew as well as she did that some change in the Rise’s status was necessary. “What are your thoughts, Jessica?” he asked as gently as he could.

  She was very still for a time, gnawing on her lower lip as she looked out over the harbor. Its charm, part of which was visible from Crosslyn Rise, not two miles away, made the thought of leaving the Rise all the harder. But it had to be faced.

  “I could sell off some of the outer acreage,” she began in a dubious tone, “but that would be a stopgap measure. It would be two lots this year, two lots next year and so on. Once I sold the lots, I wouldn’t have any say about what was built on them. The zoning is residential, but you know as well as I do that there are dozens of styles of homes, one tackier than the next.”

  “Is that snobbishness I detect?” Gordon teased.

  She looked him in the eye without a dash of remorse. “Uh-huh. The Rise is Georgian colonial and gorgeous. It would be a travesty if she were surrounded by less stately homes.”

  “There are many stately homes that aren’t Georgian colonial.”

  “But the Rise is. And anything around it should blend in,” she argued, then darted a helpless glance toward the ceiling. “This is the last thing I want to be discussing. It’s the last thing I want to be considering.”

  “You love the Rise.”

  She pondered the thought. “It’s not the mortar and brick that I love, not the kitchen or the parlor or the library. It’s the whole thing. The old-world charm. The smell of polished wood and history. It’s the beauty of it—the trees and ponds, birds and chipmunks—and the peace, the serenity.” But there was more. “It’s the idea of Crosslyn Rise. The idea that it’s been in my family for so long. The idea that it’s a little world unto itself.” She faltered for an instant. “Yes, I love the Rise. But I have to do something. If I don’t, you’ll be forced to foreclose before long.”

  Gordon didn’t deny it. He could give her more time than another person might have. He could indeed grant her another, smaller loan in the hope that, with a twist of fortune, she’d be able to recover from her present dire straits. In the end, business was business.

  “What would you like to do?” he asked.

  She started to turn back to the window but realized it wouldn’t make things easier. It was time to face facts. So she folded her arms around her middle and said, “If I had my druthers, I’d sell the whole thing, house and acreage as a package, to a large, lovely, devoted family, but the chances of finding one that can afford it are next to nil. I’ve been talking with Nina Stone for the past eight months. If I was to sell, she’d be my broker. Without formally listing the house, she’d have an eye out for buyers like that, but there hasn’t been a one. The real estate market is slow.”

  “That’s true as far as private buyers go. Real estate developers would snap up property like Crosslyn Rise in a minute.”

  “And in the next minute they’d subdivide, sell off the smallest possible lots for the biggest possible money and do everything my cousin Felicia would do with just as little care for the integrity of the Rise.” J
essica stood firm, levelly eyeing Gordon through her small, round lenses. “I can’t do that, Gordon. It’s bad enough that I have to break apart the Rise after all these years, but I can’t just toss it in the air and let it fall where it may. I want a say as to what happens to it. I want whatever is done to be done with dignity. I want the charm of the place preserved.”

  She finished without quite finishing. Not even her glasses could hide the slight, anticipatory widening of her eyes.

  Gordon prodded. “You have something in mind?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know if it’s feasible.”

  “Tell me what it is, and I’ll let you know.”

  She pressed her lips together, wishing she didn’t have to say a word, knowing that she did. The Rise was in trouble. She was up against a wall, and this seemed the least evil of the options.

  “What if we were to turn Crosslyn Rise into an exclusive condominium complex?” she asked, then hurried on before Gordon could answer. “What if there were small clusters of homes, built in styles compatible with the mansion and tucked into the woods at well-chosen spots throughout the property?” She spoke even more quickly, going with the momentum of her words. “What if the mansion itself was redone and converted into a combination health center, clubhouse, restaurant? What if we developed the harbor area into something small but classy, with boutiques and a marina?” Running out of “what ifs,” she stopped abruptly.

  Unfolding his hands, Gordon sat back in his chair. “You’d be willing to do all that?”

  “Willing, but not able. What I’m talking about would be a phenomenally expensive project—”

  He stilled her with a wave of his hand. “You’d be willing to have the Rise turned into a condominium complex?”

  “If it was done the right way,” she said. She felt suddenly on the defensive and vaguely disloyal to Crosslyn Rise. “Given any choice, I’d leave the Rise as it is, but it’s deteriorating more every year. I’m long past the point of being able to put a finger in the dike. So I have to do something. This idea beats the alternatives. If it was done with forethought and care and style, we could alter the nature of Crosslyn Rise without changing its character.”