An Unexpected Suitor Read Online Free

turned down Rosemary Lane to the cottage that had become his ’Sconset home.
    He needed to talk to someone who not only knew Nola, but could be trusted not to go running all over town with the news he’d been asking questions. Rachel! The image of his mother’s first cousin, Rachel Williams, popped into his mind as he sat alone at his kitchen table cracking open the clams he’d prepared for his noon meal. Everyone liked and respected Rachel. More to the point, the woman knew everyone and every detail of their lives. And like Nola, Rachel had never married. Had chosen not to marry. Yes, Rachel would understand a woman like Nola and know the best approach to take with the tearoom proprietress. Harry flicked the last of the clamshells into a bucket just outside his cottage door and mounted his bicycle for the short ride into Nantucket.
    “Well, if it isn’t my long lost cousin,” Rachel Williams exclaimed when she opened the door to her house on New Street and saw him standing there. “I thought you’d been lost at sea or some such disaster. Surely nothing short of that would keep you from calling on your mother’s poor old relation.”
    Harry laughed. “You are neither poor nor old, Rachel,” he replied as she ushered him inside and took his hat. Harry glanced into the dining room where the table was piled high with an odd assortment of items. Rachel was a dedicated historian and charter member of the island’s historical association, and she had made no secret of her disappointment in her cousin once she realized that Harry was far more interested in Nantucket’s future than its past.
    “What’s all this?” he asked, fingering one of a pile of carved ivory pipes.
    “Members of the historical association have been collecting all sorts of these thousand-year boxes and depositing them here for me to sort through and catalog.” She sighed. “It’s amazing how people simply assume that a single woman has all the time in the world for such projects. Not that I mind. There are treasures to be found in these collections of clutter.”
    “Thousand-year boxes?”
    “Now, Harry, you are not so young that you never heard the term. Your own mother must have had just such a box—a depository for all the odds and ends of the household. Odd doorknobs or keys that no longer fit a lock or the heads of walking sticks?” She fingered each item as she named it. “Stuff she probably wouldn’t use for a thousand years but kept just in case the need arose?”
    “And of what possible use is all this junk?”
    “This ‘junk’ provides a tangible portrait of daily life hereon Nantucket in years past. It can be used to create living history for the younger generations, and actually being able to see and touch the things once used in daily life is ever so much more exciting than reading about them in some book. You might want to think about that when you write your next play.” She pulled out a chair and sat, then indicated that he should do the same. “Now, why have you come?”
    “You make it sound as if I need some pretense to call upon my favorite cousin,” Harry replied with mock hurt as he began following her lead in sorting the miscellany into more organized categories.
    “You’ve been back here for a good month already and this is the first I’ve seen of you other than the day you arrived.”
    “I’ve been busy.”
    They worked in comfortable silence for several minutes. Then Rachel rested her elbows on the table and studied his face. “Gossip has it that you’re interested in buying Nola Burns’s place. Turn it into some kind of fancy inn for your rich friends from Boston and New York.”
    “That’s fact, not gossip,” Harry replied, continuing to sort the knobs and watch parts and keys.
    “Save yourself the time and trouble and find another site—maybe out by the golf course. Those businessmen seem to enjoy their golf and their ladies like puttering around.” She cackled at her play on words. It