First Impressions

by Jude Deveraux

  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
.”

  He paused while the audience laughed politely.

  “Today, after lunch, you can consult with Ms. Palmer and decide what you want to do about your own garden. If you like her designs and want to put one in, then we have maintenance people to take care of it for you. By the way, the maintenance company happens to be run by my son-in-law, so let me know if he doesn’t do his job and I’ll tell his boss, my daughter.”

  More laughter, then Brad held out his hand to Eden, and she went to the podium.

  Twenty minutes later Eden stepped down from the podium and followed Minnie into a long room where tables had been set up.

  “That was good,” Minnie said, referring to Eden’s speech. “Very good.” There was a respect in her voice that hadn’t been there before, and it made Eden feel good. She knew that in Minnie’s eyes she’d gone from being just an extension of Braddon to being a woman with her own mind.

  “You can sit here,” Minnie said, walking to the far end of one table.

  “I have nothing to show people,” Eden said. Her heart was still pounding from her speech. Had she said the right things? Minnie had liked it, but did Brad?

  “Don’t worry about supplies. Brad has everything that was left by the two landscapers he fired.”

  “If I’d known I was to do this, I could have brought some books to show people what I would like to do.” Eden grimaced. With the way her morning had gone, she should have done a presentation on poisonous snakes of North Carolina.

  The tables had several seatings, each supplied with pencils, pens, pads, and notebooks, all with the name of Queen Anne on them. It was all very nice, elegant, even.

  One side of the room was all windows, and just outside sat Jared McBride, half hidden under a shade tree. He had on dark glasses, and he was talking on his cell phone, but he nodded at Eden when she glanced at him.

  The door to the room opened and a waiter brought in a tray of sandwiches and drinks.

  “I told Brad you’d probably rather eat in here,” Minnie said, glancing out the window at Jared. “But if you’d rather…”

  “No, this is great. I need more time to think about what the heck I’m doing here.”

  “You can’t kid me. I’ve seen the Farrington gardens, so I know what you can do. Just BS your way into it. Act like you know more than they do and they’ll believe you. Besides, you’re saving Brad’s life. He was going to have to hire someone from outside Arundel or let his son-in-law do it. Brad would rather do it himself than let Remi have any responsibility.”

  “What in the world did Remi do to make Brad dislike him so?”

  “Married his daughter,” Minnie said. “Until she married, Brad and his daughter were very close. They traveled together, worked together. She ran that big house of his with an ease I’ll never have. Between you and me, I’d like to burn it down. Termites and peeling paint! Ugh! Anyway, after Cammie got married, Brad was left alone. I doubt if any man could have pleased him as a son-in-law, but a blue-collar hunk like Remi never had a chance.”

  Once again, Eden could see both sides. Remi seemed to be a good person, but Eden knew what it was like to be ambitious for your child. She wondered if Brad would rather that his daughter had married someone like the clean, never-been-dirty young man Drake Haughton.

  They had just started their lunch when Minnie said, “Everybody in town says that Braddon has the major hots for you.”

  Eden nearly choked. “I think it’s much too soon to say that. And as for gossip—”

  “Gossip, ha! It’s hope. If you knew what that man has been through with women you too would want him to find someone!”

  Eden couldn’t help the little rush that went through her. She knew she shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “And what exactly has he been through?”

  “Didn’t anyone tell you about Braddon’s wife?”

  “Yes, but only quickly.”

  Minnie took a breath, ready to settle into her story. “They were married for over twenty years, but I don’t think they ever loved each other—at least that’s what Camden says.” Minnie took a drink of her sweet tea. “Sourpuss, isn’t she? She’s married to the biggest hunk to hit this town since Brad Pitt, but to look at her, you’d think she was Woody Allen’s new wife. Anyway, what did you hear about Braddon’s marriage?”

  Eden was cautious. “That they were about to separate when she was diagnosed with cancer.”

  “You were just told the bare bones. She was having an affair with a man who had been Braddon’s best friend since they were kids. The boys were born just a few days apart and spent their whole lives together. Braddon had the brains, and Treddy had the brawn. His name—”

  “Let me guess. Tredwell.”

  “Right. Tredwell Norfleet Pembroke. Anyway, they were a perfect match. When the boys left Arundel, they went to some school up north where Braddon could study law and Treddy could captain the football team. It was before my time so I never saw him play, but I was told that Treddy was headed toward being one of the all-time greatest football players in history. But in his freshman year he got in the sports car his father had given him for high school graduation and ran off the side of the road. He injured an elbow and a knee, and that was the end of his glorious career. He returned to Arundel to heal and try to help run the family businesses. But he wasn’t any good at business. When Braddon came back to Arundel with a Yankee wife, ready to open his law practice, he tried to renew his friendship with Treddy, but by then Treddy was drinking too much and had a deep anger inside him. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do.” Eden knew a lot about deep anger, and that knowledge was held in her voice.

  Minnie looked at her sharply.

  Eden looked down at her plate, not wanting to answer the questions that Minnie looked like she wanted to ask. “So what happened?”

  “Treddy and Braddon’s wife had a long-term affair. They managed to keep it secret for years, but Braddon finally found out about it and filed for divorce. Just days after he filed, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and Treddy hightailed it out of town pronto. Braddon stayed with her to the end, and three weeks after she died, Treddy came back to town married to some model half his age. There was a cocktail party to celebrate Treddy’s marriage, and Braddon showed up. He didn’t say a word, just walked up to Treddy and hit him in the face. He broke Treddy’s jaw so bad it was wired together for months. Brad also broke two bones in his hand. He and Treddy aren’t friends anymore.”

  “I should think not,” Eden said, then lowered her voice even though they were alone in the room. “What I’m curious about is the woman Brad had an affair with while his wife was ill.”

  “That would be my mother,” Minnie said, “but don’t look shocked. I used Braddon’s guilt feelings over not marrying her to get him to employ me and give my daughter and me a place to live. It’s tough being a single mother.”

  “Yes, it is,” Eden said, smiling at Minnie and understanding her “use of guilt feelings.” “I’m a single mother too.”

  “That’s great. Maybe our kids can play together sometime.”

  Eden started to explain, but then she laughed. She was sure Minnie knew all about her daughter and how she came to be. She also probably knew Melissa’s birth date. “You’re very kind,” Eden said.

  Before Minnie could reply, the door opened and people began pouring in. Within seconds, Eden was faced with her first client. She took a breath and did as Minnie had advised: she acted as though she knew what she was talking about.

  Throughout the long afternoon, Jared sat outside, under the shade of the trees, always in view, now and then on his phone. A few times Eden saw him frowning and his conversation seemed to be angry.

  Brad was at the far end of the room, talking and smiling at people, and seeming to do it all with ease. Once she looked up to see him watching her, and he gave her a look and gesture that said he was exhausted. Eden nodded in agreement. At five, Minnie efficiently and politely ushered everyone out
of the room.

  Brad collapsed on the chair beside Eden. “I don’t know about you, but I need a drink. A large one.”

  “Me too.”

  He took her arm and they walked outside, where Jared was waiting for them. “Where we going?” he asked.

  Eden felt Brad stiffen. “Eden and I are going to dinner,” he said pointedly.

  “Great idea. I hear there’s a great seafood restaurant in town.”

  “McBride…” Brad began.

  Minnie, coming up behind them, put her arm through Jared’s and looked at her boss. “I’m famished. Where are we going for dinner?”

  Brad was frowning, but Eden said, “I think we’re outvoted.”

  They all looked at Brad, and after a moment he relaxed and smiled. When he started walking toward his car, his arm was still locked with Eden’s. Behind them, Jared and Minnie were also walking with linked arms.

  “Why do I feel like chanting, ‘Lions, tigers, and bears’?” Eden asked. Brad laughed.

  “We could make a mad dash for my car and escape them,” he said.

  “They’d find us. Arundel isn’t that big.”

  “I know a few secret places.” He leered at her in such an exaggerated way that she laughed.

  “Actually,” she said, “I want to spend some more time with Minnie. I want to hear more about why she and her child are living with you.”

  “Minton sometimes has a very big mouth. What else did she tell you? No, don’t tell me. Let me have my innocence.”

  Eden smiled. “Did your broken hand heal all right?”

  Brad groaned. “I’m going to strangle her.” He glanced back at Minnie and Jared behind them. “You know, it’s beginning to look like Minnie’s setting her cap for your cousin. Maybe she’ll keep him so busy that I can have you all to myself.”

  Eden looked at Minnie and Jared. She was talking ninety miles an hour, and Jared was listening, but he was also very aware of where Eden was. She had no doubt that Jared was directing Minnie’s conversation toward whatever he wanted to know about anything that had ever happened in Arundel.