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he did care about the girl. The fact that he’d hidden those albums away, however, was rather curious. The man lived alone. There was no reason she could think of to hide them anyway.
    Pondering the matter, Eshe had locked the albums away back safely in their drawer, and then slid out of the room to await Armand’s return, her mind full of questions. She’d waited for him to return to the house until just before dawn, pacing his living room like a caged tiger until she couldn’t stand it anymore and had finally gone out in search of him. She’d found the barn that held his dairy cows, a couple of pigs and goats, but he hadn’t been there. She’d then gone through the other barns searching a good-sized one that held horses, and a henhouse full of sleeping chickens that had started stirring before she determined he wasn’t there and closed the door on the incredible stench coming from inside, and then she’d checked the last barn to find it held a tractor, a riding lawn mower, and various other farm equipment but no sign of Armand.
    Eshe had given up after that and made her way back to the house as the sun began to crest the horizon. Tired, she’d sought out her room and got ready for bed, thinking she would start fresh in the evening. However, tired as she’d been, sleep had not been easy to claim or keep. It was bloody noisy in the country. She often heard people comment on how noisy the city was and how blissfully quiet the country was in comparison, but she would have a couple of choice words on the subject in future. They were full of crap. Her apartment in the city was soundproofed, her sleep never disturbed by the sounds of traffic or city life. The same wasn’t true out here. While there wasn’t much in the way of traffic on this rural road, there were a gazillion other sounds instead; the deep thrum of passing trains in the distance, the chatter and song of birds, the chirps of crickets…She’d had the devil of a time getting to sleep and staying there.
    And now there was that damned vacuum cleaner to contend with, she thought, and glowered at the door as the sound grew louder, suggesting it hadn’t been right outside her room at first but now was.
    The country definitely was not a quiet place, Eshe decided grimly as something banged against the base of the door several times. Growling deep in her throat, she threw the blankets and sheets aside and slid out of bed to stomp to the door. Tired as she was, Eshe was in a fine dudgeon, and all wound up to blast Armand for his inconsideration in waking her, but was brought up short when she dragged the door open and found a round little mortal woman about to bang her door again with the head of a vacuum cleaner.
    “Oh dear!” the woman exclaimed, stopping just short of running the vacuum over Eshe’s bare feet when they appeared in place of the door. “I’m sorry! Did I wake you?”
    Eshe stared at the woman rather blankly as she quickly shut off the vacuum she’d been running over what seemed obvious to Eshe was a perfectly clean carpet. The vacuuming hadn’t been necessary. The woman had just been trying to “rouse Mr. Argeneau’s guest,” she read from her mind. It seemed her presence was such an oddity the woman had been waiting impatiently all day for her to make an appearance and finally gave in to the urge to bring that about herself…with the vacuum. And the woman was glad she had, Eshe read from her mind as the woman thought that the guest was quite a looker, and she couldn’t wait to tell the girls at the beauty parlor when she went in for her weekly wash and rinse. Oh, the girls would all be aflutter when they heard the elusive bachelor Armand Argeneau had himself a beauty in his house. Perhaps there were wedding bells in the future.
    Sighing, Eshe stopped focusing on the woman’s thoughts and shifted her attention to her eager expression, only then becoming aware that while she had been reading her mind, the woman had been giving her