“See, that’s my real question. Did I really kill your crush?”
She folded her lips together in a clear message that she wasn’t going anywhere near that one. He smelled too good, like ocean mixed with pine, and he looked too good, dark and sexy and clean-shaven. And even the sound of his voice made her want to squeeze her thighs together.
“Okay, fine. Here’s another one. What can I do to fix this?”
“Fix it? What do you mean? Everything’s fine. Didn’t I prove it last night?”
“You proved something, that’s for sure.”
The lustful rumble of his voice sent a pleasant thrill down her spine. “Okay, my turn. What did I prove last night?”
“That you’re a hot babe who drives me out of my mind. I mean, you always did. But now it’s true in bed, too.”
Her hands were getting slick on the steering wheel. She wanted to wipe them off, but that would make it too obvious that he was rattling her. “I always drove you out of your mind?”
“Well, at first it was your unorthodox work ethic that drove me nuts.”
She laughed. “Fair enough.”
“Then it was the bikinis. I was worried about sunburn,” he deadpanned.
“I was worried you were going to fire me. You frowned at me a lot.”
He reached for her right hand, which was resting on her thigh, and interlaced his fingers with hers. “That was an ‘ignore the bikini’ frown. And, well, you did have a bit of a learning curve.”
He laughed over at her. Those gleaming dark eyes made it impossible for her to be indignant at his insult. “I would have learned faster with more hands-on training,” she pointed out.
“That’s what I was trying to avoid. I had a girlfriend. I was trying to keep my life on track. You were a bad influence.”
She pulled her lower lip between her teeth, warmth welling through her heart. “And now?”
“Just take one look at me.” He swept his other hand through the air. “First time I’ve left the marina in ten years. I’ve only checked in once. Dwayne could have turned the boats into bumper cars for all I know. He might be offering free gas to every vet who comes through.” He cocked his head. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”
She smiled at the thought of Dwayne transforming Ocean Shores. This would be a good challenge for the vet. “Sometimes change is good. Look at me. I hardly ever left the lodge for the first twenty-three years of my life. Now I’m…free. I can go anywhere.”
“So can I. Strange feeling, come to think of it.”
“It’s kind of funny that we’re both such stick-in-the-muds,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you think it comes from being kidnapped?”
“Different mud. Ocean for me, mountain for you.”
She laughed. “Mud is mud, especially when you’re stuck in it. Seriously, don’t you think it’s strange that we both kind of…clung to what was familiar after what happened?”
“But you didn’t even remember until recently. You were so young.”
The landscape was changing as they lost elevation, the evergreens replaced by a mix of birch and maple. It felt almost like going forward in time, since spring was more advanced the closer to sea level they got. “I think I must have remembered but didn’t remember that I remembered.”
He propped one knee up on the dashboard.
“I wonder if there’s more that you remember, but don’t remember remembering?”
“You mean, like who my parents were?”
“Yeah. It’s all probably locked in there,” he touched her head, “no need to bother the crazy artist dude.”
He took his hand away, but she felt the aftereffect of his touch like a photograph still continuing to develop. She shook it off. Now that they were on the next step of this journey, she didn’t want to get distracted by her feelings for Mark.
“I haven’t had any other memories like when I remembered you. I mean, little moments, like the sound of a voice, and eyes coming close to me…I think she had blue eyes.”
“Probably like yours.”
“Yes, I guess that’s not much of a clue. Seeking a blue-eyed woman who was driving an expensive vehicle sometime in the spring about twenty-three years ago.”
“We can narrow down the date better than that.”
“But can we? You don’t know how long I’d been in the car by the time you saw me.”
“It couldn’t have been too long, because you weren’t upset. You were happy when I saw you. Kicking your legs, throwing your pacifier around. Hey, did you look at the pacifier more?”
“Not really. It seemed like a regular pacifier. I even put it in my mouth in case that brought back any memories. After I soaked it for about a day,” she added when she noticed the queasy look on his face.
“And nothing?”
“Nope, nothing. Nothing but a grown woman sucking on a pacifier,” she added with a grin. “And I complain when people say I look young. Go figure.”
“The thing about you, Gracie, is that you might look young, but inside, you’re wiser than most.”
Flushing, she kept her eyes focused on the bumper of the car ahead of her. That was exactly how she’d always felt, that she was a lot older and wiser on the inside than what showed on the outside. The fact that he saw that…
“My inner crone says thank you,” she said as lightly as she could.
He laughed at that, and they drove in silence for a while. “Let me take a look at that pacifier,” he finally said. “I remember thinking that the daisies were unusual.”
“Sure. It’s in my backpack, in the outer pocket.”
He twisted around to rummage through her pack, then took a photo of the pacifier with his phone. “I’m going to image search it, see if anything comes up.”
“Oooh, good idea! I knew I brought you along for a reason.”
“You mean, besides my good looks and stamina in bed?” He lowered his voice to a sexy growl.
“Stamina? That remains to be seen.”
“And experience,” he added. He turned his attention to his phone, scanning through links while she lost herself in pleasant thoughts of where they might spend the night. Spokane, maybe? Or somewhere in Idaho?
Were they really going to do this? Or should she draw a line in the sand right now? No more sex, because she didn’t know what was really going on between them, and she didn’t want to get distracted from her search? Or should she just go with what her gut said?
Her intuition said to get naked again with Mark as soon as possible. Usually she trusted her gut, but then again, it was part of her body, and her body seemed to be all in when it came to Mark. So maybe she should ignore her gut this time and put her faith in her brain.
Which was so addled by the sound of his voice and the sight of his strong thighs filling her passenger seat that it was no help at all.
“Well, it does seem to be a high-end kind of pacifier,” he said. “Generally about forty bucks. But quite a few baby boutiques carry that style. It would be hard to track it down.”
“Nice to know I had the very best in pacifiers,” she noted.
“That fits with my memory of the expensive car. Looks like your parents had money. I wonder why there wasn’t news coverage of you going missing, then? Rich people generally get headlines when they get carjacked and their babies are stolen.”
“Maybe there was locally, but not nationally. Maybe he drove far enough away so that the papers in central California didn’t cover it.”
“Where did you search?”
“Just the local library in Carmel. That’s where Mary Wing, the bassinet maker, sent me. It’s kind of a fluke that I found an article that mentioned you. Santa Rosa’s at least a hundred miles away.”
Mark tapped on his phone. “I can try a few searches.”
“Does it really matter? Kaminski should have all the answers.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Even if he does, will he share them? He’s a mind-fucker. You don’t want to count on him, believe me.
We should think about other ways to find out who your mom is.”
She refused to give up before they’d even found Kaminski. Maybe the man was wracked with guilt and ready to spill his guts. She had to try.
In the meantime, Mark had a point about other leads. “I already have a lot of notes in my journal. You should look at those first.”
He reached for her backpack again while she negotiated an exit where they could fill up with gas. Too late, she realized there was a downside to letting him look through her notebook.
All the sketches she’d done of him.
He went silent as he leafed through the pages, taking in sketch after sketch. He hadn’t been her only subject. Mellow played a big role, too. She’d also drawn fleets of fishing boats and diving pelicans and detailed miniatures of the starfish that clung to the pilings of the wharf. But her primary subject for weeks had been Mark.
Mark bent over the fish-cleaning station in his oilskins. Mark with his head deep in the engine room of a yacht. Mark chatting with a group of tourists. Mark pumping gas when one of the high school kids hadn’t shown up.
“These are great,” he finally said. “Your talent is amazing.”
“Nah. Serena, Griffin’s fiancée, she’s the talented one. She’s actually a portrait artist, can you believe it?” She hoped she didn’t sound as nervous as she felt. “I just play around. I was practicing my accuracy while I was working at the marina. As if I was illustrating a field guide or something.”
“Guide to the Flora and Fauna of Ocean Shores Marina?”
She laughed. “Exactly. Black-headed Fishermanus Americanus.”
“Damn straight.”
She couldn’t tell from his voice if he was embarrassed by her sketches. Then again, she’d already abandoned all her pride when she’d announced that she had a crush on him.
Speaking of which…she suddenly remembered the page with the heading “Crush the Crush.”
“Turn to the page with the paper clip,” she told him quickly. There, she’d drawn the boy from her memory next to an image of the grown-up Mark.
“When I drew that, I knew I’d found you. I wasn’t really sure until then.”
His mouth tightened as he gazed at the two drawings of himself. “You really do have a gift. I think you put your finger on something here.”
“What’s that?”
“I was never the same after that. In this drawing you did, when I was six, I hadn’t yet spent much time with Kaminski. It was a crisis, but I was still the same person. But anything after that, I probably had this look in my eyes.”
He waved at the other drawing, of him as an adult. She’d drawn an impressionistic version of him with lots of dark shadows around his eyes. Even though he wore a slight smile, it didn’t reach the rest of his face. The words “serious” and “stern” had always chased through her mind as she drew him, but now she realized that “haunted” was probably better.
“Janus Kaminski stole my childhood, that rat bastard.”
22
Mark flipped through the notebook until he reached a blank page. He couldn’t bear to look at images of himself anymore. It made him too furious.
How did a person have any right to grab a kid right out of his own life and whisk him off somewhere else and turn him into free labor? No one should have that ability. Especially a psycho like Janus Kaminski.
So maybe he hadn’t followed Gracie just to help her. Maybe he wanted to find the man for his own reasons. Make the bastard suffer. Terrify the crap out of him. Stand up to him, the way he’d wanted to when he was little but couldn’t.
“We’re going to find that man, and he’s going to tell you every little thing you want to know,” he said grimly. “Then I’m going to gut him like a fish and leave him for the seagulls.”
She glanced over at him in alarm. “Don’t talk that way. I don’t want you going to jail over him.”
“No one would convict me.” His jaw flexed hard. “But you do have a point. I might need a big dose of Xanax before we talk to him.”
“We’ll stock up,” she promised. “I’ll get you some chamomile tea, some lavender aromatherapy, valerian root. I can give you a foot rub. We won’t go near him until you’re so relaxed, you’re like a blob of jelly.”
He threw his head back and laughed at her stress-relief ideas. The suggestions themselves might be absurd, but they were also very endearing. “I feel better already.”
“Because I’m so silly?”
“Yes. But in a good way. Just keep being adorable and maybe I won’t want to throttle that asshole.”
“I’ll do what I can, but that’s a lot of pressure,” she joked. “What if I’m the one who loses it?”
“Good point. I didn’t think of that. I guess we’ll have to watch each other’s backs. If one of us gets homicidal, the other will have to step in.”
“What if we both do?”
“Then we’ll just have to Bonnie and Clyde our way out of there.”
She tilted her head, pursing her lips. “I always preferred Thelma and Louise.”
“Fine. Thelma and Louise. Which one am I?”
Her saucy sideways smile made his cock stir. Damn it. “Well, I guess I’d have to say that you’re Louise because you’re the older one.”
“Damn, I was sure you were going to give me the Brad Pitt role.”
“Take your shirt off and we’ll talk.”
“If I take my shirt off, can we stop talking?”
Her quick intake of breath told him that she was thinking along the same lines as he was. Hallelujah.
“How much further is it? Should we stay somewhere for the night or drive on through?” she asked, all innocence.
“It’s probably better to stop and rest up.”
“Rest? Do we have to?”
And that was it. Full-on erection. She definitely had a gift for getting him revved up. He shifted uncomfortably in the seat. “Unless we’re going to stop soon, maybe we should change the subject.”
She glanced over at him in surprise, her gaze dipping to his crotch. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
She giggled. “Well, sure, we can change the subject. We’re getting to know each other, right? There’s tons of things I don’t know about you. What’s your favorite movie? Edward Penishands?”
His dick pulsed painfully. “Very funny.”
“Oh, sorry. How about your favorite color. Nipple red?”
“I kind of hate you right now.”
“They say it’s a thin line.”
They spent the rest of the drive across Washington talking about more innocuous things than revenge and pornos. Gracie’s favorite color turned out to be very specific. “The spring green of the fiddlehead ferns when they first start unfurling. You see it for about a week, then they turn a darker green, and I’m over it.”
“That is the most detailed answer to the favorite color question that I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, what’s yours?”
He had to admit that he didn’t have any strong color preferences. “Brown works just fine for me.”
“Brown is an underrated color,” she agreed. “Trees and wood are a thousand different shades of brown. Then there’s chocolate.”
“Good point. And coffee.”
“Many fur coats are brown.”
“Cockroaches are brown.”
“Next topic,” she said quickly. “Not a fan of cockroaches. We don’t have any in the mountains.”
“Okay, here’s a good one. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”
She pursed her lips and tucked a flyaway wisp of hair behind her ear. He longed to do that for her, to slip the silky strand back into place, but he resisted the temptation. “Jupiter.”
He snorted. “Jupiter Point? That little honeymoon town?”
“No. Jupiter. The planet. You said anywhere in the world, right? I’ve always been curious about those enormous storms that have been going on for hundreds of year
s. Or maybe an asteroid belt. Yes, I’d like to hop from one asteroid to another, like lily pads. Or, you know, anywhere in the world, since I’ve seen barely anything.”
Bemused, he shook his head. “You really are the oddest girl, aren’t you?”
“Is that what you think? I’m odd?”
“It’s a compliment,” he said quickly. “It means I could never fit you into a convenient category. I tried, believe me. Flighty beach girl, manic pixie dream girl, sun-worshipping party girl, future cat lady.”
“You nailed it with that one.” Luckily, she didn’t seem offended by his attempts to label her. “I never knew I was a cat person before I came to the marina. We never had cats at the lodge.”
“Just dogs?” He tried to keep his voice neutral.
“Rogue is Serena’s dog, she just got him recently. We had a dog when I was little, but when he died, Max refused to get another because Mom was gone by then. He didn’t have the heart for more dogs.”
Well, that was one thing he and Max had in common. “I thought about bringing Mellow with me,” he told her. “He missed you a lot. But I didn’t know how he’d handle being in a car.”
“You did?” She turned her face toward him, and her expression, somewhere between wonder and tears, made the breath catch in his chest. “You really are such a sweet person.”
“Oh yeah. That’s me. Mr. Sweetie-Pie. All the girls say so.”
“They do?”
“Hell no.” He laughed. “You’d be the first.”
“Well, I’m right. Own it, dude. Don’t fight it.”
He wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or an insult, but being with Gracie made him feel so good that he didn’t worry about it. “I will embrace my sweetie-pie-ness. I’ll cuddle after sex and paint your toenails for you.”
“Can I be naked while you do that?”
“Aaaand…changing the subject again.” He tugged at the crotch of his jeans, which had gotten tight. Again. He cast around for something, anything, to focus on besides the thought of her naked while he painted her toenails. His stomach growled. “French fries. Ketchup or mustard?”
“Neither. I like mine without any condiments. Bare, you could say. Naked. Condomint-free.”
The Runaway Page 17
