Saving Grace

The inside of the apartment was as depressing as the exterior. It had the unlived-in air of a seedy motel room, the kind where they charge you extra for sheets.

A particularly ugly gold-and-blue couch ran the length of one wall and a matching chair faced it, but they were the only pieces of furniture in the room. The only anything in the room. He frowned. There were no pictures on the wall, no books, no knickknacks. None of the little personal items people liked to scatter around the corners of their lives.

So Grace Solarez wasn’t much of an interior decorator. There was no law against that.

He shifted his attention from her home and looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time. She appeared as tired and worn-out as her surroundings, with sallow skin and huge purple shadows under her eyes.

And she was younger than he would have expected. Late-twenties, maybe. Certainly too young to have that look of fragile despair haunting those big dark eyes.

She wore a thin T-shirt, faded gray from many washings, a pair of worn cutoffs and nothing else. His gaze was drawn to her long, slim legs, to the soft curve of her breasts under the threadbare cotton, and Jack was astonished—and disgusted—at himself for the little kick of awareness in his gut.

Maybe Piper McCall was right. His business partner was always telling him he’d been too long without a woman. There might be some truth to that, especially if he could get all worked up about one who looked like she’d been on the wrong end of a runaway bus.

She had left the door open, so she could call for help if he decided to attack, he imagined, and now she clutched the frame as if she couldn’t stand without it.

“Why did you say you’ve been looking for me?” Her voice again sounded thin, disoriented.

“I don’t believe I said.” He decided to put his suspicions away for now. Whatever her reasons for being there, whatever her involvement, she had plucked Emma from that burning car where the man who took her would have been willing to let her burn.

“I’ve come to thank you,” he finally said.

“For?”

“For saving my daughter’s life,” he said quietly.

She frowned and he noticed her knuckles were bony and white on the doorframe. “Wh-what?”

“Oh, and to give you this.” He thrust out the picture.

At the sight of it in his hands, those huge dark eyes widened even farther and what little color he could see in her face leached away like sheets left hanging too long in the sun.

With a soft, almost apologetic moan, Grace Solarez collapsed in a tangled heap on her gold shag carpet.

Chapter 2

For an instant after she fell, Jack just stared in shock at the tangle of dark hair hiding her face. Maybe she was a junkie coming off a bad trip. Maybe that’s why she risked almost certain death to save Emma—because she was too high to know any better, so whacked out she had lost all sense of self-preservation.

The reminder of how very much he owed Grace Solarez—junkie or not—spurred him to quick action and he knelt by her side. “Ma’am? Ms. Solarez?”

She didn’t answer. He pushed back a thick hank of hair to find her eyes closed, her face the color of faded news-print. Her skin felt hot, and up close she looked even more haggard than she had at first, with those dark circles ringing her eyes and cracked, swollen lips.

If not for the slight rise and fall of her chest under the thin shirt, he would have thought she was dead. He started to roll her over but a tiny cry of pain slipped from her dry lips, stopping him cold.

He sat back on his haunches. What could be wrong with her?

How the hell was he supposed to know? he answered his own question. He was a pilot, not a damn doctor.

Should he slap her, see if that would rouse her? He started to, then stopped before his hand could complete the movement. It seemed highly presumptuous to strike a woman he had just met.

Cold water might do the trick. That’s how they did it in Hollywood, anyway. He stepped gingerly over her prone form to reach the sink in the small kitchen area and found a clean drinking glass in the dish drainer next to it. After filling it quickly with rusty-looking water from the tap, he turned back toward her.

And caught his first sight of her back.

He growled a raw expletive, the water glass nearly slipping from his hand. What the hell had she done to herself? The cotton of her shirt was soaked with what looked like fresh blood and it seemed to stick to her back in spots. If that was as painful as it looked, no wonder she had passed out. She needed medical attention and she needed it now.

Before he could find the phone to dial the emergency number, she stirred again. This time she started to roll to her back. The pain must have stopped her because she moaned and froze at an awkward angle.

“Easy now,” he murmured. “Let’s just roll you to your stomach.”

Grace Solarez whipped her head around at his voice, her eyes wide with disoriented panic. “Who…” The single word seemed to sap her energy because her eyes closed and for a moment he thought she had passed out again until they fluttered open again. “Who are you?” she finally asked.

“Jack Dugan. Remember? Right before you decided to take a header on me, I was trying to explain why I was here.”

The confusion faded a bit from her dark eyes. “You have my picture,” she whispered. “What have you done with it?”

She tried to prop herself up but he laid a hand on the hot skin of her forearm to stop her. “Easy. I don’t think you ought to be moving around too much right now. Here’s your picture. I haven’t done anything with it. It’s just like you left it.”

He pulled the photograph from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. She gazed at it for a moment, then clutched it to her as if he had just handed her a briefcase full of diamonds.

“Thank you.” Her voice was even huskier than before. “I have others, but this…this is my favorite.”

The raw emotion on her face made him shift uncomfortably. “No need to thank me. I’m just returning what belongs to you. Now why don’t you tell me what you did to yourself. Is it a cut?”

Her cheek rubbed against the ugly carpet in what he took for denial. “Burn,” she murmured. “Tried to put something on it but I couldn’t reach the whole thing. Think it’s infected.”

“How did it happen?”

She closed her eyes again. “Car exploded. Couldn’t run fast enough.”

His heart seemed to stutter in his chest as he stared at her. She did this to herself pulling his Emma out of the crash? He reached blindly for her hand and squeezed it tightly. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

Grace lifted her head, the panic back in the flaring of her pupils. Her hand fluttered in his like a tiny butterfly trapped in a net. “No! No hospital!”

“You’re hurt. You need medical attention.”

“No hospital. Promise!”

She seemed so agitated, he didn’t know what else to do but agree. “Fine. Whatever you say. Settle down now, ma’am, or you’re going to make that thing start bleeding again.”

But he was speaking to the walls of her dingy little apartment, he realized. Grace Solarez had headed back into the ozone.

He bit out the kind of oath that would have earned him a sharp rap on the knuckles with a wooden spoon if Lily had heard it. What was he supposed to do now? He had an unconscious woman on his hands with God knows what kind of injury. And not just any woman, either, but the one who appeared to have risked her life—who had sustained an incredibly painful injury—to rescue his daughter from a burning vehicle.

He couldn’t possibly leave her in this dump of an apartment by herself, not when she was in this kind of pain. And he had just given his word he wouldn’t take her to the hospital.

Lily. Lily Kihualani could take care of her. He seized on the idea with vast relief. She was always looking for somebody else to mother and with her nursing background, she would know just how to treat a burn like this one.

And if she didn’t, he’d make her find out.

It was only after he had carried Grace Solarez out of her apartment, laid her carefully in the back seat of the Jaguar and pulled out onto the highway back toward the ferry and home that he realized, with a grimace, that he hadn’t been able to answer a single damn question about Grace Solarez.

She awoke to agonizing pain.

“Shhh little keiki,” a voice as comforting as the sea murmured in her ear. “Hush now. Stay still.”

Someone was taking a hot poker to her back and she was supposed to just lie here and take it? Yeah, right. Forget it, sister. She tried to rise but strong arms held her in place.

“How much longer is this going to take, Lily?” A deep male voice asked. It sounded familiar but she couldn’t see anything past the floodlights of pain exploding behind her eyelids.

Her head throbbed at the effort but still she tried to place the voice. She had a fleeting, strangely comforting memory of a sun-bronzed stranger with a sweet smile and eyes the pure, vivid green of new leaves.

He’d given her back Marisa. She frowned. That was impossible, wasn’t it? Marisa was dead, had been gone for a year. No one could bring her back. No one.

“It’ll take as long as it takes,” the sea-voice answered. “No more, no less.”

“I think she’s coming back to us. She’s going to hurt like hell when she wakes up.”

“You think I don’t know that? That there’s one nasty burn.”

“Can’t you give her something to take away the pain?”

“What do you think I am, some kind of miracle worker?”

The other voice was like waves crashing against the rocks now. Listening to it made her head ache as if she were stuck in a room full of pounding hammers.

“I’m not a doctor,” it went on. “I said take her to the hospital. Would you listen to me? No! She stays here, you said. She don’t want no hospital. Okay then. You want me to fix up the wahine, I fix up the wahine. But I don’t need you yappin’ at me.”

“Sorry.”

“You better be. Now hold her still while I put the ointment on.”

Fire streaked down her back again as cruel hands rubbed the raw skin of her back. Grace fought to hold on to consciousness but the pain was too great, screaming and clawing at her. In a desperate bid to escape it, she finally surrendered to the quiet, peaceful place inside her.

The next time she opened her eyes, it was to find two huge green eyes and a head full of blond curls peeking over the side of the bed. Emma, she remembered. The child she had pulled from that wreck, what seemed a lifetime ago. What was she doing in the middle of her nightmare?

“Hi,” Emma chirped.

Grace tried to answer but her throat was thick, gritty, like she’d swallowed a quart jar full of sand. Her back felt as if the skin had been flayed open and scoured with the same stuff.

The burn she had suffered from the flying debris of the explosion, she remembered.

She had tried to care for her injuries on her own but hadn’t been able to reach the center of her back well enough to apply salve to the burn or even to bandage it.

She had done her best, but by the third day after the accident she had become shaky, feverish, disoriented. She remembered weird, nightmarish visions of whirling cars and demons with orange eyes and men who would leave little girls to burn to death.

The blistering skin must have become infected. That explained the fever, the dizziness, the hallucinations. So how did she get from curling up in her single bed with its thin, lumpy mattress—afraid to move for the pain that would claw across her skin if she did—to this strange room with its cool linen sheets and a curly-haired little elf-spy?

“Are you gonna die like my mama?”

Startled, Grace blinked at the girl watching her with a forehead furrowed by concern. She cleared her throat and tried to speak but couldn’t force the words past the sand.

A crystal pitcher of ice and water and a clean glass waited tantalizingly close, on the table next to the bed. She fumbled her fingers out to reach it but came up about six inches short. After several tries, she let her arm flop to the side of the bed in frustration.

Emma must have understood. “You want a drink?” she asked eagerly. “I’ll get it. I can even pour it all by myself.”

With two hands around the pitcher and her tongue caught carefully between her teeth with fierce concentration, she filled the glass then carefully set the pitcher back on the table.

“Lily said you prob’ly wouldn’t be able to drink right from a cup at first because you can’t turn over, so I said you could use my bendy straws. See?” she said, with a proud grin that revealed a gap in her upper row of teeth.

She helped Grace find the straw then held the cup steady while she sipped. In all her life, she didn’t think she’d ever tasted anything as absolutely heavenly as that ice water. It washed away the sand, leaving only a scratchy ache in her throat.

“Thank you,” she murmured when she’d had enough. Her voice sounded rough and gravely, as if it hadn’t been used for a long while.

“You’re welcome,” the little girl said. “Lily and my daddy said I’m not supposed to bother you but I’m not, am I? I’m helping.”

Something didn’t make sense. It took her several seconds before she realized what had been nagging at her subconscious. I’ve come to thank you for saving my daughter’s life, the golden-haired stranger had said. His daughter.

If he was Emma’s father, who was the man who had been driving the car that night, the scruffy-looking drunk with the dark hair and tattoo who had been willing to let the little girl die?

Somehow it didn’t seem appropriate to ask the child. “Where am I?” she asked instead.

“My house. My daddy brought you here yesterday.” The little girl’s forehead crinkled again. “Or maybe it was the day before. I forget.”

Grace tried to remember coming here but couldn’t summon anything but fragmented images after opening the door to the stranger Emma claimed was her father. “Why am I here?”

“Daddy said you were sick and we needed to take care of you for a while. Lily put some gunk on your back. It stinks.” The girl bent down until her face was only inches away from hers, until she could feel the moist, milk-scented warmth of her breath on her cheek.

“Are you gonna die?” Emma asked again.

She had wanted to, hadn’t she? She remembered headlights and the sharp bite of a mosquito and a dark night of despair, and then that survival instinct bubbling up inside her out of nowhere when she thought the car would explode.

Did she still want to die? She didn’t want to think about it right now.

“My mama died when I was only two,” Emma confided. “She was in an airplane crash. She didn’t live with us but I still cried a lot.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“Who’s that?”

Grace’s gaze followed the direction of Emma’s finger. She was completely unprepared for the agonizing pain that clutched her stomach at the sight of Marisa’s picture propped against a lamp on the bedside table. She must have been so focused on the pitcher of water she hadn’t noticed it before.

She absorbed those little gamine features—as familiar to her as her own. The big dark eyes, the dimpled smile, the long glossy braids. The grief welled up inside her, completely blocking the physical pain of the burn.

“Is that your little girl?”

Grace nodded. “I…yes,” she whispered.

“Where is she?”

A cemetery, a cold grave marked by a plain, unadorned headstone, all she had been able to afford after the funeral expenses.

“She died.” The words were wrenched from her. They sounded harsh and mean but the little girl didn’t seem to notice.

“Just like my mama.” Emma’s face softened with concern and she patted Grace’s arm. “Did you cry a lot, too?”

Buckets of tears. Oceans of them. Her heart hadn’t stopped weeping for a year.

Before she could form her thoughts into an answer appropriate for a five-year-old girl, the door opened and the man who had come to her apartment, who had brought her Marisa’s picture, entered the room.

He wore tan khakis and an icy blue polo shirt. With his slightly long, sun-streaked hair and tan, he looked like the kind of man who had nothing more pressing to worry about than whether he’d remembered to wax his surfboard.

When she looked closer, though, she recognized an indefinable air of danger about him. He reminded her of a tawny cougar, coiled and ready to pounce.

What had he said his name was? She sorted through the jumbled-up memories until she came up with it: Jack, wasn’t it? Jack Dugan.

“Emma!” Jack Dugan said in a loud whisper. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here. What do you think you’re doing, young lady?”

“I helped Grace get a drink, Daddy. She was thirsty so I poured her some water all by myself.”

He turned his head quickly from his daughter toward Grace. “You’re awake.”

She suddenly felt vulnerable, off-kilter, lying facedown in a strange bed, in an unfamiliar room, watching the world from this odd, sideways angle. Her stomach fluttered like it used to in the old days before she went out on an unknown disturbance call.

She blinked at him but said nothing.

“She waked up and I helped her get a drink all by myself,” Emma announced again.

He gave his daughter a smile of such amazing sweetness it completely transformed him, gentled those lean, rugged features. His eyes warmed, darkened. Instead of a cougar, now he looked like a sleek, satisfied tomcat letting a kitten crawl all over him.

The little girl dimpled back and Grace’s chest felt tight and achy at the obvious bond between the two of them.

“What a good nurse you are, Little Em,” Jack said.

“Just like Lily, yeah?”

He chuckled and tweaked her chin. “Just like Lily but not so bossy.”

Lily was the one who had put the “gunk” on her back, Emma had said. She gathered Lily was the sea-voice.

From her sideways perspective, Grace watched him pull a chair to the side of the bed and tug Emma onto his lap. Those vivid green eyes studied her intensely, like a boy watching a bug trying to scurry along the sidewalk, and she again felt exposed, stripped bare before him, even with the soft quilt covering her.

“How are you feeling this afternoon?”

“Peachy,” she muttered.

“I could probably round up some aspirin for you but that’s the best I can do. If you would let me take you to a hospital, you could probably get your hands on some kind of serious pain medication. I imagine something like that would hit the spot right about now.”

No hospitals. Hospitals were anguish and death. Doctors who told you, without any emotion at all, that your world had just ended. “I don’t need a hospital.”

“That’s a matter of debate, Ms. Solarez.”

“What is there to debate, Mr. Dugan? I don’t want to go to the hospital and you can’t admit me without my permission.” She knew she sounded petulant, childish, but she couldn’t help herself. I don’t want to and you can’t make me.

Exhausted suddenly, as if her brief spurt of defiance had drained her last ounce of energy, Grace rolled to her side, wincing as pain scorched along her nerve endings. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me but I—I just want to go home.”

It was a lie. She hated that apartment, hated the gray desolation of the neighborhood. But it was as far as she could get from the cheerful little two-bedroom cottage near the university, with its white shutters and the basketball hoop over the garage and the wooden swingset in the backyard she and Marisa had built together.

She had lived there for a month after her daughter’s death and then couldn’t bear it any longer. She had wanted to sell it but Beau had talked her out of it, so now she was renting to a married couple. Schoolteachers, both of them, with a son about Emma’s age.

The hovel she lived in now was her penance, her punishment for the sin of not protecting her daughter.

“You wouldn’t be able to take care of yourself for one day if I took you back to your apartment,” Jack said. “Sorry, but you’re stuck with us. At least until you regain your strength.”

She could hardly think past the fatigue and pain battling for the upper hand but she knew she couldn’t stay in this house where there was such love. “You can’t keep me here.”

“Don’t you like us?” Emma asked, her face drooping.

What was she supposed to say to that? How did she explain to a five year old that being here—seeing this warm, loving relationship between father and child—was like having not just her back flayed open but her whole soul.

She was spared having to answer by the return of the sea-voice.

“What do you two think you’re doing in here?”

“Uh-oh. Busted.” Jack sent a guilty look towards his daughter, then together they turned to face the woman glaring at them from doorway. Grace could see immediately why he looked so intimidated. Though an inch or two shorter than her own five-foot five-inch height, the woman had to weigh at least two-hundred pounds.

She had the brown skin and wavy dark hair of a Pacific Islander, probably Hawaiian, and right now she looked as if she wanted Jack Dugan served up at her next luau with an apple in his mouth.

“Uh, your patient’s awake, Lily.”

“Didn’t I say she needed to rest? Didn’t I say leave her be?”

“Well, yes—”

“I go for ten minutes and what do you two do? Come in here and start pestering her. You even wait ’til Tiny and me pulled out of the driveway before you came barging in here?”

“Yes,” he said defensively, then gave a rueful grin. “Almost.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Next time you want dinner, maybe I’ll ‘almost’ fix it, then.”

Despite her annoyance, she looked at both of them with exasperated affection. It was obvious to Grace that the woman doted on Jack and his daughter. Again she felt excluded, more isolated than before.

Emma seemed impervious to the big Hawaiian’s temper. She hopped down from her father’s lap and skipped across the room. With a winsome, dimply smile, she grabbed the woman’s big brown hand in hers.

“Guess what, Lily? I gave Grace a drink of water all by myself and Daddy said I’m a good nurse just like you.” She giggled and tugged on the hand. “But not so bossy.”

The housekeeper lifted an eyebrow. “Bossy, hmm?”

“Someone better be careful,” Jack said with a pointed look at Emma, “or a bee will fly into that big mouth of hers.”

The little girl just giggled and even the housekeeper looked like she was fighting a smile. Still, she aimed a stern look at the pair. “Well, I’m gonna boss you both right out of here so my patient can get some sleep.”

“We’re going, we’re going.” Jack stood and, in one clean motion, scooped Emma up and over his shoulder. She shrieked with glee as he headed toward the door. At the last minute, he turned and met Grace’s gaze.

“Oh, I almost forgot to ask you. Would you like us to make any calls for you?”

“Why?”

He looked startled. “To let somebody know where they can reach you. You know. Family. Friends. Anybody who might worry about you if they couldn’t find you for a while? I can do it for you or bring the cordless phone in when you’re feeling better.”

She shook her head, her cheek rubbing against the sheet. She had no family, at least none that cared where she was. And in the last year she had distanced herself from all of her friends in the Seattle PD, unable to bear their sympathy.

All except Beau, her former partner and best friend. He refused to let himself be distanced, wouldn’t let her push him away.

“No,” she whispered. “I don’t need to contact anyone.”

“Are you sure?” Jack asked. “Someone is probably worried sick about you.”

She had just enough energy left to glare at him. “I said I didn’t have anyone I need to contact.” To her horror, her voice broke on the last word and unexpected tears choked in her throat, behind her eyes. She must be more exhausted than she thought.