First Impressions

  “But not now?”

  “I think he may ask for a restraining order against you.”

  “You are a truly horrible human being!” Eden said, but she couldn’t help smiling.

  “There, that’s better.” He looked at his watch. “Unfortunately, duty calls and I have to go. They’re going to let you go home after the doctor sees you. You’re just tired from the workout. There’s not a dent on that pretty little body of yours.”

  “You’re very fresh, aren’t you?”

  Brad laughed. “Fresh. I haven’t heard that word in years. Don’t you watch reality TV? Don’t you know what people in the real world are saying to each other on the first date?”

  “Not your generation and not mine,” Eden said primly.

  Brad took her hand in his again and for a moment looked as though he was going to kiss it, but then he put her hand back on top of the sheet. “Young Clint gets off duty in two hours so I’ll make sure he drives you home. My housekeeper went out there this morning, gave the place a good cleaning, and”—he wiggled his eyebrows—“turned the breakers back on. I had to sign an affidavit swearing that you wouldn’t be there if she touched your, uh, breaker box.”

  In spite of herself, Eden blushed. “You’re incorrigible. Go on, get out of here. I’ll be fine. It’s Mr. McBride I’m concerned about.”

  “If I were you, I’d stay away from him. I doubt if he’s your biggest fan. Gotta go. I’ll see you at six tonight and I’ll bring dinner. You take a bath, wash your hair, make yourself pretty, and await my arrival.”

  With that he was gone. As the door closed behind him, Eden grimaced. “ ‘Await my arrival’?” she said. “Who does he think he is?” But she smiled anyway and rested against the pillow until she had to get up.

  “So help me, Bill,” Jared said into his cell phone, his teeth clenched, “if you don’t stop laughing I’ll remove two of your teeth the next time I see you—which will be soon.”

  Jared listened, but his temper didn’t abate. “You didn’t tell me she was insane. None of you happened to mention that fact, and it was nowhere in the papers you had me read. I thought she was some poor woman who’d had a hard life. I thought—No, I’m not going soft on you. So help me, Bill, if you start laughing again I’ll…” Jared gave a nasty smile. “I’ll tell the whole department where I saw you last summer.”

  Jared’s smile returned to normal. “That’s better. No, I’m fine. I’ve been a lot worse, but I look bad. No, I’m not being vain. I was sent here to seduce information out of a woman, wasn’t I? So tell me how I’m supposed to wine and dine her when I have a black eye, an arm in a sling, and bruises all over. I tell you, I’ve never seen anybody fight like she did! She was blind! Crazy.”

  He listened for a few moments. “That’s nice that the house shrink has a rationalization for why she attacked me, but it doesn’t help any. I think you ought to send someone else out here to do this job. What about Lopez? He’s great-looking. So what if he’s fifteen years younger than she is?”

  He paused. “I have no idea what she looks like! It was dark and she attacked me. I saw her snooping around, so I very calmly went to her, then she attacked me. I wasn’t expecting it, and I couldn’t very well attack her back, could I? I did everything I could to get away from her, but she’s an agile little thing, I’ll give her that. At one point, when I had almost scooted away from her, she bit me on the ankle. When I tried to push her head away, she bit my arm. And you should see the claw marks I have on me!”

  Jared stopped talking and listened to his boss. He knew that Bill had been sent a full report of what had happened, but Jared wanted to exaggerate everything so, maybe, Bill would take him off the case. It was one thing to try to sweet-talk information out of a woman he was attracted to, but quite another to have to be around a woman whose brain cords didn’t connect properly. For all his undercover work, Jared was no actor. Maybe he could play the tough-guy parts, but not the romantic ones. That’s why he liked women who were reformed bad girls. They didn’t expect much from him—which is just what he gave. His professional life was difficult, so he didn’t want the same in his private life, what little there was of it.

  “There’s something else that wasn’t in your reports on her,” Jared said. “She’s practically engaged to some lawyer in town. Yeah, I know she just got here, but they must have known each other before because they’re already a couple. Last night as I lay bleeding on a gurney, being sewn up and swabbed down, some kid of a deputy made it clear to me that little Ms. Palmer belongs to one of the town’s founding families—or whatever they are down here. Lord! Deliver me from the South. Everybody knows who everybody’s great-great-grandfather was and what his rank was in the war. Civil War, that is. No, I can’t calm down!” Jared said. “I’m in pain and I’m not the right man for this job. I think you should send a woman to befriend her. Maybe send an engaged couple, as I think Ms. Palmer is about two seconds away from being engaged herself. They’ll all talk to each other.”

  Jared took a breath to listen. “No, nothing. I didn’t see anything in the house that looked out of place. Nothing. I only had about forty-five minutes and I had to use a penlight. I thought your people said she was spending the night in town.”

  Jared listened to Bill defend his information while he looked out the window at the river at the bottom of the hill. In the next second, he came alert as he saw someone coming through the cut in the hedge that separated “her” house from his. Yesterday he’d done some exploring of the two connecting properties, mainly looking for hiding places and avenues of exit. He planned to explore every inch of the place, probably at night while Ms. Palmer slept the sleep of the innocent—if she was innocent, that is. There were a couple of places outside that Jared thought might be good to stick a couple of surveillance cameras. There were birdhouses and vines up the trees. He could hide the cords in the vines and the cameras in the birdhouses. No one would see anything.

  Since last night he’d developed the opinion that Ms. Palmer was indeed guilty of something. He wasn’t sure what, but she was guilty. All the sympathy he’d built up when he’d read about her life had left him when she’d sunk her teeth into him for the third time.

  Now he looked out the window and drew in his breath. Coming through the bushes was none other than the lady in question—and she was carrying a big ceramic dish, with a loaf of bread on top, pot holders covering her hands. While Bill was droning on and on about how Jared had to do the job and that if he were a good agent he could get it done in a matter of days, Jared got his first real look at Ms. Palmer. She wore jeans that were much looser than he liked on women and above that an oversize sweater that hid most of what was under it, but there was a breeze, and he could see the outline of a curvy little body that wasn’t half bad. He’d read that in New York she often went to the gym after work, but the report hadn’t said whether she went there to socialize or to sweat. From the look of her, she’d done a lot of sweating.

  When the breeze lifted her hair and she moved her head to one side to get the hair out of her eyes, he saw her wince. Good! he thought. He hoped she was very sore from what she’d done to him last night.

  Jared felt a tiny bit of guilt because he had been snooping through her house, and because his story about lights going off had been something he’d made up when the police arrived. And of course she had every right to call the sheriff or her boyfriend or anybody else, for that matter. And, yes, she was perfectly justified in thinking that he was a thief and therefore was probably going to attack her when he reached out to touch her arm. So, okay, maybe she’d been right on every count; but that didn’t heal his body or his pride.

  Jared listened to Bill and in an instant saw a way around all the obstacles. Her guilt. If he’d ever seen a human being with a sorrowful look on her face, the woman walking toward him with her peace offering was it. “I gotta go and don’t call me back. She’s here,” he said quickly, then closed his cell phone. Jared ran to the chair in front of t
he empty fireplace. He hadn’t had time to lay a fire on this cool spring morning because he’d been snooping inside the old house next door while she was still in the hospital. That she’d stayed longer than he had he was sure was due to her big-deal lawyer’s word.

  As Jared heard her walk up the front porch steps, he glanced at the coatrack by the door and saw three walking sticks, left, no doubt, by some previous tenant. He grabbed a stick, pulled a blanket off the back of the couch, then hurried across the room. By the time she knocked on the door, Jared was bundled up under what had to be the dustiest old blanket in the world, but he left his sling-bound arm outside so it would show. Beside him was the cane.

  “Come in,” he said in the voice of an old man in pain.

  Slowly, the door opened to reveal a pretty woman with a hot casserole. Jared had seen worse sights in his life.

  “I…I’m Eden Palmer,” she said softly, looking at him with a combination of guilt and pity. Part of Jared wanted to jump up and show her that he was fine, that he looked worse than he was, but he made himself pull the blanket up around his chin in a protective way.

  Eden took the few steps across the room to stand near him. “I don’t know where to begin to apologize about last night. Until recently I’ve been living in New York and maybe I’ve come to think that everybody is…” She trailed off, not finishing her sentence. “Could I put this down somewhere?”

  Weakly, Jared nodded toward the kitchen at the other end of the house. He watched her walk away and decided that under her big clothes was a mighty fine little tush. She disappeared through the doorway into the kitchen and he heard nothing but silence for several minutes. He knew why. The kitchen was a mess. Yesterday he’d thrown food into cabinets and the refrigerator as fast as possible so he could start scouting the area before the Palmer woman got there. He’d run in twice to make himself a sandwich and had left everything as it was. He figured that after she moved into the house he’d have plenty of time to straighten up.

  A few minutes later, Ms. Palmer came out of the kitchen with a little tray filled with food. He could smell what seemed to be homemade vegetable beef soup. The women he liked were very understanding and tolerant of what he did for a living, but none of them were cooks. It seemed to be a law of life that women who took their clothes off for a living didn’t cook, while women who went to church did.

  “I, uh…” she said hesitantly. “I’ll just leave you to, uh, heal, and, again, I’m sorry that I…” She looked at his eye, which he knew was huge and black and purple, and which distorted his face as though he’d had a stroke. On the other side of his face were two deep scratches from her nails.

  Jared couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw tears form in Eden Palmer’s eyes. “Could you put the food a little closer?” he whispered, as though talking was painful—which it was. “I think I can reach it if it’s a bit closer.”

  “Yes, of course,” Eden said quickly, then moved the tray to the table next to Jared’s chair.

  He pulled his uninjured arm from under the blanket and made a shaky attempt to get a spoonful of soup, but he dropped the spoon back into the bowl. He gave Ms. Palmer a look that said he was trying but couldn’t quite make it.

  In the next second, Eden had pulled up a chair and was feeding him. It was all Jared could do not to smile at such luxury. But he had to concentrate on playing the invalid, and that meant no smiling.

  It took thirty long minutes to feed him all the food, and they didn’t talk during that time. While he chewed, she scurried about the room, straightened up, and lit the logs in the fireplace.

  “Thank you,” Jared said, collapsing back against the chair. “I needed that. Since I got out of the hospital I haven’t been able to do much for myself. I’m sorry the house is such a mess. You must think that I’m—”

  “I don’t think anything at all bad about you, Mr. McBride. It’s me who’s at fault. When I think about what you were doing for me last night and what I did to you, I…Well, I…”

  Jared reached out for her hand. Nice, he thought. Soft. He started to move up her wrist but then remembered himself enough that he gave a tiny moan of pain and flopped back against the chair.

  “Can you walk?”

  “A bit,” he said heavily. “I can get to the…you know, by myself.”

  Standing up, she put her hands on her hips, and when Jared groaned, it was for real. He hated that hands-on-hips stance that women put on. It was the Earth Mother pose, and it suited this woman much too well. Deliver me, thought Jared. He was about to throw back the blanket and tell her to go home when she spoke. “I insist that you stay in my guest room until you can take care of yourself,” she said.

  Jared wasn’t sure that any woman had ever been able to take his breath away in the same way that she had just done. “No, Ms. Palmer,” he said softly. “I couldn’t move in with you.”

  “I’m not asking you to move in with me. It’s just until you can take care of yourself.”

  He gave a sigh, then a wince as he moved in the chair. “This is a small town and people will talk.”

  “They’ll talk more if they think I’ve left a man I’ve rendered helpless to fend for himself.” She sat down on the chair in front of him. “I’m going to be honest with you. I feel very guilty about what I did. Someday, maybe, I’ll tell you what happened inside my mind when you touched me in that dark room. It brought back some very unpleasant memories for me, and for a while I lost it. I apologize. But I can’t go back and undo what I did, all I can do is try to make amends. I can’t leave you in this dirty house to take care of yourself. I can’t afford to hire a nurse to look after you, and I don’t have the time to run back and forth to clean up your kitchen and keep fires going. This afternoon FedEx brought me a box of six manuscripts that have to be copyedited or critiqued within the next few weeks. Have you ever copyedited a manuscript, Mr. McBride?”

  “I can’t say that I have.” He was watching her with amusement. She had put on an act of sternness, like a lady schoolmarm, but what she was saying was softness itself.

  “They take a lot of time, so I need to have the time to give them. I really can’t see any other way except that you move into my guest bedroom and let me take care of you there.”

  “And what about the lawyer?”

  “Braddon Granville? Yes, he’s my attorney,” she said, puzzled, and the way she said it told Jared everything he needed to know. Maybe the lawyer and maybe the whole town thought that the Granville-Palmer wedding was a done deal, but it didn’t seem that cute little Ms. Palmer thought so.

  Chapter Four

  EDEN put down her cup of tea and glanced upward, as though she could see through the ceiling to what Mr. McBride was up to.

  Why is it that men think all women are stupid? she wondered for the hundred thousandth time in her life. It seemed that a woman had to prove herself to every man she met before he believed that she had any brains. And after she’d shown him her intelligence, he still spent the rest of their time together seeing what he could get away with.

  She’d been in Arundel just two days, but already she had two eligible, middle-aged bachelors who were coming on to her. She figured she had a choice. She could believe that, in their eyes, she was the sexiest thing since Marilyn Monroe, or she could believe that both of them were up to something.

  Eden nibbled on a cookie that she’d just taken out of the oven. She had left Arundel by the time the old washhouse had been repaired, but Mrs. Farrington had often talked about her plans for renovating it. She was going to rent it to someone for a little money in return for working in the garden on summer evenings and weekends. Eden knew Mrs. Farrington well, and there was no way she’d connect the electricity between the washhouse and the main house. She’d insist on separate bills. Eden could almost hear the old woman now: “If they left all the lights on day and night, would I be required to pay for them? Absolutely not!” But now she had been told that the electricity of the two houses had been joined.

&
nbsp; Today, Eden had had to spend most of the day in the hospital, and she felt sure it was on Brad’s orders. She kept asking the hospital staff if she could go home, but every nurse and doctor had been evasive. Finally, at two o’clock, they’d said she could leave. Eden wondered if Brad had finally given permission for her dismissal.

  The smiling, smirking deputy sheriff, Clint, was waiting for her, and Eden was glad for her sore muscles so she could use them to explain her angry red face. She’d had to sit in the police car on the ride back to Farrington Manor in silence as Clint made what he thought was one joke after another. According to him, Eden had lived too long in the North and didn’t understand how neighbors in the South looked out for one another. They took care of one another. Lent helping hands, that sort of thing. Clint chuckled and smirked through the entire ride. When they got to the house, he asked her if she wanted him to get out his gun and go through the house to check it for her. Eden was about to tell him what he could do with his gun, when his radio came on. He gave her a look that said he had important work to do now, so she got out of the car, somehow managing not to slam the door.

  Inside, Eden got her first real look at the magnificent old central hall. When she’d first laid eyes on it years ago, it had been a mass of furniture and papers; eventually the papers had been removed and filed, but the furniture had stayed where it was, even if the pieces were on top of each other. There had simply been nowhere else to put it all. Now, the hall was sparsely furnished, with two small couches, a tall secretary (reproduction, not original), and a few chairs and two little tables. For the first time in her life, Eden could see the hall for the grand size that it was.

  “Magnificent,” was all that she could say, and she had to blink away tears that Mrs. Farrington had renovated the house so beautifully and that she’d left it to Eden. The walls had paneling to half their height of twelve feet. The ceiling was surrounded by tall, deep crown moldings. The doors at opposite ends were original, two hundred plus years of paint painstakingly removed so the dents and nicks of centuries showed in a patina that only age could give.