Sanctuary Island

by Everett, Lily

  Needing to distract herself from errant thoughts about what it would feel like to be touched by a man wearing leather gloves, she said, “This is not the plan. You’re supposed to be showing me around the island. Surely any good tour starts in the ‘Heart of Sanctuary.’”

  He smiled a little at her air quotes. “I hate plans. And trust me. The town square is not the heart of Sanctuary Island.”

  The Jeep churned its way up a sandy hill and shuddered to a stop at the top. Ella had to blink furiously to clear her vision of the dazzle of sunlight on water as the never-ending vastness of the ocean stretched beneath them.

  A snowy white egret lifted its beak from the shallow tidal pool at the bottom of the hill and stared up at the Jeep. As if finding them boring, it went back to grooming its feathers. Ella’s breath went ragged, her ribs squeezing hard around the beauty of the wide, open meadow, the tall grass waving down the shore to meet the lapping of the waves.

  “This, on the other hand.” Grady’s voice was quiet, almost reverent. “This is where I feel the heartbeat of the island.”

  The look on his face was one she’d seen before, she realized with a shiver.

  He looked like someone who’d just made a breakthrough in therapy—emotional and almost overwhelmed, but somehow at peace.

  Ella had seen that expression in the mirror, once or twice, after a particularly difficult session—one of the few times she’d managed to push herself to open up and be really honest about how she felt.

  Amazing that for Grady, all it took was a glimpse of this serene, breeze-ruffled meadow.

  Shaking himself free of his reverie, Grady smiled over at her, the wide, carefree grin of a little kid. “Want to get a closer look?”

  Ella regretted her choice of shoes almost immediately. Her brown ankle boots were eminently sensible in the city, low-heeled and comfortable for walking, but they were no match for the soft, sucking ground or the razor sharpness of the salt-marsh cordgrass.

  She picked her way after him, reluctant to say anything to break the spell of contentment this place had woven around Grady. He moved through the thigh-high grass as if following some path only he could see. Every few steps, he’d glance over his shoulder to check on her progress, and if she fell too far behind, he’d grin and wait for her to catch up.

  To her surprise, Ella couldn’t help grinning back at him even as sweat began to prickle at her hairline and dampen the spot at the base of her spine. Sure, her tender ankle gave her a twinge or two, and she was pretty sure this field was crawling with ticks, but there was also something indefinably exhilarating about being out here.

  In the middle of nature—practically covered in it, in fact, she mused as she swatted at a mosquito—bushwhacking through soggy patches and heading steadily for the coastline.

  “I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time keeping up,” Ella panted apologetically, scurrying the last few steps to where Grady stood watching her patiently. “It’s not the ankle, I swear. And I walk everywhere in the city. I don’t even own a car!”

  He shrugged easily. “City walking is different. But don’t worry your head, pretty city mouse.” Grady’s mouth kicked up in a teasing smile. “We’re not in a hurry to catch a train or something. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

  She blinked. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Been a while since you took some time off, I bet.”

  She was watching where she put her feet, hoping to avoid another patch of sticky mud. The fact that she was also avoiding Grady’s too perceptive gaze was just a bonus.

  “I’m not big on downtime.” She smiled, trying to keep it breezy and light. “I like to work.”

  “What is it you do, exactly?”

  Ella cast him a searching glance, but he seemed sincerely interested. Most men who asked that question, on a first date or at a bar, tended to glaze over the minute she started answering.

  Keeping tabs on his reaction from the corner of her eye, Ella said, “I’m in commercial real estate development, hotels and office buildings, mostly. Lots of wheeling and dealing, contract negotiations, scouting potential properties…”

  Nothing about that description conveyed the excitement of pitting herself against other developers or talking indecisive buyers into signing on the dotted line. It also, she admitted to herself, didn’t describe quite how exhausting the whole process could be, how easy it was to get lost in the minutiae of contract details. How easy it was to start making mistakes.

  “So, basically, your life is a giant, never-ending game of Monopoly.”

  That surprised a laugh out of her. “More or less.”

  Of course, one bad roll of the dice hadn’t landed her on Free Parking—it had gotten her banished to this tiny island.

  There was a pause where Grady paced her, slowing his loose, long-limbed stride to match her more cautious steps. The line of his body along her side radiated warmth more intensely than the morning sun reflecting off the water.

  For the last few years, Ella had brought in more business than anyone else in her firm. That wasn’t an accident. She knew an opening when she saw it, and she never hesitated to press an advantage.

  Out here in the sunlight, with Grady in an open, sharing mood, was her best chance at getting more information about Jo’s financial situation.

  “Actually,” she began, deliberately casual. “I know how you feel about the whole idea of a bed-and-breakfast bringing tourism to this island, but I have to tell you—in my professional opinion, Jo is sitting on a potential gold mine.”

  He stiffened, his movements losing that easy, loping grace and going jerky. “Leave it alone,” he growled.

  The intensity in his tone brought Ella’s head up to study his face. But his expression had closed down, the ease of the morning shuttered away as he gazed off into the distance. He looked like a stranger all of a sudden, hard-faced and wary.

  Ella was surprised to find herself wanting to tailor her questions to draw him back out into the sun—even if that wasn’t really necessary for her goal of getting information.

  “It could be a wonderful thing for the island,” she said, as if she hadn’t noticed his shutdown. “But even more than that, it could be great for Jo Ellen.”

  She watched him closely as he stomped along at her side, but he didn’t appear to be moved. “Jo will be fine. We take care of our own here on Sanctuary.”

  His words had a conviction that told Ella she’d butted up against one of his unshakable beliefs. Every person in a negotiation had at least one or two ideas that they couldn’t be talked out of—beliefs so strong that they were considered capital T Truth.

  It was pointless to continue a line of discussion that would entail contradicting one of those Truths. Ella veered around it.

  “Must be nice to live in a community like that. Especially if something unexpected happens—when something unexpected happens, I should say.” She forced a laugh. “Goodness knows, into each life a little surprise catastrophe must fall, right?”

  He rolled his shoulders as if trying to warm up to lift something heavy and unwieldy. “I told you already that your mom helped me a lot, when I first moved here after the accident.”

  The accident. His injuries were the result of some sort of accident.

  Ella’s brain greedily snatched at the crumb of information, adding it to her hoard of facts about Grady Wilkes.

  “But it wasn’t just Jo,” he went on, his jaw like iron. “It was the whole island, the horses, the peace. How much it felt like nothing could touch me here, like the outside world stopped mattering and I could finally stop running. All the things that a B and B, or anything that brings tourists to the island, would ruin.”

  “I understand all that, but what if Jo truly needed the money?”

  He gave her a look that bordered on pity. “Not everyone cares about money as much as you do.”

  The slap of shame rocked her back on her heels, the sensation of being seen through, and found lack
ing, almost enough to distract her from the fact that she’d achieved her goal.

  Grady didn’t know about Jo’s money troubles.

  The success of her plan wasn’t enough to dull Ella’s urgent, immediate, foolish need to slap Grady back with one of her own personal Truths.

  Raising her chin, Ella gathered the scraps of her dignity like spare change dropped on the street. “You’re probably right. But then, not everyone has been working since they were sixteen to help support their family because their divorced single dad couldn’t make enough to cover rent and food at the same time. And trust me, when you get home from double-bagging groceries and stocking shelves only to dig into a mountain of homework so you can get a desperately needed scholarship, well. It gives you a strong appreciation for what money can do.”

  He stilled, the hard planes of his angular face softening ever so slightly. “Ella…”

  “Save it,” she told him, picking her way through the marsh and leaving him behind, along with every drop of joy she’d taken in the beauty of the day. “I don’t need your pity.”

  “Will you take my apology?”

  She didn’t stop moving. If she stopped walking, she’d have to face him, and somehow she wasn’t quite ready for that. “Only one way to find out.”

  “Ella. I’m sorry. I hate when people make assumptions about me—I shouldn’t have done it to you. Not today, and not when we met.” The quiet sincerity in his simple words melted the angry lump in her throat.

  The problem was that without anger as a shield, Ella was all too aware of just how much this whole conversation meant to her. She cared way too much about what Grady thought of her. She needed to get control of this spiraling need, this awful vulnerability.

  She slowed enough to allow him to catch up with her. “Apology accepted. If you tell me what assumptions people tend to make about you.”

  The least he could do was put them back on some sort of even footing, she reasoned. Except when she glanced over her shoulder, ready to make a mood-lightening joke about how he was the one falling behind now, Grady wasn’t even looking at her.

  He stared out over the field toward the water, every muscle in his lean, rangy body tensed. His brows drew together, a troubled frown tugging at his mouth, but instead of baring his soul and his vulnerabilities, he bolted past her.

  He took off for the beach at a dead run, his long legs eating up the distance as Ella’s heart jumped into her throat.

  Shading her eyes, she watched him cut a path through the grass and emerge onto the strip of sandy beach about fifty feet in front of her.

  Ella squinted. There was something happening down there, the tall grass waving jerkily. Did he need help?

  She pushed herself into motion and took off after him, moving as quickly as she could with her heart pounding out a sharp, staccato rhythm.

  For such a peaceful, sleepy little island, Sanctuary was turning out to be a thrill a minute.

  *

  Gritty pebbled sand ground into the knees of Grady’s jeans as he dropped down beside the heaving mare.

  She snorted nervously, rolling her eyes to track his approach. Her dappled gray flanks were flecked with foam, the distended mound of her belly straining with contractions.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Ella gasped from behind him.

  He spared her a quick glance as she hit the grass line and froze as if one step onto the beach would trap her in sucking quicksand.

  Ella’s face was pale with worry, and maybe a little fear. He hadn’t missed the way she kept her distance from Voyager when Merry introduced herself. Ella was afraid of horses.

  Well, she was going to have to get over it in a hurry. “She’s in labor. The wild mares come down to the beach to foal.”

  “So this is normal.” Relief throbbed through Ella’s voice. “Surely she knows what she’s doing, right? Instinct takes over?”

  “Normally, yeah.” Grady passed his hands over the horse’s sweaty side, feeling the heat rising from the dark patches of hair even through the thin leather of his gloves. “But I think something’s wrong here. Her hind muscles are all relaxed, as they should be, but that means things should be moving really fast by this point, and nothing much seems to be happening. I can see a hoof, but it’s not…”

  He ducked down to check the progress of the foal’s emergence from the birth canal and swore under his breath.

  One hoof instead of two. Not good.

  Ella swayed and her skin went from parchment-white to faintly green. That was enough to convince Grady not to give her a play-by-play of what was happening at his end of the struggling mare.

  Adrenaline poured into Grady’s system, speeding his heartbeat and narrowing his focus. “I left my cell phone in the Jeep. Do you have yours with you?”

  When she nodded, he recited a number and asked her to call it. “We need help. Tell the guy who answers to get down to the west end of the cove, south side of the watering hole, as fast as he can.”

  Ella pulled herself together pretty well, Grady noted with approval. Her fingers only trembled a little as she obeyed his instructions to the letter.

  But at the end of her conversation with Ben, she nodded at something he said and held the slim black phone out to Grady.

  “He says he’s on his way, but he needs to know what’s happening. He might have to talk you through assisting the mare.”

  Her eyes were as big as dinner plates. Grady could relate—he wasn’t exactly qualified for this, and the idea of screwing it up and letting anything happen to this mare or her foal sent chilly fingers of anxiety skittering down his back.

  Snagging the phone from Ella’s hand, Grady barked, “Ben, come on. I know I’m kind of the boy who cried wolf here, but this time it’s serious.”

  “I believe you.” Ben was doing that soothing thing with his voice, where he got extra super calm to combat the drama and chaos around him. Even recognizing the tactic for what it was, Grady felt his shoulders loosening.

  “But it’s going to take me a while to get out there; I’m up at Windy Corner now, so at least half an hour. I need you to be my eyes. What do you see?”

  Having a clear mission settled Grady’s nerves more than anything else could have. Using brief, terse sentences, he described the width of dilation he was seeing, and the worrying appearance of just one of the foal’s little hooves. He’d been around enough equine births to know that wasn’t optimal.

  Ben’s sigh confirmed it. “Yeah, sounds like the foal is going to need to be turned in the birth canal. Can you tell how long the mare has been in labor?”

  “She’s pretty sweaty and exhausted. Barely twitched when I touched her.”

  Which was another hint that something was wrong, because as much as Grady loved the wild horses of Sanctuary, as much as he’d appointed himself their protector, he kept his distance. The horses weren’t tame pets—they were truly wild animals, unused to human contact. This was the closest he’d ever been to any of them.

  “Once the foal first appears, the rest of the birth should only take about half an hour. Sounds like she’s been working a lot longer than that, which isn’t good—if she gets too tired … Listen, here’s what I’m going to need you to do.”

  Ben got brisk and businesslike, going through the list of things that had to happen immediately, if not sooner, and Grady snapped to attention. It was exactly like gearing up for a rescue. He memorized every last instruction, visualizing the actions that would be required and not allowing himself to dwell on the possible negative outcomes.

  Ben paused, then said, “Grady. We need to keep things as clean and sanitary as possible. You’re going to have to take off the gloves. Maybe your overshirt, too, or at least roll up the sleeves to above the elbow. Can you do that?”

  Darkness encroached on his vision, tunneling the world down to the glaring bright spot of the task ahead.

  He’d be exposed. All those scars, the living memory of pain and terror, and Ella would see it all, and she’d
get that look, that pitying horror-struck look …

  “Grady!”

  He blinked at the bark of his best friend’s voice in his ear, and swallowed down the nightmare. The mare moved under his hands, straining hopelessly against a contraction, and Grady reached for the inner core of peace he’d found with the horses before.

  It didn’t matter what Ella saw or how she looked at him after. He’d do it, because he had no choice. He couldn’t let this mare suffer, or take the chance that the foal might suffocate before it ever had a chance to breathe the clear island air.

  His voice was a painful rasp in his throat, but he forced the words out. “Get here, Ben. I’ll do my best, but—”

  “I’m on my way. You’ll be fine,” Ben promised, then hung up.

  Grady stared at the silent phone in his hand for a long moment, wishing he could hate Ben for making promises there was no way he could be sure would come true. But since Ben was one of the few friends Grady had managed to make after his accident, he knew he’d end up letting it go.

  Ella took a tentative step closer to the mare. “How can I help?”

  Light pushed back some of the darkness dragging at Grady’s heart and mind. Even though Ella was scared, here she was, her chin tilted up and a determined glint in her blue eyes.

  “The foal is twisted in the birth canal—the mare’s not going to be able to push him out on her own.” Tamping down the fear of failure, Grady kept his voice firm and matter-of-fact. “I’m going to have to physically locate the foal’s other leg and pull him into position. Hopefully she’ll be able to take it from there.”

  He could see the gulp of her swallowing down her nerves even from across the expanse of the mare’s rounded belly. “That sounds … messy.”

  Grady had to grin. “Don’t worry, city mouse, any mess will be getting all over me, not you. But I’m going to need you to hold her head, keep her quiet and still while I work. If she decides to freak out and stand up while I’ve got my arm inside her up to the elbow, we could both be in trouble.”

  “Wow. Better you than me.” She wrinkled her nose, pulling a grossed-out face, but Grady caught the hint of a smile curling her mouth. Warmth washed through him at the realization that she was doing her best to break the tension.