“There’s been nothing except some really hateful personal things.” She turned away, not looking in his eyes. “No one has mentioned the necklace or…or anything that could remotely be something anyone would kill for. Except Minnie. She might kill me just for the pleasure of it.”
“Minnie? Her beef is with me, not you.”
Eden looked at him in astonishment. “She thought you were her boyfriend.”
Jared shrugged. “Hazards of the business. Happens to me a lot.”
His statement was so vain, yet at the same time so honest, that she laughed. “It’s nothing to you, but Minnie wants a husband and a father for her child. And she wants a place to live. I think her deal with Brad is that…” Trailing off, she looked away.
“Go on,” Jared said. “What happened?”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that…”
“I know,” he said, his jaw held tightly in position. “You can’t think of Granville without what? Great pain? He dumped you, so you had a tumble with the second-best man. Thank you, I enjoyed it, and I can assure you that I won’t tell him.”
She looked at him for several seconds. “I see why your wife ran off with another man.”
“I don’t see anything bad about you at all,” he snapped, “except your refusal to tell me what I need to know.”
She looked down at her wine. Light was beginning to come in through the cracks between the old boards. Dawn was approaching. What was she going to think of herself when she was away from him? There was no future with a man like Jared McBride. He was a mover, a vagabond, a…a bum? He wasn’t a man to settle down in one spot and plant fruit trees. And he certainly wasn’t a man to elevate one’s social position in a snobby town like Arundel. No, there was no future with a man like Jared McBride.
“You want to quit looking at me like that?” he asked as he pulled on his clothes. “I’m not something that you found under a rock.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”
“It doesn’t matter, and stop apologizing,” he said as he buttoned his shirt. “I want to know what happened with Minnie.”
Eden had to take a deep breath to give herself strength as she quickly told Jared the gist of what Minnie had said to her.
“I don’t know about what she said about Granville, but she made everything about her and me up. I never gave her any encouragement.”
She knew he was telling the truth, but that still didn’t keep Minnie’s anger from running around inside her head.
Eden took a deep drink of her wine. It was now morning, and she’d never had an alcoholic drink in the morning in her life. But then she’d never made love with a man she knew she had no future with. She’d never been a one-night-stand type of woman. She looked at Jared, remembering his hands on her body.
“Cut that out!” he snapped. “I can’t concentrate when you look at me like that. Remember when I told you that that ancestor of Mrs. Farrington’s had killed his wife and her lover? I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Yes, but that was—”
“Human nature. It’s something I’ve had to deal with a lot. Minnie is lying about Granville. If he called his former girlfriend, then it was for a reason other than getting back with her. What exactly did she say?”
“What does this have to do with some spy swallowing my name?”
“If Minnie lies about one thing, she’ll lie about another. I can see that she might think I was interested in her. That could have been an honest mistake. Happens to me all the time. And too, I was trying to make you jealous so—”
“Why would you want to do that?”
Jared ignored her question. “Tell me again what she said, word for word.”
Eden did the best she could, but it had been an emotionally charged conversation, so it was difficult to remember clearly.
Jared leaned back on the mattress, his hands behind his head. “Granville could have called the woman about something legal. It sounds to me as though Minnie’s mother is as fanciful as her daughter. They’ve both made up men who are hot for them. What else did she say?”
Eden put down her empty cup and looked at her hands.
“That bad, huh?” Jared asked softly.
She lay down beside him, not touching him. “Minnie said that I was a slut when I was a teenager and I haven’t changed since.” She took a deep breath. “From the evidence of tonight, maybe she’s right.”