First Impressions

by Jude Deveraux

  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
other man. I thought she didn’t like him in that way, but I saw them laughing together.”

  “Ah,” Katlyn said. She could understand that. She’d shared a few laughs with Brad, but none with her husband. “You think she’s going to choose the other man?” she asked softly.

  “Maybe. I don’t think she knows what she wants. Right now, I think Ms. Eden Palmer could go either way.”

  “Palmer?” Katlyn said. She would have frowned if her forehead weren’t so full of chemicals. “Eden Palmer. Where have I heard that name before?”

  “Weren’t you living in Arundel when she was? Or are you now too young to remember her?”

  “My last surgeon says I now look young enough to be my own daughter,” Katlyn said distractedly, then her face lit up. “The book!”

  “Book? Yes, Eden was an editor here in New York for a while, and—”

  Katlyn jumped off the bed, paying no attention to the fact that she was naked. She spent enough hours with a personal trainer to know she looked good with nothing on. She opened a little French cabinet and pulled out a paperback book with a plain blue cover. To Die For, the title read, by Eden Palmer.

  “I didn’t know Eden had written a book,” he said, taking it and flipping through the pages. “When did it come out?”

  “It hasn’t yet,” she said as she put on a silk robe. “It’s an advance copy. Charley has things sent to me, and he asks my opinion sometimes, you know, for his movie studio.” She shrugged, as though embarrassed by this confidence. “Anyway, this was sent to me. It’s good. I told Charley the story had great potential.”

  “I had no idea you were a major force in the movie industry,” he said, teasing her, and she looked as though she might blush. “What’s it about?”

  “Generations of a family in an old house,” she said. “She takes them from the time they settled in America in the 1600s to the present. It’s an old theme, but she does it well. There’s a story of a duchess escaping the French Revolution and a—”

  “Sapphire necklace,” Brad said quietly.

  “Yeah, right. A real whopper of a thing that leads to murder and lots of feuds.”

  Brad sat down on a chair and said, “I want you to tell me everything that’s in the book.”

  “You can read it. It—”

  “I don’t have time to read it. Tell me everything. Are there any other mysteries in the book besides the necklace?”

  “Who said the necklace was a mystery? The man who stole the necklace and then killed the mistress of the house died. Mystery solved.”

  “Right,” Brad said quickly. “What else is in the book?”

  Katlyn looked at him hard. “If you know about the necklace but don’t know about the book, then is the story true?” Her eyes widened. “The Farringtons! Wasn’t there some story about missing sapphires when I was a kid?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. In a second he went from lover to lawyer. “Tell me,” he ordered.

  “I can’t think of any other mystery,” she said, annoyed. “Oh! Wait! What about the riddle?”

  “There’s a riddle?” Brad asked softly.

  Katlyn took the book from him, flipped the pages, then handed it back to him.

  Five by five and three by three.

  Worth more than gold and married to thee.

  Ten times ten and legends of me.

  Look not where thou canst find me.

  He looked at her in question. “What does it say about this riddle in the book?”

  “That it was always believed to be bad poetry written by someone in the family, but no one knew who. The main character, a woman from this generation, found it carved into the back of a door in the attic. She was told it was probably written by a kid and that it had no meaning, but she believed it was a riddle. She never found out anything about it, though.”

  “ ‘Worth more than gold,’ ” Brad whispered. “ ‘Legends of me.’ ‘Look not where thou canst find me.’ ” He looked at Katlyn. “There’s only one person in the Farrington family who had an ego like that.”

  “Old Mrs. Farrington?”

  “Not by a longshot.” Brad grabbed his coat. “Mind if I keep this?” he asked, holding up the book.

  “Sure, but—” She caught his arm. “Why do I feel like I’m never going to see you again?”

  He frowned. “I don’t have time for this right now. I have to get home. I think I have an idea of what they’re after.”

  “Who is after what?”

  Brad didn’t answer her. He ran out of the room and didn’t look back.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  EDEN tried to open her eyes, but it wasn’t easy. She didn’t know where she was or what was wrong with her head. Her brain was fuzzy and didn’t seem to be working properly. She sensed that there was something she should remember, but she didn’t know what it was.

  When she heard a low voice, she opened her eyes. Jared McBride was standing in front of her bedroom window, talking on his cell phone. He was frowning.

  I must get up, Eden thought. It was daytime, and she never stayed in bed during the day. There was always work to be done. She had to get Melissa ready for school. She had to—

  At the thought of Melissa, memory came back to her. Frantic, she tried to get out of bed, but her body wouldn’t obey her.

  “Gotta go,” she heard Jared say, then he was leaning over her and moving her leg back onto the bed.

  “Be quiet now,” he said, his hand on her forehead. “Everything will be okay.”

  She clasped his wrist with both her hands. “What happened? Where is Melissa?”

  He sat on the bed by her, her head by his thigh. “You’re groggy because I gave you two of those sleeping pills you had in your bathroom. I need for you to keep calm right now.”

  “Tell me,” Eden said, tears in her eyes.

  “At three-thirty this morning, when it was raining hard, and while you and I…” He looked away, a muscle in his jaw working. “I didn’t hear her. I should have, but I didn’t.” He turned away for a moment and she knew he was thinking that he had been lax in his duty, because if he hadn’t been making love with Eden, he would have heard the car. “Your daughter got into your car and drove to the airport in Greenville.”

  “That’s a long way.” Eden was trying to keep her heart still as she listened.

  “Yes, it is. One of our men was right behind her the entire way, but it was hard to see in the rain. She went to the airport where she met a man—”

  “Stuart,” Eden said, feeling some relief.

  “No. We have photos of the man she met, and he wasn’t your son-in-law. Besides, we know where Stuart is at every minute. He’s under surveillance.”

  “Surveillance,” she whispered. “You mean that he’s being spied on. He’s imprisoned. Like me.”

  Jared stroked her hair. “Yes, like you, he’s being watched over. Taken care of. Anyway, your daughter met an older man. He’s tall and thin. We’re still trying to find out who he is and if he’s the instigator of all this.” Jared’s calmness left him. “What the hell was your daughter doing out alone at that time of the night?” he snapped.

  “She was never told anything about the danger surrounding her mother,” Eden said. Her heart was beginning to race as she thought of the possible consequences of her daughter being kidnapped. Where was her baby right now? Was she safe? Warm and dry? Was she—?

  “A man from the agency was right behind them every moment, but someone reported our man as having a gun, and you know what airports are like now. Before he knew what was happening, he was knocked to the floor and handcuffed. He looked up to see Melissa and the man hurrying away. That was the last our people saw of them.”

  Eden tried to sit up but managed only to get to her elbows. “Maybe the man she met is someone she knows. Stuart’s father, maybe. I’ve never met him, so I don’t know what he looks like. Maybe he—”

  “A note was put on the seat of our agent’s vehicle. It said that we would be contacted.”
>
  “Contacted? When? For what? By whom?”

  Jared got up and went to the window. “We still don’t have any answers.” He looked back at her. “I’m sorry. This is the most baffling case I’ve ever been on.”

  Eden collapsed against the pillows. “Why did you drug me? I can’t think clearly. I can’t—”

  “I did it to calm you down and so you can’t get into trouble. I’m going to send you somewhere safe.”

  “No!” she tried to shout, but it came out as a raspy whisper. “I want to be here. I want to be near my daughter.”

  “Your daughter—” Jared began, but stopped at a knock on the door. He stepped outside the room for a moment, and Eden could hear low voices. When Jared returned, he wouldn’t meet her eyes, but before she could ask any questions, her cell phone rang and Jared picked it up. Answering it, he listened for a moment. “It’s for you,” he said. “It’s Granville, and he wants to talk to you. He says he knows something.”

  Weakly, Eden took the phone. Jared plumped the pillows behind her head so she could sit up. “Brad?” she asked. When there were tears of relief in her eyes, Jared turned away for a moment, then he sat down beside her and motioned for her to let him listen. He put his face close to hers, the telephone between them.

  “Eden, are you all right?” Brad asked. “You sound awful.”

  “I’ve been drugged,” she said, her voice full of tears. “Did you hear? Melissa…” She couldn’t go on as sobs overtook her.

  Jared took the phone from her. “Granville? McBride here. What do you know?”

  “What’s wrong with Eden’s daughter? Did she go into labor?”

  “We can’t tie up this line. If what you have to say isn’t of vital importance—”

  “I think it might be. Did you know that Eden wrote a book about the history of the Farrington family?”

  Jared looked at her in astonishment. “Did you write a book about the Farringtons?”

  “Yes. No. I mean it’s a fictionalized version of their lives, but, yes, it’s about them.”