First Impressions Read online

  “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.

  It had taken nearly thirty minutes to get Mr. McBride across the garden that separated their houses, then up the stairs to the guest bedroom. Eden knew that he was doing all that he could to slow their progress so he would have time to ask her lots of questions.

  He seemed to want to know all about the history of Arundel and Farrington Manor in particular. On the surface, it seemed a normal bit of conversation, but something didn’t ring true. If he knew absolutely nothing about the area, what had made him decide to come here?

  And another thing: not only did he not ask her a single personal question, but he always deftly managed to change the subject when she asked him about himself. Eden grew suspicious.

  “This is so very nice of you, Ms. Palmer,” he said as he slipped into the bed in the guest room. “I’m not used to Southern hospitality, but it seems to be all that people have said it is.” Reaching out, he put his hand over her wrist, then lowered his voice. “You seem to be so nice.”

  “Mr. McBride,” she said.

  “Call me Jared,” he answered, smiling at her in a way that she was sure had won the hearts of many women. In spite of a black eye and a deeply scratched cheek, he was still quite handsome.

  “Mr. McBride,” she said firmly, “I invited you to stay here out of a sense of guilt because of what I did to you. There’s no more to it than that. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly, sliding down under the covers. “I could never hope that a woman as fine as you—”

  She gave him a look that said, Cut out the bull.

  With a little smile, he closed his eyes and pretended to rest.

  Eden went downstairs to clean up the kitchen, and when she’d finished, she treated herself to a call to her daughter. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Melissa said quickly. “Oh, Mom, I don’t mean to be rude