She smiled, a dimple appearing in her left cheek, giving her expression an irreverent, sexy touch that suggested that maybe Annie Payne wasn't as innocent as she looked. Garvin found himself intrigued and just a little suspicious. Given his experience with her so far, he wouldn't be surprised if she did always get her way.
She certainly had today.
"Good luck," he told her. "By the way, if you decide you don't want the painting after all, give me a call. I'm over in Marin. My number's in the book."
"All right. I'll do that. But don't get your hopes up. I doubt I'll change my mind."
Garvin narrowed his eyes on her, unable to dismiss the sudden impression that Annie Payne was hiding something. He thought he saw her squirm, just for the flash of a second, under his scrutiny. Definitely, he decided, she was hiding something.
But he needed to regroup, rethink his strategy, before pouncing on her.
The sexual connotation of the image hit him hard, shot urges through him that had nothing to do with paintings or suspicions. He could feel his throat tighten, his body tense. Well, what the hell did he expect? An undertone of sex was the raw, inevitable result of their sparring in the auction room.
He wondered how shocked Annie Payne would be if she knew what he was thinking. Even if he wouldn't act on such an impulse under the circumstances, the thought of going to bed with her seemed perfectly natural.
Also bloody dumb, he added silently.
"Enjoy the painting, then," he said, his throat still tight.
She smiled brightly, oblivious to his tortured state. "I will. Oh, and give my best to your wife. I'm sure you'll find another present for her."
That brought him spinning back to reality. But he'd turned away from her and thus was spared from answering, from having to explain that his wife was dead.
"Hell," he breathed, and kept walking.
Ten paces up the sidewalk, he heard Annie Payne laugh in unbridled delight. Garvin glanced back. Otto had decided to move. Seizing the moment, his master shoved the painting in back, shut the liftgate, and skipped up to the driver's seat with her shawl over her head as the heavens opened up.
Ignoring the downpour, Garvin stood on the sidewalk and watched her old station wagon cough and choke out onto the street.
The woman didn't even have a decent car. How could she have afforded to pay five thousand dollars for a painting he doubted was worth even five hundred?
It was a question, he knew, that needed an answer.
* * *
Chapter Two
Annie drove across Divisadero to upper Market Street and found her way to the tangle of streets where the reclusive painter she knew only as Sarah lived. She grabbed a parking space on a narrow street below the little hilltop bungalow. To get to it, she had to take a set of stone stairs that ran up the steep hill between two pale-colored stucco houses. She was still getting used to how San Francisco, built on forty-odd hills between ocean and bay and crunched for space, piled houses on top of each other and tucked them into every possible nook and cranny.
Having become adept at parallel parking in her three months in the city, Annie got her car into the small space on the first try. She laid down the law to Otto and, taking no chances with Sarah's painting in back, locked all her doors. She didn't bother with her shawl or an umbrella. The rain had stopped, and the sun seemed to want to come out. It might decide yes; it might decide no. She'd given up trying to predict San Francisco weather.
She took the stone stairs two at a time, arriving at a little cul-de-sac—a turnaround, really—with several small houses built around it. A street curved sharply, and almost vertically, down the other side of the hill, but Annie hadn't quite figured out how to get to it from the bottom. Even her map of San Francisco hadn't really helped. Back in her part of Maine, there wasn't a road she didn't know.
Perched on the edge of the hill, Sarah's pale pink clapboard bungalow would have been a mundane house but for its sweeping views of the city and the bay, stretching not quite from the Golden Gate Bridge east to the Oakland Bay Bridge. Even now, her heart still pounding from the Linwood auction and her encounter with Garvin MacCrae, Annie took a moment to appreciate the picturesque San Francisco skyline, the tufts of fog clinging to dips and valleys, the impressive expanse of the Bay Bridge, the bay gleaming in the distance. Nothing, she thought, seemed to detract from the beauty of her adopted city.
The little house had no yard, not even a scrap ol grass, nor was there a front porch or front steps. Only a sloping square of concrete marked the entrance. Pots of hydrangea on either side of the white-painted front door would be a nice touch, Annie thought. Gran had always hated a bare entrance. Anyone, she'd maintained, could manage to grow something with a packet of seeds and a few cheap pots of dirt.
But Gran had never met Sarah. Not only was she possibly incapable of such endeavors, she seemed thoroughly disinterested in her surroundings.
Annie rapped on the front door. "Sarah? It's me, Annie Payne."
"Door's open."