Sanctuary Island

by Everett, Lily

  Below their feet, the rocky hillside sheared away to a fifty-foot drop, straight down to the white-capped waves crashing into the cliff face. The air smelled of salt and honeysuckle, a beachy perfume rushing into Ella’s lungs and filling her with a sense of freedom and serenity as she stared out over the endless blue horizon.

  Part of her mind couldn’t help but note that this would make an excellent end to a nature trail. The B and B wouldn’t attract serious hikers—Sanctuary was too small to provide long, challenging trails—but there were lots of nature walkers out there who’d pay plenty for the chance at a view like this.

  Ella sighed. It seemed like no matter which way she turned, she found some new aspect of the island that she could envision as part of a marketing proposal to tempt investors to develop Sanctuary.

  Which was a good thing. Of course it was.

  “Most people, when they get up here and see that view, they don’t scowl. What are you thinking about?”

  Grady’s voice shattered her train of thought. Hurriedly smoothing out her features, she dredged up a smile for him. “Nothing, really. Just … wishing I had a little more time here.”

  With a few more weeks, she might be able to come up with an alternate plan for Jo Ellen, something that would let her keep the house without turning it into an inn.

  “You could stay longer,” Grady pointed out.

  And as he shifted behind her, the hard length of his rock-solid body brushing against her, Ella closed her eyes and admitted that she was worried about just what might happen to her heart if she spent too many more afternoons like this one.

  “No. I really can’t.”

  *

  King Sanderson and Pete Cloudough spent most summer days playing checkers in front of the hardware store and arguing about whether this particular vista was the most beautiful place on Sanctuary Island or not.

  Personally, Grady had always agreed with the island’s unofficial royal highness that no swan-speckled pond or wide field of waving reed grass and blooming mallow could compare to the view from Wanderer’s Point.

  It was one of his foolproof ways to quiet the rumblings of nightmares in his brain, to calm himself down and even himself out. Usually, one look out over the ocean and he was transfixed. He’d sat up here for three and a half hours once, without even realizing how long it had been until the sun kissed the far horizon in an explosion of orange and red splendor.

  And then he’d taken a running leap off the side of the hill, letting the endless seconds of free fall and the shock of the cold water jump-start his heart. There was nothing better.

  But today, the view he couldn’t take his eyes off was the woman at his side.

  A week on Sanctuary Island had been good for Ella. The prim, buttoned-up beauty he’d rescued from a hole in Jo’s front porch stood on the rough rock outcropping over the water in jeans and a blue tank top that bared her smooth shoulders and the upper swells of her small breasts. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, but the wind up here caught at the flyaway tendrils and lashed them against her flushed cheeks.

  Grady decided he deserved a reward for taking off his gloves in public. He reached up and swept his fingers through the small, loose curls at her temples.

  Soft. Her hair, her skin, her eyes when she tilted her head and gave him a look from underneath her sooty lashes.

  So unbearably soft, softer than anything Grady was used to in his life—but there was a core of steel running through her, too.

  “It’s nice,” she murmured. “Without the gloves. I like your hands.”

  A warm wash of satisfaction poured through him, even when she pressed her lips together as if frustrated with herself, and turned away.

  “Still trying to keep your distance,” he observed, letting himself grin a little. “No problem. I’m wearing you down, I can tell. Funny that of everything I’ve tried, it’s these ugly paws of mine that have come the closest.”

  “They’re not ugly!” The protest was immediate, almost annoyed, and Grady’s grin widened.

  “Well, they’re not going to win any beauty contests.” He studied his ravaged hands as impartially as he could, finger by finger, scar by scar. “But I guess they’re not going to make any little kids run away in terror, either. You were right—they’re part of me now. They’re only as big a deal as I make them. I might as well get used to them.”

  A shudder of memory sucked him under for a second—darkness, heat, the poisonous stench of burning natural gas—but he shook himself free of it in time to meet Ella’s watchful gaze.

  “Can I ask…” She stopped, uncertain, and he realized it had been a while since he’d seen her so hesitant. He didn’t like it.

  “You want to know how I got the scars,” he said, breaking her stare to look out over the water.

  He hadn’t told this story to anyone in years. The island gossip machine was well oiled, and ensured he’d never had to have this conversation with anyone who lived here. The last person he’d told had been his physical therapist in the hospital, and then he’d only talked about it because she needed all the details to be able to plot out the best course of treatment.

  But what had hiding the scars for five years gotten him?

  Ella slipped her warm, slender hand into his and curled their fingers together. Their linked hands felt like an unbreakable bond, a solemn vow, a promise for the future.

  Grady closed his eyes and jumped.

  CHAPTER 18

  “It’s not a pretty story, but it’s not some deep, dark secret, either.” Grady tried to laugh, but it sounded kind of choked. “You sure you want to ruin our afternoon with this?”

  Determination hardened the lines of her jaw and sharpened her eyes to navy blue. “I’m sure.”

  “Come on, we might as well get comfortable.” Heart hammering, Grady led her over to the large slanted boulder that served as a convenient backrest when he wanted to lose himself for a few hours in the infinite horizon.

  This time, he took comfort in the familiarity of the view while he braced himself to go spelunking in the darkest corner of his own mind.

  “I told you I was with Texas Task Force One.” Even now, he could hear the immediate surge of pride in his own voice. “Do you know what that is?”

  She settled on the ground next to him, pulling her raised knees into her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “Not really, sorry.”

  He shrugged. “It’s okay. We—they are an elite urban search-and-rescue team that operates out of Dallas. But we used to get sent all over the country, and even abroad sometimes, whenever there were disasters—man-made or natural. The force was there to sift through the rubble in the aftermath of September eleventh, and we went into New Orleans after Katrina hit.”

  Every bit of Ella was intent on his story, her entire body inclined toward him and her eyes fixed, unblinking, on his face. “Search and rescue,” she said. “Tell me what you did, exactly.”

  He rolled his shoulders, remembering the weight of his gear. “We did it all. Whatever it took, when people were in trouble, we went in and got them out. Floods, collapsed buildings, earthquakes, train derailments, you name it, Texas Task Force One has dealt with it.”

  “It sounds like worthwhile work. You must have done a ton of training to prepare you for such a variety of situations.”

  “More than ninety hours of training a year, in addition to the cross-training for the specialist position I held on the structural engineering team.”

  Ella’s gaze flickered and went transparent. For a moment, Grady imagined he could read the thoughts spooling out into her active mind.

  “So.” He took a stab at it. “How did a guy who trained with the best and worked a job like that for years wind up a handyman on a tiny island, rescuing nobody but the occasional wild horse that gets caught in a bramble patch?”

  Red scorched up her neck and into her cheeks. “I’m not judging you,” she said hurriedly. “Really. But the task force sounds like a job t
hat requires a level of dedication and commitment that, honestly, I can barely even imagine … and I’ve literally been diagnosed as a workaholic by a mental health professional!”

  “You needed a professional to tell you that? I pegged it the minute I met you.”

  That got her to quirk a smile and slug him in the shoulder.

  Grady grinned, feeling a little easier in his skin. “I get it, though. You love your job. SAR…” He paused when she drew her brows together bemusedly. “That stands for ‘search and rescue.’ Anyway, SAR teams tend to be made up of … I guess, true believers. For lack of a better term. It’s insanely difficult, strenuous, exhausting, stressful work. You’re always on call. Middle of the night, Thanksgiving Day, whenever. And when you get called out, you never know exactly what you’ll be facing. All you know is that it will be dangerous. Potentially deadly, in fact, or they wouldn’t have called you. It’s a rough life.”

  Ella leaned her chin on her folded arms and studied his expression. “You miss it, don’t you?”

  Grady blew out a breath and let himself confront the truth. “Every day.”

  “So why did you quit?”

  “I didn’t.” And boy, wasn’t that still a bitter pill? “They asked me to leave. After…” He flexed his hands into fists and felt the pull of scar tissue all the way up to his shoulder.

  For the space of four heartbeats … five … there was no sound but the clash of wave against rock at the base of the bluff and the rustle of a cool breeze through the stands of bayberry bushes.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it,” Ella said, “it’s fine. No pressure.”

  He forced himself to smile. “I appreciate that. But it’s okay, I want to tell you. It’s just … I need a minute to work up to it.”

  “Take your time.”

  A whipcord of self-disgust lashed through him. “This shouldn’t be so hard,” he snarled. “Empty words, memories of stuff that’s over and done with. That’s nothing compared to what my buddies on the force are dealing with right this minute, or any of the other minutes since I left.”

  “Grady.” Her worried tone and the concern in her eyes grated over his raw nerves. When she put a light hand on his arm, he jerked away from her and spoke in a harsh monotone.

  “It was a natural-gas explosion. A five-story apartment building in Richardson, outside Dallas, came down. We were called in to search for survivors. I found some in an air pocket, in what used to be the building’s elevator shaft. SAR teams work on the buddy system. My partner was a guy named Tom Caldwell. Our captain sent us into the elevator shaft on a rope-and-pulley system we rigged up to help us lift out the victims. Some of them were in medical distress.”

  Bile rose up in the back of his throat, sour and acidic with adrenaline, as his body remembered how it had felt to peer up into the impenetrable, windowless blackness of that shaft and see the elevator suspended by its frayed cables only twenty-five feet above his head.

  “It was my turn to be the pivot point, the anchor at the top of the rope, but I wanted to go down. I loved the hard ones—the challenge and the satisfaction of coming out on top. And this one was hard because we had wounded civilians, which meant we were working against the clock, trying to get them out before they went into shock or fell unconscious, or their condition deteriorated to the point where even if we got them to the hospital it would be too late. And there was that dangling elevator, let’s not forget that. We were all aware that if those cables snapped, if those emergency brakes went, we were in a lot of trouble.”

  Ella’s eyes were huge and round. “But you volunteered to go down and rescue those people.”

  “I was an idiot. A cocky idiot. Sure, I aced all the tests about spotting potential risks—but deep down, I never truly believed anything bad could happen to me. And up until that day, I’d lived a pretty charmed life. But that’s skipping ahead.”

  Ella looked sick. “Oh, Grady.”

  “No, you wanted the whole story. You’re getting it.”

  She subsided, but she didn’t look happy. That was fine; he wasn’t happy, either. But now that he’d started, he couldn’t seem to stop.

  “So, the wounded disaster victims. We had a middle-aged man, overweight, with chest pains. A young woman and her two kids—one of the kids wouldn’t stop crying, and the other one never made a sound. The mom had a broken arm, but she wouldn’t put the crying kid down. We got her and the crier out first, then the silent kid, then the fat guy. I sent them up on the litter, then prepared to head back up the shaft myself. And that’s when it happened.”

  She sat up straight, pale and riveted. “The elevator?”

  “Nope.” Grady closed his eyes and breathed through the memory, tasting nothing but ash. “A second explosion. I found out later that a second natural-gas pipe burst before they could contain the fire from the first explosion. But I didn’t know that at the time, because the second explosion brought the rest of that building down on my head. I was knocked unconscious, and when I came to, they told me every bone in my left hand had been broken. A piece of foundation wall crumbled and pinned me at the left shoulder, half in and half out of the elevator shaft. My legs were fine—they were stuck out in the shaft.”

  He paused. “That damn elevator never did come down.”

  Silence. Ella had buried her head in her arms—all he could see were the knobs of her knees, sharp through the thin denim of her jeans, and the golden tan of her arms and shoulders. She shuddered once, then again, and Grady braced himself for a storm of tears or—worse—an outpouring of sympathetic pity.

  But Ella never seemed to do what he expected.

  “You idiot.” Her furious voice jerked his head around like she’d snapped a leash on his collar. “Have you honestly been beating yourself up for five years over the fact that you left the task force after that?”

  He blinked. “It’s not like I was the first guy to ever get injured on a rescue, or even like I was hurt the worst on that rescue.”

  Narrowing her eyes, Ella placed a hand on his shoulder. “And how long did the physio take? We’re not talking a few weeks here, or even a couple of months. Grady, it sounds like they basically had to rebuild your arm from scratch. That’s not a simple injury—that’s a life-changing event.”

  The uncompromising edge to her voice was a weird contrast with the gentleness of her touch, and it confused Grady enough that he almost wanted to shrug her off. “Maybe that’s true. Maybe I’m being dumb. But it’s not just about the task force.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He felt a strange compulsion to tell her everything, to lay it all out for her, all the ugliness inside him. That would be the end of it, he knew—if she got how truly messed up he was, Ella would leave. She’d stop looking at him like that, with expectation in her eyes.

  And that would be better. For her, obviously. But for him, too, because then he could stop this ridiculous hoping and wishing for something he could never have.

  Mostly so he wouldn’t have to see Ella’s reaction, Grady looked out over the ocean at the blurred, distant edge of the world.

  “I didn’t leave the task force,” he ground out. “I was drummed out. Officially marked down as unfit for duty, so no other SAR team in the country would have me. After that, I tucked tail and ran to the most isolated place I could find, and I never left.”

  Unbearably soft wisps of hair brushed his arm as Ella shook her head. “There’s no shame in being afraid, after brushing so close to death.”

  Be a man. Face up to it.

  If he couldn’t be the man she deserved, the least he could do was look her in the eyes when he told her.

  Grady steeled himself, shutting down as much as he could to get through the next few minutes. He met Ella’s concerned gaze and said, “I wasn’t afraid. At least it wasn’t the kind of fear where I lost my nerve. But after I got out of the hospital, I felt … ‘invincible’ isn’t the right word. It was more like I didn’t even see the risks—I was always an
adrenaline junkie, but after the accident, I started taking insane chances, doing all the things they trained us not to do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I became a danger, to myself and the other guys on my team, even to the people we rescued. I lost the job I trained my whole life for. I committed everything to the task force—it was the most important thing I’ve ever done. The adrenaline rush, the focus, the direction, helping people … I’ll never be the same without it.”

  “That’s why you do the cliff jumping thing.” Ella gestured toward the rocky ledge that stretched out over the water.

  “It’s a piss-poor substitute, because I know the depth below the cliff, I know there are no dangerous rocks, and nothing that can truly hurt me,” he said. “But it makes me feel alive. And it reminds me of what it was like to be brave.”

  “You’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever met,” Ella said, a fierce light in her eyes.

  She needed to hear the rest of it. Grady swallowed his shame and self-loathing. “You’re wrong. I’m a coward. Since the day I moved here, I haven’t left Sanctuary Island. Not once in the last five years. I can’t. Panic attacks. At this point, I’m pretty sure I’ll die here without ever seeing the mainland again.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Ella stared at the man beside her. Grady’s body was like a carved wooden statue. The only part of him that looked alive was his eyes, which burned with a dark fever that Ella recognized, deep down.

  There was nothing quite as toxic as hating yourself for your own inability to cope with what life threw at you. Her heart was a giant bruise, tenderized and sore from too many blows to count.

  “That boat in the photograph in your living room,” she realized. “The one you’re so proud of, but you don’t go out in it anymore.”

  “I can’t,” he confirmed in a monotone. “Can’t force myself to cast off and pull away from the dock.”

  The way Grady sat there beside her, impervious and stoic, she knew he was waiting for her to get up and walk away from him. Or maybe for her to laugh and tell him he needed to suck it up and get over it. But Ella had worked too hard and for too many years to conquer her own demons to ever minimize someone else’s.