by Beth Ciotta
She shrugged. “Sara’s shy. Izzy doesn’t understand shy. As for Jonas, he doesn’t know what he’s got.”
Ace settled back in his chair. “He’ll come around.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Just then the music mellowed. A ballad. Couples latched on to one another. Grace saw Mick coming her way, that glassy but determined look in his eyes. She wanted him to look at her the way he used to. Like a pal to clown around with. She grabbed Ace’s hand. “Let’s dance.”
“But you don’t dance.”
“The Grace LaRue I know has never made a rash decision in her life.”
She jerked him out of his chair and onto the floor. “I changed my mind.”
RUFUS KNEW HE was drunk off his ass. He struggled to maintain his balance as Grace tugged him onto the crowded dance floor. Near as he could tell, “espresso with a twist” was some sort of killer rum straight up. Lethal. That much had been clear after the first sip. He hadn’t planned to get trashed, but Izzy kept the espresso coming. Her friends kept distracting him with their views on free-loving bohemians. “Oh, to be Isadora Duncan,” Miriam had cooed. Then there was that cigarette girl with legs up to her neck.
Finally, Elroy had sidled over, and Izzy had latched on to him like a mink stole. Rufus had to admit, he’d breathed a sigh of relief. Izzy’s hand had slid so far up his thigh, if Velma hadn’t knocked into them and tumbled into his lap, Izzy might have grabbed him and never let go. She was one determined dame. Dame. What a great word. He grinned. Maybe if she weren’t a ghost . . .
Then Grace had stomped over, and every other female in the room had paled in comparison. He snickered at his pun. Grace’s face shone with a healthy dose of the outdoors and sunshine. No makeup to cover the golden flecks scattered across her nose.
He’d tried to keep focused on why he might be here. He’d asked Izzy about herself. Had asked her friend at least three questions about Izzy. Judging from Grace’s answers, Izzy had simply followed her heart down the wrong matrimonial aisles. Nothing earth-shattering so far, considering she would marry twice more.
She didn’t hate Jonas’s wife. She just didn’t “get” Sara. Dead end there.
He spied Roy Tadmucker, sitting at a corner table, sipping from his coffee cup and watching Izzy slow sway with some handsome young man. Roy’s own dark hair was sprinkled with gray, but he still looked spry. More importantly, he had kind eyes. Rufus wondered if Roy was the key to Izzy’s regret. Husband Number Three. Of course, Izzy didn’t know that yet. Did Izzy’s moral mistake, the royal screw-up of her life, have something to do with Roy?
He’d work on that angle tomorrow. Right now, the room was spinning and he had better things to do—like slow dance with Grace LaRue. He’d been waiting all night for an excuse to get her into his arms.
Moving among the Atlantic City elite, all dressed to the nines, he should’ve looked out of place. He was from the twenty-first century. Yet Grace was the one who stuck out like a sore thumb, dressed in her khakis, those clunky boots, and the goggles pushed up on her head. But no one gave her a second look. In fact, they seemed to be pointedly ignoring her.
If she was aware of being snubbed, she didn’t show it. Her confidence was as thick as the cigarette smoke in the room. Maybe he was imagining things.
When she stopped and turned, he pulled her into his embrace. Unlike the other couples on the floor who danced with one arm extended, he wrapped both arms around Grace. She was so stiff, it felt as if he were dancing with a two-by-four. Her husky voice echoed in his mind. “I don’t dance.” She’d meant she didn’t know how.
He glanced down. Her arms were ramrod straight at her sides. He reached down, clasped her hands, then wrapped her arms around his neck. “Lesson number one.” Then he wrapped his arms around her compact body and pulled her close. “Lesson number two.” He pressed her head to his shoulder. “Relax.”
She tried to push back. “I can’t breathe.”
He held on tightly. “Relax. Listen to the music. Imagine what you feel like when you’re flying your ship.”
She drew a breath, loosened a bit. He stroked her back. God, it was hot in this joint. Joint. He grinned again. He enjoyed the feel of her, amazed that she hadn’t slapped him for taking liberties. Liberties. He nuzzled her ear, daring a slug. She smelled of sunshine, sweat and . . . gasoline?
“Kiss me.”
Rufus pulled back, certain he’d misheard. The music had reached a climactic swell. “What?”
“Kiss me,” she repeated.
It sounded like an order, which would have turned him on if she weren’t looking at another man. A dark haired, good-looking man with piercing blue eyes and exquisite taste in clothing. Not to mention fists like meat hooks. He stood to the left of the bandstand, watching them with intent eyes and looking as if he owned the place. Or maybe he just ran it. The thug? “Mick Mahoney, I presume?”
She glared up at Rufus. “It’s like Pop Pop always said—if you want something done, do it yourself.”
She grabbed two fistfuls of his hair and kissed him square on the mouth. Though the aggressor, she kissed like an inexperienced teenager. He pulled her closer and opened his mouth, teasing her pressed lips until she parted them. Her mouth was warm, soft. So unexpected. He felt her body sag in his arms. The kiss deepened.
He actually saw bursts of color behind his closed lids. Fireworks? No way . . .
The excited shriek of the crowd startled him. Whistles. Sirens.
“Raaaaaaaid!”
Rufus felt a strong hand slam down on his shoulder and yank him from Grace. Mick Mahoney grabbed her hand and dragged her toward the bandstand. She struggled.
Rufus shadowed them. “Let her go.”
Mahoney shot him a venomous look. “Lay off.”
Grace broke loose and tried to run back into the frenzy. “Izzy!”
Mick snatched her up. “James will bail her out.”
A gunshot rang out. Then another.
Rufus reached automatically for Grace as Mick pushed her toward him. “Get her out of here,” Mick said. “Follow the musicians. They know the way.”
Mind reeling, Rufus tossed her, kicking and screaming, over his shoulder and followed the saxophone player through a secret door. Something told him he hadn’t seen the last of Mick Mahoney.
Chapter Seven
GRACE GUNNED THE car down Atlantic Avenue, her muscles tight with fury. They’d manhandled her. Treated her like a . . . a girl! Her blood heated at the memory of Mick snatching her up and handing her off to Ace. Of Ace tossing her over his shoulder and whisking her out of the chaotic speak. She could almost envision them thumping fists to chest. Me, big strong man. Me save little woman. Thank God Joystick and his boys hadn’t been there yet to witness her humiliation.
“Slow down,” Ace said.
“Who’s gonna stop me? The cops?” Just about now the gumshoes were probably corralling Izzy and her friends into the paddy wagon. Grace told herself not to worry. It wasn’t as if Izzy had never been inside the clink. Or that she’d be there long. Mick was right. Jimmy would bail her out. If not Jimmy, then Jonas. The Van Buren siblings looked out for one another come hell or high water. All for one and one for all. The one constant in their family life that she respected.
“You’re upset. Maybe you should let me drive.”
“You’re drunk. Maybe you should go to hell.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“Who?”
“Your ‘special man.’”
She jerked the car right onto Albany Avenue, clipping a curb. “What?”
“Your boyfriend. Mick what’s his name. Looks like a guy who can take care of himself.”
“Mick’s not my boyfriend.”
He grunted. “Could’ve fooled me.”
&nb
sp; She gripped the wheel tightly, concentrating on the headlights’ beams slashing the narrow road. She refused to look at Ace as her thoughts flew from the raid to their kiss. Her cheeks burned. No wonder they had treated her like a girl. She’d danced like a girl. Kissed like a girl. Acted rashly like a girl.
Mick’s marriage talk had sent her into a tailspin. Kissing Ace had seemed the easiest way to get Mick off her back. Instead it had made him jealous. Not what she wanted. Worse, she wondered if Izzy had witnessed the kiss. If she had, she’d probably just laughed at how ridiculous her friend looked in her trousers and goggles, stiff and unsure, with her arms around Ace. Not to mention, it was partly Izzy’s fault she’d kissed Ace.
As for Ace . . . where had he learned to slow dance like that? So close. So . . . intimate. Relax, he’d said. Was he kidding? He’d pulled her into his arms, and she’d forgotten to breathe. When he’d slid his tongue into her mouth . . .
She shook her head.
From the corner of her eye, she saw him slumped in silence against the passenger door. Was he thinking she was an amateur? Was he glad they’d been interrupted? Wondering made her crazy. Exactly why she never got involved with men. Pop Pop was right. Romance messed with your focus. Here she was, worrying about what a man thought of how she kissed. What should she care what Ace thought? She’d used him to give Mick a message. Period.
So why was she dwelling on their kiss?
Because it was her first.
Well, the first she’d instigated.
Her first kiss actually had been with Mick—under the boardwalk, while learning to inhale the ciggies. She hadn’t liked smoking. There was something sacred about fresh air. Nor had she liked it when Mick planted one on her kisser just after she finished choking on a Lucky. It hadn’t been a horrible thing. It just hadn’t been something to go gaga over.
She supposed it made sense now, Mick’s having a crush on her. He must’ve read something into that stupid kiss, even though she’d socked him hard in the jaw. Even though it was thirteen years ago. Which explained, though not really, their second kiss six days ago. The one where he’d stuck his tongue into her mouth. Now that had been a horrible thing.
Funny, Ace had pulled the same stunt, but there hadn’t been one blessed unnatural thing about it. She’d liked his kiss. A French kiss.
Had it shown? Did he know? What was Ace reading into it? Worse, what was she reading into it?
“If you’d wanted to make Mahoney jealous, all you had to do was ask.”
Her neck hair stood. There was something predatory in Ace’s voice. Whether it was anger or an invitation, she couldn’t tell. With his voice so low, the car so dark, their thighs so close, she couldn’t think straight. It was so . . . so intimate. That word again. Her knuckles turned white under the death grip she had on the wheel.
“Are you a Fed?” she asked.
“What?”
“A prohibition agent. An undercover Fed. Did you use us to get to Mick? Did you sneak away to make a call? Tip off the cops?” Had she been so blinded by all the proposing and kissing that she’d missed something critical? Her gut was usually better than that. Especially in a crisis. Pop Pop had trained her to think on the edge of the worst. She couldn’t afford to lose that ability now.
“No.”
“For a man with amnesia, you sound sure of yourself.”
He didn’t flinch. “I’m not a Fed.”
“Then who are you?”
“A man looking for answers.”
He sounded so earnest. So . . . tired. Again she spared him a glance. Whatever aggression he’d worked up had disappeared behind heavy-lidded eyes. She didn’t think he was lying. At least not about being a Fed.
His hooded gaze lingered on her mouth.
She jerked her gaze to the road, leaning her head out the side to breathe in a heavy dose of fresh air. She looked over and saw Ace doing the same. Head out the side, trying to clear his head.
He looked exhausted. Rumpled. Sexy.
Sexy. She grimaced. Another one of those words. Like intimate.
Men were her co-workers. Her friends. Her rivals. She didn’t act like a girl, so they didn’t treat her like one—despite the rowdy pilots she’d once heard snickering, claiming she’d change her tune once she got a little nookie.
Hard as nails, Mick had called her.
She preferred confident. Even fearless. She didn’t question her purpose. She knew her place was in the sky. It was where she lived. Where she’d die. On the ground, she was a solo act. After all these years, she couldn’t believe her friends didn’t get it. Or maybe they had, until the accident.
The memory of that day and Tuck’s subsequent newspaper interviews made her want to jump out of her skin. She gritted her teeth against her fury. Against the lingering sensation of Ace’s kiss. The latter potentially as ruinous as the first.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” she mumbled to herself.
THE LIQUOR THAT, at first, had made Rufus playful now lulled him. Wind rushed in his ears as they sped down the dark, deserted road. He held his open hand out in the thick summer night, heavy air and bugs whistling through his fingers. He barely had the energy to lift his head from the door, the drone of the motor soothing his nerves. Or maybe it was the afterglow of a sweet kiss. He loved to kiss. Found it as erotic as any other close physical activity. But he’d rarely experienced sweet. He purposely kept his distance from sweet. Sweet meant broken hearts. Somehow, he’d felt Grace wasn’t so breakable. So he’d savored the sweetness. He didn’t want to think about the fireworks.
“You always drive fast, don’t you?” he said.
“Never feels fast enough.”
He heard the tension in her voice. “Hoping the car will take off into the sky?”
“Sometimes I wish I could always be up there.”
He knew the feeling. He’d always wanted to fly. As a boy he’d spent summers at Coney Island riding the Cyclone and flying his homemade kites—box kites, eddy kites, wishing a million times that he was one of those paper-and-wood contraptions. Free. Soaring. “Did you fly kites when you were a kid?”
“Who didn’t?” Her serious, husky voice proved as intoxicating as Mahoney’s rum. “When I was eight, I tried to fly with one. I fashioned a kite about six feet across, climbed up onto the barn roof, held onto the kite’s frame, and took a running leap. I figured my momentum and a strong north wind would be enough to keep me airborne.”
Rufus remembered reading a similar story about Roscoe Turner, a master aviator, who, by his calculations, was only five years Grace’s senior. No doubt a thousand other adventurous kids had pulled the same stunt. Hell, if it hadn’t been for his mother’s threats to send him to Catholic school, he might have tried it. “And?” he prompted.
“I dropped like an anchor. Landed in an eight-foot haystack, suffering disappointment and a mangled glider.”
Feeling a kindred spark, he pushed his drunken body straighter and studied her. Kids were kids, he supposed, no matter the decade. His gaze lingered on her charismatic silhouette. She leaned her head out the side to look up at the stars. She drove flawlessly. He thought about her plane, the open-air cockpit, and how pilots peered over the edges to see what they needed. No radar. No gauges. No radio. Just the naked eye and raw nerve.
She jerked upright, swerving to avoid something scurrying across the road. He lost his balance and knocked into her, his head resting on her arm. He didn’t move. He was playing it by ear. Thinking about that kiss. He recalled her mumbled comment about smoke and fire. “You smelling smoke, Grace?”
She didn’t say anything at first. He felt her muscles contract beneath his cheek as she flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. She elbowed him off. “I don’t know who you are, but I know you’ve been around. I know you know airplanes.”
He tensed. “How so?”
“Your leather jacket. An aviator jacket. The pin on your lapel.”
His wings. A gift from his sister after he’d earned his pilot’s license.
“Then, back at the speak, you referred to my Jenny as a ship. That’s aviator talk.”
He’d read the term enough times in biographies of 1920s barnstormers. He supposed it had been second nature to use it with Grace. “Thoughts pop into my head now and then,” he said, wondering how much to tell without raising more suspicion. “I think . . . I might be a pilot.” There. He’d done it—opened a specific line of discussion. Let’s talk planes.
She stared ahead for an eternity. When he was about to backpedal, she finally spoke, her tone slow and skeptical. “If you’re a pilot, where’s your plane?”
Uh-oh. “I don’t know.”
“How’d you end up on Izzy’s front lawn?”
“I don’t know.” He was beginning to sound like Bookman.
“Right, the amnesia thing.”
“Maybe I crashed. Hit my head. That would account for my memory loss.” Smooth.
“Uh-huh. You know, Ace, I’ve decided I believe you about not being a Fed. You remind me more of Mick. Someone who’s spent a lifetime working angles. Take this amnesia thing for instance . . .” She shook her head. “I think it’s a crock. A cover. I think you’re hiding from someone. A loan shark? A girlfriend’s angry husband? I don’t really care as long as you’re not out to hurt my friends.”
“I’m not out to hurt your friends.”
“Good to know.”
His muscles relaxed. He had no desire to get tangled in an identity snafu, not when Newborne could whisk him back to the future tomorrow. Now, at least, he could act more like himself, maybe enjoy some of his misfortune. Though he didn’t appreciate the comparison to Mahoney. He wasn’t sure he liked the man. He definitely didn’t like the way he looked at Grace. But he did appreciate Grace’s eat-my-dust attitude and her rabid protectiveness of her friends. She was, he realized, a lot like him.
