First Impressions Read online

  As Jared listened to the person on the other end, his face changed. His eyes widened and the color drained from his face. From the way he wouldn’t look at Eden, she knew that it was something bad and that it concerned her.

  “Okay,” he said into the phone. “I’ll do what I can.” He closed the case then took a step toward her. “Eden,” he said softly, and his tone scared her.

  Before he could reach her, she knew that whatever was wrong concerned her daughter. She stood up and put her hands in front of her face, as though to ward off an attack. “No,” she whispered, backing up.

  Jared took her hands in his. The candle had burned out, but there was enough light in the little building that she could see his face. Whatever he was about to tell her, she didn’t want to hear. “Eden,” he whispered, holding her hands tightly. “We’ll solve this. I promise. On my life, I swear that we’ll solve this.”

  She backed away from him until she was against the wall. She tried to pull her hands from his, but couldn’t. “No, no, no” was all she could say.

  In the next second, Jared unlocked the door. A man was silhouetted in the daylight, and he didn’t see Eden in the dark interior. “McBride! Did you hear? They took the whining brat. Palmer’s pregnant daughter has been kidnapped!”

  In the next second, Eden fainted and Jared caught her.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  BRADDON Granville rolled out of the luxurious bed and pulled on his trousers. A beautifully manicured hand touched his shoulder.

  “Don’t leave yet, darling,” said a soft, sultry voice. “I’d like some more, please.”

  “Sorry,” Brad said, “but I’m afraid that’s all I have today. Age does that to a man.”

  Katlyn fell back against sheets of 1600-count cotton. “Age? What do you know about age? Now, Charley, he knows about age.”

  “You married him, dear,” Brad said matter-of-factly.

  “Please, no morality lectures today. It’s been weeks since I saw you, so I don’t want to fight. What have you been doing? Other than the pretty heiress who just moved into town, that is.”

  “You do keep up, don’t you?”

  “With my hometown? Of course. Hate always makes one curious.”

  Brad rolled his eyes as he picked up his shirt. “Okay, so Arundel snubbed you. What can I say? You were born with the wrong name and in the wrong house. You weren’t invited to the parties when you were growing up there. And, no, your beauty wasn’t enough to get you inside, but you’ve made up the deficit, haven’t you?”

  Katlyn laughed as she reached for a cigarette from the gold box on the bedside table. She knew that Brad hated for her to smoke, but today she didn’t care. She knew that she was losing him, and even though she pretended that it didn’t hurt, it did. She had met him three years ago, when he was in New York for some convention in one of her husband’s hotels. She’d been married to Charley Dunkirk for seven years, and she’d never been unfaithful to him. She didn’t want Charley’s greedy children to have any reason to try to take away the money after Charley died. And she didn’t want to give her husband any reason not to leave her masses of it. He’d already lived five years longer than any doctor predicted when she saw Brad in a crowd of conventioning lawyers.

  Instantly, she’d known who he was. He was a lot older than she was—well, less “lot” than Katlyn admitted to—and she’d seen him often in Arundel, where she’d grown up. But he’d been one of those people, the privileged families, “founding families” they liked to call themselves. Whatever the name, they were the ones who owned the town, and they were as impenetrable as a lead box. It hadn’t mattered that little Susie Edwards had been the prettiest girl that town had produced in a century. She won every beauty contest there was—except Miss Arundel, of course. For that you had to have a pedigree, something that Susie didn’t have. She didn’t know her ancestors past her parents, and based on them, she didn’t want to know them.

  When she was eighteen, filled with anger and a deep sense of betrayal, she left Arundel and went to L.A., and then to New York. She got a job as a secretary to a man who was in an office two floors below Charley Dunkirk, an old and immensely wealthy man who was on his fourth wife. It had taken some doing and she suspected that Charley had seen through all her machinations, but she got him to notice her. But when he did, she would have nothing to do with him. She refused to have sex with him unless he married her. To a man used to having everything he wanted, Susie—by now renamed Katlyn—was a novelty. Eventually, he divorced his wife and married her, and Katlyn had kept her end of the bargain by being faithful to an old man who was nearly impotent.

  But then she’d seen Brad across a room and knew that she had to have him. Not because she wanted him, but because he was from Arundel, and she’d always wanted what she couldn’t have. Since Brad was a widower, it had been easy to seduce him. Afterward, when he’d called her “Susie” and let her know he knew who she was, she had laughed so hard she’d fallen off the bed. After that they’d remained lovers and had become friends.

  Out of curiosity, and to protect herself, Katlyn supported the lazy son of the people who still lived next door to her father in Arundel. He looked after her father after her mother died, and, sporadically, he sent a badly written, misspelled report to Katlyn, telling her all the gossip around town. She’d read a lot about the woman who’d returned to town and had Braddon Granville chasing after her.

  Katlyn had been surprised at how much jealousy she’d felt to think that Brad had fallen for someone else. Not that Katlyn was in love with him, but she rather liked to think that Brad was mad for her.

  “All right, so I’m jealous,” Katlyn said, inhaling deeply on the cigarette. Charley expected her to be an ornament, and smoking was the only way she could keep reed-thin. At least that was her excuse. “Are you planning to marry her?”

  Brad paused in tucking his shirt in. “I was thinking about it. When I first saw her…” Pausing, he went to look out the window at Park Avenue. “It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was a sense that I’d found someone who was like me.”

  “This is the girl who was raped and had a bastard when she was a kid?” Katlyn asked.

  “Get your claws in. You got what you wanted.”

  “No, I wanted to marry into one of your families and give dinner parties that old Mrs. Farrington attended.”

  Brad snorted. “That’s what you think you wanted, but you would have died under the load of charity meetings and dinner parties with cantankerous old women. No, you’re much better off doing the nothing that you do now. Spending the days doing your nails. Eden has dirt under her nails most of the time. She doesn’t know it, but it’s there.”

  “She sounds delightful. Does she wear overalls?”

  “No. Cotton. Ever hear of it?”

  “It used to grow right up to my back door, remember?”

  Brad didn’t answer her but sat down to put on his shoes and socks.

  Katlyn put out her cigarette, then stretched across the bed in what she knew was an alluring pose. “I do hope you aren’t going to tell me that you’re never going to see me again.”

  “Last week I would have said that I was going to send you a note to say that it was over.”

  She sat up. “This is beginning to sound interesting. You aren’t going to tell me that this paragon of virtue has turned you down, are you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Is there another man? A Camden maybe?”

  “He’s not from Arundel.”

  This so startled Katlyn that she couldn’t say anything.

  Standing, Brad adjusted his pant cuffs, then looked at her. “I thought she and I were…” He grimaced. “Actually, I thought we were a done deal. I guess I was like the old maid who goes on a first date then picks out her wedding china.”

  “She didn’t call you back?”

  “Yes, she did.” He took a breath. “We spent quite a bit of time together, and I thought there was nothing between her and the