First Impressions (Edenton 1)

“Okay,” she said, glad for his interest, because she needed someone to run her ideas past. “It’s like this. Here’s the house.” She drew a rectangle near one end of the paper. “I’d bring in at least one old building and have it restored—and thank you for that idea. I’ll be sure and give you credit.” She drew a small square to the left of the page. “Now we connect the buildings with a walkway. Colonials didn’t have a huge lawn where people could walk anywhere they pleased.”

“And these were the guys fighting for freedom?”

“Before power mowers, having an acre of lawn to mow wasn’t freedom.”

“Point taken.”

“Here, near the house, we enclose a place for a pleasure garden that would be used for picnics and just sitting outside on warm evenings.” She drew a rectangle near the house, then surrounded it with what looked like rounded shrubs. “Trees at each corner, and over here a little gazebo, but you have to be careful of gazebos so you don’t make it look Victorian.”

“Then what?” Jared asked.

“The kitchen garden. Not too far from the house, but not too close either. A colonial kitchen garden was a thing of beauty and didn’t need to be hidden.” She drew six narrow rectangles, then a square with a diamond in the center. As Jared watched, she drew paths off the diamond.

“I see. You could put a fountain there in the middle. An authentic-looking fountain, of course.”

She smiled at him. “Now, curving pathways to connect all the spaces, and they’d all be tree-lined, of course. This was before air-conditioning, so shade was important. And, depending on the size of the property…” She turned the pages in the book to the plan for the Governor’s Palace and described the various “rooms.” There was a “ballroom garden” filled with topiaries, a maze made from hedges of American holly, a canal stocked with fish, and a bowling green. It was a garden that nearly bankrupted the government, but Eden thought it was worth every cent.

Jared looked up from the book. “So where do the ATVs race?”

“On the highway, with the eighteen-wheelers,” she said instantly, and he laughed.

“I’ll take you on one for a spin one day, and you’ll love it.”

“I doubt it,” she said, then looked at her watch. “I have to go meet Brad.” Her eyes pleaded with him to not go with her.

“Sorry,” he said, “but it’s my duty to keep you safe. Tell Mr.—”

She gave him a look to cut it out.

“Granville,” Jared said. “Tell him that I’m going to help you with the designing.”

She started to protest but stopped herself. What good would it do? “You wouldn’t happen to have a camera, would you?”

“Digital, five million pixels, with a one gigabyte card.”

She raised her eyebrows, impressed. “Okay, you can take pictures of everything for me.”

“Meant to do that anyway,” he said softly. “I want you to get us into that house where Tess lived, okay?”

Eden nodded. She wasn’t sure how she was going to ask Brad, but she’d figure out something. She smiled at McBride, and he smiled back. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

“So what’s for lunch?” he asked, and she groaned.

Chapter Thirteen

WHEN Eden saw Brad, she again marveled at how comfortable she felt with him. She wondered if it was because he was part of the Arundel family that Mrs. Farrington had been part of. For all that Brad was, more or less, a stranger, she felt as though she’d known him forever. Mrs. Farrington said that when you met the man, THE man, you started planning your wedding dress. So far in her life, every time Eden had dated a man for more than three months, she started planning how she was going to let him down easily. Never in her life had she been dropped by a man, but she’d had to tell several of them that it was over between them.

But Brad was different, and she knew it—and so did he. When he saw her, his face lit up. Like a child at Christmas. Like she was a gift that he’d wanted all his life. We’ve had similar bad experiences, she thought, and we’ve never come close to finding that Great Love.

Brad hurried forward, took both her hands in his, and kissed her cheeks. He looked like he wanted to do more, but instead he just stood there, holding her hands and looking into her eyes.

“I hate to break this up,” Jared said from behind them, “but the architect is waggling at you.”

“Waggling?” Brad said, smiling at the old-fashioned word. Still holding Eden’s hands, he turned to Drake Haughton, who looked exaggeratedly at his watch. “Sorry,”

Brad said to Eden, “but I’m on a strict timetable today. We have some buyers flying in from New York later this afternoon, and I have to be back here to meet with them. Shall we go?”

Eden followed Brad to his car, and after a look at Jared, he seemed resigned to his presence. As Brad held the door open for her, he said quietly, “I see Mother Superior is well.” Eden giggled.