Saving Grace (Serve and Protect Series)

by Wilson, Norah

  “It’s not that‌—”

  “Hell, Grace, just pretend I’m him. That should do it for you.”

  Pain lanced her to the bone. Pain for him, for her. She turned away, scrabbling at the unfamiliar door until she found the handle. The door popped open and the dome light came on, but before she could get out of the car, he restrained her by grabbing her arm.

  “Are you forgetting our audience?”

  She glanced up to see the clerk had come out from behind the desk and was standing in the window watching openly now. Then Ray’s head blotted out her view as his mouth closed on hers.

  She sat motionless for a few stunned seconds as his lips moved over hers, hard and angry. There was anger, too, in the hand that came up to hold her head prisoner. But heaven help her, this was Ray, and she missed him so badly.

  She opened her mouth to the demand of his.

  Instantly, he deepened the kiss, his tongue invading her mouth, demanding a response. For a few heartbeats, shock prevented her from providing it. He’d never kissed her like this before. The hot insistence of the invasion swept her up.

  She’d braced a hand against his chest when he’d grabbed her, but now she curled her fingers into his shirt and pulled him closer. Oh, God, the taste of him! And the smell. She didn’t care if she ever breathed anything else again. The clean cotton smell of his shirt mixed with the lemongrass soap he used, and all of it underlain by his own unique musk.

  She lifted her arms to encircle his neck, straining closer. In that instant, the kiss changed. There was nothing left but desire, his anger burned away in its cleansing fire. No longer needing to hold her head prisoner, he dropped his hands to her waist. She felt a draft of air as his hands slipped under the thin shell she wore, then the bliss of his palms on her midriff, the undersides of her breasts.

  She wrenched her mouth from his. “Oh, yes, Ray, touch me.”

  His fingers flexed on her breasts, drawing a moan from her. Suddenly, she needed to touch him like this, too, feel the warmth of his skin beneath her palms. She slid her hands down his chest and pulled his shirt free of his jeans. Her fingers found the hair-roughened skin of his abdomen, but before she could explore further, he drew back, putting a layer of cooling air between them again.

  She opened her eyes. “Ray?”

  “I think we’ve convinced junior in there that we need a room. Guess we’re better actors than I thought.”

  The words would have cut her, had she not heard the tremor in his voice or seen the way his skin was so tightly drawn over his face. He’d been no more acting than she was. The knowledge helped her fight off the despair that hovered so close.

  “Ready for act two?” he asked.

  “What do I do?”

  “Just register us as Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Tell him we’ll want to get a fast start tomorrow, so you’d like to pay cash right now.”

  “He’s not going to believe that.”

  “He’s not meant to.”

  Of course. His register was probably full of John Smiths.

  “Remind me again, why is he not going to recognize you?”

  “If he’s hetero, which I think we can safely say from the way he’s watching us, he’ll be too busy checking you out.”

  Ray jumped out of the car and came around just as she closed her own door. To Grace’s surprise, he pulled her into an embrace. This time, his kiss was controlled, purely for show. Still, a little tremor raced through her as he released her.

  “Lead on,” he said, “and make it look good.”

  She closed her eyes for a second. Pretend. That’s all you have to do. Pretend it’s for real.

  Taking his hand, she tugged him toward the office, doing her best to look like a woman embarking on a sexual adventure. The clerk, who’d retreated hastily behind his desk, glanced up as they burst through the door. Grace felt Ray’s hands settle on her waist. She approached the desk, keeping Ray behind her.

  “Can I help you folks?”

  “We’d like a cabin,” she said. Behind her, Ray lifted her hair off her nape and began nibbling the side of her neck.

  The clerk’s eyes widened. “Reservation?”

  “No, it’s kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.” Grace tilted her head to let Ray have access to her ear.

  The clerk’s eyes dropped to Ray’s hands, which were now splayed on her belly. “The name?”

  “Um ... Smith. Robert and Evelyn Smith.”

  His eyes flicked up to meet hers at that. “I can give you Cabin Three, at the end.”

  “That’d be great,” she breathed, dropping a hand to cover one of Ray’s, threading her fingers through his. Obligingly, the clerk’s gaze dropped to their linked hands. “I’d like to pay for it now, if that’s okay. We’ll need to leave early tomorrow.”

  “Certainly, ma’am. Credit card?”

  “Cash.”

  “Of course.” He reached for a key from the pegboard behind him.

  Grace inhaled sharply as Ray’s hands snaked up under the hem of her sweater. She didn’t need the draft on her belly to tell her Ray had exposed a significant amount of her skin. The clerk’s expression told her as much.

  “That’ll be fifty-four dollars, including tax,” he said to her mid-section.

  She pulled three twenties from her purse.

  “Keep the change,” she said, snatching the key he’d placed on the counter. They whirled and made a speedy exit. Grace felt the clerk’s gaze on her all the way out.

  They’d done it!

  Outside, in the flickering light of the motel’s sign, Ray pulled her into his arms again. Grace lifted her face eagerly, ready to put her elation into another searing kiss, but he merely leaned close.

  Of course. She thudded back to earth. This was just acting. From the clerk’s perspective, he would assume they were kissing, and that’s all that mattered.

  “Good job,” he said into her ear. “Now, you run along and unlock and I’ll bring the car around. No need for him to see us drag the shopping bags in.” He pulled back slightly, as though lifting his head after a kiss. “We’ve got a lot of work to do before morning.”

  His words brought the gravity of their situation home again. She’d been distracted while they’d performed for Norman Bates, but it all came flooding back now. Someone was trying to kill Ray. Possibly her, too, since she’d witnessed the sniper attack. And if Ray was right, they couldn’t turn to the cops. At least, not yet.

  Beneath those worries was a groundswell of more generalized anxiety about the memories she’d lost and the unexplained money. Dr. Greenfield had mentioned that paranoia was common in amnesia sufferers, but was she being paranoid to suspect the events she’d forgotten might tie into their current peril? She thought not.

  Pulling away from her husband’s mock embrace, she crossed the parking lot to the third cabin, trying to look like a woman eager for illicit sex instead of one ready to crack under the strain of fear and unhappiness.

  Chapter 6

  AS RAY UNPACKED THE contents of the shopping bags onto the coffee table, he was supremely conscious of Grace.

  Of course, after that clinch in the car and the groping in the motel office, he’d be conscious of her if she were in the next cabin. But as it happened, she was moving around this cabin, checking the locks, plucking at the ugly green curtains he’d closed for privacy. Her scent swirled all around him.

  Dammit, couldn’t she just light somewhere?

  A moment later, she emerged from the tiny bathroom and sat on the edge of the bed. He continued with the sorting, gaze down. Too bad he couldn’t tune the sound of her out, too. He knew precisely where she was and what she was doing. He heard the small squeak as she sat on the edge of the bed, heard her soft sigh, the louder protest of the bed’s frame when she flopped backward on the mattress.

  Irritated with himself but unable to resist, he glanced at her. Just as he’d pictured in his mind’s eye, she lay sprawled, arms outflung, contemplating the ceiling. Her hair was fanned o
ut on the floral bedspread and her breasts jutted invitingly against the thin fabric of her top. The ache in his groin was back just like that. Suddenly, fiercely, he wished she’d get up and roam again.

  He dropped his gaze. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said, focusing on the box of hair dye he’d fished from the bag. Lightest Blond. Was that for him or for her?

  She lifted her head. “Do what?”

  He pulled out another box of dye. Dark Auburn. “Get too cozy with that bedspread. It could probably be classified as a bio-hazard.”

  She rolled off the bed like it had caught fire.

  “Just take the throw off,” he advised without looking up. “I’m pretty sure they do launder the sheets.”

  He stuck his hand in the bag and came up with some headache medication and a bottle of vitamin C, which he added to the growing pile of irrelevant stuff she’d bought to camouflage the purpose of her shopping spree. Razor, barbering kit. Those he put in another pile.

  “Yuck!”

  He glanced up to see her peeling back the coverlet fastidiously, using the very tips of her fingernails. She let the fabric fall in a heap on the once-blue carpet.

  She wiped her hands on her jeans. “I just didn’t think.”

  No, he didn’t suppose she had. The sugar daddy who’d landed all that cash on her certainly wouldn’t have exposed her to a sleazy room like this.

  The muscles of his jaw tightened, but he forced himself to relax as Grace came over to perch on the room’s other chair, a Naugahyde-covered relic from another era.

  He reached for the next bag, this one emblazoned with a department store logo and spilled the contents onto his lap. More good stuff, he decided as he rifled through it. Costume jewelry, self-tanning lotion, condoms....

  He shot a look at Grace, who blushed to the roots of her hair.

  She leapt up. “What did you expect me to buy to go with the body jewelry and fake tattoos? A Little Mermaid night light?”

  Ray made no reply, just put the package in the pile with the other unnecessary purchases.

  She paced again while he emptied the rest of the bags, which contained clothes, mostly.

  “I can see you had a particular look in mind,” he said, after examining the last article of clothing, a hooded jacket much like the one the kid at the bus station had worn.

  “You hate it. I knew you would.” She’d stopped pacing and was now worrying at the cuticle of her thumb. “It’s just that I couldn’t think of anything else. I figured we could either dress up or down, and down seemed easier. And there was this store with all this hip young stuff....”

  “No, it’s brilliant. No one who knows me will look twice when I get this stuff on.”

  She looked so grateful for his assurance, he felt like a real jerk. She must be scared witless. And it was his damn fault she was in this position.

  Well, mostly his. The bag full of money in his truck hadn’t helped. If it weren’t for the money, there’d be no internal investigation, no friend who thought Ray had tried to whack him.

  On the other hand, if he hadn’t been rattling Landis’s chains, he’d have no worries. The prospect of an internal investigation didn’t scare him. Like he’d told Grace, he hadn’t done anything wrong. But after that sniper attempt, he was scared to sit downtown while they sorted out the confusion.

  He’d heard the rumors about Viktor Landis. Hell, everyone had. Back in Brighton Beach, they’d never been able to prosecute him. Cases fell apart, people disappeared. Frankly, Ray had taken the whole thing with a very generous dash of salt. It seemed exactly like the kind of rep that might attach itself to any Russian who’d spent time in that infamous Brooklyn neighborhood. Landis was dirty, all right. Real dirty. But Ray hadn’t given much credence to the murmurs.

  Until now.

  Since his vehicle had been sabotaged and the high school’s grounds left littered with shell casings, credence came much easier. Now, he could readily believe that if he turned himself in, he’d make an excellent cadaver by morning. And what would happen to Grace then? She’d been there in the car with him when the shooter tried to take him out. They’d go after her, too.

  Grace. She was still punishing her poor thumb. “Yeah, this is perfect,” he reiterated, gesturing to the baggy pants and the skater shoes. “You did great.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Next time I go on the lam, you’ll be the first one I call.”

  She blinked rapidly, as though she might be fighting tears, but she still managed a smile. “Yeah? I bet you say that to all your fellow fugitives.”

  He laughed. Damn, but she kept surprising him. He knew plenty of guys who’d crack under this kind of pressure, but here was Gracie, holding up like a rock. The old Gracie would have buckled. Never mind that the new Gracie had a huge hole in her memory. Never mind that life as she knew it had been torn away this afternoon by a sniper’s bullets.

  Ray hauled himself up. What about life as you knew it? It had been ripped away the day she’d told him she couldn’t bear to spend another night apart from the man she loved.

  He picked up a box of hair dye. “Okay, let’s get this done. What comes first? The cut or the color?”

  “The color.”

  “Do I get to be red or blond?”

  The corners of her mouth lifted. “Definitely blond.”

  Ten minutes later, he sat with his hair spiked up in wet tufts.

  It had been torture to have her stand close enough to smell her scent, torture to feel her run her fingers through his hair as she applied the hair coloring. He’d sat stiffly, trying not to inhale too deeply, longing for it to be done.

  “There,” she announced eventually. “Done.”

  She stepped back and peeled off the latex gloves. Perversely, he felt a stab of disappointment at her retreat. Ignoring it, he pushed up off the chair.

  “Geez, my scalp is starting to itch already,” he complained. “I have to leave this on how long?”

  “Wimp,” she said mildly. “Think you can do mine, now?”

  He accepted the box from her. “Sure. Nothing to it.”

  Except there was. It was damned complicated. Once he got all the goop on her head, a hideous thought occurred to him. “This’ll wash out, right? It’s not permanent permanent?”

  She smiled without opening her eyes. “I can dye it back later. Why?”

  “I like your hair the way it was.”

  She opened her eyes, her smile fading. “I think it’s time to rinse yours off.”

  “Thank God. How do I do that?”

  “Just shampoo it off in the shower. Oh, and use this on your head rather than the motel towel.” She plucked a navy hand towel from the pile of purchases he’d pegged as superfluous. “Some of the dye always comes off on the towel. If we don’t want the motel operators to know what we’ve been up to, we better use our own. And remove our own garbage.”

  He shot her a look. “Hey, you are pretty good at this. I’m definitely calling you next time.” Of course, the need to remove their garbage had already occurred to him, but he wouldn’t have thought to buy towels. He’d have just taken the motel’s stained ones with him.

  By the time he’d finished with the shower and pulled his jeans back on, Grace declared her own color ready to come off. He busied himself laying out the barbering stuff, but there was no shutting out the sound of the shower through the paper-thin walls. No shutting out the mental image of Grace standing under the spray, rivulets of water streaming down her body.

  At last, the shower stopped. The plumbing made a loud hammering as she shut off the taps. Minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, her hair wrapped in a dark towel.

  “That bad, eh?”

  She looked at him questioningly and he gestured toward the towel.

  “Oh.” She lifted a hand to it as though she’d forgotten it. “No, not that bad. Though I gave myself a start when I first looked in the mirror.”

  “Tell me about it
,” he said dryly, running a hand through his own nearly dry hair. It was so ... yellow. “So, am I gonna get a look at it?”

  Grace unwound the little towel and shook her hair out. She combed her fingers through the tangles. “What do you think?”

  He’d been prepared for fire engine red. “It doesn’t look a lot different. Darker, maybe.”

  “Hah! Just wait’ll it dries, or until you get a look at it under a better light source than that grimy sixty-watt bulb.”

  “You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”

  She shrugged. “My mother had red hair for a while. A little goes a long way.”

  Ray wasn’t sure whether Grace’s last observation pertained to red dye or her mother. Both, he suspected.

  “I don’t suppose you have any hair-cutting experience?”

  She smiled. “Actually, I do.”

  “You do?” How the hell had she come by that?

  “Well, sort of. Dog clipping.”

  “You were a dog groomer? How come I didn’t know that?”

  She picked up the scissors and tested them, seemingly satisfied by the rasp of the sharp carbon blades. “Just for Mama. I learned to clip the poodles to save the grooming fees.”

  Right. Ostentation on a budget. That was Elizabeth Dempsey’s style. And usually at her daughter’s expense. He’d long ago given up voicing those thoughts. Grace always rushed to defend her mother, a woman who wouldn’t return the favor.

  “Poodles, eh?” He eyed the scissors in her hand with exaggerated wariness. Frankly, he wasn’t too concerned, but he didn’t mind pretending if it would take that look off Grace’s face, the one she always got when she talked about her mother.

  She laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you look like Fi-Fi. Now, go wet your hair a little so we can get on with this.”

  A minute later he sat astride a chair, arms resting on its back, while Grace cut his hair. If having her color it had been bad, this was worse.

  At the first touch of her fingers in his hair, he closed his eyes, only to find it intensified the sensations skating over his skin. He opened his eyes to find her breasts at eye level, just inches away. With both arms elevated, her hands busy in his hair, her bosom looked lusher than ever. He dropped his gaze, which settled on the leather belt cinched at her waist. She’d changed into a fresh t-shirt, which was tucked into her soft faded jeans.