First Impressions

by Jude Deveraux

  “I can hardly wait to do that,” Eden said, smiling.

  “Grandkids are better than you can imagine. Anyway, Hank said something to me about pictures some woman had left in the store and he didn’t know what to do with them. I was in a rush that day so I didn’t pay much attention to him. I remember wondering why he was telling me about pictures left by some woman. I thought maybe he wanted my services as a lawyer to get his money for the framing job.”

  “But maybe he told you because the woman had been renting a house from you.”

  “Right. I bet her family would like to have those pictures.”

  “Would you mind if I went to the frame shop and asked about them? Maybe I could have Mr. Smiley call your office for verification of who I am.”

  “He knows.”

  “Of course,” Eden said, half glad that people knew of her, and half annoyed.

  For several moments Brad said nothing, just stared up at the house in front of them (brick with a wing with huge windows). Then he sighed, as though he had decided something. “So what’s up with you and McBride?”

  “He’s my—” she began but broke off at the look on Brad’s face.

  “I’ve been a lawyer a long time and I know when someone’s lying. He’s good at it; you’re not.”

  She took a deep breath. “How angry would you be if I told you that I can’t tell you?”

  “I’m flattered that you think I have the right to be angry, but the answer is, Not at all. Something’s very wrong in your life, isn’t it?”

  Eden couldn’t think what to say, and besides, she wasn’t sure that she wasn’t being taped.

  “Does it have something to do with the woman who was killed?”

  Eden looked down at her hands in answer.

  “Long ago, I learned the true meaning of that old cliché, that anything worth having is worth waiting for. Whatever is to happen between us can wait until you’ve solved what you need to in your life. Are those watercolors important to you?” Brad asked.

  “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I have a meeting in just a few minutes, and Drake and I have to be there, but afterward I’ll go get that poor woman’s watercolors—if that’s what Hank has—and I’ll take them out to your house.”

  “Couldn’t Drake handle the meeting alone?”

  “Not quite,” he said quickly, “but don’t get me started on that. The things we do for old friends, right?”

  Smiling, she nodded.

  “We’ll have dinner together tonight at your house, if I can invite myself, that is.”

  “McBride will be there,” Eden said heavily. His strong hands on her shoulders made her feel like falling forward and putting her face against his chest. He was so strongly built and looked so warm.

  “Don’t break down on me,” Brad said, dipping his head down to look into her eyes. “Whatever is wrong, we’ll fix it. Okay? Will you trust me?”

  All she could do was nod. She’d held up so well since she’d been told that the FBI was investigating her, but now she wanted to collapse against Brad and turn everything over to him. A taken-care-of woman, she thought. A luxury she’d never had.

  Brad slipped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him. “Come on, let’s go back to the car. I’m sure McBride is hysterical by now, since you’ve been out of his sight for a whole fifteen minutes.”

  In spite of herself, Eden smiled and Brad tightened his grip on her.

  “I just want to know one thing. Is he protecting you? Is that why he’s always with you?”

  She nodded. “But I can’t—”

  “I know. I mean, I don’t know, but I sense that something is wrong. Ever since the first time I met him in the hospital, I’ve thought that there was something not right about him.”

  “That’s just what he says about you.”

  “Does he? Well, at least I don’t sneak around women’s houses with a flashlight and try to make people think I was looking for a circuit box.”

  Eden stopped walking and looked at him in astonishment.

  “Yeah, I knew,” Brad said. “And I think the sheriff knew too, but he said he believed McBride. I played along with him. I was hoping that you’d come to trust me enough to tell me what’s going on.”

  “I really can’t.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll find out. I’m a lawyer, remember? I always find out the truth. And I keep to myself what I find out. I could tell you some truly ugly secrets about people in this town.”

  Eden lifted her head. “Such as?”

  “Any secrets I tell you, you’re going to have to kiss out of me.”

  “No, no, not that! Anything but that!”

  Brad laughed, and for a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, but she looked up and there was McBride coming across the street, and he looked furious.

  “Tonight,” Brad whispered. “I’ll be there at seven with wine, flowers, and chocolate cake. The rest is up to you.”

  He pulled his arm from around her and went forward to meet Jared McBride.

  Chapter Fourteen

  AS soon as Eden said good-bye to Brad at the Queen Anne clubhouse, she felt a sense of panic. She was to cook a meal for a man who maybe, possibly, might become part of her life. What was she to cook? Words from Mrs. Farrington came back to her. “Honey, don’t ever try to impress a man with your cooking, especially one you want to marry. If you spend all day in the kitchen making him the first meal you serve him, he’ll expect you to spend exactly the same amount of time on every meal you cook for him.”

  As she got into the car with Jared behind the wheel, she put her hands to her temples. What would taste great but was easy to prepare? She didn’t want it to seem that she was trying too hard. “I need to go to a grocery,” she said, and Jared turned left.

  “So what were you and Granville talking about while I was taking pictures?” he asked.

  “We were exchanging spy information,” she said as he pulled into the parking lot of the Food Lion. “Wait for me here while I get—”

  She cut off as he got out of the car to go with her. Inside, he followed her around in silence, watching everyone who got near them while Eden shopped.

  When they got home, Eden went to the kitchen to begin to cook. Her face looked as though she was trying to pass an exam that would get her into college.

  “Mind if I…?” He motioned to her telephone, and she knew he was asking if he could check her messages. That he knew her PIN number didn’t surprise her at all. He pushed buttons, listened, then hung up.

  “Minnie?” she asked.

  He raised his eyebrows in a way that made him look a bit like a trapped animal. “Four calls.”

  Eden waited a moment to see if he was going to call Minnie back, but he didn’t. He sat on a stool on the far side of the Vermont soap-stone-topped island and watched her moving from stove to sink to counter to refrigerator and tried to lighten the mood. “You’ve never cooked for me like that,” he said in a false whine.

  “I’m not trying to win your heart. Here, you can chop the onions,” she said as she pushed a cutting board, a knife, and a big Vidalia onion toward him.

  “You know, don’t you, that there’s been research done on this. Women complain that men never help them in the kitchen, but studies have found that women always dump the most odious jobs on men when they do try to help. It makes men stop offering to help.”

  She didn’t look up from the pot simmering on the stove. “And who says our tax dollars are unwisely spent?”

  Jared gave a little smile as he started chopping an onion.

  At exactly seven, Brad showed up at the screen door in the front, yellow and white daisies and mums in one arm, two bottles of white wine in the other, and a chocolate cake in a box at his feet.

  “Am I early?” he asked.

  Eden had taken a five-minute shower. She hoped she looked half as good to him as he did to he
r. He had on a tan cotton short-sleeve shirt, freshly ironed trousers, and he looked like he’d just stepped off a yacht. It was all she could do to keep her hands off of him.

  But she knew that McBride was five feet away, so she behaved herself as he opened the door. She took the cake, the flowers, and the wine and handed them all to McBride. He grimaced, letting her know that he didn’t like being a packhorse, but he turned away to take the things into the kitchen.

  As soon as he was out of the room, Brad opened the screen door and reached down to pick up something else he’d brought. “It’s a little house-warming gift,” he said, and handed her a plant.

  She looked at the plant, rubbed a leaf with her fingertips, and smelled it, then she looked into Brad’s eyes. Slowly, she set the plant on the floor, then looked at him. Their minds were in accord. He put his arms around her, and as she knew they would, their bodies fit together perfectly. When his lips touched hers it was with a pent-up desire that seemed to have been held inside her for a lifetime. Whenever she’d kissed a man in her life, she had always been cautious. She didn’t want to lead him on, didn’t want him to think that she was going to give more than she was going to. But with Brad she didn’t feel cautious. She didn’t feel tentative. She felt that this man was the one she’d been searching for for a very long time.

  She kissed him with passion and with promise. Their lips and tongues met; their bodies met. Perhaps it was Eden’s imagination, but it seemed that their spirits met.

  She wasn’t sure what would have happened if McBride hadn’t cleared his throat.

  Brad pulled his lips from hers, and reluctantly, Eden moved her head down to rest on his shoulder. Her heart was pounding so hard that she couldn’t allow her face to be seen. Brad stroked her hair and after a few moments she was able to pull away and look at McBride.

  “Wow,” Jared said in a falsely teasing voice. His expression looked as though he’d like to hit Brad. “Do you react like that to anybody who gives you a plant?”

  “This is lemon balm,” Eden said, smiling lovingly at Brad.

  “Is there something I’m missing?”

  “Lemon balm’s Latin name is Melissa officinalis. I named my daughter after this plant, and Brad knew it. It’s just a thing between gardeners, that’s all.”

  “Ah, right,” Jared said, looking from one to the other of them, then he gave a false smile. “Maybe we should eat while it’s still hot.”

  “Like me,” Brad whispered as he followed Eden into the dining room, and again she giggled.

  During dinner, Eden told herself that she had to stop acting like a teenager, but she was feeling as nervous as a girl on her first date. Brad and McBride talked about some things, but she wasn’t sure what they were saying. Something about the house down the road, the one where the woman who had been hit by the car had lived. Eden cleared the plates after the appetizer (cold asparagus wrapped in paper-thin ham) and brought in the bowls of vegetables (spring peas, tiny new potatoes, itty-bitty carrots) and the roast chicken that she’d wrapped in rosemary from her garden.

  Gradually, she was able to calm herself and began to listen to McBride and Brad and even to make a few comments. She had to give it to McBride that he never strayed from his job. His main concern was about the woman who had lived down the road, and he never left the subject. He had quickly secured Brad’s permission to visit the house. To search it, she thought.

  She served Brad’s cake on a tall silver pedestal cake stand that Mrs. Farrington had loved.

  “Ah, yes,” Brad said, looking at the cake stand. “Pulled out of the walls,” he said.

  As they ate cake (from a bakery, not homemade) and had coffee, Eden said to Brad as she cleared the table, “Did you bring them?”

  “They’re in the car. I’ll go get them.”

  “Get what?” Jared asked as soon as Brad left, and Eden told him about the watercolors.

  Jared’s face started turning red, looking as though he was about to explode. “You’ve known about these watercolors all afternoon, but you didn’t tell me about them?”

  “Yes, I knew about them, and, no, I didn’t tell you. Do you plan to arrest me for withholding evidence?” She glared at him. “So help me, if you get angry I’ll start keeping everything from you.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Oh, no? Try me.”

  Jared glared back at her. “If Granville knows about the watercolors, what else does he know? And how does he know about the watercolors? What did you tell him about me?”

  “Don’t look at me like that. I told him nothing, but he’s figured out a lot. He says he knows that you’re not what you say you are, and he knows that you were snooping in my house the night I beat you up. Right now I wish I’d used a weapon on you.”

  At that statement, Jared’s face showed astonishment and disbelief, then he started to get angry. “If I hadn’t been here, you’d be dead of snakebite by now.”

  “If you hadn’t been here, I doubt very much if any snakes or men would have been inside my house.”

  “You think I caused all this?” Jared gasped out.

  “You—” Eden began, then saw Brad.

  “Did I miss something?” Brad asked.

  “Nothing worth repeating,” Eden said, smiling coldly at McBride as Brad put the box on the dining table.

  “This has been a great evening,” Jared said as he put himself between the box and Brad. “Lotta fun, but—” He yawned hugely. “I think it’s time all of us hit the hay. Maybe we can do this again, Granville.”

  Brad didn’t move, just stood there and stared at Jared. “I’m not leaving.”

  Jared took a step closer to him. “I think—”

  “Stop it, both of you!” Eden said. “You! McBride, back off. Brad knows a lot about this and maybe he can help us.”

  “Help us with what?” Jared asked, glaring at her.

  “Finding out whatever it is that you’re trying to find out,” Brad said, his lips in a line and staring at McBride.

  “I’m not—”

  “The two of you fighting like a couple of dogs isn’t going to help anything,” Eden said. She put her body between the two men, then put her hand on Brad’s chest. “Mr. McBride believes that the woman who rented your house was murdered, that it wasn’t an accident, and he’s here trying to find out who killed her and why.” Her eyes begged Brad to accept what she was telling him and to ask no more questions. Brad’s lawyer-mind would, of course, see right away that what she was saying made no sense. A murder investigation didn’t cause the investigator to move in with a person who’d not even been in town the same time as the victim. And, besides, earlier Eden had admitted that McBride was protecting Eden. From what?

  Understanding, Brad picked up her hand and kissed her fingertips. “For you, anything.”

  Behind them, Jared rolled his eyes, then glanced at the box on the table. It seemed that wanting to see what his friend and colleague had left behind was overriding his common sense.

  When the two men seemed to have silently agreed to back off, Eden turned to the box and opened it. Slowly, she withdrew nine framed watercolors, each nine by twelve, and put them on the table, one beside the other.

  “Hank said he should charge me rent on them,” Brad said into the heavy silence. “He was going to put them in an auction this weekend.”

  Jared set the box on the floor, and the three of them looked at the paintings. They were nice, what the English call “chocolate box” paintings, meaning they were like the romanticized house and garden paintings that are often seen on boxes of chocolates. Not great art, but charming, something you could easily look at every day and not get tired of. All the pictures were of Farrington Manor. Two were of the exterior, and the rest were of the interior.

  Standing up straight, Brad looked at Eden. “I did not give her or anyone else permission to enter your house. It was kept locked, and I made sure that someone came by here every day to check on the place. I didn’t want pipes freezi
ng and not find out about it for a week.”

  Eden waved her hand to let Brad know that she wasn’t concerned that the woman had illegally entered her house. “Maybe this is what she was doing when she was out at two A.M. These curtains are heavy, and there are blinds under them. She could have closed off the windows to block out enough light so that she could have worked in here at night. The question is why?”

  Brad couldn’t let go of his feeling of wrongdoing. “The truth is that if she’d asked for permission to paint the interiors I would have said yes. So why didn’t she ask me?”

  “Maybe she didn’t trust you,” Jared said. “You have a lot to gain with this house being inherited by an attractive woman like Ms. Palmer.”

  Turning, her face red, Eden opened her mouth to bawl McBride out for his insinuation, but then she heard Brad laugh.

  “That’s it, Eden, I’m after your money and this old house.” He seemed to be truly amused by what Jared was implying. He looked at Eden. “You know, don’t you, that if either of us had any sense we’d sell our old houses and buy one of those new brick things in Queen Anne. I could get us a real deal.”

  Eden smiled at the absurdity of the idea. “Trade an authentic Queen Anne for a fake one?”

  Jared grimaced as he looked from one to the other. “All right,” he said, “point taken. Now, could you two get back to these watercolors? What do you see in them? Anything different? Unusual?”

  Brad looked down at the nine pictures, but Eden looked across the table at Jared. Was he asking for Brad’s help? What was next? Would he tell Brad what was going on? Trust him? Looking at McBride, Eden raised her eyebrows in disbelief.

  Understanding her completely, Jared pointed to the paintings, as though to tell her to get busy and stop trying to analyze things.

  “Nothing,” Brad said after a few minutes. “I don’t see anything unusual. Eden, you haven’t changed the house at all since you returned, and these pictures show the house just as it is now.” He looked at Jared. “Of course it would help if I knew what I was looking for.”