Saving Grace (Serve and Protect Series)

by Wilson, Norah

  Saving Grace

  Book 2 in the Serve and Protect Series

  Norah Wilson

  Saving Grace

  Copyright © 2010 Norah Wilson

  Published by Norah Wilson

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and are not to be construed as real. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This book contains content that may not be suitable for young readers (under 18).

  Cover by Kim Killion, Hot Damn Designs

  Formatting by Michael Hale, Hale Author Services

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Thank You

  Other Works

  About the Author

  Protecting Paige (Preview)

  Chapter 1

  BEING DRUNK SLOWED RAY Morgan’s reaction time. The telephone managed a full ring before he snatched the receiver.

  “Grace?” To his own ears, his voice sounded like someone else’s.

  A second’s silence, then a man’s voice. “That you, Razor?”

  Ray sagged back into the depths of the couch. John Quigley, from the station.

  Not Grace after all. Never again Grace.

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Ray dragged a hand over his face. “’Fraid I’m no good to you tonight, though, Quigg.”

  Another pause. “You okay, Ray?”

  “Sure. Been keeping company with Jim Beam, is all.” Ray’s lips twisted at his own wit. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t that witty, but it was either laugh or cry. “S’okay, though. I’m not catching tonight anyway. Hallett is.”

  “Just a sec, Ray.”

  Quigg must have covered the mouthpiece, because Ray could hear muffled conversation in the background.

  “Okay, I’m back,” Quigley said.

  “I was sayin’ to call Gord Hallett. He’s your man tonight.”

  “I don’t need a detective, Ray. I was looking for you.”

  “Huh? You’re looking for me at, what...?” He squinted across the room at the glow of the VCR’s digital clock. Grace’s VCR. She hadn’t slowed down long enough to take anything.

  What had he been saying? Oh, yeah, the time. “...eleven o’clock at night?”

  “It’s Grace.”

  At the mention of his wife’s name, Ray felt the hollowness in his gut open up again, wide and bottomless as ever. Guess the bourbon hadn’t filled it after all.

  Leave it to Grace to get stopped on her way out of town, in her red Mustang the boys in Patrol had come to know so well. Had she explained why her foot was so heavy tonight? His grip on the phone tightened. Had she told the uniform‌—‌a guy Ray would have to face every day for the next ten years‌—‌that she was rushing off to meet her lover and couldn’t spare the horses?

  Her lover.

  “You got her downtown?” he asked evenly.

  “Downtown? Hell, no. They took her to‌—”

  “’Cause you can keep her. You hear me, Quigg? I don’t care.”

  “Dammit, Ray, listen to me. She’s been in an accident.”

  Ray shot to his feet, dragging the telephone off the table. It hit the floor with a crash, but the connection survived. “What happened?”

  “She missed a bend on Route 7, rolled her vehicle.”

  He felt his stomach squeeze. “Is she hurt bad?”

  “Hard to say. By the time I got there, they were already loading her into the bus. But she didn’t look too bad, considering she rolled that puppy like the Marlboro man rolls a cigarette. Paramedic said he thought she might have lost consciousness for a bit, but she seemed pretty with-it to me.”

  Wait a minute, Quigg was off duty. Why’d they call Quigg?

  Unless Grace was hurt so bad they thought his best friend should break the news.

  Ray gripped the receiver so hard now his fingers hurt. “Why’d they call you?”

  “Nobody called me. Suz and I were on our way home from visiting friends when we came on the scene. I stopped to see if our Mountie friends could use a hand. When I saw it was Grace, I offered to make the call.”

  Okay, relax, man. Breathe. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. But she’d rolled the car.

  Pressing a thumb and forefinger to his closed eyelids, he pushed back the images from every bad wreck he’d seen in his twelve years on the force.

  “They taking her to the Regional?”

  “She’s probably there already.”

  “I’ll be there in‌—” Ah, hell, the booze. Morgan, you idiot. “Quigg, I’m in no shape to drive. Can you send a car?”

  “Way ahead of you, buddy. Stevie B will be there in about four minutes.”

  Four hours later, Ray sat across the desk from Dr. Lawrence Greenfield, the neurologist who’d just finished Grace’s workup.

  The six cups of coffee he’d downed had sobered him up, but his stomach lining felt like he’d been drinking battery acid.

  “So she’s going to be okay?” Ray had been through such a wild range of emotions in the five hours since Grace had dropped her bombshell, he didn’t know how he felt about this news. Christ, he didn’t even know how he was supposed to feel. He eyed the doctor, who looked way too young to be fooling around with anyone’s grey matter. “She’ll walk away with no real injury?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. At least not yet. She did suffer a Grade Three concussion.” Dr. Greenfield leaned forward in his chair, steepling his hands. “Brain injury is more of a process than an event, Detective. It can escalate over as much as seventy-two hours, so we’ll have to wait and watch for the next little while. What I can tell you is she has no focal injury we can pinpoint with conventional imaging.”

  “Focal injury?”

  “No concentrated damage in any one area. The scans were clean. On the other hand, any time a patient loses consciousness, we have to be suspicious.”

  “What do you mean, suspicious?”

  “She could have a diffuse injury, where the pathology is spread throughout the brain, rather than focused in a specific spot. We’ll have to follow her for a while to rule out more subtle brain injury.”

  Ray slouched back in his chair, kicking a leg out carelessly. “She’s conscious now?”

  “Yes. And anxious to see you.”

  Ray rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Then I think I’d go back and look at those scans again, Doc.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She can’t possibly want to see me.” He congratulated himself on how matter-of-fact he sounded. “She left me tonight. She was on her way to join her lover when she had her accident.”

  Dr. Greenfield blinked. “She told me she was coming home from an interview with a man who raises miniature horses, and that you’d be worried that she was late.”

  The pony interview? “Doc, that interview wa
s a week ago. The story ran on Monday.”

  “I see.” Dr. Greenfield leaned back. “Well, this puts things in rather a different light.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we could be looking at a retrograde amnesia.”

  Amnesia? Oh, Christ, he was in a bad novel now. “But you said she’d escaped injury.”

  “Amnesia can accompany any loss of consciousness, however brief, although I thought we’d ruled it out.” Greenfield removed his glasses and polished them. “She identified the date and day.”

  “Couldn’t she have picked that up from the EMTs or the hospital staff?”

  “Absolutely. Amnesia victims can be very good at deducing such things from clues gleaned after the accident. But she correctly answered a whole host of other questions for me, including the results of Tuesday’s municipal election.”

  Ray digested this information. “Is it possible she remembers some things, but not others?”

  “Oh, yes. In fact, it’s quite probable.” Dr. Greenfield replaced his glasses. “Amnesia can leave holes in the memory, with no predicting where those holes will appear. The location of the gaps can be as random as the holes in Swiss cheese. In fact, we call it Swiss cheese memory.”

  Terrific. Freaking wonderful. “So she might remember the election results, but not the fact that she’s taken a lover?”

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  To his credit, Greenfield’s gaze remained steady, but Ray could read his eyes. Faint embarrassment, carefully masked empathy for the cuckolded husband.

  “Or she may not have forgotten Romeo at all, right, Doc?” he rasped. “Just the fact that she told me about him.”

  “That’s also a possibility,” the neurologist conceded. “Whatever the case, Detective, I can vouch for the fact that she seems genuinely anxious to see you. She’s very much in need of some sympathy and support.”

  Ray made no comment, keeping his face carefully blank.

  “I should add that new memories are especially vulnerable, since it takes a few days for your brain to move them into permanent memory.” Dr. Greenfield hunched forward again. “Do you use a computer, Mr. Morgan?”

  Ray struggled to follow. “Of course I do. Who doesn’t?”

  “Well, to make a very crude analogy, fresh events, whatever might have happened in the last couple of days, are to your brain what random-access memory, or RAM, is to your computer. If the computer unexpectedly loses power before a bit of data gets stored on the hard drive, it’s lost. You can boot up again, but whatever was in the RAM has been wiped out. Thus, with any loss of consciousness, it’s possible to lose memories that were in transition.”

  Great. She’d probably forgotten she’d dumped him.

  Ray stood. “Well, no time like the present, is there, Doc? Let’s go see my darling wife.”

  Dr. Greenfield’s eyes widened. “Surely you don’t plan to tell her ... I mean, you won’t‌—”

  “Won’t what? Suggest she call her boyfriend so she can cry on his shoulder instead?” Ray drew himself up, growing in height and girth, and let his expression go flat in the way he knew inspired fear. Bad cop to badder cop. “Why shouldn’t I? She chose him.”

  Dr. Greenfield looked singularly unintimidated, no doubt because he’d already seen the raw edge of Ray’s anguish.

  Damn you, Grace, how could you do this to me?

  “The fact remains that she seems to need you right now. She’s quite distraught. The last thing she needs is to be upset any further. If a diagnosis of retrograde amnesia is confirmed, I’d like to give her a chance to recover her memories on her own.” Dr. Greenfield’s intense gaze bored into Ray. “Can I have your cooperation on that point?”

  Ray stared back at the doctor, unblinking. “I hear you, Doc. Now, take me to her.”

  Grace Morgan felt like a dog’s breakfast.

  Despite the painkillers the nurse had given her, everything she owned seemed to hurt, albeit in a distant way, and her head ached with a dull persistence. But she hadn’t cried.

  In fact, she seemed unable to cry. Instead of tears, there was just a hot, heavy misery in her chest. If only Ray would come. If he were here with her, she could cry rivers.

  She’d cry for her beloved Mustang, shockingly crumpled now, a red husk of twisted metal they’d had to open like a sardine can. How had she come out of it alive?

  She’d cry for her carelessness.

  She’d cry for scaring Ray, and for scaring herself.

  Ray. He would gather her close and soothe her while the pain seeped out, soaking his shirt. He would lend her his strength, his toughness. He’d kiss her so carefully and sweetly....

  She could almost cry, just thinking about it. Almost.

  Ray, where are you?

  On cue, the door swung open to admit her husband. Her heart lightened at the sight of him, so strong, so solid. His shoulders seemed to fill even this institutional-size doorway.

  If she felt bad, he looked worse. Haggard. And for the first time she could remember in the six years she’d known him, he looked positively rumpled, and his face was shadowed with stubble as though he’d missed his second shave of the day.

  Poor pet. He must have been so worried.

  “Ray.” Her right arm hindered by IV lines, she reached across her body with her left arm. He took her hand, but there was something wrong. He looked ... funny. Guarded. Wrong.

  Oh, Lord, was she dying after all? Was her brain irrevocably damaged and nobody wanted to tell her? She could be hemorrhaging right now, her brain swelling out of control. Maybe that’s why her head hurt. Maybe....

  Then he touched her forehead, brushing aside the fringe of hair peeping out from under the bandage, his gentleness dispelling her crazy impression.

  “You all right?”

  She would be now. “Yeah, I’m all right. Unless you know something I don’t.”

  That look was back on his face again. “What do you mean?”

  “They didn’t send you in here to tell me they mixed up the charts, by any chance? That my brain is Jell-O after all?”

  He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “No, your head is fine, as far as they can tell.”

  She drew his hand to her cheek, pressing it there with her own palm. Some of the pain abated. “That’s what they told me, too, but you’d never know it from the way I feel.”

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  She swallowed hard, her throat tight with the need to cry. “I rolled the Mustang.”

  “Like a cowboy’s cigarette, to quote Quigg.” Another ghost of a smile curved his lips. Lips he hadn’t yet pressed to hers.

  She smiled tremulously. “I guess I’m lucky, huh?”

  “Very lucky.”

  The tears welled, scalding, ready to spill. “I really loved that car.”

  “Something tells me you could love another one.”

  Again that twisting of his lips. It wasn’t humor that lit his eyes. What? A vague, formless anxiety rose in her breast.

  “A newer model, with fewer miles on the odometer. Or maybe something faster, flashier.”

  She wasn’t imagining things. His tone was ... off. What was it she was hearing? Accusation? Grace blinked. “Are you very angry? About the car, I mean?”

  He seemed to swallow with difficulty, and his hand tightened on her chin. “Grace, I don’t give a damn about the car.”

  For the first time since he entered the room, she finally saw what she expected to see in his face. To hell with the car. You’re okay. You’re safe, his eyes said. Her sense of strangeness dissipated.

  “I was so scared.”

  He pulled her into his arms. The dam broke and her tears spilled over at last.

  They kept Grace overnight for observation.

  Ray stayed, planting himself in the single chair by her bed. Once he dozed off, waking when the night nurse came in for yet another check. At eight o’clock, he left Grace to her breakfast and went down to the
lobby to find a pay phone.

  He was a fool, plain and simple. He knew it, but knowing didn’t seem to help. He was going to take her home anyway.

  Of course, it wasn’t like he had a helluva lot of alternatives. He couldn’t send her home to her mother, that frozen excuse for a human being, even supposing Elizabeth Dempsey would take her daughter in. Grace’s father had died two years ago, completing the retreat from an imperious wife which Ray figured must have begun minutes after Grace’s conception.

  No, there was no place for Grace to go. Not in her current condition.

  Ray dropped his quarter and punched in the number, kneading the tense muscles at the back of his neck as he waited for his Sergeant to answer. It was likely to be a short-lived arrangement anyway, having Grace back home. When she didn’t show up for her rendezvous, no doubt lover boy would come looking‌—‌

  “Quigley.”

  “Quigg, it’s me.”

  “About time you checked in. How’s it going?”

  “Grace is good. Concussed and sore as hell, but okay.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been getting regular updates. But that’s not what I meant.”

  Ray bit back a sigh. “Is this where I’m supposed to ask what you did mean?”

  “Last night you were ready to let her rot in the lockup.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Pain shot up to the base of his skull, and Ray massaged his neck again. “Biggest favor I could do for the motoring public, with that lead foot of hers.”

  “Except you don’t know how to be mean to Grace. Leastways, not before yesterday.”

  “Yeah, well.” Ray rubbed at a scuff on the tiled floor with the toe of his Nikes. There was a pause at the other end of the line, no doubt so Quigg could digest that pithy comment.

  “I think you should take some time off,” Quigg said at last.

  “That’s actually why I’m calling. I’ll need a day or so to get Grace settled.”

  “I was thinking more in terms of weeks.”

  “Weeks?” The idea of spending days at home with Grace as she recovered her mobility‌—‌and her memory‌—‌filled him with cold dread. Not that it would take long. Even if nature didn’t cooperate, Grace’s paramour was bound to show up to hurry the process. Ray had been counting on putting in long days on the job, both before and after Grace’s veil of forgetfulness fell‌—‌or was ripped‌—‌away.