First Impressions Read online

  Slowly, Eden went down the stairs to stand beside McBride. She was too astonished to move.

  Not so Jared. He stepped into the little truck, turned the key, and started the engine. “Look at this,” he said, then flipped a switch and the bed moved upward. “It’s a dump truck.”

  Shovels, rakes, a gardening fork, a three-pronged bulb planter, a soil aerator, and at least a dozen hand tools went tumbling out the back to the ground. “Look what you’ve done,” Eden cried as she began to pick up the tools.

  Jared turned off the engine, stepped out of the truck, and looked at her. “So what do you think of all this?”

  “I think Braddon Granville is the most wonderful man in the world,” she said softly as she put the tools against the big cypress tree. She went to the perennials to read the labels. Astilbe. For shade, she thought. Under the pecan trees. Heuchera and agastache.

  “You think it was Granville who sent you all this?” Jared asked.

  “Of course. Who else would do this?”

  “Ah, yes, who else could it be?” he said.

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “Are you going to accept gifts from a man you barely know?” Jared had his hands in his pockets and, for once, he wasn’t wearing his isn’t-life-funny look.

  Eden looked at the plants, the truck, and the tools, then back at McBride. “Since I was eighteen years old, I’ve tried to set an example for my daughter. When a man liked me and offered me a gift, I didn’t take it because I didn’t want my daughter to grow up thinking that if a man gave her something she owed him something.”

  “Hard life to live.”

  “Yes, it was sometimes. I think I wanted to prove to myself and the world that even though I’d had a child when I was a child, I could still be a good mother.”

  Jared, with his hands still in his pockets, nodded toward all the things around them. “But now you have nothing to prove, so you’re going to accept the gifts.”

  She put her hand on the fender of the little red truck. “I’d rather have these things than an engagement ring.”

  “Engagement ring?! So now you’re engaged to Granville? When did this happen?”

  “It hasn’t, but a woman knows, and I know that I will be asked.”

  “Why not? You have nothing to lose,” Jared muttered.

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “Nothing. It means nothing,” he said. “I’m sure that you and Granville will make a great couple. You can live together in your old houses, one week in his and one week in yours. You’ll be the leading couple in town, and everyone will want to go to your parties. Young girls will make their husbands’ lives hell if they aren’t invited to your parties. In one generation you’ll have gone from being a pregnant kid with nothing, to being Mrs. Astor of Arundel. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. Don’t leave your property and you’ll be safe.”

  Eden watched him go into the house, then sat down on the seat of the little truck. What a day! she thought. First Melissa and now McBride. She saw the thick stack of papers in the little cubbyhole to the right of the steering wheel and took them out. It was the instruction manual. As she opened the booklet, she told herself that she was going to enjoy the day no matter what anyone did to her.

  Easier said than done. All of the hundreds of plants needed to be put into the ground, and something that usually relaxed her now seemed to be a monumental task. Her mind wouldn’t stop working. Had she been horrible to her daughter? Should she have been more understanding? Should she have said that she’d known all along that Stuart was no good? Should she have jumped in her new car and driven to New York to be with her pregnant daughter?

  That she’d done none of those things worried Eden, ate at her. She even wondered if she was jealous of her daughter. Melissa had everything while she was pregnant, but Eden had had so very little. As McBride said, Eden had worked herself half to death while she was pregnant. She’d climbed stairs carrying heavy boxes and stayed up late to read what was inside the boxes. Her only time “off” was when she was in the kitchen, trying to figure out how to cook something that Mrs. Farrington would like.

  Brad had said that Mrs. Farrington was “cantankerous” and Eden had defended the woman. It was true that Mrs. Farrington had treated Eden and Melissa well, but Eden had had to earn that good treatment. Before Melissa was born Mrs. Farrington had demanded a great deal of work. After the child was born, it had been better, but that Eden should sit down and rest were words that were never spoken.

  Eden picked up her new hand shovel and looked at it. Damn McBride, she thought. He was as bad as those snakes that had been put into her bedroom. He was always spreading poison. The truth was that he had presented her with a picture of her future with Brad that she didn’t like. And a truth that she didn’t want to hear.

  Was it possible that part of her attraction to Brad was that his family was so very prominent? Arundel, North Carolina, wasn’t New York or Palm Beach, but, well…As Brad’s wife, Eden would be accepted into social circles that had always been outside her world. When Mrs. Farrington had parties, Eden served drinks.

  Eden knew from having lived with Mrs. Farrington that some of the families of Arundel were accepted in those “old money” worlds. Compared to the rest of the world, the United States was very young and had no aristocracy. By default, any family that had had money for over two hundred years was considered upper class. A Granville would be welcome anywhere.

  Eden turned a bulb planter over in her hand. How much of her attraction to Brad was the man himself and how much was his name?

  “Can’t decide where to begin?” Jared asked from above her.

  She didn’t look up. “Get over your sulk?”

  “I wasn’t sulking,” he said to the top of her head. “I was in a fury of jealousy.”

  “Oh?” she said, her head still down, but she was smiling. “Happen to you often?”

  “Not even once before, I’m happy to say. Not even my wife—”

  She looked at him. “You were married?”

  “Long ago. And stop looking at me like that. The divorce wasn’t any great traumatic thing that broke my heart.”

  When Eden just kept looking at him, he shrugged. “I was young, and marriage seemed like the thing to do, so we did it. Three years later I came home to find a note saying she’d left me. To tell you the truth, I was so tired that night that I was more angry that there was no beer in the refrigerator and that she’d taken the TV with her than I was that she’d left me. We didn’t know each other very well and had never spent much time together, so I never really missed her.”

  Eden kept looking at him. “So how bad are you lying?” she asked softly.

  Jared gave a laugh. “A hundred percent. I was mad about her, and I thought I was going to go crazy after she left me. The guy she ran off with came up to my shoulder and was bald at twenty-six. But he was home every night, they went to church on Sunday, and he coached Little League.”

  “Children?”

  “Three. All of them smart, polite, and great athletes.”

  When he glanced back at her, Eden meant to give him a look of sympathy, but instead she laughed. “We’re a pair, aren’t we? School of Hard Knocks. So why don’t you get a shovel and help me plant these trees?”

  Jared looked aghast. “I’ve never planted anything in my life.”

  “Dig a hole, stick it in. It’s not—”

  “Yeah, I know, rocket science.” His words were sarcastic, but he was grinning as he picked up a shovel. “So Granville sent you all of this?”

  “Who else? The FBI? Maybe it’s a new technique. Maybe instead of threatening people to make them talk, they’re going to start using bribery. By the way, after you drugged me to sleep last night, did they do any more searching in my house? Tell me they didn’t take the pictures apart.”

  “First of all, I didn’t drug you. Is this shovel big enough?” he asked, holding up what could be used as a snow sh