First Impressions (Edenton 1)

“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.

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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.

“Beautiful,” she whispered, twirling about and looking at everything.

She wanted to see the rest of the house, but she was sure that Brad was going to show up at any minute, so she got her cell phone out of her bag, then called the local electric company and told them she wanted her electricity and McBride’s billed separately. “But it is,” the girl at the electric company said. “ ‘Mr. McBride’ had all the electricity put in his name when he rented the house.”

“Our two houses aren’t on the same circuit?” Eden asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” Eden said, then hung up.

She sat down on one of the couches and looked at the beautiful molding around the room. Mrs. Farrington had had every bit of it restored. Brad had said that he believed Mrs. Farrington had had the house restored for her, for Eden. Yes, Eden could believe that, but she also knew that Mrs. Farrington had left the house to Eden so she could protect it. She went into the living room. Paneling covered the wall from the chair rail down, all around the ceiling. The fireplace was especially beautiful; even Thomas Jefferson would have liked it.

Eden leaned against the wall for a moment. What in the world was going on? she wondered. Brad had seemed to believe McBride completely, even to making Eden the butt of all the jokes. Dumb woman used to living in the city gets freaked out because a man is snooping around in her house in the middle of the night. “Let’s see one of them find someone snooping around and see how he reacts,” she said out loud, then pushed away from the wall with a moan of pain. It would take days to get over her soreness.

It seemed that the police had contacted someone, been told that Mr. McBride was one of them, and that was the end of it. No one had questioned his story. To them he was a man who’d been innocently using his table saw—male bonding there!—and when he’d seen that he’d blown out his female neighbor’s lights, he had tried to repair them. Take care of the little lady, so to speak. Only Eden had thought it was odd that two separate houses were on the same circuit.

Trying to calm herself, she walked into the kitchen and saw that it was much as she’d left it all those years ago. She’d been the one to remove all the papers from the cabinets and the countertops. She’d read each piece, then carefully ordered them in one of the many file cabinets that Mrs. Farrington had purchased. Whenever Eden had found dishes buried among the papers, she’d washed them, then put them into the cabinets with the glass doors. As Eden looked around, she saw that the Wedgwood was missing. The expensive set. Mrs. Farrington’s son had probably sold them.

Slowly, with each muscle aching, Eden went outside to her car. The groceries she’d bought the day before were still in there. Some of them were spoiled, but she could save most of what she’d bought. Limping, she managed to carry the bags inside. When she opened the side-by-side refrigerator, she saw that Brad had had his housekeeper fill it. There were three pounds of stewing beef inside, so Eden set to work making a pot of soup.

As she chopped, she thought about what had happened last night. Yes, she’d gone crazy. They’d all made her see that. From the doctor to the police boy, they’d let her know that she’d “overreacted.” The only person who hadn’t been “on their side” was one of the nurses, a large woman well into middle age. She was adjusting the machine that was monitoring Eden’s heart rate and hadn’t said a word when the doctor told Eden that she was fine. No real injuries, he’d said, then he’d given her a little smile and told her that the next time she should just run out the front door and not try to beat up a man twice as big as she was. The nurse waited until the doctor was out of the room, then she’d put her hand on Eden’s wrist. “Honey, I know they’re all giving you a hard time, but what you did was right. If you were a man you would have shot him. Snooping around your house like that at night! He shouldn’t have been in there, I don’t care who he was or what his intentions were. As for you, if other women reacted like that the morgue wouldn’t be so crowded.”

What the nurse said made Eden feel a lot better about herself, and when she was finally released, she could stand young Clint’s smirking.

But as Eden made her soup she started to think about what had happened to her in the past few days. Suddenly, there were two men in her life. A lawyer who seemed to already be assuming that the two of them were a couple, and another man who lived next door and had snooped around her house at night. What was going on?

When the soup was simmering, she went upstairs to the bedrooms. Technically, the house was just two bedrooms and two full baths, but the rooms were so big that they were disconcerting. Her bath was the size of a large bedroom, and the room on the other side of her bedroom was bigger than the average living room. Across the hall was a large bedroom with windows on three sides, and a bathroom in the corner. As Eden looked at the room, an idea came to her. If this man McBride was as beaten up as people said he was, maybe she should take care of him. Maybe she should move him into her house where she could be his nurse—or his jailer. If he was in the house she could see what he was doing. She was a light sleeper, so she’d hear him if he started snooping around again. Electrical box indeed! she thought.

As she went downstairs again, Eden thought how having someone live upstairs could also serve as a chaperone for her and Brad. That man was coming on too fast, too soon. That kind of thing happens when you’re in your twenties, but not when you’re forty-five. Eden’s gut instincts were telling her that the two men were up to something—or wanted something. Could she use one man to protect her from the other?

When the food was ready, she had taken it to Mr. McBride’s house—their first proper meeting. At her first sight of him, she felt bad that she’d done something so awful to another human being, but as she spent more time in his company, she knew that he was faking how badly he was injured. When Melissa had been in the third grade, she’d had a very hateful teacher, and every morning Melissa had come up with excuses as to why she couldn’t go to school that day. Eden had learned how to distinguish between real pain and fake. When it had been extraordinarily easy to get Mr. McBride to move in with her, she knew she was right.