Hidden Treasures by Judith Arnold Page A

people the way Fern and Jed did, the way someone who was truly a Rockwellian would.
    “So,” he said when the silence deepened with her shutting off the water, “I see there’s still some wine in that bottle.”
    Great. He was hanging around to drink her wine. Given what a sterling conversationalist she’d been, why else would he have stayed so long?
    “It’s kind of warm out,” he went on. “For April, anyway. We could refill our glasses and sit on the porch.”
    “I haven’t got a porch,” she said. “The back porch is really just a couple of steps.”
    “I meant my porch.”
    He had a huge porch. And there was enough wine left to top off both their glasses. If they sat outside, the night air would dilute his testosterone effect. In all honesty, she wasn’t ready to say good-night to him, even if she’d had trouble thinking of anything else to say to him.
    They’d find things to talk about on his porch. She wanted to hear more about his junk business. She’d driven past his father’s junkyard a few times; it seemed to be little more than a huge lot enclosed by a chain-link fence and filled with wrecked cars, rusting refrigerators and other large appliances from which salvageable parts could be harvested. What Jed did had to be different from what his father did, which, as best Erica could tell, amounted to sitting on a bench in the doorway of a small, ramshackle shed near the gate, listening to talk radio and waiting to make a profit off someone’s desperate need for a gasket from an old Whirlpool dishwasher.
    Jed bought junk; he sold antiques. His father didn’t sell antiques. For that matter, he didn’t buy junk. As Erica understood it, people paid him a fee to truck their old appliances or tow their wrecked cars away. So he made money on that end, and on the other end, when he cannibalized his acquisitions and sold the parts. In theory it sounded like a pretty shrewd arrangement. But Jack didn’t appear to be raking in the big bucks with his junk trade.
    Neither did his son. But what did she know?
    Not much, she acknowledged as she slipped her arms through the sleeves of her field jacket. Late-April warmth in Rockwell was not the same thing as late-April warmth in Miami. Without the jacket, she’d be too cold outside to enjoy her wine, let alone Jed’s company.
    He grabbed the bottle and both glasses and preceded her out the back door. Walking behind him afforded her an interesting view of his narrow hips and long legs, his relaxed gait and solid shoulders. For a junk-dealing son of a junk dealer, he was damn nice eye candy.
    The porch of his grandfather’s house was furnished with a swing and several deeply sloping Adirondack chairs. The swing looked more comfortable, and she’d be able to burn off her nervous energy by swinging. Not that she was nervous, but sitting in the peace of a half-moon evening, drinking wine with Jed, was just romantic enough to make her edgy.
    As soon as she was seated, she realized her mistake. If she’d sat in one of the Adirondack chairs, he wouldn’t have been able to plant himself right beside her. But the swing was wide enough for two, and hislegs, being much longer than hers, got to dictate whether they swung, and how fast.
    And it wasn’t a very big swing. Once he’d settled his large frame next to her, she realized he was awfully close.
    He refilled their glasses, set the empty bottle on the porch planks and said, “So, what do you think about Derrick Messinger?”
    She didn’t want to think about him at all. That a TV tabloid journalist had phoned her was preposterous. “I think he wears a toupee,” she said.
    “Nah. That’s real.”
    “No way.”
    Jed eyed her, not quite smiling. “Fifty bucks says it’s real.”
    “Fifty bucks?” She scowled. Even if she were a wagering woman, fifty dollars was a lot of money.
    “Okay. Ten bucks.”
    “I’m not going to bet on something like that!”
    His smile widened into something mischievous,