She wanted to push herself away.

But the harder Grace tried to keep Jack Dugan and his little girl at arm’s length, the harder they tried to sneak through her defenses.

With Grace watching, Jack knelt down to slip a bracelet on his daughter’s wrist.

Grace was so fascinated by the sight of those broad, strong fingers performing such a delicate task that she forgot to keep him from putting her own bracelet on her.

“Your turn.”

With his head bent over her hand, his scent drifted to her on the sea breeze. His neck was tanned and strong. Would his hair be as soft as it looked?

Just before she would have reached her fingers to find out, the ferry horn sounded, and she snatched both hands away from him. What had she nearly done? Touched him, caressed him. Wanted him.

And for the first time in a year, she felt alive again.

Saving Grace
RaeAnne Thayne

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Donald and Janice Thayne, for sharing the beauty of the Islands, and for raising such a wonderful son.

Special thanks to Cissy Serrao of Poakalani Hawaiian Quilt Designs in Honolulu for her vast knowledge of this exquisite art form.

RAEANNE THAYNE

lives in a crumbling old Victorian in northern Utah with her husband and two young children, where she writes surrounded by raw mountains and real cowboys. She loves hearing from readers at P.O. Box 6682 North Logan, Utah 84341.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 1

If she was going to do this, it would have to be soon.

Grace Solarez crouched in the dirt and watched cars move in an endless rhythm past the orchards that marched along this desolate stretch of interstate.

Three-hundred-sixty-five days ago she would have savored the sensory assault around her: the sweetness of the apples just a few weeks away from harvest, the tweet-tweet-tweet of the crickets; the cool, moist night breeze kissing her face.

Now, she could only watch the headlights slice through the night and wonder which pair she would see right before she died.

A mosquito sunk its teeth into her right biceps, honed and toughened by the last few months of hard labor on the docks. She glanced down briefly at the first sharp needle prick of pain, then ignored it. What was the point in swatting it away?

She had blood to spare.

Her eyes felt gritty, as if she’d grabbed a handful of dirt and rubbed it across her face. And she was tired. So tired. For a year she had gone through the motions of living, functioning on only the most basic of levels. Breathing, eating, sleeping. She couldn’t bear it another day, another hour, another minute.

This grief was too huge, too constant. Nothing slipped through it, not even the smallest shadow of respite. She couldn’t survive it anymore. The grief and the guilt had become burdens too heavy for her to carry.

She pulled the snapshot from the pocket of her T-shirt one last time. Moonlight filtered across the image, washing out the colors to a grayish blue, but she could still see the mischief glimmering in her daughter’s eyes. She traced Marisa’s smile with her fingertip.

“I’m sorry, Marisita,” she whispered. “So sorry. I tried—I swear, I tried—but I’m not strong enough. I just can’t do it anymore.”

Looking at the picture—at the image of a laughing, beautiful child frozen forever in time—was too excruciating to endure for long. After a few moments she carefully slipped it back into her pocket. Her right hand lingered over her heart protectively while she watched the mesmerizing parade of oncoming headlights, trying not to wonder if she would feel the impact of the collision before she died.

What she was about to do was a mortal sin, she knew. If Padre Luis—the bitter old priest at Tia Sofia’s church—could be believed, she would be damned for eternity, consigned forever to a special kind of hell reserved for those who defied God’s will.

But what did she care? She’d already been damned in this life, why not the next one, too? Besides, she had no problem pissing off a God vengeful enough to take away the only thing that had ever mattered to her.

Now, a few minutes past midnight on the anniversary of the day her life had effectively ended, she might as well make it official.

Muscles tensed and ready, she scanned the traffic, trying to pick her moment. From the orchard elevated six feet or so above the roadway, she had a good view of traffic in both directions.

Headlights a mile or so in the distance caught her attention. Even in the dark—and even absorbed, as she was, in the unchangeable past—she could tell it was moving much faster than the other vehicles, weaving and darting crazily from lane to lane.

From this distance, it looked like some fancy foreign make. A Porsche, judging by the sleek, curvy lines. Probably some spoiled rich kid coming home drunk after a night of clubbing.

As it approached her spot in the orchard, she watched the little sports car come dangerously close to hitting the fender of a pickup truck. The pickup driver apparently didn’t like being tailgated and she saw the angry red glare of brake lights suddenly light up the night.

The sports car driver apparently saw them, too, but just an instant too late. He slammed on the brakes and yanked the wheel to the left, sending the car hurtling toward the wide barrow pit in the median.

Just before he would have slammed into a reflector post, the driver jerked on the wheel again, overcorrecting the car and sending it screeching back across the lanes of traffic.

At such a high rate of speed, the driver couldn’t possibly regain control of the vehicle. Just as it passed her, the Porsche rolled, flipping side over side until it came to rest upside down in the empty drainage ditch a few hundred yards ahead of her.

For an instant, she stood stunned, disoriented by the abrupt, jarring shift in her emotions, from weary despair to adrenaline-laced shock in a matter of seconds.

Smoke began to pour from the mangled carcass of the car and she could smell that scent peculiar to accidents: a combination of gasoline, scorched rubber and hot metal.

What were the chances of the drunk walking away from such a crash? It was hard to gauge. When she’d still been on the job, she had worked accidents she would have sworn no one could possibly survive where the victims came out completely unscathed. And she had worked simple, no-frills fender-benders that resulted in fatalities. Every situation was a crapshoot, like so much of police work.

She looked through the filter of leaves but couldn’t see any activity around the car. Her stomach churned suddenly, unexpectedly, as she fought the urge to check out the scene, to make at least some effort to help the idiot driver.

She didn’t want to get involved, couldn’t handle getting involved. She could hardly think past her own agonizing grief. But she had been a cop for almost a decade and it was hard to ignore those powerful instincts.

The battle with indecision lasted for only a few seconds. With a defeated sigh, Grace scrambled down the small slope toward the accident scene.

A few other motorists had already stopped and a small crowd had gathered around the periphery of the accident scene. They all looked stunned, with the kind of dazed disbelief civilians share during traumatic incidents.

Nobody seemed inclined to move closer, which was just as well. A shower of sparks rained down beneath the sports car’s hood and she was afraid it was only a matter of time before those sparks ignited the fuel line and the whole thing exploded.

Just as she reached the edge of the crowd, a man pulled himself out of the car, his face a bloody mass of cuts and his arm cradled against his side. He looked scruffy and ill-kempt, with dark, shaggy hair and a long, droopy mustache. Through a rip in his T-shirt, she could see a twisted tattoo, some kind of snake peeking through.

Not exactly what she would have expected from the driver of such an expensive car. Most likely it was hot.

Regardless, he would walk away, like so many drunk drivers, she thought with disgust. He weaved a bit and started to topple over, but righted himself just before she reached him. Grace grabbed his arm—the one with the tattoo—and helped him the rest of the way to safety.

“Anybody else in there?” Grace had to yell to be heard over the traffic still speeding past.

The man didn’t answer, just gave her a bleary-eyed stare, so she tried again. “I said, is anybody in there? Was there anybody else in the car with you?”

The question finally seemed to sink in. The man looked back at the car and she could swear there was perfect clarity in his red-rimmed eyes, then a strange, furtive look slunk across his battered features.

“No,” he said hoarsely. She could see a ruby earring glint through the shaggy dark locks when he shook his head. “Nobody else. Just me.”

A plump woman with teased blond hair and wearing surgical scrubs rushed over to them. “I’m a nurse,” she said, and quickly, efficiently, led the drunk farther from the wreckage.

Grace watched them for a moment then turned to give the vehicle one last look. The police would be here soon. She could already see the faint flicker of flashing lights off in the distance. Somebody in the crowd must have a cell phone to summon them so quickly.

She wondered if the patrol would be someone she knew, then discarded the thought. Not this far east. She doubted if she was even in King County anymore, although she didn’t quite know where she was, exactly. She’d been driving all evening trying to outrun her ghosts and it was only by chance that they had caught up with her here, on this isolated stretch of road. She knew she’d come some distance, though.

Wherever she was, she knew she didn’t want to be here when the police arrived. She turned and would have slipped back into the safety and solitude of the orchard when she thought she heard a tiny cry.

Marisa.

Her daughter’s voice called to her, haunted her. It seemed to float across the noise of vehicles whizzing by, past the crowd’s excited hum, above the scream of approaching sirens.

Was she the only one who could hear it? She must be—no one else in the crowd reacted at all.

Her head buzzed from the fumes and the noise and the emotional trauma of the last few hours. Maybe she was hearing things.

“Daddy! Help me!” she heard. Louder this time, but still faint. She frowned and shook her head in confusion. Why would Marisa be calling for a father she never knew, for a seventeen-year-old boy who had refused to take responsibility for the child he’d helped create in a brief, forbidden moment of passion.

It made no sense. Still, she had to find out.

“What are you, crazy, lady? That thing’s going to blow any second now.” A burly trucker tried to bar her way but she shoved past, barely aware of him, and slipped away from the crowd toward the wreckage, toward the beckoning call of her dead daughter.

She ignored the shouts of alarm behind her, focused only on following that tiny voice. Her daughter needed her and this time—dear God, this time—she would be there to help her.

The instant she reached the overturned car and knelt in the gravel of the shoulder to look through the window, reality hit her with a cold, mean slap.

It wasn’t Marisa calling her at all. It was a small blond-haired girl, several years younger than her daughter would have been, strapped into her seatbelt and suspended upside down in the passenger seat of the smashed sports car.

Smoke poured from the hood, obscuring her vision and burning her eyes and throat. Grace coughed and tried to wave it away so she could see into the vehicle.

“I want my daddy!” the girl cried, her voice wobbly with fear.

A cold fury swept through Grace. The driver had known the little girl was in there, Grace was sure of it. That moment of clarity had been unmistakable. Yet he had lied and said he was alone in the car, consigning his daughter to a fiery, gruesome death.

Not if she could help it.

“There’s a kid in here!” she shouted with a quick look over her shoulder. “I need help!”

The other motorists just stared at her, not one of them willing to risk death for a stranger. The flames licked the side of the car now, and the roar of the fire seemed louder. She was going to have to move fast. Conscious that with every passing second her chances of rescuing the girl—and of escaping the inevitable blast herself—diminished, Grace sank to her stomach and pulled herself in through the driver’s-side window. The rollover had smashed the other door and she could see no other way in or out.

She dragged herself along the overturned roof of the car, heedless of the scrapes and cuts she earned along the way. When Grace reached her, the girl appeared to be on the verge of hysteria. Who wouldn’t be, strapped upside down in a burning car?

The first order of business was calming her down, she decided, although she knew she had precious seconds to spare.

“Hi. I’m Grace.”

“Are you an angel?”

The soft question nearly destroyed her. “Nope,” she answered. The understatement of the decade. “Just somebody who’s going to help you. What’s your name, honey?”

“Emma. My daddy calls me Little Em.”

If we make it through this, Little Em, I hope your daddy rots in prison for the rest of his life for child endangerment. She let her fury give her strength while she battled to unhook the stubborn safety belt latch from this awkward angle.

Despite her efforts, the belt refused to give. She yanked and pulled for several more seconds, then knew she couldn’t afford to mess with it any longer.

“Okay, Emma, this isn’t working. Let’s see if we can slip you out of there.” Her heart pounding with exertion, she pulled the shoulder strap behind the girl’s back and supported her weight while Emma tried to wriggle out of the lap belt.

“Almost there,” she encouraged. “Just a little more. That’s it.”

With a small cry, Emma toppled free and into her arms. Grace cradled her with one arm and tried to slither back out to the window. Both of them wouldn’t fit through the opening at the same time, but when she tried to push the little girl through ahead of her, Emma’s little arms clung tightly around her neck.

“Honey, you have to let go. I’m right behind you, I promise.”

The girl must have finally understood because she let Grace push her through the window frame. She crawled out after her and scrambled to her feet.

Fueled only by adrenaline now, Grace lifted Emma into her arms and cradled the girl’s head against her shoulder as she raced away from the car. She made it only a few feet before she heard a hissing rumble behind her and knew with sick certainty that she wouldn’t be able to reach safety before the car blew up.

She wasn’t ready to die.

In that instant, her whole world seemed to shift, to spin crazily, and she discovered a fierce survival instinct lurking somewhere deep inside her.

She wasn’t ready to die.

It was the ultimate irony. She’d come so close to killing herself and now—when that bastard Fate finally decided to cooperate—leave it to her to change her mind.

Be careful what you wish for, Gracie.

With one last, tremendous burst of energy, she dropped to the pavement, her body curled protectively around the little girl, an instant before the explosion rocked through the night, shaking the pavement and rippling the leaves of the apple trees.

She cried out as something sharp and scorching hot ripped across the flesh of her back. For a moment, she could only concentrate on breathing past the pain.

After several seconds, when it faded somewhat and she could think again, she straightened. She must have been hit by flying debris. It hurt like hell but she was alive and so was the child she held.

“Wow. That was exciting.” Her voice sounded hoarse, not her own. “Are you okay, sweetie?”

She felt the little girl’s hair brush against her cheek as Emma nodded. “I think so.”

Grace hugged her, dizzied by the pain from her back and the waves of grief crashing over her at the feel of the warm, small weight in her arms, against her chest.

Oh Marisa, Marisa.

“There are people who can help you now,” she creaked out. She could see three highway patrol vehicles on the scene, as well as a fire engine and paramedics. Already, rescue workers were heading toward them carrying a stretcher for the child.

It was suddenly vitally important that she get away before they arrived. She didn’t want to face the inevitable questions, couldn’t bear to have anybody poking and fussing over her.

She pulled her arms away from Emma and climbed to her feet, ignoring the razor blades of pain slicing across her back where the blast had scorched through her clothing.

“Don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me!” the little girl begged.

Grace summoned the last of her energy and managed a facsimile of a smile. “You don’t need me now, sweetie. You’ll be just fine. I promise.”

The paramedics were almost upon them. In the bustle and confusion, it was easy for Grace to slip through the crowd. No one even tried to stop her as she made her way carefully, slowly, back to the cool refuge of the orchard.

The place was a dump.

Jack Dugan double-checked the slip of paper he held with the address on it. It was a shipping invoice, but it had been the only piece of paper he could find when Mike called an hour ago to give him the information they’d been seeking for a week now.

The numbers hanging crookedly against the cinderblock walls of the apartment building matched the numbers on the paper, but he found it hard to believe anybody actually lived here.

The place was falling apart. Weeds thrust through the cracked sidewalk and choked what likely had been a flower garden once. The peeling aquamarine paint of the roof and shutters had probably been cheerful—trendy, even—thirty years ago but now it made the building look just like the rest of the neighborhood: worn-out, tired, an area sagging into itself with a kind of quiet despair.

Grace Solarez lived here alone, according to Mike and the rest of the team of private investigators he’d paid a hefty amount to locate her. She had no husband, no kids, no pets. Just a failed career as a Seattle cop and a dead-end job hauling freight on the docks.

He shoved the Jaguar into Park and studied the building. Inside those walls could be the answers to the tangled quest he’d embarked upon a week ago. Inside, he would find either an amazingly heroic stranger who had faced almost certain death to rescue his daughter—an angel, Emma called her—or he would find the truth about Emma’s kidnapping.

Anticipation curled through him. Since that terrible night, he had tried to be patient while the investigators—both the police and his own—followed various leads to determine the identity of the mysterious stranger who had come out of nowhere to pluck his daughter from the wreckage of the stolen car her kidnapper had used to take her from him.

They’d had precious little to go on—just a few eyewitness descriptions of a slim, wild-eyed Hispanic woman and a well-handled snapshot that had been left at the scene, a photograph of a little girl in two thick dark braids giving a mischievous smile to the camera.

It hadn’t been much, but it had been enough. He now had a name to put with the woman. Grace Solarez. And it was only a matter of time until he could find out more, until he could learn whether she had helped the “bad man” Emma described as her kidnapper escape in the noise and confusion after the accident.

No one remembered seeing her drive up before the accident or drive away after it. It was as if she appeared out of thin air then disappeared into it again. What had she been doing there? How had she managed to slip through the crowd? And had she taken the kidnapper with her?

One way or another, he would get to the bottom of it.

A cool September wind, heavy with impending rain, rattled the rusty chains of an old metal swingset in what passed for a play area as he made his way across the uneven pavement to apartment 14-B.

Did the little girl in the snapshot play there? he wondered. It hardly looked safe, with two swings barely hanging on and the bare bones of a glider with no seats swaying drunkenly in the wind.

If Grace Solarez turned out to be just as she appeared—a brave stranger who had risked her own life to save his daughter’s—he planned to do whatever it took to ensure she wouldn’t have to live in this bleak place anymore.

If not—if it turned out she had a role in his daughter’s ordeal—he would see that she paid, and paid dearly.

As he climbed the rickety ironwork stairway to the second level of the building, he thought he saw a curtain twitch in the apartment next to 14-B. Other than that, the place seemed eerily deserted.

He rang the doorbell and heard its buzz echo inside the apartment, then waited impatiently for her to answer. She had to be here. He’d called McManus Freight, her employer, as soon as he hung up from talking to Mike and had learned Grace Solarez hadn’t reported to work since the night of the kidnapping, eight days ago.

Besides that, Mike said she had one vehicle registered in her name, an old junkheap he could plainly see decomposing over in the parking lot.

He rang the buzzer again and added several sharp knocks for good measure. The curtains fluttered next door again and he was just about to see if the nosy neighbor might be able to tell him anything about his quarry’s whereabouts when he heard a faint, muted rustling behind the door inside her apartment.

It swung open, barely wide enough for the safety chain to pull taut. Through the narrow slit, he could make out little more than tangled brown hair and a pair of huge dark eyes, very much like the pair belonging to the girl in the snapshot he held.

“Grace Solarez?”

The eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Yes?”

Now that he was here, he hadn’t the faintest idea where to start. He cleared his throat. “Hello. My name is Jack Dugan. I need to speak with you, please.”

“About what?” Her voice sounded thready, strange, as if she’d just taken a hit of straight oxygen in one of those hip bars downtown.

Maybe she was a junkie. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t waited around long enough to give a statement to the police and maybe that’s why she was no longer with the Seattle PD.

Would a junkie have stuck around the scene long enough to rescue a terrified little girl?

So many damn questions and she held the key to all of them.

He pushed them away for now. “I’ve had investigators working around the clock for the past week, trying to locate you.” He watched carefully for some reaction in those eyes: curiosity, guilt, anything, but they held no expression, as deep and fathomless as a desert canyon.

The nosy neighbor was at it again. He could see movement in the window and fought down annoyance. He didn’t care for an audience and somehow he doubted she would either. “May I come in?” He tried a friendly, casual smile he was far from feeling. “I swear, I left my ax-murdering kit at home.”

Those eyes studied him for a moment longer, then she pushed up the safety latch and opened the door.

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.

Lily must have seen it, too. With a flip of her wrists, she shooed the father and daughter out the door then glided to the bed despite her girth.

“You just rest now, keiki.” The housekeeper skimmed a gentle hand down Grace’s hair. “You had a bad burn and now your body needs time to heal. Don’t let that huki’ino bother you.”

With fluid movements, she checked Grace’s bandage, fluffed the pillows, smoothed the blanket.

And then, comforted in a way she hadn’t felt in longer than she could remember, Grace slept.

Chapter 3

“You keep those dirty paws of yours out of my strawberries or I’ll chop ’em off.”

Used to her threats, Jack just grinned at his housekeeper brandishing a paring knife dangerously close to his fingers, and popped a slice of fruit into his mouth. For all her bluster, he knew Lily loved him nearly as much as he loved her. Even though neither of them spoke of it, both understood and accepted that she was the closest thing to a mother he or his daughter had ever had.

“If you chopped off my hands, I wouldn’t be able to do this.” Heedless of the knife in her hand, he grabbed her around her ample waist and scooped her off the ground in a hearty embrace.

She shrieked and slapped at him with her free hand. “You think I got time for this kind of crazy stuff? Put me down. I just get that girl of yours down for a nap and try to get some work done and you have to come in with your nonsense.”

He set her back on her feet, snitched another strawberry and leaned back against the counter to watch her finish making a fruit salad. “You work too hard, Lily. You need to relax.”

She snorted. “Food doesn’t just show up on your table like magic. Your clothes don’t wash themselves. Somebody’s got to do all that. Now I have to take care of the wahine, too. Just when am I supposed to relax?”

Her diatribe was as familiar as her threat to chop his fingers off for picking at food between meals and he treated it the same way—with a grin. Despite his frequent offers to hire someone to help her, Lily refused assistance from anyone.

Only once had he dared to go behind her back and had hired a maid through a temp service. Lily had been nothing short of livid and the woman had ultimately left in tears after only a few hours trying to meet her unreasonable expectations. Since then, he just let his housekeeper complain and tried not to give her too much extra work.

Until this week, and Grace Solarez. With a mental note to give Lily a hefty bonus, whether she wanted it or not, he reached into the refrigerator for a juice. “How is your patient, anyway?”

Lily shrugged. “She don’t say much. She seems to be getting better—the burn, anyway. Her heart, now, that’s different.”

He glanced up from twisting the top off the bottle. “What do you mean by that? What did she say to you?”

“Not much. I told you, she don’t talk much to me. I don’t need the words for me to see she’s got pain, though. You just have to look in her eyes to see she’s hurting big. Maybe too big even for words.”

He sipped the juice and thought of the report on his desk, outlining in stark detail the reason why Grace Solarez grieved. He pictured the child in the photograph, all big eyes and toothy grin. Her daughter, Marisa, he had learned. The innocent victim of a drive-by shooting while waiting outside her school for her mother to pick her up.

She had been killed a year to the date from the night her mother had given Emma back to him.

He grimaced at the bottle and set it down. The police had no leads into Emma’s kidnapping, and despite the lengthy report from his private investigators, he was no closer to unearthing the truth about Grace Solarez.

She had been staying in his house for five days and her presence on the highway that night—the anniversary of her daughter’s death—was still a mystery.

“How long you gonna keep her here?” Lily asked.

“She’s not a prisoner.”

“Does she know that?”

“Of course.”

Lily went on as if she didn’t hear him. “Because last I heard, you were telling her you wouldn’t let her leave.”

“I had to tell her that. If you had seen that apartment of hers, you wouldn’t want her going back there either. At least not until she builds up her strength.”

“Why don’t you take her dinner to her and tell her that yourself. You can save my old legs a few steps.” She held a tray out for him, brimming with food.

“I think you have a few good hulas left in those old legs.” He grinned, but took the tray from her, not willing to admit even to himself that he was eager for an excuse to talk to his guest again.

The door to the guest room had been left open and he found Grace sitting on a curvy old rocking chair and gazing out at the Sound. She made a stunning picture, swallowed up by what had to be one of Lily’s massive muumuus, with her dark hair curling around her face and her feet tucked under her.

She should have looked ridiculous in the oversize garment, but it just seemed to make her look delicate, ethereal. A lighter-than-feathers little sprite who could float away wherever the breeze took her, like a character in one of Emma’s favorite storybooks.

She seemed unaware of his presence so he rested a hip against the doorframe and studied her profile, wishing he could read in her features some clue to the mystery woman who had invaded their lives.

After five days of Lily’s mothering, she definitely appeared healthier, he could say that much for her. Her skin had lost that sallow tinge it had worn when he first brought her here and those plum circles had faded from beneath her eyes.

No shadows remained under those mocha-colored eyes, but there were definitely still shadows in them, a sadness that looked as if it had been there for a long time.

He thought about what Lily had said, about her hurting too big for words. How would he bear it if he lost Emma the way she had lost her daughter?

If he hadn’t been holding the tray of food, he would have rubbed his chest at the sudden ache there. The startling depth of his compassion made his voice more curt than normal. “Are you supposed to be out of bed?”

She glanced up and those too-serious dark eyes blinked at him. “Beautiful view you’ve got here, Dugan,” she said, instead of answering his question.

He looked over her shoulder at the garden with its colorful late blossoms, framed by the vast blue of the sky and the water. It was one of those perfect, unusually clear fall days in the Northwest, and it looked like everyone on the Sound had decided to take advantage of the great weather. Dozens of pleasure boats—everything from sailboats to yachts to sea kayaks—dotted the water.

He had fallen in love with the view the first time he’d seen it, from the back of a motorcycle on the other side of the Sound. He’d been a badass seventeen year old, angry at the world and at himself. And most of all, hurting and furious over his father’s betrayal.

Trying to go as far and as fast as he could from the chaos left in the wake of his father’s, William Dugan, suicide, he had spent six days on the back of the bike. He remembered stopping on the water’s edge and staring out at Puget Sound, knowing he couldn’t go any farther, that he would have to stop here or go back the way he had come.

Suddenly, it was as if the anger and the grief fueling him through the trip had kept right on going without him, had slid into the ocean and washed away with the tide.

His father had left him with nothing but obligations, debts he had spent years paying off. But he had done it. And when it looked like the shipping company he had created out of the wreckage his father had left behind would survive, the first thing Jack had purchased had been this strip of land on the shore of Bainbridge Island.

“I like it,” he finally murmured to Grace Solarez. It was a vast understatement and couldn’t even begin to describe the tie he felt to this place.

He held out the tray to her. “I come bearing food.” He scanned the contents of the tray, pulling lids off of containers to snoop underneath. “What do we have here? Looks like soup, homemade bread, a fruit salad and some juice.”

She drew her bare toes even farther under the edge of the muumuu until they disappeared. “Please tell Lily thank you, but I’m not very hungry right now.”

He set the tray down on the bed. “You need to eat to get your strength back.”

“If I eat all that, will you let me go home?”

“Why are you in such a big hurry?”

“I don’t belong here. We both know that. While I certainly appreciate all you’ve done for me, I’m feeling much better now and would like to leave. I’m not used to having all this time to…to do nothing. Besides, I have a life to get back to in the city.”

Not much of one. A slum of an apartment, a job on the docks. No friends, no family who would worry about her. She couldn’t possibly be happy in that bleak existence.

“Can’t you just look at this as a well-deserved vacation?”

Her mouth pursed into a frown. “Why are you so insistent I stay here?”

“I just want you to be comfortable, for you to have someone to look after you while you heal.”

“Why?”

“You earned those burns saving my daughter’s life. I can never repay you for what you did for her. For me. The least I can do is make sure you have people to look after you while you recover.”

Her short laugh sounded harsh, caustic. “You don’t owe me a thing, Dugan.”

“I owe you everything,” he corrected softly.

She studied him for a moment, those big dark eyes murky, then she shrugged. “Fine. You’ve repaid me by giving me the royal treatment for a few days. It’s been a real blast, believe me, but we’re square now. Why don’t you just give me a lift to the ferry and we can call it even.”

They weren’t even close to being even. Besides that, he didn’t want to let her out of his sight until he could be absolutely sure she wasn’t involved in the kidnapping, until they had a suspect in custody.

Jack couldn’t shake the gut instinct someone else besides the man Emma described had been involved in her kidnapping. He didn’t want that person to be Grace Solarez, but he couldn’t let what he wanted interfere with the investigation.

He sat on the bed, careful not to tip the tray. “I understand you used to be a cop in the city.”

The gentle movement of the rocking chair ceased and her expression became closed. “Used to be. A long time ago.”

“Not so long. You resigned about a year ago, didn’t you?”

“Your snoops were efficient.”

“It wasn’t exactly a state secret.”

She was silent for a moment, then turned curious eyes to him. “How did you find me, anyway?”

“The picture.”

She stared at him. “What?”

He gestured to the photograph still propped against the lamp by the side of the bed. “Your snapshot. You dropped it at the scene. We were able to identify the park in the background of the photo and then hit all the film processing places in the general area. I thought we had hit a dead end but it turned out a photo technician at the QuikPic where you developed the film knew you.”

“Pham Leung.”

He nodded. His private investigator told him the clerk hadn’t wanted to talk at first. He had been fiercely protective of Grace—to the point of rudeness—but had cooperated after Mike told him she had saved a little girl’s life, that the girl’s father only wanted to thank her.

“Once we had a name,” Jack continued, “the rest was easy.”

“You had no right asking questions about me.”

“Maybe not. But I had to find you.”

“Fine. You’ve found me, you’ve patched me up. Now let me leave.”

“Why are you so uncomfortable with my gratitude?”

“Why can’t you clue in that I don’t want it?”

At an impasse, they gazed at each other across the length of the room. Anger sent a flush of appealing color to her cheeks, turning her eyes almost black. Now that she was on the road to recovery, she looked much less the injured waif and much more a lush, soft woman.

There were curves somewhere in that voluminous robe, he remembered. They had been hard to miss when he carried her to his car that day. Now, with her spine stiff and her chin at an angle, he could see the high, firm outline of her breasts beneath the bright Hawaiian print.

To his shock, his body began to stir, to sizzle to life. He felt his blood begin to thicken, begin to churn through his veins like golden honey through a straw.

Where the hell did that come from? She wasn’t at all the kind of woman that usually attracted him. If he had a type, it was tall, willowy blondes, not scrawny ex-cops with wild dark hair and big, wounded eyes.

The situation between them was complicated enough. The last thing he needed to do was toss his suddenly unruly libido into the mix. With fierce determination, he clamped down on the burgeoning awareness.

His gaze found the photo by the bed, the one that had brought him to her. “I didn’t have the chance to tell you this before,” he murmured, “but I am very sorry about your daughter.”

At his words, the defiance seemed to drain away from her features. Hell, the whole life seemed to drain out of her, leaving only a cold, stark grief. He instantly regretted mentioning Marisa Solarez. If Grace had wanted to talk about her child, she would have brought the subject up herself.

She slowly sank back into the chair as if her bones couldn’t support the weight of her pain. “How did you…? Oh. Pham.”

He nodded. “Is that the reason you quit the police force?”

For a moment, he didn’t think she would answer him. She sent him one quick, unreadable look, then gazed out at the relentless water beating away at the shore, her fingers twisting restlessly amid the flowery folds of Lily’s colorful dress.

After several moments, she looked back at him. “I couldn’t do it anymore. I had too much rage, too much hate built up inside me. The department psychiatrist thought I would be a danger to myself and others.” She said the words with bitter self-mockery.

“Have you ever thought about doing any private security consulting work?”

“Excuse me?” She stared at him as if he’d just asked her to climb on the bureau and yodel.

“With your background in police work, I think you would be exceptional at it.”

This wasn’t the first time the idea of hiring her had occurred to him. Since he had brought her here, the idea had percolated in the back of his mind. It was the perfect solution on several levels. It would get her out of that dismal apartment, for one thing. And he would have a better chance of proving whether she participated in the kidnapping—and, if so, of finding the other kidnapper—if she stayed close enough for him to keep a watchful eye on her.

“I suppose you’ve heard by now about my daughter’s kidnapping.” He watched her intently for any sign of guilt—a nervous twitch, a flicker in her eyes—but she returned his gaze without emotion. She was either as cold as an iceberg or she was innocent.

He was almost positive it was the latter. Almost.

“Yes,” she replied. “Your housekeeper mentioned it. I imagine you both must have been terrified.”

His gut clutched in memory. The ransom note had arrived at the office: $500,000. Not much for a little girl’s life.

At first he’d put it down to some kind of sick joke and then his phone had rung with that panicked call from the director of Emma’s preschool saying she hadn’t come in from outside play time and had he somehow come to pick her up without checking in at the office?

Terrified didn’t even begin to describe how he had felt then—that cold, sick, paralyzing fear.

Would he ever be able to let her out of his sight again or hear the phone ring without that jolt of panic?

“How is your daughter handling it?” Grace asked. “It must have been a terrible ordeal for her.”

He uncoiled the lingering tendrils of fear that wrapped around his insides whenever he thought of that day and rested a hip on the edge of the bed, crossing his legs out in front of him at the ankles. “She’s seems to have emerged relatively unscathed.”

“That must be a relief.”

He nodded. Odd how he hadn’t been able to talk about this with anyone else—not even Piper or Lily—but he found himself wanting to confide in this slight, quiet woman.

“I would hate for her to live her life afraid,” he admitted, “but I hope she has gained at least a little healthy suspicion for strangers. She still treats everybody like her best friend, from the garbage man to the bag boys at the supermarket. She probably jumped right in the car with the guy who took her.”

He realized his hand had fisted in the quilt covering the bed and forced his fingers to relax. “If it can happen once, it can happen again,” he went on, “and I want to do everything I can to prevent that. I want to hire you to do everything you can to prevent it from happening again.”

“Is that your gratitude offering me a job, Mr. Dugan?”

“In part. I also hear you were one hell of a cop, that you made detective after just four years on patrol. It seems a shame to waste that hauling dead fish around.”

“My career choices are really none of your business.” That frosty, screw-you tone was back.

“You’re absolutely right. But protecting my daughter is my business.”

“You can’t keep your daughter in a bubble,” she said quietly. “No matter how good your security system is, how many people you hire to protect her, there would still be risks.”

“I know. But I want to do everything I can to minimize them, both here and at my business.”

“Global Shipping Incorporated. Specializing in Far East imports and exports.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You must have a few snoops of your own.”

“Just Lily. She’s full of information. In fact, if you’re looking for a security leak you might want to start there.”

He grinned at the idea. People didn’t come any more loyal than Lily and Tiny Kihualani. “She must really like you. Usually she keeps her lips sealed up tighter than an oil tanker.”

Instead of returning his grin, Grace just continued regarding him solemnly, and he found himself wondering what it would take to make that lush, kiss-me mouth break into a smile.

He indulged in the possibilities for only a moment then returned to the business at hand. “I’m prepared to pay you well if you take the job.” He named a figure and had the satisfaction of seeing her eyes widen. “That would, of course, include room and board, since the most logical thing would be for you to stay here.”

She shook her head. “That’s certainly a very generous offer, Mr. Dugan, but I’m not interested.”

“Why not?”

She tilted her chin defiantly. “Does it matter?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “It matters to me.”

Her eyes were as cool as her voice now. “I was a police detective, not a security guard. I don’t know the first thing about what you’re asking me to do.”

“You solved crimes, right? I just want you to take it a step further and try to prevent this crime from happening again.”

“I’m not interested,” she repeated.

He studied her, noting the implacable thrust of her jaw, the stubborn light in her eyes. Finally he straightened from the bed. “Don’t give me an answer now. Just think about it for a while. Overnight, maybe. Then, if you’re still not interested in the morning, I’ll have Tiny take you home.”

For long moments after he left the room, Grace stared after him. The room felt colder, somehow, emptier without his presence.

Something about Jack Dugan appealed to her, in a way she hadn’t been attracted to a man in longer than she could remember. It startled her—frightened her, even—the way her heart seemed to catch in her chest and her pulse fluttered wildly when he grinned, when he looked at her out of those green eyes.

Another reason why she absolutely could not take the job, as if she needed more.

Despite what she had told him, she knew she was capable of handling the assignment. Like he had said, she had spent enough time solving crime to have picked up plenty of knowledge about how to prevent it and she had worked enough VIP security detail to give her some idea of how she could make life safer for Jack Dugan and his daughter.

Still, capable was a far cry from expert.

Not that it mattered. No way could she even consider taking the job, not if it involved staying here in this house where there was such love, filled with toys and hugs and laughter.

She couldn’t bear it.

No, the smartest thing for her to do would be to catch a lift in the morning and ride away from Jack Dugan and his little blond daughter without a backward glance.

A knock interrupted her thoughts and she grimaced, not wanting another run-in with him. To her relief, it was Lily, the loquacious housekeeper.

“You’ve got a phone call.”

She straightened from the rocking chair. “There must be some mistake. No one knows I’m here.”

Lily shrugged. “It’s some man. Want me to tell him you don’t want to talk?”

“No. No, I’ll take it.”

Lily handed her a cordless phone and then slipped from the room, respecting her privacy. Still thinking the housekeeper had erred, she spoke hesitantly into the phone. “Yes?”

“Dammit, Grace. Where the hell have you been?”

She relaxed at the familiar voice. “Nice to talk to you, too, Riley.”

Her former partner bit out a curse. She could just picture him, clothes slightly rumpled, dark hair characteristically messy, hawk-like features twisted with irritation as he glared at the phone he hated.

Beau Riley was the closest she had to family. Six years of being partners, first on patrol and then as detectives, had made them closer than blood. Brain clones, Riley called them. They knew how the other thought, felt. They even finished each other’s sentences half the time, which was exactly why there could never be anything romantic between them.

In the hell of the last twelve months, he had been the only person she had stayed in contact with, although even that had been as sporadic as Seattle sunshine.

“You got any idea how worried I’ve been?” he snapped now.

“No.” Suddenly, unaccountably, famished, she speared a strawberry with a fork. “But I’m guessing you’re about to enlighten me.”

“You don’t answer your phone for a week. I go by your apartment and you’re not there. I go to that crummy job of yours on the docks. You’re not there. I go back and forth between the two until I feel like a stinkin’ yo-yo. Finally, I get one of your stupid neighbors to answer the door, only to learn some guy carried you out the door and into some fancy car a week ago. A stranger hauls an unconscious woman into his car and not once did the idiot think to call the police. What the hell is this city coming to?”

She settled back into the rocking chair and nibbled at the fruit salad while she listened to his familiar rant about the pitiful state of society.

When it finally sounded like Beau was beginning to wind down, she interrupted him. “How did you find me?” That seemed to be the question of the hour.

“The idiot neighbor at least had the brains to remember part of a license plate and the make of the car, although why he didn’t contact the police before is a complete mystery to me. Took me two days but I finally traced it to Dugan. What the hell are you doing there, Grace?”

Good question, one she’d love to answer if she only knew. “It’s a long story,” she finally said. “Why were you looking for me?”

The silence stretched thin between them, a few beats longer than was comfortable. When he finally spoke, he sounded almost sheepish. As sheepish as macho-man Beau Riley could sound, at any rate. “I was worried about you.” He cleared his throat. “What with the anniversary and all. Afraid you’d do something crazy.”

Crazy like taking a little stroll into traffic on the interstate. He didn’t say it, but she knew exactly how his mind worked. Hers had worked the same way, which is probably why he’d been worried about her.

Sitting here in Jack Dugan’s sleek, elegant guest room with a bowl of luscious food in her hands—with the waves licking at the shore and gulls crying out overhead—the desperation and despair of that night seemed as far away as the moon.

She felt a deep guilt at her weakness, that she had even considered ending her life. That she had almost succumbed to the pain.

“You okay?”

She blinked away the shame, knowing there would be plenty of time for it later. “I’m fine,” she lied. “You?”

Beau cleared his throat again. “Yeah.”

She heard the raw emotion in the single word and drew a shaky breath. She should have known the anniversary would hit him hard, should have tried to reach out to him.

Beau had loved her daughter, too, and had relished his role of honorary uncle. She thought of birthday parties and piggy-back rides and lazy Sunday picnics in the park.

Before she could answer, though, to offer whatever kind of meager comfort she could, he changed the subject.

“So tell me what you’re doing with Jack Dugan, of all people.” His tone shifted suddenly, edged with a suspicion that hadn’t been there at the beginning of their conversation. “What are you up to? Dammit, Grace. Don’t you dare tell me you’re playing Lone Ranger on this one.”

She frowned, puzzled by his anger. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t try to con me. I know you better than that. There’s no way I’ll believe it’s purely a coincidence you’re staying with the owner of Global Shipping Incorporated.”

The first glimmer of unease began to stir within her and, suddenly restless, she rose to return the empty bowl to the tray on the bed. “Should that mean something to me?”

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone line, then Riley swore softly. “You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what? I’m too tired to play games with you. Spit it out.”

“Global Shipping, Inc., and your friend Jack Dugan are smack dab in the middle of a multi-jurisdictional investigation for smuggling.”

The lingering taste of the fruit turned to ashes in her mouth and the glimmer of unease became a riot of foreboding. “Drugs?”

“No, big, bad nasty assault weapons. Name a kind of illegal weapon and he’s suspected of bringing it in.”

Somehow this had something to do with her, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so suspicious of her reasons for staying with Dugan. She frowned. She must still be woozy from her illness because, try as she might, she couldn’t figure it out. “It’s been a year since I turned in my badge. Why would you think I’d suddenly develop an interest in some petty smuggling ring?”

When he spoke, Beau’s voice was as sharp as a switchblade. “You need me to spell it out for you? Weapons, Grace. GSI and Jack Dugan are suspected of bringing in most of the assault weapons on the street today, including the AK-47 favored by our mutual friend Spooky Lawrence. The same Spooky Lawrence currently serving fifteen-to-life for killing an eleven-year-old girl named Marisa Solarez in a drive-by shooting outside her school.”

Chapter 4

Grace couldn’t speak for several seconds after Beau’s announcement, couldn’t think straight, could only stand there, an empty bowl in her hand, while an awful, cold numbness began in her stomach and spread out through the rest of her body

Weapons smuggling.

The man with the sweet smile and the green, green eyes and the gentle way with his five-year-old daughter was a weapons smuggler.

She thought she would be sick suddenly. Totally and violently ill all over Jack Dugan’s glossy, elegant guest room.

“Grace? You okay?”

She blinked several times, then set the bowl down gingerly on the table, fearful it might shatter into a million pieces if she wasn’t careful. “I… Yes,” she whispered. “Fine.”

But she wasn’t. Her thoughts had turned black and horrific, to blood and sirens and a child’s shattered body.

Most of the time, she tried not to think about that day—just living without Marisa was torture enough—but with Riley’s words, everything she tried to block from her mind came rushing back.

She hated most that the last words between them hadn’t been spoken out of love but out of exasperated anger. Marisa had called her at work to tell her she’d missed the bus for the third time in two weeks.

“Can you come get me?” she had begged, and Grace—with a dozen cases open on her desk and two interviews scheduled within the hour—had snapped at her about being responsible and trustworthy.

In the end, she had reluctantly agreed to pick her up, but she had been too late.

Five minutes.

That’s all it took for her world to shatter.

If she had been five minutes earlier—if she hadn’t stopped to buy a Coke from the vending machine at the station house or to exchange jibes with the desk sergeant on her way out the door—her daughter would have been just fine.

They would have been at the little house they’d worked so hard to fix up, catching up on long division homework or watching TV or taking a bike ride through the park.

But she had stopped for a Coke. She had stopped to ride the desk sergeant about his pot belly and his junk food habit.

And she had arrived at the school five minutes too late to protect her eleven-year-old daughter from being caught in the crossfire of rival punks fighting over drug territory.

Her stomach pitched and rolled as she relived driving up to the school and seeing the two squad cars already on the scene, their flashing lights piercing the long afternoon shadows. Already a crowd had gathered on the playground. She’d picked out the principal of the school, the gym teacher and the lanky, tow-headed boy Marisa had a crush on, the one probably responsible for her missing the bus.

Their faces had been taut with shock, and she had known. Somehow she had known.

She remembered stumbling out of her car and rushing toward the crowd, then the horror—the devastating horror—of seeing Marisa there, covered in blood and completely, terribly still.

“You still there?” Beau asked in her ear.

She couldn’t answer him, lost in the nightmare she couldn’t seem to wake from.

“Say something, Gracie,” he demanded, and she could hear the concern roughening Beau’s voice.

She cleared her throat and felt the pain of the action through vocal cords suddenly thick with emotion. “What…what do you want me to say?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Anything. Just don’t freeze up on me like that. I hate it when you do that.”

“I didn’t know any of this. About Dugan, I mean. You shocked me. I’m sorry.”

He swore viciously. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry about. It’s Dugan who should be sorry. And he will be. Trust me, Gracie, if he’s dealing in illegal weapons—if he played the slightest part in providing the assault weapons Spooky and his crew got their hands on for their little turf war—Jack Dugan is going to be very, very sorry.”

With monumental effort, she managed to gather the memories and shove them back into the corner of her mind where they usually lurked. They wouldn’t stay long, she knew, would soon be scratching and clawing their way out. But for now she forced herself to tune them out, to become detached and clinical. The hard-nosed cop sniffing out a lead.

“How strong is the case against him? Who’s working it?” she asked.

She could almost see the shrug of his broad shoulders. “Who’s not? Customs, ATF, FBI. Five of us from the Seattle PD. Everybody wants a piece of it.”

“So do I.” She stared out at the water. “I want in.”

He snorted. “Absolutely not. No friggin’ way.”

“I’m part of this, Beau. I want in.”

“You’re too close.”

“And you’re not?”

He swore again. “Dammit, Gracie. You turned in your badge.”

For the first time in a year, she felt the loss of it, of the gold detective shield she had worked so hard to earn. She had been so proud of it once, amazed that she was finally doing the job she’d dreamed of since she was younger than Marisa.

Her father had worn his own uniform with such dignity. Manny Solarez had loved being a cop, the honor and the integrity and the ceremony of it. In the end, he had given his life for the job.

Her own passion for becoming a peace officer had been born that day when she was eight years old, after her father’s partner and best friend had come to the house bearing the news of Manny’s death in the line of duty.

Her job and her daughter had been the only things that mattered to Grace. Without one, though, the other had seemed pointless and she had surrendered her badge without protest.

Now she wanted it back, if only to make Jack Dugan pay.

“I don’t have to be official,” she said now. Excitement clicked through her, the almost forgotten buzz of bringing a criminal to justice. “I’m in the perfect position. I’m staying at his house, Beau. You can’t get any closer than that.”

“Which brings me to my original question. What the hell are you doing there?”

She debated how much to tell him, then shrugged. “I told you, it’s a long story, but he thinks he owes me right now. What do you know about his daughter’s kidnapping?”

“Holy cow! That was you?”

She frowned into the phone. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all.”

“That’s all? You’re a damn hero, Gracie!”

“Drop it, Riley,” she snapped. She wasn’t a hero. She was a weak, pathetic coward.

To keep him from making the inevitable leap and start asking her what she was doing there in the first place on the anniversary of her daughter’s death, she changed the subject. “How does the kidnapping play into the whole thing?”

Beau immediately changed gears, and she sat back, with a minor congratulatory pat on the back for still knowing exactly how to work him. “We’re still trying to figure it all out at this point,” he said. “One theory is that a deal might have gone sour or he might have pissed off one of his customers somehow.”

“So they took the kid as payback? Nice. Dugan must run with a real swell crowd.”

“That’s one of the screwiest things about the case. As far as we can tell, he doesn’t hang with any known criminal elements. He comes from East Coast money, but built GSI from the ground up after a well-decorated stint as an air force pilot. Other than a few problems with the law when he was a juvie and one disturbing the peace citation for hosting a loud party when he was in the military, the man is so clean he squeaks.”

“Or at least he manages to put on a good show.”

“Right.”

“I can find out, Beau. I can dig deeper than anyone on the task force. You know I can.”

“Grace—”

“I’m staying in his house. Not only that but he just asked me to handle his personal security. I told him no, but I can go to him and tell him I changed my mind. Think about it. I can work it so I have complete access to everything—where he goes, who he sees. What kind of damn breakfast cereal he prefers. Everything.”

His silence dragged on so long she was afraid she had lost the connection. “I don’t like it,” he finally said, reluctance clear in his voice. “My butt would be toast if anybody else on the task force found out what’s going on.”

“So don’t tell them. Just think of me as any other informant.”

He snorted. “Right.”

“Come on, Beau. Take a chance. You want Dugan and you know I’m the one to help you get him.”

“Yeah,” he finally said. “Yeah, I do. Okay. You can feed me whatever information you come up with. But for Pete’s sake, Gracie, be careful, would you?”

She tried not to let her grim anticipation filter through her voice. “I always am, Beau. I always am.”

Jack sliced through the water of his swimming pool with strong, steady strokes. Ten laps. Eleven. Twelve. With each turn, he felt his stress level drop a notch.

He had left the lights off in the indoor spa, preferring the glow from only the pool’s green underwater lights reflecting off black tile and the occasional moonbeam that thrust its way through the thick storm clouds to pour in through the wide row of sky lights overhead.

Including an indoor pool in the house design had been purely an indulgence—and an expensive one at that. But he didn’t regret a penny of the money he’d spent. In stress reduction alone, the thing had more than paid for itself.

At the end of the day, with his work finally done and Emma tucked into bed, all storied-out, he retreated here to unwind.

He needed it today. He had more kinks in his shoulders and neck than the cord of the damn telephone he sometimes felt was permanently attached to his ear.

He had spent the morning going over contracts, then had been on the phone in teleconference negotiations most of the afternoon. He had haggled and bartered and wrangled until he was bleary-eyed and hoarse-voiced, but he’d been successful. He had managed to swing a multimillion dollar deal for GSI.

Now, though, he wanted nothing more than to lose himself in hard, mindless physical activity.

After twenty laps, he paused to catch his breath and floated on his back for a few minutes, trying to see if he could find any stars in the murky night sky.

He ached to be up there. He hated sitting behind a desk—even when that desk was at his home office where he worked two days a week, instead of GSI’s hangar at the airport where he spent the rest of the week.

Desk work—even very lucrative desk work—made him feel trapped and edgy and out of sorts.

He wanted to be flying. If he had his choice, he’d leave all the negotiations and paperwork to Syd—hell, she was better at it than he was anyway—then he could do nothing else but fly.

But he didn’t have a choice. He had Emma to think about.

Even though Lily was wonderful with her, he hated leaving her overnight more than once or twice a month. She was only five years old and she needed her daddy right now more than he needed the thrilling rush of being behind the controls of a jet airplane.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to leave her if he didn’t know exactly what it was like to be on the other side of the equation. He had a whole childhood full of memories of yearning for his parents to remember he was alive. He knew firsthand the loneliness of another night spent in the company of only a surly housekeeper, of waking up alone after a bad dream and knowing he would have to comfort himself.

During those long nights after Camille took off, when he had been the only one there to get up with a baby crying out for a mother who wanted nothing to do with her, he had made a promise to himself and to his little girl. Even though her mother had jumped at the first chance to abandon her, he had vowed that Emma would always know she came first with him.

In a few more years, she’d be old enough that he could leave her without this guilt, without worrying about whether the pizza she had for dinner would give her a stomachache or if she had her favorite stuffed poodle tucked into her bed or if she remembered to brush her teeth.

Until then, he would work out his frustration at what amounted to a self-imposed standdown here in the water.

He curled over to his stomach again and started to freestyle toward the shallow end of the pool when a flash of color caught his attention.

He glanced up and found his houseguest standing in the doorway to the spa wearing that same robe of Lily’s, with vibrant red hibiscus and fronds of greenery splashed over it.

Her hair was tousled and her feet bare. From his vantage point in the water, he could see them clearly—slim and brown and somehow unbearably sexy.

Man, he needed a woman if he could get all fired up over a pair of bare feet.

“I’m sorry,” she said when he stopped swimming, in a voice as cool as a January wind blowing off the Sound. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

He frowned, wondering just what he’d done to earn such dislike, or if she treated everybody with the same chilly detachment.

“You didn’t disturb me. I was just about done anyway.”

With three quick strokes, he finished the lap and hoisted himself out of the pool then grabbed a thick towel hanging from the back of a koa wood chaise cushioned in bright tropical colors and wrapped the towel loosely around his hips.

“It’s after midnight—if you’re still determined to head over to the ferry in the morning, shouldn’t you be tucked in your bed, saving up your strength?”

She buried her fingers in the fold of the robe. “I was too restless to sleep. It feels like I’ve done nothing else for a month.”

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