Jude Deveraux (26 page)

'All
right!' he yelled joyously.

Eden
turned the wheel sharply so they went in a circle, then she ran it toward
another old peanut bale. When she hit it, the truck bounced them to the
overhead canopy. Her head only touched it, but Jared yelled in pain — which
made Eden throw back her head and laugh. Looking at her, he joined in the
laughter.

It was
on the fourth bale that they got stuck. The engine died and they stopped
moving. Eden started the motor again, but the truck wouldn't move. She turned
off the engine and looked at McBride expectantly. Someone was going to have to
push.

Jared
threw a long leg out — and promptly sunk down to the middle of his calf. 'What
the — ' he said.

'Swamp,'
Eden said succinctly, nodding toward the great barrier of trees at the end of
the field. 'Precisely, it's the Great Dismal Swamp. Did you know that George
Washington surveyed the place?'

'Yeah,
yeah, I know. And he stayed in your house.'

Eden
scooted to his side of the truck and looked over. The more McBride tried to get
out, the deeper he became stuck. 'Maybe. There's a bathtub that — '

'Could
you stop with the history lessons and give me a hand here?'

When
Eden  raised  her hands  as  though  to clap, he
narrowed his eyes at her.

'Come
on,' she said, teasing, 'you're a big-deal FBI agent. What would you do if I
were a drug dealer and about to escape?'

In the
flash of an eye, Jared fell forward so that he landed on top of her. His feet
and half of one leg were still buried in the mud, but the upper half of him was
inside the truck and holding her down.

'Would
you mind!' Eden said, looking up at him, utterly still beneath him.

'No, I
don't mind at all,' he said happily.

'The
gearshift is sticking me and it hurts.'

'Good
try. The gearshift is on the side. So if you were dealing drugs, how would you
get away from an FBI agent who is handicapped with his legs pinned down?'

She
glared up at him. 'I'd get my gun out of the glove box and shoot you in the
head.'

'Try
it.'

Eden
started to reach for the little black plastic glove box by her head, but she
knew that if she moved, he'd love it. 'Get off of me.'

'Not
good enough.'

'I mean
it. Get off of me!'

'No,' he
said, looking away, as though remembering. 'I don't remember anybody saying
that to me. I think they knew I'd not obey that command.'

She
squinted at him and didn't care that she was making wrinkles at the corners of
her eyes, if you don't get off of me, I'll go back to the house, stand in front
of a camera, and tell whoever   is   watching  
that   you   are   becoming emotionally involved
with me.'

Jared
blinked at her a couple of times, then stood upright in the mud. 'You sure know
how to play dirty, don't you?'

'I've
learned a lot since I was seventeen.' Solemnly, she sat upright and turned the
key in the engine. It started, but the truck wouldn't move in the deep mud. She
looked at McBride. 'Could you give me a push?'

Just
before he moved, he had a glint in his eyes that made her eyes widen.

'Oh,
no, you don't,' she managed to say just before he gave her a push that sent her
flying out the side of the truck to land on her fanny in the mud. She pulled
her hands out and tried to stand up, but fell back down. She looked up to see
McBride, thick mud on him from the knee down, sitting behind the steering wheel
of her brand-new Mule.

'You're
getting it dirty,' she wailed.

'A
dirty machine to match the mind of its owner,' he said as he started the
engine, then tried to reverse it.

Eden
grabbed a handful of mud and threw it at him. Her aim was perfect, and she hit
him on the side of the face. When he turned to her, wiping mud out of his eyes,
she grinned at him.

'I'll
get you for that,' he said, then leaped out of the truck.

She
rolled, and he landed facedown. Eden let out a howl of laughter, and when he
lifted his face and she saw the mud, she laughed more.

'You —
' Jared began and made a grab for her ankle.

Eden
tried to get away, but the mud was too deep and too slippery. Her head went
back and the side of her face hit the mud. 'Yuck!' she said as she scraped off
two inches of it. Mud was crawling down the back of her neck to the inside of
her shirt. 'You are — '

She
didn't finish telling him what he was because just then the sound of a
helicopter came to them, and they both looked up. Eden knew without a doubt who
the 'copter belonged to and where it was going to land. She also knew that she
was going to have to meet whoever was inside while she was plastered in mud.

'At
least it's not Brad,' she muttered in disgust. She'd rather face the president
of the United States like this than the man she was beginning to like so much.

When
McBride removed enough mud off his face to give her a wicked grin, he pointed,
and Eden didn't have to look to see what he was looking at. He was pointing
toward the driveway, and she could hear gravel crunching.

'A
car?' she asked over the noise of the helicopter.

McBride
nodded vigorously.

'Brad?'

He nodded
with such energy and enthusiasm that Eden wanted to hit him — if she could find
her hand, that is.

'Girl
in the car,' he yelled. 'Looks like you.'

'Like
me?' Twisting as best she could, Eden looked at the car that had stopped in the
driveway. It was Brad's car, and he was driving. Beside him sat Melissa.

Eden
thought maybe there were tears in her eyes under the mud., but she wasn't sure.
She turned back to McBride. What other horrible, rotten, humiliating thing
could happen to her?

In the
next second the helicopter stopped to hover above them. In the noise and the
wind, she looked up to see two men hanging out of the door with rifles aimed at
her and McBride.

'Are
you all right?' came a voice over a loudspeaker, and Eden was sure that
everyone in Arundel heard it.

'Yes,'
Eden tried to shout up to the men over the noise of the helicopter.

'They
mean me,' Jared yelled, grinning. 'I'm the good guy, remember? You're the
suspect. They want to make sure you haven't hurt me — again.'

Behind
them, Eden heard a car door slam, then a wail that every mother on earth
responded to. 'Mother,' came the voice, a high, plaintive wail that carried
above the roar of the helicopter hovering over them.

'Kill
me now,' Eden said, and fell back into the mud.

'I really
don't know what to think,' Melissa was saying as she held the hose on her
mother. 'I was already in Arundel when I called you. In the past, in normal
circumstances, I would have gone straight to you, but you've been acting so
strangely lately that I wasn't sure what to do, so that's why I called first
and asked permission to visit my own mother.'

The
water from the hose was icy, and if Eden had had her way, she would have gone
upstairs, peeled off her muddy clothing, and jumped in the shower, no matter
how much mud she tracked in, but Melissa had been horrified at that idea. Eden
thought maybe her daughter was enjoying spraying cold water on her mother. Eden
bit down on her tongue to keep from talking and scrubbed off mud as quickly as
she could. She glanced at Brad. He was standing under the big cypress tree in
front of her house and looking at all the things he'd sent her. She'd have to
thank him later — and that thought warmed her a bit.

Melissa
was telling her story for the second time. 'I had no idea what to do when my
own mother told me I couldn't visit her, so I did the only thing I could think
of and went to the office of Mrs. Farrington's lawyer. It was only by chance
that I remembered his name. Really, Mother, you have been so secretive about all
of this that I feel like I don't even know you. You can't imagine my surprise
when I met the daughter of the lawyer and she informed me that her father and
you were thinking about getting
married.'

'Melissa,'
Eden said, turning around to face her daughter, 'could you please keep your
voice down? I don't think — ' She broke off because her daughter hit her in the
side of the head with a freezing blast of water. The nozzle was set on 'jet.'

'Sorry,'
Melissa said, but she didn't sound sorry. 'It has been almost more than I can
bear. First you leave me in New York, then you don't call for weeks on end,
then Stuart and I — ' She paused to sniff. 'Well, that's all over with. What
with all the stress in my life, it's a wonder I'm not in labor.'

'You
look great,' Eden said, rubbing mud off of her. 'You look like a poster for a
healthy pregnancy.' She just managed to dodge the next blast of water. 'I think
that's enough hosing.'

'No,
you still have some mud in your hair. Bend down.'

'I
think — ' When another jet shot past her ear, Eden grit her teeth. This was
punishment, pure and simple. Eden had never spanked her daughter but right now
she was wondering if it was not too late to begin.

'I
really don't think this is something to smile about,' Melissa said just before
her mother took the hose out of her hand.

'Neither
do I,' Eden said, pushing the arm down on the hose bib. 'As soon as I get
cleaned up and into some warm clothes, we'll talk about everything. But right
now I'm wet and I'm cold.'

'Alone,
Mother,' Melissa said. 'I want to talk to you
alone.'

Eden
looked around her garden. Three FBI agents were standing together, and she knew
that McBride and some man named Teasdale had gone to the house where McBride
was supposed to be living. Brad, looking forlorn and hurt and unable to
understand what was going on, had moved to her front porch steps. Now and then
he'd glance at Eden, his eyes begging her to talk to him and reassure him that
everything was okay between them. Besides Brad's and Melissa's concerns, there
was a murder to solve and a riddle to answer. 'If I can,' Eden answered at
last.

'What
does that mean?' Melissa asked, following her mother into the house. 'Don't you
think your daughter comes first? Your
pregnant
daughter?'

Eden
was dripping water across the old wooden floorboards of the kitchen, through
the hallway, and up the stairs. For all that Melissa kept saying that her
pregnancy was hard on her, she was right behind her mother as Eden bounded up
the stairs.

'Yes,
of course, you come first in my life,' Eden said. 'But right now there are some
things going on that — '

'I
remember this place,' Melissa said from behind her. 'I remember these
paintings.'

On the
wall, all the way up the stairs, were Tyrrell Farrington's watercolors. Two of
them showed   the  creek,  his  family's 
boats  lined   up along the dock. The Farrington boats had all
been sold, and the boathouse had fallen down long ago.

Pausing,
Eden looked at the paintings. She opened her mouth to tell her daughter that a
necklace had been painted on a family portrait and that had led them to solving
the mystery of the Farrington Sapphires. But she didn't say anything, as she
didn't think Melissa would be interested. Why was it that love took precedence
over everything else in life? Eden hadn't been able to enjoy the beautiful
gifts that Brad had sent her because of her love for her daughter. And now
Melissa couldn't think of anything else except her love for her husband.

And,
yes, Melissa did love him. Eden could hear it in every word out of her daughter's
mouth. In between the complaints about having found her mother rolling about in
the mud with a man Melissa had never met, her daughter told her everything
about what Stuart had done — or not done. According to Melissa, Stuart had
turned into a different person the second Eden left — and Melissa didn't like
the new Stuart one bit!

However,
from Eden's perspective, it looked as though Stuart had had a dose of reality
after his mother-in-law left town. Since they'd married, Stuart had had Eden to
depend on. She'd been there to make sure the rent was paid and food was on the
table. Once Eden was gone, responsibilities had been dumped on Stuart. By
necessity, he had gone from being a timid little man  
who   was   content   to  
wait   years   for   a promotion, to being a man
who was making every effort to better himself. Eden thought she might like the
new man Stuart had become much better than the old one.

But she
couldn't tell Melissa that. Melissa was still a little girl, torn between being
her mother's daughter and being a grown-up with a husband and soon a child to
take care of.

If I
had stayed, Eden thought, my daughter would never have grown up. She is so
spoiled she would have turned the baby over to me. Eden shook her head to clear
it. She didn't want to think that maybe she'd made some really big mistakes in
raising her daughter. Oddly, it was as though she could hear McBride's voice in
her head and he was telling her that it wasn't too late to start over.

Melissa
followed her mother into her bedroom and would have gone into the bathroom with
her, but Eden shut the doors. Once she was alone in her bathroom, Eden wanted
to fill the tub and soak in it for hours. Truthfully, she wanted to tie the
towels together and climb out the window and escape all of them. She didn't
look forward to facing Brad, or trying to deal with her daughter's marital
problems, or to talking to the FBI men who'd flown in.

'Being
an adult is overrated,' she muttered under her breath, then got into the shower
for the second time that day. She was going to have to face all of them. What
was she going to say to Brad about why she'd been rolling about in the mud with
McBride? Smiling, she wondered what   McBride  was  telling
his  boss  about  the way they'd been found.

Forty-five
minutes was all that Eden could drag out for a shower and blow-drying her hair.
Bracing herself, she opened the bathroom door and prepared to face her
daughter. It was time to come up with explanations.

Eden nearly
wept with joy when she saw her daughter, her big belly in front of her,
stretched out on her mother's bed, sound asleep. She spread a cover over
Melissa and offered a silent prayer of thanks. 'One down and about fifty to
go,' she muttered.

As she
stepped out of her bedroom, she almost ran into McBride. He had a duffel bag in
his hand, so she knew he was moving out of her house. This is good, the
intelligent side of her said, but the other side thought of omelets and
pancakes and having someone to ride across the peanut fields with.

'Was it
bad?' she asked softly, knowing he'd know what she meant.

'Yeah,'
he answered, glancing at the head of the stairs. He took Eden's arm and pulled her
toward her bedroom. But when he opened the door, he saw Melissa just as she was
turning over in her sleep, her belly so big it hid her face. 'Should we call a
doctor?' he asked, with almost fear in his voice.

'We
should call her husband,' Eden said as McBride pulled her into his bedroom.

He
closed the door behind them and seemed not to know where to begin.

'Did
you get in a
lot
of trouble?' she asked.

'More
than you can imagine. There is no more cover. This town is going to know about
us by evening, if they don't already know.' He glanced quickly at her. 'By us,
I mean the agency.'

She
watched as he walked toward the window and looked out. She knew what was down
there: at least three agents, and in the field sat a helicopter. If her tax
dollars weren't paying for the thing, she'd wish it would sink in the mud.

He
looked back at her. 'No one any longer thinks you know anything. Someone
remembered seeing a book about missing treasures in Applegate's apartment, so
they think that searching for them was his hobby. They've decided that the
paper he swallowed had a lot of other stuff on it, and it just happened to have
your name at the bottom.' He took a breath. 'Anyway, they're pulling me off the
case. Your part in this is over.'

Eden
sat down. 'I see.' It's what she'd wanted, but at the same time fear ran
through her. 'What about the men who ransacked my house?'

'They
think it was some relative of Mrs. Farrington's who thinks he should have
inherited this house rather than you. That makes it a domestic problem, not
FBI.'

'But
Mrs. Farrington didn't have any relatives.'

'Not
that you know about,' he said. 'I've managed to persuade the agency to look
into people who are related to her distantly. And' — he hesitated — 'that son
of hers knew a lot of very bad people. We think he made friends while he was in
prison.' Jared looked at her hard.

Eden
pushed away the images that came into her mind of how a person made 'friends'
while in prison. 'So you think that one of them . . . '

'Tried
to find the treasure. I was told that the agency, as a favor, will splash it on
the news about finding the necklace and its being a fake. We hope that will
keep future treasure hunters away from you. They — we — think you'll be safe if
no one thinks a valuable necklace is hidden inside your house. You'll have a
bit of publicity for a while, but it'll blow over the first time a movie star
gets a divorce.'

'So the
necklace isn't valuable?'

Jared
lifted his eyebrows.

'Worth
anything at all?'

'Historic
value, and the gold is real.' He shrugged.

Eden
shook her head. 'I wish I knew who that French duchess was who offered it to
Mrs. Farrington's ancestor. I've wondered why she didn't hide the sapphires.
The story was that she showed the greedy young man the pearls, but he turned
them down and demanded the sapphires.'

'Clever
young woman. The pearls were probably real.'

'Yes.
He did just what she wanted him to do. He took the fake gems and left her with
the real stuff.'

'And  
later   people   were   killed  
over   that necklace.'

Eden
leaned back in the chair. 'Irony,' she whispered and thought about it all for a
moment, then looked at McBride. 'So you're leaving.'

'Yes.
I'm under orders, and, besides, things between you and me —'

She
looked at him sharply.

'Okay,
so maybe the attraction was one-sided. But I — '

'Don't,'
she said, turning her head away. She could feel him looking at her, but she
wouldn't meet his eyes.

'Can't
blame a man for trying,' he said, and his voice changed, lightened. 'I said good-bye
to Minnie, and yes, I let her down easy. She was in a state over the gossip
about us. And Granville's pretty broken up over what he saw this morning. I
tried to talk to him, but he wouldn't listen.'

'I'd
better go to him,' Eden said, getting up.

'He had
to get back to his office, but if you want to keep that going, you'd better
come up with some good lies.'

She
glared at McBride. 'I plan to tell him the truth. There was nothing,
is
nothing
between you and me.'

'And
who's going to believe that?'

Eden
stood up. 'You really are despicable, you know that?'

'Yeah.'
He was grinning at her, and, suddenly, the heaviness between them was gone.
Eden sat back down; they were friends again. 'So how's it with you and your
daughter?'

'She's
okay. She thinks she's a mess and that her marriage is over, but she's okay. I
figure Stuart will be here by tomorrow and demand that she return home with
him.'

'Will
that work?'

'Probably.
I think she just wants proof of love.'

'Don't
we all?' he said under his breath.