“She didn’t do anything wrong,” he snapped. “She ought to be able to walk to a damn candy machine without always having somebody looking over her shoulder.”
“The other alternative is to change your routines. When I was a cop, we advised people who had been victimized to never take the same way home twice. You’re at a disadvantage because you live on an island with only one route on or off, but if you took a few basic precautions with Emma, you could go a long way toward protecting her.”
“What kind of precautions?”
“Vary the times you leave and the routes you take. Keep her away from large groups of people. Stay close to her at all times.”
“Basically smother her, you mean.”
“I’m sorry there are no easy answers, Dugan. You hired me to keep her safe and I’m just trying to do my job.”
“You could be her bodyguard,” he said suddenly. “Just until this is over and the creeps who took her are behind bars. She likes you and it wouldn’t be the same as having some stranger tailing her all the time.”
She looked out at the water, appalled at the very idea. “No,” she said emphatically. “That’s not part of my job description.”
“But you could do it.”
“I could. But I won’t.”
She prayed he wouldn’t push her on this. Mercifully, after one long, searching look, he said nothing more about it and she breathed a tremendous sigh of relief.
How could she explain to him that being with his daughter even occasionally was difficult enough. Having to shadow her day and night would be torture.
Dear God, she missed Marisa. She filled her lungs with salt-soaked air, hating herself for the melancholy that was a physical ache, but unable to prevent it.
Marisa seemed so close to her here on the water and yet so terribly out of reach.
She had loved the water. Beau used to take them out on his junk heap of a fishing boat whenever the weather was good and the three of them would spend the day watching for dolphins and whales just as Emma watched for mermaids.
She would give anything—anything—for one more day like that.
Instead, she was stuck here with a man she despised and a little girl who broke her heart every time she looked at her.
As if on cue, Emma returned, hands held behind her back.
“What are you hiding?” Jack asked her.
“You have to guess.”
“Is it…an elephant?”
She rolled her eyes. “No.”
“Is it…a new car?”
“Daddy, you’re being silly.”
“I give up, then. What did you buy.”
“It’s a present. For Grace.”
Grace turned warily.
“You gave me four quarters so I bought two of the very same things, one for her and one for me.” In Emma’s chubby little hands were two identical cheap bracelets, braided from colorful string. She thrust one out to Grace. “See, they’re friendship bracelets.”
“I don’t…” Her voice broke off and she just stared at the loop of string. She wanted to push her away, to refuse the gift, but how could she without sounding cruel?
The harder she tried to keep Emma Dugan and her father at arm’s-length, the harder they tried to sneak through her defenses.
“Thank you very much,” she finally said solemnly, taking the offering from the little girl. “Pink and purple are my favorite colors.”
Emma grinned her gap-toothed little grin. “Mine, too! Daddy, will you put them on us?”
She opened her mouth, ready to protest that she could take care of it herself, but the words caught in her throat when she found him watching her intently. His green eyes had lost the coolness she’d seen in the car—now they had warmed to the lush color of maple leaves in July.
An answering heat revved to life in her chest and began to spread outward. Before she could close her hand around it to keep him from taking her gift, the rough pads of his fingers brushed her skin as he pulled the bracelet away from her.
He slipped Emma’s bracelet on her wrist with all the ceremony of a court attendant fitting Cinderella for a glass slipper.
She was so fascinated by the sight of those broad, strong fingers performing the delicate task that she forgot to think of some way to keep him from putting her own bracelet on. All too soon, he turned to her, the entwined strings dangling from his fingers.
“Your turn. Give me your hand.”
Her heart began to pump harder, faster. She didn’t want him touching her again. She didn’t. His touch made her feel too much, and she hated it. “I can do it. Really.”
“No, you can’t.”
She blinked as the full force of his smile hit her straight on, sweet and tantalizing and unbelievably potent. “I can’t?”
“We’ve bought these before, in fact I have a green one just like it on my desk at home. It’s a clever little thing, actually. You have to have someone else adjust it on your wrist, you just can’t do it one-handed. That’s why it’s called a friendship bracelet, since you need a friend to help you put it on. Come on, give me your hand.”
She chewed her lip for a moment then thrust her arm out, knowing she had no choice. Not with both of them watching her so expectantly.
He lifted the sleeve of her borrowed sweater that smelled like him, and took her hand. The bracelet had been made for a child so it took some effort to get it past her fingers, although with all the weight she had lost in the last year, it hung on her bony wrist with room to spare.
Was she imagining things or did his hand linger on hers a bit longer than strictly necessary? He was warm, much warmer than she was. She could feel the heat of him against her skin, and despite her efforts at self-preservation, it lured her like a woodstove on a cold day.
With his head bent over her hand, his scent drifted to her on the sea breeze. Masculine and alluring, with a hint of sandalwood and perhaps a dose of pine, like the towering trees that surrounded his house there on the water.
His neck was tanned and strong, corded with muscle, but she could see where the tan line ended above his hairline. Would that hair be as soft as it looked, like fine suede?
Just before she would have reached her fingers to find out, the ferry horn sounded, deep and loud.
She snatched both hands away from him as if he had just poured hot ash on them and thrust them into the pockets of her borrowed jeans. Even through the layers of cloth she could feel her fingers trembling.
Good heavens. What had she nearly done? Touched him, caressed him. Wanted him.
He might be the enemy. She had to remember that, that this man with the green eyes and the ready smile could be one more cog in the vast criminal wheel that had taken her daughter’s life.
She had to remember the reason she was here with him. And even more important, she had to completely forget that for the first time in a year, she felt alive again.
* * *
Her apartment building was just as grim as he remembered. The same peeling paint, the same rusty swings hanging forlornly from the cracked playground, the same stench of desperation.
“It shouldn’t take me long to pack a suitcase,” Grace said in a low voice so she didn’t disturb Emma, who had conked out the moment they drove off the ferry.
“Take all the time you need.”
Pack up everything, he wanted to say, because I’m sure as hell not letting you come back here.
“Do you think she’ll wake up?”
He glanced in the back seat again. Emma’s head lolled to the side and she was sleeping with her mouth open. It didn’t look the least bit comfortable, but she’d been known to sleep all the way to Oregon like that.
“Once she falls asleep in the car, it takes a foghorn to wake her up again. I can carry her into the house, change her into her pajamas and put her into her bed without her even stirring.”
Grace’s features softened, and her mouth curved up in the barest shadow of a smile. “Marisa…” her voice faltered and sh
e cleared her throat before continuing. “My daughter used to be the same way. She could sleep through anything.”
It was the first time she had voluntarily brought up her daughter’s name with him. Maybe she was finally ready to let him inside those high walls she’d built around herself.
Before he could pursue it, though, and ask her more about her child, she slipped from the car and hurried up the rickety iron steps without a backward glance.
Dammit. The woman was more skittish than a whole blasted herd of wild horses. The minute he started to believe he might be making some small degree of progress gaining her trust, she hightailed it away from him.
Not this time, he decided. He wasn’t going to let her run away this time. He scooped Emma out of the back seat and hefted her over his shoulder, hoping she wouldn’t suddenly decide to turn into a light sleeper tonight of all nights. She stirred a bit, then nestled into the curve of his neck while he climbed the steps to Grace’s apartment.
He didn’t bother to knock, just tried the knob. Ms. Former Cop must have been more overwrought than she was letting on—she hadn’t bothered to lock it behind her, a caution he felt sure was as instinctive to her as breathing.
He pushed the door open and cocked his head, listening. The place was just as depressing as he remembered from before, only this time it had the stale, closed-up air that came from being empty for over a week.
He could hear the soft rustle of movement in the rear of the apartment, in what he assumed was a bedroom, so he gingerly laid Emma on the ugly gold couch, checked to make sure she didn’t awaken, then followed the sound.
He found Grace in the bedroom, with a suitcase already gaping open on the bed. Her back was to him as she sorted through her things inside a drawer of the chipped old bureau.
He started to knock on the doorframe to alert her to his presence, then he froze, his fist hanging in mid-air, as he caught sight of her reflection in the wavy mirror above the dresser.
While she went about the ordinary task of packing up the pieces of her life—the socks and jeans and hairbrushes she would need during her stay in his house—silent tears coursed down her cheeks like slow summer rain.
CHAPTER 7
Panic spurted through him at the sight of her tears.
He was no different from the next man. He would rather bring down a 747 with no landing gear and only one engine in the middle of a frigging ice storm than have to deal with a crying woman.
Before he could take the coward’s way out and figure out how to back away from the room without giving himself away, she sensed his presence. Her head lifted sharply and their eyes met in the mirror, his concerned and edgy and hers suddenly wary.
She whirled to face him and he had a feeling she wasn’t even aware of the tears trickling down her cheeks. It was so incongruous—the glare peeking through the tears—that he would have smiled if not for this heavy ache in his chest.
“What are you doing in here?”
He paused, unsure how to answer her. If he told her he had been worried about her, that he could see how just the mention of her daughter upset her, she probably would deny it.
She definitely wouldn’t welcome the comfort he was all too willing to offer. Grace Solarez struck him as a woman who preferred to do her grieving alone, who didn’t like to show this raw, vulnerable side to anyone, no matter how compassionate that person might be.
He thrust his hands in his pockets. “I thought you might need a little help carrying your things out to the car,” he finally said.
“I suppose it never occurred to you to do something normal for once like, oh, I don’t know, maybe knock first?”
He gave a half-smile. “It occurred to me.” He left it at that.
“And you just as quickly decided to ignore the impulse.”
He shrugged. “I had my arms full. It just seemed easier to come on in.”
“Full of what?”
“Emma. She’s on the couch, sound asleep.”
With the reminder of his daughter, she seemed to finally realize she continued to weep even as she confronted him. Those dark eyes widened with horror and she tried to surreptitiously wipe her tear-stained cheeks against the shoulder of her borrowed sweater, as if she thought he wouldn’t notice them.
Her movements became brisk. “I’m almost done here. You can wait in the other room with your…with Emma.”
She had a hard time even saying the word. Daughter. Your daughter. The life that had been taken so cruelly from her.
“Grace,” he began, then fumbled for words, not sure what he could say. He was no good at this stuff.
Excessive emotion of any sort had been frowned upon in the Dugan household. William Dugan allowed no loud laughter, no raised voices, and—God forbid—no tears.
He’d learned young to conceal everything, that any outward show would only result in his father’s stiff, silent disapproval.
Only as an adult had he realized how unhealthy it was. His mother drank herself to a slow, painful death. And his father…
Jack blew out a breath at the image that was scored into his mind like a brand, even after all this time.
Rather than cope with his financial failures and the death of his wife, William Dugan chose the coward’s way out. Escape. He sat behind his antique oak desk, shoved a gun in his mouth and put a bullet through his brain at a place and time where he had to know his only son would be the one to stumble onto him.
He wasn’t that boy anymore, Jack reminded himself. He was a grown man who had learned the bitter lesson that covering up a wound sometimes only prevented the healing touch of air from reaching it.
“Would you like to talk about her?” he finally asked.
Grace gave him a deliberately obtuse look. “About Emma? She’s a sweet little girl. Just a little warning, though. She thinks Santa Claus is going to bring her a puppy this year if she doesn’t take her stuffed dog into the bathtub with her anymore. You might want to be prepared for that.”
“No. Not about Emma. About Marisa. About how you can’t even ride the ferry without thinking about her, without grieving for her.”
Dammit. He’d blown it. At his words, her face grew stony and cold, her body even more tense. “No, I don’t want to talk about her. And if I did, it wouldn’t be with you.” She slammed the lid of the suitcase down so hard it bounced up again.
“Why not?” he asked, stung somehow even though he knew damn well he shouldn’t be.
She closed the lid more carefully this time and thumbed the snaps without looking at him. “Because it doesn’t concern you. Stay out of that part of my life, Jack. It’s my business, something you know absolutely nothing about.”
“It might help. To talk about her, I mean.”
“Drop it, Dugan.”
He should. She was right, it wasn’t any of his business. But he wanted fiercely to help her find a little peace. She had done so much for him—had given him back his daughter—he owed her that much, at least.
“I don’t know anything about what you’ve gone through during the last year,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I can’t even imagine it. But I do know something about grief and anger, about how closing yourself up with it will eventually suffocate you.”
She glanced at him, that wariness back in her eyes.
He again debated what to say and felt like a hypocrite. Despite his grand advice, it was still difficult for him to talk about the summer he’d lost his family.
“My parents died when I was eighteen,” he said abruptly. “My mother was an alcoholic and died of advanced liver disease. A few months later my dad killed himself. Chewed on one of the handguns he collected.”
She stared at him, shocked. For some reason she pictured him as having a pampered, idyllic childhood, private schools and riding lessons and trips to Europe.
“For a long time,” he went on, “I refused to talk about it with anyone. I was exactly like you and thought it wasn’t anybody’s business but my own.”
She studied him, at the rare vulnerability in his green eyes, and almost gave in to the powerful urge to do as he said and talk about Marisa. But she had shut herself off from everyone for so long she didn’t know how or where to begin. “Well, we’re not flying, are we?” she finally said.
She heard the bitchiness in her voice and hated it but couldn’t seem to stop the brittle words from bursting out. “I’m sorry about your parents, Dugan, but this isn’t ‘True Confessions’ where you bare your soul, then I bare mine. It doesn’t work that way.”
She picked up the suitcase and started for the door, intent only on escape. Just as she started to brush past him, he reached a hand to stop her and grabbed her arm.
With her mind still seething and churning, her nerves completely on edge, she didn’t stop to think. She just relied on the self-defense instincts she’d developed over ten years as a cop. In one motion, she dropped the suitcase and grabbed his wrist in a twist lock. She would have toppled him to his knees if he hadn’t turned into her, making the hold useless.
As soon as he parried the move, she snapped back to her senses. Jack Dugan posed no threat to her. No physical one, anyway. She had drastically overreacted to what was a completely innocent touch.
Mortified heat soaked her skin and she closed her eyes, wanting to sink through her ugly gold carpet.
“I’m sorry. I don’t…I wasn’t thinking.”
“I upset you and pushed you too hard. I don’t blame you for wanting to knock me to the floor.”
“It wasn’t that.”
Saving Grace Page 8
