“She burned the skating rink down,” Alice said, speaking for the first time during the exchange between Jane and Stacy.
“You burned it down, Aunt Jane?”
“That I did. Of course I didn’t think that the cops would discover it was arson. I thought that Lucky would collect on the insurance, and he’d have all the money he needed, and it wouldn’t matter if I was penniless.”
“What happened,” Alice went on to explain, “was that he was the prime suspect, and he ended up losing everything.”
“Of course I had to let him go then. He thought I’d changed my mind. But I never lost touch with him. I even knew about you and your little garage. And when Gavin started talking about land and a restoration center, I knew I had the chance to make it up to Lucky for what I’d done.”
Stacy was stunned. She couldn’t believe the astonishing story she’d just heard. At the same time she knew that Jane and Alice were telling the truth. Here she’d been worrying that Jane was trying to take her garage and she was trying to do just the opposite. Sitting there with her red hair hanging in errant tendrils, wearing a miniskirt and go-go boots, was the woman who might have been her stepmother if an ice-skating rink hadn’t burned fifteen years ago.
“I’m very sorry, Stacy,” Jane said. “I never wanted you to know. But when Gavin brought you home, I understood the master plan. Your aura so perfectly matched his, there was no dividing them.”
“Why yes,” Alice added, “we’ve even unearthed Jane’s wedding dress, the one she bought to marry Lucky in. We think it will fit you beautifully.”
“But, I’m not going to marry Gavin,” Stacy protested. “I can’t live on Valley Road. I don’t even want to.”
“Don’t worry, you won’t have to. I’m going to sell the house and give the money to Gavin so he can repay that awful Sol. He thinks that he’ll be able to talk Sol into backing out of their deal, but he won’t. Sol will try to take over, that’s the way he operates. And Gavin won’t be able to stop him.”
“Gavin’s gone to talk to Sol?”
“Oh, yes, if he can track him down. I’m worried sick.”
Stacy was worried too. She worried the rest of the week. Neither Jane nor Alice heard from Gavin. He didn’t call the shop, and he didn’t call Stacy. A dozen yellow roses arrived on Friday with a card that said, Put these in your room and imagine that I’m there too.
Two tickets to the Braves/Padres game arrived on the following Monday, with a note that said, I hope to be there, but if I’m not, take Mother. She’ll love to watch you get excited. I do, too, but it’s not the game that I’m thinking about.
A Dracula and a Frankenstein video arrived Wednesday with a note that said, Watch these and start with my neck. Then think of the rest of me and know that I’m very ready to be home with you.
Each package was postmarked from a different place in the United States. Each gift made the waiting worse. Where was Gavin? What was he doing?
Jane and Alice ran an ad to sell the house.
The garage flourished.
The dogs languished.
The Braves won.
Stacy paced the floor and thought about boxer shorts with baseballs.
“Gavin, I’m a gambler, always have been. How else do you think a poor kid on the docks could acquire what I have?”
“I understand, Sol, but my little operation isn’t big enough for you. You own shipping lines, casinos, resorts. Why on earth would you want an antique car restoration business?”
“Because of Lucky Lanham, boy, only because of him. He broke my daughter’s heart. Now I’m going to do the same to his daughter.”
“This is all because of Lucky Lanham?”
“It always was.”
“But what if I come up with the money to pay you back?”
“You won’t, and you won’t find a banker willing to finance the rest of the deal either. It’s me, or nobody.”
“There’s just one thing, Sol,” Gavin played his last card. “I don’t have the garage yet. She hasn’t accepted my option money. So, even if you do take over the deal, you won’t touch her.”
There was a long, heavy silence before the olive-skinned man raised his eyes and concentrated their full force on Gavin. “So. You think that ends it? It only makes the gamble a bigger challenge. Tell you what, Magadan, I’ll make you a deal.”
“I don’t think I’m interested in any more of your deals, Sol. I never should have taken your money to begin with. I did and I’ll repay it, but I won’t let you hurt Stacy.”
“Oh, yes, you’ll repay it all right, or I’ll take everything you own, including that mortgaged mansion your mother lives in on Valley Road. You know they ran an ad to sell it?”
Gavin cursed silently. He hadn’t known. Jane hadn’t known that the house was transferred to his name years ago, when he’d had to pay off the last mortgage to keep her from losing it. Now Sol was threatening to take the house, and he had the means to do it—the loan. Gavin owed Sol the money, and Gavin owned a house that could be claimed.
“So, what’s the deal, Sol?”
“You get me that garage, and I’ll forget about the rest of the land, and your house.”
Gavin blanched. He couldn’t take Stacy’s garage. It was too important to her. Still, from the reports he’d received, it had become very successful in a short period of time. So what if the building went to Sol. They could find another building. He’d build another one in the center and give it to her. After all he was going to marry her, and what he had would be hers and what she had would be his.
“I’ll do it, Sol. But I think you ought to know that I can’t force Stacy to give up her business.”
“Oh, I don’t intend to deal with you, Magadan. You’re welcome to be present, of course, but I’ll only talk business with Lucky Lanham’s girl. Go back to Hiram, Georgia, boy, and tell her that it’s time she made good on her daddy’s biggest debt.”
Gavin felt like a jerk. He’d worked for years to be respectable, to make enough money to take care of his mother and his aunt, and then in a weak, self-indulgent moment he’d let his grand scheme to be a millionaire put him in a position to lose everything, including the woman he loved.
Sol never wanted to take over his business. Sol only wanted to get even with Lucky Lanham, and Gavin had given him the means to do it. Aunt Jane had always said there was some kind of force that tied people together, controlled their lives, and shaped their destinies. But Gavin had never believed it.
He still didn’t.
He spent two hours feeling angry about what he’d done, then put his mind to a solution. Granted he had never made such a stupid mistake before, but he’d had worse situations to deal with in working through some of his mother’s and Aunt Jane’s wild schemes. He simply had to outsmart a crook, and he had three weeks to figure out how.
Now he had a baseball game to get to.
With one bite on the neck he’d become immortal. Night was coming, and he was in dire need of his life’s blood—Anastasia Lanham.
Nine
Alice and Jane’s spiritual center in downtown Atlanta was where Gavin caught up with Stacy. She was under the sink, repairing pipes that had gone unused for years.
For a long time he stood in the doorway, just looking at her. That was all it took for that satisfied feeling to steal over him, the promise that everything would be right, the warm spotlight of confidence.
“Whoever you are, I could use a hand down here.”
“You can have it, Princess, and every other part of my body as well.”
“Gavin!”
Stacy sprang up, banged her head against the open end of the pipe, and saw stars. “Ow!”
In an instant Gavin was beside her, hauling her out from under the cabinet, kissing the spot on her forehead that was already turning red.
“I’m so sorry. I really didn’t mean to hurt you. Are you all right?”
Stacy looked into worried green eyes, stormy green eyes—Gavin’s g
reen eyes—and felt the connection reestablished. “I am now. Why did you leave me?”
“I had to. Business …” he offered lamely, his fingertips rimming her face as though he’d never seen it before.
“I know about that business, Gavin. I’m having a hard time keeping the home fires burning. We have to talk. We need to—”
“We need to get out of here before I do something that would embarrass my aunt and my mother.”
“Not before we talk, Gatsby.”
Gavin glanced around. The area just beyond the kitchen where Stacy had been working was crawling with workers. He shuddered to think what kind of wages his aunt had promised or what he’d have to do to stop this venture. He could hear Jane barking orders and his mother patiently explaining what it was that Jane wanted done.
The confusion fueled the emotional turmoil he’d gone through for the last week, and the confidence he’d felt seemed to vanish. Even Stacy couldn’t make everything all right. He’d expected to find Stacy under the hood of a car or replacing brakes or mounting tires. Instead she was there, with his family, joining in their latest well-intentioned, but doomed-to-failure project. Stacy was becoming, not only a part of his heart, but his family as well.
Gavin smiled and nodded slowly. Stacy was right. He didn’t want to talk about Sol and where he’d been. He wanted Stacy’s comfort, her wonderful reassurance. He wanted her in his arms where they could make slow, beautiful love for hours. They could talk about horror movies and baseball, not trouble, not the collapsing of a dream. Like Lucky, he’d put on a brave face and shield her from the problem.
“Must we talk, Princess? I can think of better methods of making fuel.”
Stacy recognized the look of pure frustration that claimed Gavin—recognized it and felt her heart lurch. She’d wanted him to face reality, to tell her what had happened, but she hadn’t intended to cause him more pain. She’d been determined not to let him sidestep the issue by making love to her, but she missed the brash, take-on-the-world man she’d fallen in love with.
For a moment she caught her breath and held it. She was in love with Gavin Magadan. She wanted to hold him in her arms and make things right. She wanted to tell him to take the garage, it wasn’t important. But she held herself in check, squelching her inclination to pull Gavin to the floor beside her and rip off his executive clothes.
She glanced down at her scruffy shorts and shirt and back at Gavin. This morning he was wearing a double-breasted business suit with a red paisley tie and a matching red handkerchief stuffed in his pocket. His shoes were dark brown with laces—imported, expensive, Italian. He looked like a man on a mission, but the expression on his face said plainly that it was a failed mission.
Well, it wasn’t going to be like that. She had never committed herself to a man before, but without intending to she’d connected with Gavin Magadan. Just, she suspected, as Lucky had once connected with Jane. Lucky had run away. But she had no intention of letting some wild scheme, or misplaced male kind of protective thinking ruin what they had going.
From day one, fate had conspired to weave a spell that brought the two of them together. Stacy was willing to concede that there was something to be said for fate, but solutions depended on reasonable analysis and well-thought-out plans, and she intended to have a say in the outcome. Gavin Magadan belonged to her, and he wasn’t about to close her out before she had a chance to make it work.
Gavin watched the myriad change of expression on Stacy’s face. She wasn’t going to let him protect her or change the subject. She wanted to talk, and no matter what he would prefer, they were going to talk. But not here, and not before he’d taken her in his arms. He couldn’t hold back any longer.
He lifted her from the floor and kissed her, thoroughly, deeply, and with every ounce of longing he’d held back during all the hours they’d been apart.
And Stacy couldn’t help herself. She kissed him back, giving as much as she got, entangling her arms around his neck and her fingers in his hair. She didn’t give a thought to the grease she had on her hands, or the spot being transferred to his red tie. The sudden flurry of activity behind them didn’t registered nor did the soft closing of the door.
Stacy gave up the pretense that talk was the first order of importance. When Gavin’s hand slipped beneath her shirt and claimed her breast, little jabs of heat spiraled outward like a spring coiling tightly in her center.
The heating system wasn’t working yet. They might never need it, Stacy thought crazily. All that was necessary was for Gavin to kiss her and the building occupants would have to open the windows in the coldest month of the year.
Then, insistently and steadily, Stacy was nudged back to reality. “Gavin,” she finally whispered, “this isn’t the dance floor.”
“I know,” he admitted, “and there aren’t any bushes outside where I can ravish you. I guess we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. I’m willing to improvise.”
“I think we’d better take what you’ve got home and ice it down,” Stacy said, drawing away. “Lonnie always made me eat my peas before I could have dessert.”
“Stacy, I’d like to call to your attention that I don’t have any peas.”
“In this case, Gatsby, consider the peas conversation, and we’re not skipping the main course.”
Stacy started for the door.
“Wait, darling, those guys out there will be able to read my condition like a newspaper. You’re going to expose me to the world.”
Stacy opened the door, glanced at the wide-eyed workers beyond, and said with a little salute, “Read it and weep, boys. Come on, big guy, we’ve got to skip the headlines and start with the fine print.”
“A girl after my own heart,” Aunt Jane said with a long, drawn-out sigh.
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s the part she’s after,” Alice commented with a satisfied smile, and watched them walk out the door.
Frankenstein and Dracula glared at Gavin, withholding their customary wags of approval as they stared at him from beside the front door.
“Come on, boys, I was out of town—on business.”
Both dogs continued to stand, making no effort to come any closer.
“I think they’re letting me know that they’re unhappy with me,” Gavin said dolefully.
“Possibly,” Stacy agreed. “They have uncanny intuition about undercurrents.”
“Hell,” Gavin said, realizing what he’d said and preparing himself for an onslaught. None came. He knew then that he was in big trouble.
“All right, Stacy, let’s talk.”
“Fine. The couch? Or the study?”
“The study. You know what will happen if we sit on that couch. Even the hounds from Hades wouldn’t be able to stop me from touching you.”
“I’ll make some coffee.”
“Make it strong and black.”
“Fine.”
The coffee was awful, but that was as it should be. By the time she’d poured it into cups and set it on the table before them, Gavin had removed his coat and tie, and unbuttoned his shirt. He was sitting hunched over resting his chin on his threaded fingers.
“I knew Sol from the office. He’d invest in real estate now and then, buy and sell an occasional office building. He invited me to Vegas on a gambling trip as his guest. Then one day he called me and said that he had a little money to invest and he wondered if I knew anybody interested.”
The dogs sat down and waited, more relaxed but still alert.
“I should have known better. But I was so certain that I could find a banker who’d back my project that I closed my eyes to the coincidence. I took his money to take options on the land and to set up my project. If I could get the land, the zoning, and the plans, then the mortgage money would come.”
“Except it didn’t.” Stacy sat across the table from him, holding her cup in a death-crushing grip in an effort not to reach across and touch the man who was bearing his soul and admitting his failure.
/> “No, not yet. And, Stacy, there’s more. I should have known that this wasn’t a big enough deal for Sol. It didn’t make sense when it was happening. This is peanuts for a man like him.”
“But he had a reason, didn’t he?”
“Yes.” Gavin raised his eyes, and the naked pain swept across Stacy like a tidal wave of icy despair.
“I know, or at least I’ve figured out that from the beginning, the kicker was—me.”
“How’d you know?”
“I knew about Sol’s daughter and my father. I knew that she loved him and defied her father to be with him. But there’s one thing I know that you don’t. After my father died, she killed herself, in her own bed, the same bed that Lucky died in.”
Gavin groaned and lowered his eyes. The final piece fell into place. Stacy was Sol’s target. She had been all along. He’d simply sat back and waited until he had the chance to take everything she cared about. He’d take her garage. He’d ruin Gavin and his family, and he’d enjoy every minute of his revenge.
“Well, I won’t let him get away with it, Stacy. I won’t let him hurt you. All I have to do is repay his loan, and I’ll find a way to do that if I have to sell everything I own.”
He stood, gathered up his coat and tie, and strode toward the door, ignoring the dogs who planted themselves firmly in front and bared their teeth in warning that he shouldn’t try to get past.
“No, Gavin. Don’t do this. I’m involved as much as you, more so. It’s our problem. Two people who love each other work together. We can do it.”
“Love each other?” He turned. “A man who loves a woman doesn’t take, he gives. I’ll be back when I’ve found an answer.”
This time the dogs stepped aside and let him through. They let Stacy through as she dashed after him, catching him at the convertible, which was gleaming like hot coals in the sunlight.
“Gavin, wait. I need you to do something for me before you go. Please?”
He pitched his jacket onto the seat of the car and turned slowly around. “What?”
“Kiss me.”
The kiss was desperate. It was wild and filled with longing. And at the end it trailed off into good-bye. Finally Gavin lifted his head and took a long, deep look into Stacy’s eyes.
Lean Mean Loving Machine: A Loveswept Classic Romance Page 11