She owed him, she realized sadly. He'd saved her life more than once and the lives of the people on her team. He was looking out for them even now, even thinking she hated him and blamed him for the death of her family.
She couldn't let that go on. She realized it wasn't the reason she was so angry with him. She was angry because he'd lied to her. He'd allowed her to fall in love with him without being honest with her. And because what she'd taken as signs of love from him – the kindness, the gentleness, the concern, the intensely personal stake he seemed to have in her own well-being – she now saw as nothing but the actions of a man with a guilty conscience. She couldn't stand the idea of being nothing but a responsibility to him. A wrong to somehow make right. Someone he pitied. Her face burned at the idea even now. At the way she'd gone so eagerly into his arms. All the things she'd felt, things she'd shown him and said to him. Why had he ever let things go so far between them? She would never understand that.
But she owed him the rest. For all he'd done to keep her and her people safe over the years. And it wasn't the kind of message to be delivered by letter or phone. She had to stand in front of him and look him in the eye when she said it.
Maybe she could do it without crying, without yelling at him, without pouring out all the feelings she still had for him. Regardless, she had to go.
* * *
When she got to D.C., he wasn't at his apartment or his office. She considered calling the number he'd said was manned twenty-four hours a day, but she wasn't looking for someone to come rescue her, and if she went through that number, he would worry. If she left a message that nothing was wrong, that she merely needed to talk to him, she wondered if he'd come after the way she'd left things between them.
Finally she drove to Dan and Jamie's house. Jamie opened the front door, and all Grace said was "I can't find him."
"He's in Colorado. In the mountains. A family friend has a cabin there. We've been going since we were kids." Jamie brought her inside, pulled a slip of paper from a message pad by the phone and started writing. "It's not the easiest place to find, but he hasn't been answering the phone or returning any messages I've left. If you really want to see him, I'd recommend you just show up."
If Grace wanted to find him still there, she supposed his sister meant.
"All right. Thank you. I just … I have to talk to him."
Jamie nodded and stood there, staring.
"I'm sorry," she said finally. "I just can't get over the fact that you were that little girl I saw in the newspaper photograph all those years ago. I didn't want to say anything before. Sean told me not to dare to bring it up," Jamie said. "But I remember how worried we all were, how close we'd come to losing Sean, and that I just didn't think I could bear that. They kept flashing the picture of you and him on the news. My mother said you'd been hurt, and that you'd lost your whole family. She said we should all say a prayer for you, and I told her that I knew you'd be okay. Because you had Sean with you."
"What?"
"I knew he'd take good care of you."
"Sean?"
"Didn't he even tell you that much?" Jamie asked. "Didn't you recognize him? Didn't you even look at the picture? Or read the report Dan gave you?"
"I… It had a transcript of his testimony. I started it, but…" It had been awful. A startlingly factual, emotionless account of what he'd done that day. A scathingly brutal dissection of all he thought he'd done wrong. "I couldn't stand to finish it."
She couldn't stand the pain etched into those words.
"You never even looked at the photo? It's you and him, Grace. He was going to do everything he could to stop that man from blowing up the building. He was running for him when the bomb went off. God, if he'd been any faster, we'd have lost him, too. As it was, he was close enough to the blast that he spent six days in the hospital himself. He carried you out of that building. You and three others before he collapsed himself."
Grace couldn't say anything. She couldn't.
Every time she'd ever seen that photo, she'd looked away as quickly as possible. She never wanted to remember that day, had steadfastly ignored reading any accounts of it until Dan had shoved that report into her hand. And even that had been an analysis, a dry accounting of the facts and assessment of blame, of which there had been plenty to go around.
But she thought of it now. That day. Deafening noise. Heat. Fire. Smoke.
She'd been terrified, and if she closed her eyes and tried very hard to go back to that day, she thought she remembered being scooped up off the ground. Remembered strong arms around her. A voice, a deeply reassuring voice, promising her that he was going to take care of her, that he would get her out of there. She'd wanted her father, her mother. Told him they were inside. And he'd told her not to worry, that he would go back for them. Obviously, he had. Back into hell to get them, and it seemed he'd lived in that hell ever since.
"I have to go," she said. "I have to find him."
* * *
She took a late-night flight to Colorado, then set off in a rented Bronco just as the sun was coming up the next morning.
She thought the drive would give her plenty of time to work out what she had to say to him, but she was too nervous. It meant too much to her. Two months away from the man hadn't made her immune to him at all. Her hands were shaking, her arms, her entire body. Jamie said he'd been here ever since Dan had called to say he'd gotten Grace safely out of San Reino, and Grace was worried.
Right before she'd left, Jamie had said, "He likes to think he's invincible, but he's not."
Just a man, Grace remembered.
She would tell him that. Now that she wasn't so hurt, so shocked, she doubted anyone could have single-handedly stopped a madman with a bomb and saved her father. Maybe if she said it, he'd believe it. Maybe they could both start to put this behind them.
Grace pulled into a small clearing with a cabin in the midst of it, smoke coming from the chimney, a big Ford Expedition parked in front of it. There was snow everywhere, but thankfully none falling from the sky yet today.
She got out of the truck and found silence greeting her, stepped closer to the house, so she could see past the clump of trees to the mountains behind the cabin. And found them breathtaking. She stood, just breathing in the air, taking in the broad expanse of sky and the rocky, snow-covered peaks.
"Grace?" a deep, familiar voice that did odd things to her insides, said tentatively.
It couldn't be him, she thought. He didn't have a tentative bone in his body. But when she turned around, there he was. In a pair of worn jeans, a flannel shirt and no coat, his dark hair damp and curling a bit, his eyes so bright in this sunshine that it hurt to look at them.
It just plain hurt to look at him, she found.
Something squeezed tightly in the pit of her stomach, a knot of pain, unfurling slowly and seeping out, like the smoke curling out of the chimney behind him.
He looked different, she realized. Like he'd lost weight. He'd never be thin, but he looked … thinner, in an unhealthy way. The skin stretched more tightly over the bones in his face and his arms, the lines deeper at the corners of his eyes. From the shadows beneath them, she'd bet he hadn't been sleeping well, either. And he was as still as she was, as cautious as he might be around someone or something he thought might lash out at him at any moment. As she'd done before she left.
Which was why she was here. To make her apologies and go.
Grace nearly laughed at how utterly ridiculous that idea was now. She'd come thousands of miles telling herself that, but one look at him and she knew it wasn't true. Not at all.
"What's so funny, Grace?"
She shook her head back and forth. "I've just been lying to myself again."
"Oh?"
She nodded. She hadn't come here merely to clear up one little thing and go. She'd come here because she wanted desperately to see him. To try to make some sense out of all that had happened. She'd come praying there was an explanation other than t
he one she'd come to on her own, for what he'd done, for the way he'd hurt her. She'd come because she needed him. Desperately.
Maybe she had no pride, either. Maybe if all he felt for her was a mistaken sense of obligation, a debt of honor, she would take that and all that came with it. Be with him, for as long as he thought it took him to repay the debt. Because he'd been the only bright spot in her life for the last ten years. The only thing she'd looked forward to. The only thing that interested her, intrigued her, excited her. He'd been her reason for wanting to stay alive, and she'd crammed more living into the few days she'd spent with him than she had in the last decade. How in the world could he think he was just a man, if he could do all of that for her? She had to find the courage to tell him, as soon as she cleared up this thing with him and her family.
"Do you think I could come inside?" she asked.
He turned, gestured for her to precede him. She climbed the three steps to the small deck overlooking the mountains, and he reached around her – his hand brushing against hers – to open the door for her. She shivered at the slight touch and felt him stiffen behind her and draw away.
Oh, Sean, she thought. Did it hurt him that much, too? Just to touch her?
He took her coat, carefully avoiding touching her again, and offered her coffee. She wrapped her cold hands around the cup and sipped, all the while looking at him. She could have sworn those were nerves that had him tapping his fingers along the countertop, hardly able to keep still. Him? Nervous?
So, it meant something to him, too?
Grace got herself back on track. First things first. The guilt. How could she make him understand? Because if they didn't get past this, they had nowhere to go. No possibilities at all. Except a lifetime without him. And then she remembered how she'd finally seen it herself.
"I lost a patient a couple of days ago," she said.
"Oh?"
"A boy. Fourteen."
He waited, arms folded across his chest now, one hip cocked against the cabinet on which he was leaning.
"He'd taken a fall, slid off the remains of a roof, and when they brought him into the clinic, he seemed okay. I checked him out as best I could, but we don't have the kind of equipment that can look inside people and pick up those subtle signs of bleeding. The slow, seeping kind that can kill people just as effectively, given time. And we were swamped, as usual. His parents took him home, and the next morning, they rushed him back. Turned out he was bleeding internally. By the time he felt bad enough to come back, there was nothing we could do that mattered. We couldn't pump the blood into him fast enough. His pressure crashed, and his heart just gave out. And I felt so guilty—"
"Grace, I'm sure you did everything you could."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I know you. I can't believe you'd ever do anything less than your absolute best. Especially when a teenage boy was concerned."
"It doesn't seem to help," she said.
He looked puzzled, uneasy, oddly reserved. "Why did you come here?"
She held up a hand to silence him. "I'm almost there. I had to tell his parents. His father was so hurt, so angry and in shock. He lashed out at me. Made me think of how I must have been with you when you finally told me what you did in Rome."
"Why did you come here, Grace?"
"I thought I owed you—"
"You don't owe me anything," he said flatly. "You can get in your car right now and go."
She flinched at that, at the harsh tone he'd never used with her before. But she hadn't come this far to turn around and run the first time things got difficult.
"I listened to you. You just had to tell me about that day, and I listened," she reminded him, because she knew that would work. His sense of honor was unquestionable. "I think you owe it to me to listen now."
He let out a harsh, ragged breath and seemed to steel himself for the rest.
Oh, Sean, she thought. Dan was right. He hated himself. He thought she hated him, too, for something that she now realized she could not blame him. She hated the idea that she'd hurt him so badly, that he'd been hurting for as long as she had over this. It seemed they'd both wasted so much time.
"I was shocked by what you told me that day. I was angry, and I was hurt and…" And she'd thought she was watching every dream she ever had of a life with him disappear. "I wasn't thinking at all, and I just didn't understand. But I'm afraid I said something about hating you and blaming you for the fact that I lost my family. And that's just not true."
He gave her a look that said it didn't matter in the least. Of course, it wouldn't. Not when he blamed himself.
"It was like me and that boy, Sean. You have to see that. You have to know it, somewhere deep inside. Sometimes people just die. I've seen it happen too many times. Heard too many stories about it from too many grieving relatives and friends just trying to make sense of it all. And you know what? There's no sense to it. Sometimes it's like we all have to step up to the table and roll the dice, see whose turn it is to go. It's as random as that."
He shook his head back and forth.
"Why do you think I was so petrified to ever love anyone again? I know how capricious life really is. One minute, you're here. The next minute, you're gone. And sometimes it's just the difference between being in a certain spot now or a split second later. So many times, I've had people drag someone to me who's just taken a bullet. They drag him in hoping I can help, and the whole time they're babbling on about how he was just standing right next to them. How is it that the one man is dead and the other isn't, when all of six inches separated them? Sean, for that boy to die, so many things had to come together in just that way. And on that day, all of them did. He was the one. He died."
"It's not the same thing," he argued.
"For him, I was just one of those pieces, and that's what you were where my family was concerned. You were one of those little pieces."
"Don't make excuses for me, Grace. It's not necessary."
"You don't make excuses for anyone. Neither do I, and even if I did, I'm hardly likely to do it for you in this case. This is my family we're talking about," she said. "Did you do the best you could in that moment? Not now that you've had twenty years to analyze it to death and know how it was going to end, but in those seconds when it was happening? Did you do the best you could?"
"It wasn't enough," he said raggedly.
"Sometimes our best still isn't enough. Even your best effort, which I know was considerable. Do you think maybe that's the problem? I had trouble believing you were just a man. I think you do, too. We all have limits. We all fall short at times."
"I know I'm far from perfect, Grace."
"Not far from it," she tried to reassure him. "Just not absolutely perfect. But you don't have to be perfect for me."
He closed his eyes, and the hand at his side was balled into a fist. She went to him. It was so good to go to him, to take that fisted hand in hers and try to soothe him just a bit with her touch. She thought she could feel the pain coming out of him, rolling off of his body in waves, and she definitely felt him go even more tense at her touch.
"You said more than once that you'd do anything for me," she reminded him, because he was a man who didn't make promises lightly.
"I would," he said tightly.
"Then I want you to forgive yourself."
"Grace—"
"That's what I want."
"Don't pity me," he said. "That's the last thing I want from you."
"Fine, I won't. Don't you pity me either. It's the last thing I want from you."
"It's not pity. I feel responsible. That I owe you."
"Then consider your debt paid," she said. "You've saved my life more than once. Probably the first time on the day the bomb went off. Were you ever going to tell me that? That you're the one who pulled me out of what was left of that building? And don't you dare try to tell me that didn't matter."
"It was damned little and too late," he said bitterly.
&
nbsp; "Saving my life was such a small thing?"
"You were far enough from the bomb that—"
"Don't tell me I wasn't in any danger. Don't tell me there are tons of men who would have gone into that building when it was on fire, smoke pouring out and the walls coming down. I know that's not true. And I know you're what I've always thought you were—"
"Grace—"
"What you've always been, your whole life. An incredibly brave man."
"You can't stand me, sweetheart."
"I can't stand the idea that you pity me. Or maybe that all you feel for me is a sense of obligation, misplaced at that. What a combination, pity, obligation and a bit of sexual attraction thrown in to confuse things even more."
"You think you and me were about nothing but great sex and me trying to pay a debt?" he said incredulously.
"I don't know what it was about," she cried. "Except that I thought you were going to be everything to me."
And then she'd said it all, laid bare her whole heart and done her best to make him believe she no longer blamed him for something for which he insisted on blaming himself.
She waited, hoped, maybe even prayed. He didn't give an inch, looked as determined and as closed-off to her as ever.
God, he was going to let her go again. She could see it in his eyes.
"Dammit." Grace bit her lip and looked to the door. "I don't know what else to say."
And still he said nothing.
She had her hand on the knob, twisting it, tears streaming down her cheeks. She didn't hear him make a sound, could have sworn he was still halfway across the room, when he came up behind her.
"Wait."
He sounded like he might have choked on the word. She leaned against the door for support, her legs shaking, and she couldn't stop crying, stop pleading with the whole universe to stop him from letting her go.
"What are you going to do?" he asked, his voice low and strained.
"I don't know." In truth, she was as lost as she'd ever been in her life.
"God," he muttered. "I've stood here and watched you walk away from me twice already. I thought the first time was going to kill me, and the second time, it hurt so bad I wished it would. I don't think I can do it again, Grace. I don't think I can stand it."
HER SECRET GUARDIAN Page 21
