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?”