First Impressions Read online

  When McBride’s eyes softened as he looked at Minnie with what could have been thought of as a sexy look, Eden rolled her eyes in disgust. “Yes,” she said too loudly, “Brad mentioned you.”

  “Did he?” Minnie said, her eyes still on McBride. “I hope he said good things, as there are lots of very good things about me.”

  “I bet there are,” Jared said under his breath.

  Eden stepped between the two of them and held out her hand to shake. “I’m Eden Palmer.”

  “Yes,” Minnie said absently, shaking Eden’s hand but not looking at her. “And this is?”

  “I’m Jared McBride, Eden’s cousin. I’m staying at her house. Farrington Manor. Would you like a map?”

  “I know where it is, and I’ve always wanted to see the inside of that house,” Minnie said.

  “Come for dinner tonight,” Jared said, looking over the top of Eden’s head at Minnie and holding out his hand to shake.

  “She can’t,” Eden said, looking up at McBride. Her eyes were telling him to remember that the house had been torn up, that there was furniture lying in the hallway, cut cushions in the living room—and who knew what was still in her bedroom? Besides that, what right did he have to invite people to her house?

  “I’d love to,” Minnie said. She was still holding Jared’s hand.

  He was the one to pull away. “I think you ladies have things to discuss. Ms.—uh, Eden, if you need me, I think you know that I’ll always be close by.” With that he walked away from them.

  “Who is he?” Minnie asked, her eyes wide. “I mean, I know he’s the man you beat up, everyone in Arundel heard about that, but I thought he must be a wimp. Obviously, I was wrong. So who is he?”

  “Uh, cousin,” Eden managed to mumble, then she brightened. Maybe Minnie could take McBride off her hands for a while. “He’s a retired policeman, very early retirement, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself.”

  “I could show him a few things to do,” Minnie said, then waved her hand in dismissal. “Don’t mind me. It’s just that I haven’t had a man in three months, and the bedposts are beginning to look good. Is he married?”

  “No.”

  Minnie smiled at Eden, and Eden smiled back at her. It was an instant friendship. “You know, don’t you, that Brad wants you to speak.”

  “Speak? What do you mean? Not, like in: Give a speech?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Oh, dear. Sometimes Braddon forgets the most important things. Last night he came home and—”

  “You live with Brad?”

  “Not like that. Utterly platonic. Like you lived with Mrs. Farrington.”

  “But she was an old woman, and Brad is…”

  “A hunk?” Minnie smiled. “Maybe he is to you, but he’s like a grandfather to me. Look, he lives alone in an enormous house, and I have a daughter to take care of by myself. I had the misfortune to fall madly in love with a man I met on a cruise ship and married him the next week. Two months after my daughter was born, my slimeball husband ran off with a woman who worked in his office, so I returned home to Arundel. Brad helped me get a divorce and child support from my ex’s family. He helped me get full custody and my maiden name. You might have noticed that names are important here in Arundel. Anyway, after the divorce I was pretty stressed out with trying to raise a child alone.”

  “Been there, done that.”

  “Right. I’m not sure how it happened, but I ended up living in Braddon’s big old house and taking care of everything in his life. Believe you me, if you want to marry him and let me move into some nice condo where the windows don’t leak, let me know. Anyway, the point of all this is that I think Brad wants you to give a speech in about thirty minutes. Last night he was very happy about your taking over the landscaping. People can hire their own outside landscapers, of course, but Brad is afraid that they’ll end up…” She hesitated as she searched for the right words.

  “Letting some guy talk them into a Japanese garden with raked gravel, while the next-door neighbor has junipers in three colors, and the next house has gnomes in the flowerbeds.”

  “You sound just like Brad. Exactly like him, in fact. Are you sure you two aren’t related?”

  “Sure of it. Would you tell me what I’m supposed to speak on? And why didn’t Braddon tell me himself that he wanted me to speak?”

  “I have no way of knowing for sure, but my guess would be abject terror. He doesn’t want to do anything to frighten you away. As for what you’re to speak on, I think he just wants you to sell the people on whatever kind of gardens they’re supposed to have. I’m sure it won’t matter to them, because all they want to do is play golf and drink gin. As long as they don’t have to pull weeds, they’ll be okay.”

  “Maybe I could talk to Drake. He seemed to be Brad’s second-in-command.”

  Minnie snorted in derision. “Don’t believe Drake’s smooth exterior. He went to architecture school because his father made him, and he’s here because Brad is friends with his father.”

  Eden’s mind was racing. She was going to have to do this by herself, but how to sell herself and her ideas in just a few minutes? Was this how new authors felt when they were given three minutes to present their ideas to her? Yes, of course it was. “I need a pen and paper and some time alone,” she said, her voice frantic.

  Minnie handed Eden a very pretty fake leather notepad holder. It was a dusky blue, a color sometimes called Williamsburg blue. On the front were the words QUEEN ANNE. Eden took the pad, then went to a quiet corner and tried to assemble her thoughts. She didn’t mind giving speeches when she had time to prepare, but off-the-cuff like this was going to be difficult. Eighteenth-century gardening, she told herself. What did she remember about it? Better yet, what did she like about it? What made it so appealing to her that she wanted to make other people like it too? It had been a long, long time since she’d been involved in gardening. Holding down jobs, trying to get her child to school and back, being frantic when her daughter had a fever for three weeks in a row, all these things in life had driven the pleasure of gardening from her mind. As for the last few days, all she’d done was…

  For a moment she chewed on the end of the pen and remembered the last few days. Snakes, two men who were no longer strangers to her, her house ransacked. Closing her eyes, she tried to clear her vision of the turbulence of the last few days. Think eighteenth century, she thought. Not the truth about the time, of fighting for independence, but the orderliness. What was that motto she’d loved so much? How could she have forgotten that? It was what she’d based the garden she’d designed for Mrs. Farrington on. Something about nature being tamed. Yes, that was it. Smiling, she began to write.

  Chapter Ten

  STANDING in the doorway, Eden listened to Brad’s welcome speech. The notebook with the few ideas she could dredge out of her memory was in her sweaty palm. When Brad had asked if he could introduce her, she hadn’t known what he meant.

  She came alert when he said that he wanted them to meet the new landscape designer, Eden Palmer, who was an expert in eighteenth-century gardens. Can he be sued for telling such a big lie? Eden wondered. How could she make these people want a garden that went against all modern-day ideas of gardening? How could she sell “difficult to maintain” and “wildly expensive”?

  She looked back at Brad and willed him to say they could meet Ms. Palmer another day, but he didn’t.

  “Now,” Brad said, talking easily, as though he were born with a microphone in his hand, “we’re not saying that you have to put in a garden that G.W. might have enjoyed. G.W. is what we call George Washington here in Arundel, because he came through here and slept around, so to speak. In fact, we’re pretty sure that he slept in Ms. Palmer’s house, Farrington Manor. Of course he was only twenty-three at the time, a long way from being president, and he was here surveying the Great Dismal Swamp. And we do not want to tell you what he said about the accommodations in North Carolina or we’d never sell you a house