Chapter Three
A glance in her rearview mirror a moment later had Anna sucking in her breath.
Gavin Marshall was still behind her.
There was something mysterious about the way those mirrored sunglasses hid his eyes from view. Something wild about him, about the way he gripped the handlebars or whatever they were called, the way he straddled the motorcycle, pulling those worn jeans tight over his thighs, the way the wind whipped his hair back from his face.
The latter image burned into her mind when she pulled her gaze from the mirror and once again watched where she was going. It occurred to her that he’d left Ben’s helmet behind. Then it occurred to her that he surely hadn’t had time to pack all his belongings before he’d left the house.
There was a conclusion she should draw, she knew, but as it wasn’t the one she wanted, she denied what she knew to be true and hoped for the best as she turned in at the parking lot of the grocery store.
He turned in right behind her.
Finally her brain admitted the truth. Gavin Marshall, the man who had invaded her home, the man who wanted to get his hands on her brother, was not leaving town. He was following her. It was enough to make her want to swear.
With her hands clenched tightly around the steering wheel, she pulled into a parking space. By the time she got out of the car and locked it, he was standing at the door to the store, waiting for her. She took one step toward the store and a hot gust of wind slapped her from behind and stood her hair straight up on end.
Mortified, Anna reached to smooth it down. A moment later she scolded herself. She wasn’t one to worry about a little thing like windblown hair. Why should she care what she looked like to this man?
She didn’t. And that was that.
Shoulders squared, purse hanging from the crook of her arm, she marched straight up to him. “Why have you followed me?” she demanded.
He placed a hand on his chest and gave her a mock look of innocence. “You don’t think I expect you to buy my groceries for me, do you? What kind of man do you take me for? No.” He held up a hand and grinned. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. I’m sure I wouldn’t like your answer.”
Anna blinked. “If you think buying my groceries is going to—”
“I didn’t say I was buying your groceries. I came to buy my own.”
“Why do you need groceries if you expect Ben to show up any minute?”
“Because if he doesn’t show up by suppertime, I’ll get hungry?”
She pursed her lips.
“Okay, how’s this? I’m buying Ben’s groceries, and until he shows up I’m helping myself.” He stepped aside, bent slightly at the waist, and extended an arm toward the automatic door. “After you, ma’am.”
In her job as a bookkeeper, and at home living alone, Anna didn’t have much call to get angry. She wasn’t used to feeling the sting of it rise from inside. Yet how many times this day had she felt like kicking something? Or, more accurately, someone?
She clamped her teeth over the petty words that wanted to spew from her lips and entered the store. She would simply ignore him. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.
But the man named Gavin Marshall proved impossible to ignore. When she got a shopping cart and started toward the household goods aisle, saving, as she always did, the dairy and produce aisles for last because it took her a half hour to get warm after traversing those cold sections, Gavin Marshall got his own shopping cart and followed her.
She breathed a sigh of relief when he stopped at the book and magazine racks. Quickly she turned her cart down the detergent aisle and hefted a large bottle into her cart, then moved on. She was in the Sundries aisle, looking at razors, when he strolled by and stopped at the selection of men’s shaving creams.
Anna would have ignored him. She meant to. But she couldn’t help but stare at the lone item in his shopping cart. As far as she knew, she’d never met a grown man who read comic books.
“If you’re nice,” he said as he plucked a can of shaving cream off the shelf and used it to point at the comic book, “I’ll let you read it after me.”
Anna turned abruptly away and grabbed the first package of razors she reached, then pushed her cart down the aisle.
On Cereals, she bought Shredded Wheat. He bought Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes.
On Canned Goods, she bought tomato paste. He bought chili and peaches.
She skipped Soft Drinks, but when next she saw him he’d added three liters of Coke to his basket.
Apparently he knew her brother’s tastes quite well.
When he reached for a six-pack of Coors on a large end display, she cleared her throat loudly. “Ben doesn’t drink in my house.”
“These,” he said with a smug smile, “are for me.”
“You,” she answered with a smile even more smug, “don’t drink in my house, either.”
He frowned. “I don’t?”
She frowned more fiercely. “You don’t.”
With the expression of a young boy bidding a final farewell to his best friend, Gavin put the six-pack back.
On the Bakery aisle, she bought whole-wheat bread and plain bagels. He bought white bread and a large package of cinnamon rolls.
She bypassed the frozen food section. He loaded up with frozen dinners, Häagen-Dazs ice cream and fish sticks.
At the Meat counter she picked out boneless, skinned chicken breasts, a lean chuck roast and three pounds of extra-lean ground beef she would have to separate into one-pound packages when she got home.
Gavin passed her and stopped at the lunch meat case, where he selected bologna and hot dogs, then turned back toward her. “I don’t suppose you have any mustard—Never mind. I’ll get some.”
She made it to the Dairy case and bought four cartons of fat-free yogurt in various flavors, a half-gallon of skimmed milk, “heart-smart” margarine and a pint of low-fat cottage cheese. She didn’t see Gavin again until the checkout stands, where he stood in line behind a woman with two small children and enough food in her cart to prepare for a lengthy siege. He’d added two dozen eggs, a pound of bacon and three bags of chocolate chip cookies to his cart.
Anna ignored him and pushed her cart in behind a woman buying a potted plant and a package of ground beef, thinking, rather smugly, she admitted, that she would be checked out and on her way home before he ever got his cart emptied onto the conveyor belt.
Things didn’t happen quite that way. Upon close inspection the philodendron the woman ahead of her had chosen sported a healthy population of aphids. It just wouldn’t do. Rather than give up her place in line to go pick out a new plant, the customer insisted that the clerk send someone to select a replacement for her. Her hip ached and she didn’t want to walk back to the plant display area again.
A sack boy chose a new plant, same type, same size. But the foil paper around the pot was the wrong color.
Anna took long, deep breaths as the drama played out slowly in front of her and the margarine in her basket approached room temperature. At the next register, the woman with the two children paid her total and led the way out the door while a sack girl followed with a cart filled with the woman’s bagged purchases.
Gavin loaded his items onto the conveyor belt, and the checker whipped them past the scanner faster than a springtime tornado. By the time he sauntered out the door with the loose-hipped gait of an Old West gunslinger, the woman in front of Anna finally wrote her check.
It occurred to Anna, as her groceries were being checked and bagged, to wonder how Gavin was going to get his groceries home on the motorcycle.
When she left the store a few minutes later, followed by the sacker pushing her cart of purchases, she had her answer. Gavin Marshall wasn’t going to get his groceries home on the motorcycle. Grinning, he stood next to her car and waited for her, obviously expecting her to haul them home for him.
“I knew you wouldn’t mind,” he told her.
Anna had the strident urge to grab his plastic bags and fling their contents across the parking lot.
The urge unsettled her. She was not a violent person. She’d never been prone to anger before meeting this man. With controlled effort, she slipped her key into the lock on her trunk and turned it. Standing aside while her bags were moved from the shopping cart into her trunk, she said not a word when Gavin loaded his bags in beside hers. She very much feared that if she opened her mouth, something totally unladylike would escape.
Anna thanked the sacker, then slipped into her car and drove home.
Gavin followed close behind her. He was really starting to like this woman. It probably wasn’t very nice of him to enjoy getting a rise out of her, but there it was. She was fun to rile.
As long, he thought, as it wasn’t over anything serious, such as her feelings of safety. As long as he wasn’t causing her genuine distress. That, he didn’t want.
No, he only wanted two things from Anna Collins. He wanted her to stop bailing Ben out of trouble, and he wanted her to not be angry with Gavin for forcing his company on her the way he was doing.
Yeah, well, pal, you go ahead and want in one hand...
When Anna pulled into her driveway and started to get out to open the garage door, Gavin blocked her car door with the Harley.
“I’ll get the door,” he called over the throaty rumble of the motorcycle’s engine and the louder clatter of her car.
Well, Anna thought, at least he was making himself useful.
When he raised the garage door, she pulled her car in, killed the engine and got out.
“If you park in the middle like that, I can’t get the Harley in.”
Anna raised an eyebrow at him. “And your point is...”
“Of course, it’s not my bike, so if it gets stolen out of your driveway, it’s no skin off my nose. I guess it’s insured. Although if anyone is paying insurance premiums on it, it would have to be you, so you’d know that better than I would.”
With a slow, deep breath for patience, Anna climbed back into the car, backed it out, and pulled in again, this time leaving room for the motorcycle on her passenger side. While Gavin pulled in, she unlocked her trunk and reached for her bags.
“I’ll get those.”
Well. Useful indeed. When Ben was home, he certainly never offered to carry in the groceries.
She pulled two bags from the trunk herself and carried them into the kitchen. Turning from the counter to go back for more, she nearly ran into Gavin. He had carried in the rest of her bags, and all of his, at once.
“You really ought to get an automatic garage door opener.” He set the bags on the counter and untangled his hands from the plastic handles.
“I’m perfectly capable of opening my own garage door.”
He started emptying the contents of the bags onto the counter. “Of course you are. But wouldn’t it be easier if you didn’t have to?”
“Easier? Is that what you look for, the easy way?”
“You sure are prickly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’d rather do things the hard way than admit somebody else had a good idea.”
“I don’t know why you would say something like that. You know nothing about me.”
“I know you’d rather get out in the rain and lift that heavy door yourself than admit how convenient a garage door opener would be.” .
“In case you failed to notice, it’s not raining.”
“Prickly, and stubborn.”
Anna placed her milk, margarine, cottage cheese and yogurt in the refrigerator. “What do you do for a living, Mr. Marshall, that makes you think money should be wasted on luxuries like garage door openers?”
“Luxuries?” he protested. “An automatic garage door opener stopped being a luxury back in the seventies. If you don’t care about the convenience, how about the safety aspect? You won’t throw your back out, and some mugger can’t grab you from behind while you’re out opening the door.”
Anna took her time carefully placing the chicken and roast in the freezer, setting the three-pound package of ground beef in the sink for dividing and rewrapping. It was either place all items with care, or risk giving in to the urge to throw them. A mugger, indeed. Did he get a commission on automatic garage door openers or something?
“You know what they call people like you who refuse to take precautions?”
“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“Victims.”
Anna slammed the freezer door closed and whirled to face him. “I’m nobody’s victim, Mr. Marshall.”
“Don’t kid yourself. You’re your own brother’s favorite victim.”
“How dare you say such a thing!”
“You do know you’re the reason he never worries about getting himself into trouble, don’t you? He knows you’ll always bail him out. Is that why you don’t have something as basic as a garage door opener? You spend all your money bailing Ben out of trouble?”
“If—and right now that’s a very big if—I’m not going to call the police again and have you forcibly removed from my home, you’re going to have to keep your opinions about my relationship with my brother to yourself.”
“Look. I like Ben. He’s basically a good kid. All I’m saying is that he’s never learned to take responsibility for his own actions, because he knows you’ll take the responsibility for him.”
It was hard to argue against the truth, and Anna resented Gavin all the more for speaking it so plainly. She did take the responsibility for Ben’s actions on herself. She did keep bailing him out of trouble. She couldn’t help it. Ben was all she had left, her only family.
“Whatever is between Ben and me is none of your business.”
“When he starts pulling his little stunts on me, I make it my business.”
This wasn’t going to work, Anna realized. Gavin was obviously not going to leave on his own—he’d just bought enough groceries for a week.
Ben, Ben, when are you going to grow up and stop getting us into these messes?
No answer came, and she felt disloyal for asking the question. For too many years it had been her and Ben against the world. Or the world against her and Ben. She could not stop protecting her brother merely because she knew she should, or because Gavin Marshall told her to.
Resigned to the inevitable, she took a slow, deep breath and faced the man in her kitchen. “How much money does Ben owe you?”
Gavin’s eyes narrowed as he studied her. “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re not going to get him off the hook by paying me yourself. This is exactly what I came here to prevent.”
“How much?”
“Nothin’ doin’, doll. I won’t take your money. It’s not your debt, it’s Ben’s. Make him own up to it, Anna. Make him pay it himself.”
“How much, Gavin?”
“How the hell’s he ever going to learn that his actions have consequences that he has to face on his own if you keep bailing him out?”
“How much?”
“Forty-five thousand dollars.”
Ann grabbed for the counter to keep from falling down.