Jude Deveraux (7 page)

Since
last night he'd developed the opinion that Ms. Palmer was indeed guilty of
something. He wasn't sure what, but she was guilty. All the sympathy he'd built
up when he'd read about her life had left him when she'd sunk her teeth into
him for the third time.

Now he
looked out the window and drew in his breath. Coming through the bushes was
none other than the lady in question — and she was carrying a big ceramic dish,
with a loaf of bread on top, pot holders covering her hands. While Bill was
droning on and on about how Jared had to do the job and that if he were a good
agent he could get it done in a matter of days, Jared got his first real look
at Ms. Palmer. She wore jeans that were much looser than he liked on women and
above that an oversize sweater that hid most of what was under it, but there
was a breeze, and he could see the outline of a curvy little body that wasn't
half bad. He'd read that in New York she often went to the gym after work, but
the report hadn't said whether she went there to socialize or to sweat. From
the look of her, she'd done a lot of sweating.

When
the breeze lifted her hair and she moved her head to one side to get the hair out
of her eyes, he saw her wince. Good! he thought. He hoped she was very sore
from what she'd done to him last night.

Jared
felt a tiny bit of guilt because he
had
been snooping through her house,
and because his story about lights going off had been something he'd made up
when the police arrived. And of course she had every right to call the sheriff
or her boyfriend or anybody else, for that matter. And, yes, she was perfectly
justified in thinking that he was a thief and therefore was probably going to attack
her when he reached out to touch her arm. So, okay, maybe she'd been right on
every count; but that didn't heal his body or his pride.

Jared
listened to Bill and in an instant saw a way around all the obstacles. Her
guilt. If he'd ever seen a human being with a sorrowful look on her face, the
woman walking toward him with her peace offering was it. 'I gotta go and don't
call me back. She's here,' he said quickly, then closed his cell phone. Jared
ran to the chair in front of the empty fireplace. He hadn't had time to lay a
fire on this cool spring morning because he'd been snooping inside the old
house next door while she was still in the hospital. That she'd stayed longer
than he had he was sure was due to her big-deal lawyer's word.

As
Jared heard her walk up the front porch steps, he glanced at the coatrack by
the door and saw three walking sticks, left, no doubt, by some previous tenant.
He grabbed a stick, pulled a blanket off the back of the couch, then hurried
across the room. By the time she knocked on the door, Jared was bundled up
under what had to be the dustiest old blanket in the world, but he left
his  sling-bound   arm   outside  so 
it  would show. Beside him was the cane.

'Come
in,' he said in the voice of an old man in pain.

Slowly,
the door opened to reveal a pretty woman with a hot casserole. Jared had seen
worse sights in his life.

'I . .
. I'm Eden Palmer,' she said softly, looking at him with a combination of guilt
and pity. Part of Jared wanted to jump up and show her that he was fine, that
he looked worse than he was, but he made himself pull the blanket up around his
chin in a protective way.

Eden
took the few steps across the room to stand near him. 'I don't know where to
begin to apologize about last night. Until recently I've been living in New
York and maybe I've come to think that everybody is ... ' She trailed off, not
finishing her sentence. 'Could I put this down somewhere?'

Weakly,
Jared nodded toward the kitchen at the other end of the house. He watched her
walk away and decided that under her big clothes was a mighty fine little tush.
She disappeared through the doorway into the kitchen and he heard nothing but
silence for several minutes. He knew why. The kitchen was a mess. Yesterday
he'd thrown food into cabinets and the refrigerator as fast as possible so he
could start scouting the area before the Palmer woman got there. He'd run in
twice to make himself a sandwich and had left everything as it was. He figured
that after she moved into the house he'd have plenty of time to straighten up.

A few
minutes later, Ms. Palmer came out of the kitchen with a little tray filled
with food. He could smell what seemed to be homemade vegetable beef soup. The
women he liked were very understanding and tolerant of what he did for a living,
but none of them were cooks. It seemed to be a law of life that women who took
their clothes off for a living didn't cook, while women who went to church did.

'I, uh
. . . ' she said hesitantly. 'I'll just leave you to, uh, heal, and, again, I'm
sorry that I . . . ' She looked at his eye, which he knew was huge and black
and purple, and which distorted his face as though he'd had a stroke. On the
other side of his face were two deep scratches from her nails.

Jared
couldn't be sure, but he thought he saw tears form in Eden Palmer's eyes.
'Could you put the food a little closer?' he whispered, as though talking was
painful — which it was. 'I think I can reach it if it's a bit closer.'

'Yes,
of course,' Eden said quickly, then moved the tray to the table next to Jared's
chair.

He
pulled his uninjured arm from under the blanket and made a shaky attempt to get
a spoonful of soup, but he dropped the spoon back into the bowl. He gave Ms.
Palmer a look that said he was trying but couldn't quite make it.

In the next
second, Eden had pulled up a chair and was feeding him. It was all Jared could
do not to smile at such luxury. But he had to concentrate on playing the
invalid, and that meant no smiling.

It took
thirty long minutes to feed him all the food, and they didn't talk during that
time. While he chewed, she scurried about the room, straightened up, and lit
the logs in the fireplace.

'Thank
you,' Jared said, collapsing back against the chair. 'I needed that. Since I
got out of the hospital I haven't been able to do much for myself. I'm sorry
the house is such a mess. You must think that I'm — '

'I
don't think anything at all bad about you, Mr. McBride. It's me who's at fault.
When I think about what you were doing for me last night and what I did to you,
I . . . Well, I . . . '

Jared
reached out for her hand. Nice, he thought. Soft. He started to move up her
wrist but then remembered himself enough that he gave a tiny moan of pain and
flopped back against the chair.

'Can
you walk?'

'A
bit,' he said heavily. 'I can get to the . . . you know, by myself.'

Standing
up, she put her hands on her hips, and when Jared groaned, it was for real. He
hated that hands-on-hips stance that women put on. It was the Earth Mother
pose, and it suited this woman much too well. Deliver me, thought Jared. He was
about to throw back the blanket and tell her to go home when she spoke. 'I
insist that you stay in my guest room until you can take care of yourself,' she
said.

Jared
wasn't sure that any woman had ever been able to take his breath away in the
same way that she had just done. 'No, Ms. Palmer,' he said softly. 'I couldn't
move in with you.'

'I'm
not asking you to move in with me. It's just until you can take care of
yourself.'

He gave
a sigh, then a wince as he moved in the chair. 'This is a small town and people
will talk.'

'They'll
talk more if they think I've left a man I've rendered helpless to fend for
himself.' She sat down on the chair in front of him. 'I'm going to be honest with
you. I feel very guilty about what I did. Someday, maybe, I'll tell you what
happened inside my mind when you touched me in that dark room. It brought back
some very unpleasant memories for me, and for a while I lost it. I apologize.
But I can't go back and undo what I did, all I can do is try to make amends. I
can't leave you in this dirty house to take care of yourself. I can't afford to
hire a nurse to look after you, and I don't have the time to run back and forth
to clean up your kitchen and keep fires going. This afternoon FedEx brought me
a box of six manuscripts that have to be copy-edited or critiqued within the
next few weeks. Have you ever copy-edited a manuscript, Mr. McBride?'

'I
can't say that I have.' He was watching her with amusement. She had put on an
act of sternness, like a lady schoolmarm, but what she was saying was softness
itself.

'They
take a lot of time, so I need to have the time to give them. I really can't see
any other way except that you move into my guest bedroom and let me take care
of you there.'

'And
what about the lawyer?'

'Braddon
Granville? Yes, he's my attorney,' she said, puzzled, and the way she said it
told Jared everything he needed to know. Maybe the lawyer and maybe the whole
town thought that the Granville-Palmer wedding was a done deal, but it didn't
seem that cute little Ms. Palmer thought so.

Eden
put down her cup of tea and glanced upward, as though she could see through the
ceiling to what Mr. McBride was up to.

Why is
it that men think all women are stupid? she wondered for the hundred thousandth
time in her life. It seemed that a woman had to prove herself to every man she
met before he believed that she had any brains. And after she'd shown him her
intelligence, he still spent the rest of their time together seeing what he
could get away with.

She'd
been in Arundel just two days, but already she had two eligible, middle-aged
bachelors who were coming on to her. She figured she had a choice. She could
believe that, in their eyes, she was the sexiest thing since Marilyn Monroe, or
she could believe that both of them were up to something.

Eden
nibbled on a cookie that she'd just taken out of the oven. She had left Arundel
by the time the old washhouse had been repaired, but Mrs. Farrington had often
talked about her plans for renovating it. She was going to rent it to someone
for a little money in return for working in the garden on summer evenings and
weekends. Eden knew Mrs. Farrington well, and there was no way she'd connect
the electricity between the washhouse and the main house. She'd insist on
separate bills. Eden could almost hear the old woman now: 'If they left all the
lights on day and night, would
I
be required to pay for them? Absolutely
not!' But now she had been told that the electricity of the two houses had been
joined.

Today,
Eden had had to spend most of the day in the hospital, and she felt sure it was
on Brad's orders. She kept asking the hospital staff if she could go home, but
every nurse and doctor had been evasive. Finally, at two o'clock, they'd said
she could leave. Eden wondered if Brad had finally given permission for her
dismissal.

The
smiling, smirking deputy sheriff, Clint, was waiting for her, and Eden was glad
for her sore muscles so she could use them to explain her angry red face. She'd
had to sit in the police car on the ride back to Farrington Manor in silence as
Clint made what he thought was one joke after another. According to him, Eden
had lived too long in the North and didn't understand how neighbors in the
South looked out for one another. They took care of one another. Lent helping
hands, that sort of thing. Clint chuckled and smirked through the entire ride.
When they got to the house, he asked her if she wanted him to get out his gun
and go through the house to check it for her. Eden was about to tell him what
he could do with his gun, when his radio came on. He gave her a look that said
he had important work to do now, so she got out of the car, somehow managing
not to slam the door.

Inside,
Eden got her first real look at the magnificent old central hall. When she'd
first laid eyes on it years ago, it had been a mass of furniture and papers;
eventually the papers had been removed and filed, but the furniture had stayed
where it was, even if the pieces were on top of each other. There had simply
been nowhere else to put it all. Now, the hall was sparsely furnished, with two
small couches, a tall secretary (reproduction, not original), and a few chairs
and two little tables. For the first time in her life, Eden could see the hall
for the grand size that it was.

'Magnificent,'
was all that she could say, and she had to blink away tears that Mrs.
Farrington had renovated the house so beautifully and that she'd left it to
Eden. The walls had paneling to half their height of twelve feet. The ceiling
was surrounded by tall, deep crown moldings. The doors at opposite ends were
original, two hundred plus years of paint painstakingly removed so the dents
and nicks of centuries showed in a patina that only age could give.

'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, but could we talk
later? Stuart took the afternoon off today and we're going shopping for our new
apartment. I mean, your old apartment. Sorry, I don't mean to be throwing you
out. So how is Arundel? Sleepy as always?'

Eden
could hear the impatience in her daughter's voice. She wanted to get off the
phone to be with her husband. Eden tried not to be hurt by this attitude, and
she had to work hard not to try to get her daughter to focus attention on her.
She wanted to say that she'd attacked a burglar, been rushed to the hospital in
an ambulance, then had invited the burglar to move in with her. But she didn't.
'Sure,' Eden said. 'Same ol' same ol'. Nothing ever changes here. Go with
Stuart and have a good time. If you need any money, I — '

'Mother!'
Melissa said stiffly. 'Stuart can certainly support his own wife and child.'

If I
give him a furnished apartment for less than it costs me to rent it, Eden
wanted to say. It seemed that after your children married, you did a lot of
biting your tongue. 'Of course he can, dear,' she said. 'Go, have a good time.'

After Eden
hung up the phone, she stood there for a few moments. She and her daughter had
been everything to each other. Not even her daughter's marriage had been able
to break the bond between them, but now . . . Eden didn't want to think what
was happening, but she knew that the umbilical cord was at last being cut.
'That's good,' Eden said aloud. She and her daughter were too attached to each
other. During the year they'd been separated they had barely been able to
function, so now, at last, they were separating. And that was good. Wasn't it?