sensed her backing off—felt her retreat—and moved to stop it.
‘Sharing a curry? What harm can come of that?’
Another pause, so long this time he had to breathe.
Then she said, almost to herself, ‘Who knows?’ and shrugged her shoulders.
There was something so pathetic in the words—so vulnerable in the gesture—it took all the restraint Alex could muster not to pull her into his arms and promise to protect her from whatever it was she feared. Because fear was certainly there. It was in her eyes, and in the quietly spoken words.
In the big fierce dog.
And still she hadn’t answered.
She looked away and whistled to her dog, and as he came gambolling back towards her, Minnie herded in front of him, she straightened her back, squared her shoulders and turned to smile at Alex.
‘Oh, what the hell!’ she said. ‘Yes, I’d like to share a curry with you, Dr Attwood!’
Henry brought Minnie safely to their feet, received a pat and a ‘good dog’ from his mistress, then as she clipped on his lead and stood up, she said to Alex, ‘They were once herding dogs, you know, Rottweilers. They followed the Roman armies across Europe, herding the animals they kept for meat. Apparently some instinct still remains in Henry.’
Alex heard the words. He was even interested in the content. What he couldn’t follow was the switch in the woman who was now walking on ahead of him, back towards their respective houses. Had she reverted to this ‘unit manager’ persona so he wouldn’t be under any misapprehension that their dinner together tonight was in any way a date?
He didn’t know, but he did know that the more he got to know Annie Talbot, the less he really knew of her!
Anxious about Amy’s condition, they called at the hospital before hitting the mall. The little girl was stable—which was as much as Alex felt he could expect at this stage. After talking to her parents for a while, he climbed back into Annie’s car, a big, comfortable SUV, and they drove the short distance to the shops. As he had been in Melbourne, Alex was surprised by how familiar the mall seemed, although Annie called it a shopping centre.
He was also surprised at how many things he considered staples went into Annie’s shopping trolley. The same brand of pancake mix he used at home, pretzels, sourdough bread and even tart green pickles.
Well, since last night he’d known she was the woman on the terrace, so she’d been in the US then. If she was Rowena Drake—or had been in the past—then she’d lived over there for some years. He knew enough of Dennis Drake’s history to know that—even knew he’d been married when he’d first arrive to work in St Louis.
But a number of her purchases were unusual. OK, the amount of dog food was explained by Henry’s size, but so many cans of soda and packets of crisps?
‘My dad’s a writer—he says munching helps him think,’ she said, as they pushed their trolleys towards the checkout.
‘A writer? What does he write?’
She smiled at him.
‘Mysteries. Detective stories. They’ve only just started being published in North America so even if you read mysteries, you probably haven’t heard of him.’
‘I do read them—all the time. They’re my relaxation. What name does he write under?’
A beat of excitement in his heart. Would he learn Annie’s maiden name if her father wrote under it?
Would that help him get to know more about her?
Probably not.
He realised he’d missed her answer, and blamed it on untangling his trolley from the woman in the queue beside him.
‘Sorry—what name? His own?’
‘Yes. Rod Talbot,’ Annie said, and Alex felt relief.
So she’d left Drake for whatever reason and had reverted to her own name. And her real first name could well be Rowena, with Annie a family nickname, and she’d reverted to that as well.
And he’d had her with serial marriages!
Then the name she’d said sparked recognition in his brain.
‘But I’ve read his books! Or some of them. They’re set right here in Sydney, aren’t they? A friend, knowing I was coming here, lent me a couple, then while I was in Melbourne I tracked down a few more.’
He was genuinely excited, having enjoyed the fast, racy read Rod Talbot provided. And to think he was Annie’s father!
She was unpacking her trolley onto the checkout counter at this stage and he wondered if he should ask her father to dinner as well. There was obviously no Mrs Talbot in the picture, and if this was just a neighbourly, colleague type dinner, then asking her father would be the right thing to do.
But in some uncharted territory of his heart, he was aware that this wasn’t just a neighbourly dinner—or a colleague-with-colleague one. He wasn’t sure what it was, maybe a first small step towards something, but, whatever, he wasn’t going to invite a third party to partake of his curry. Not tonight.
Annie, refusing his offer of help to unload her groceries from the car, dropped Alex and his shopping off at his front gate, then drove around the block and down the lane behind the row of houses, into the garage behind her house.
She turned off the engine, opened the door but didn’t get out. Instead, she slumped across the steering wheel in relief. Shopping with Alex had been far too intimate an experience for her to ever want to repeat it.
‘Intimate?’ she muttered to herself, as the thought registered in her brain. ‘Shopping?’
But she couldn’t find another word for the confusion of symptoms she’d displayed as they’d pushed their respective trolleys up and down the aisles. No premature menopause this time, for which, she supposed, she should be grateful.
But empathy, togetherness, bonding stuff had happened, and when they’d both reached for Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix at the same time, and they’d turned towards each other and laughed, a heap of other emotions had fluttered in her heart. Emotions she didn’t want to think about.
‘It was pancake mix, for Pete’s sake,’ she said to Henry, who’d come out to the garage to see why she was so slow at bringing in his food supplies. ‘You can’t get all squishy and romantic over pancake mix. Especially when the other pancake-mix purchaser would have been considering his stomach, not his heart.’
Henry gave her his ‘don’t take it out on me’ look and sat, willing, if necessary, to wait by the open car door for ever.
‘I’m coming,’ Annie told him, reaching over the back of the seat to pick up her first load of supplies. ‘At least now he knows where the shops are, so there’ll be no excuse for the two of us to ever shop together again.’
She hauled the bags out and started towards the house, arms getting longer by the second as innumerable
