A Gift of Grace

by Sarah Wynde

Crazier than usual, that was. Technically, Noah knew he’d been insane for years, ever since he woke up in a hospital room to the sound of his best friend’s voice. Even in his coma, he’d known that was impossible. The memory of the light draining out of Joe’s eyes had been a nightmare he couldn’t escape.

  But this was today, not back then. Yeah, he was crazy, but why the hell couldn’t his hallucinations argue about something reasonable? Basketball, say. Baseball, maybe. But no, his imaginary companions wanted to debate Disney movies.

  Worse, they were flat-out wrong. Okay, sure, Frozen was decent for a girl movie, but no way did it beat The Lion King musically. One impressive song did not stand up to a score that included Hakuna Matata, Circle of Life, and that one about feeling the love. And Toy Story — fine, great movie — but Toy Story 2 & 3 were even better, plus sequels. How often did sequels improve on the original? The filmmakers deserved credit for pulling that off.

  But if he opened his mouth to argue with his hallucinations... No, he wanted no part of that slippery slope. Talking to them would put him on the fast track to a ratty bathrobe, zombie eyes and a slurred voice, zoned out on whatever antipsychotic the VA was experimenting with.

  It was bad enough that he was following their directions. If they started ordering him to assassinate presidents or open fire at a shopping mall, he hoped he’d have the sense to get himself locked up instead.

  “Oh, turn right up here,” the new guy’s voice said. “We’re almost there.”

  Almost there? They were in the middle of nowhere, deep dappled light scattered by the trees overhanging the narrow road, no sign of houses or human habitation. But Noah took the right turn as ordered and within a few more minutes, the trees opened up as he entered a small town.

  Two minutes later, the trees began closing in again.

  “Go back,” the voice demanded. “Go back. You missed it.”

  That was it?

  Noah wanted to beat his head against the steering wheel. He’d come all this way, driven through the night to get to this tiny spot on the map, and it was nothing. Nothing. One street, maybe two blocks of shops. What the hell?

  But he slowed his truck. At a wide spot on the empty road, he made a three-point turn and headed back. His eyes were hot with the burn from a sleepless night. He’d find a cup of coffee, maybe some breakfast, and look around. Maybe he’d ask someone about the business card that sat in his back pocket and maybe not. Either way, he’d made it to the town. Surely the voices that had been nagging him night and day would shut up now.

  The town was cute. But strange. Not at all what he’d expected. He’d imagined a place that looked top secret. Concrete walls and big blank buildings, parking lots and fences, that kind of thing. Instead, he’d found a dusty little tourist town. Glass window fronts on cozy shops, wide sidewalks, and street parking with no meters.

  As he stepped out of his truck, an impossibly tiny old woman in a brightly-flowered muumuu paused on the sidewalk. She tsk-ed at him, shaking her head. He glanced at the distance between his truck and the curb — the appropriate six inches — and raised his eyebrows.

  “Ma’am?” Had he done something wrong?

  “Sage, young man,” she said. “Sage. Or perhaps juniper.” She shook her head again, then toddled away.

  Noah blinked. He was tired, but he was pretty sure he was awake. Still, that had felt an awful lot like a moment out of a dream. Surreptitiously — not that anyone was on the street to notice — he pinched his arm.

  Definitely awake.

  He started walking down the street, checking out the storefronts as he passed. A bookstore, with what looked like a mix of new and used titles. A small drugstore, not one of the chains. Antiques, a gift shop, a window display of fancy rocks and crystals, and finally, a restaurant. Planters of lush blue lobelia bordered the doorway and under an awning, a window with gold lettering spelled out ‘Maggie’s Place.’

  Noah paused. The restaurant looked nicer than the basic all-American diner he’d been hoping for, but it was the only restaurant he’d seen and he was running out of street.

  When he entered, a bell jangled over the door. From behind the counter, a young waitress, her jagged blonde hair tipped with purple, called out, “Sit anywhere you like, I’ll be right with you.”

  A shriek of feminine delight split the air. “Dillon, Dillon, Dillon,” a girl’s voice chanted. “You’re home! I’ve missed you so! Where have you been? You missed the wedding.”

  Noah took a long, slow glance around the restaurant. It was more crowded than he would have expected for an early mid-week morning, with most of the tables and booths full. But there were seats available at a diner-style counter.

  There was not a shrieking girl.

  And the only one responding to her delight was his most recent hallucinatory voice, the new guy, saying, “Hey, Rose.”

  Second-most-recent now, Noah supposed. Another hallucination was not what he’d been hoping to find on his long drive to the middle of nowhere. Resigned, he held back his sigh and moved to the counter, sliding into an open seat next to the cash register.

  His voices were quieter away from the door, as if he’d left them temporarily across the room. But he could still hear the girl saying, with a southern lilt, “You could have danced with me. I had to dance with Toby and you should have seen the way people looked at him.” She laughed, the sound contagiously cheerful.

  Noah found his lips curving up in an involuntary smile. Huh. This voice wasn’t like most of them. She talked like she went places, did things.

  “He’s a little short for you, isn’t he?” the new guy replied.

  Noah’s smile faded. He hated that voice. It had been badgering him for weeks, pestering him endlessly to go to Tassamara, to find Akira. Apparently his subconscious thought he was living in an animé. It was damn annoying.

  “I taught him to jitterbug. He did pretty good for a three-year-old.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it. I really tried to get back in time.”

  “What can I get you?” the waitress asked. She couldn’t be much out of high school, if that, but she wiped down the counter before him with practiced efficiency.

  “Coffee, please,” Noah responded. He took a deep breath. The air smelled incredible — sweetly spicy, like cinnamon or vanilla. Maybe he didn’t want bacon and eggs after all. “And a menu?”

  “A menu? Oh, sure.” The waitress sounded surprised, but she nodded toward a built-in slot on his side of the cash register. “Grab one from that bin. I’ll BRB with your coffee.”

  Noah leaned to the side. The bin held multiple menus, some large, some small, some colorful, some plain, all different. He grabbed a red one from the middle of the pile and opened it up.

  It was in Chinese.

  Noah blinked.

  It wasn’t even the kind of Chinese menu that put English translations or pronunciations under the characters. It was just Chinese.

  He stared at it.

  “Try the special,” a woman said from the seat next to him. “It’s a sure thing.”

  Noah glanced her way.

  Time stopped.

  And then it started again.

  But for a moment, a split second, unnoticeable, he hoped, he’d felt like he’d just taken a hard kick to the gut. Blonde hair, swooping in a graceful curve across her cheeks; green eyes, the color of army drab; a smiling mouth; and the lightest splash of dusty freckles across her nose. He felt a mad desire to count them.

  She blinked at him and her smile deepened.

  “You must be new in town.” Her voice was light, pleasant, nothing special, but he felt the sound of it running down his spine like a shimmer of electricity. She stuck out her hand. “Grace Latimer.”

  3

  Grace

  Whoa.

  Hot guy alert.

  Grace was just as glad she hadn’t looked at the man next to her before telling him to try the special, because she might have stumbled over the words. What in the world was a guy
like him doing in Tassamara? He belonged on the cover of a magazine, not on the stool next to her at the local diner.

  The pause before he took her hand was noticeable, but not quite rude.

  “Noah Blake,” he said. His hand was cool in hers, but his grip was perfect, his fingers lightly rough against the smoothness of her own skin.

  “So what brings you to Tassamara, Mr. Blake? Just passing through?” she asked. There was no way he was a local. She would have seen him before. Or heard of him. Hell, every single woman in a five-mile radius would be whispering about him, she thought, entertained by the notion.

  His eyelashes were unreal. And seriously unfair. The best mascara on the planet wouldn’t make hers that lush and gorgeous. And then there were the stark cheekbones. The stubborn chin. The long, lean fingers.

  “Not exactly,” he replied.

  Plus, there was the stubble. What was it about a guy who was twenty-four hours too far away from a shave? Were pheromones connected to facial hair?

  “Oh? Visiting someone in town?” Three days earlier and Grace would have been scrambling to remember the names of the guests Akira had invited to the wedding. But if he was here for the wedding, he was very, very late. Besides, he was much too pretty to be a physicist or an academic. He hadn’t gotten those shoulders crouching over a lab table for ten hours a day.

  “Sort of.”

  She waited, head tilted, a welcoming smile on her face, letting the expectant silence stretch. She wasn’t going to badger him if he didn’t want to talk to her, but the borderline rudeness in his initial hesitation was crossing over into surly asshole territory.

  “Looking for a place,” he finally said, sounding reluctant.

  “Any place I might know?” Grace pushed her empty coffee cup away. She’d already finished eating and she needed to get to work. The wedding had disrupted her schedule and the emails were piling up. She wouldn’t have minded chatting with him if he wanted to talk — it wasn’t every day that a gorgeous man showed up at Maggie’s — but she wasn’t going to waste her time if he was a jerk. She reached for the strap of her purse where it was slung over the back of the stool and started to stand, adding, “I grew up here and it’s a small town. I know a fair amount about the area.”

  “Maybe.” He sighed. It sounded resigned. Pulling a business card out of his back pocket, he showed it to her, asking, “Have you heard of this place?”

  It was a generic General Directions card: no employee name, no direct phone line, stained with brown drops that looked like coffee, and worn around the edges, as if he’d been carrying it around for a while.

  Grace relaxed back onto her stool. “I have, yes.”

  She eyed him with new interest. Gorgeous and now mysterious, too. What was he doing with one of the generic General Directions cards?

  He set the card on the counter between them. “What do they do there?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “You’re looking for them, but you don’t know what they do?”

  His lips tightened and he looked away from her, glancing down at the countertop.

  She didn’t wait for him to respond. “It’s primarily a holding company, buying and selling stock in other companies,” she told him. That was true enough that if she were hooked up to a lie detector, it wouldn’t even blip. The vast majority of GD’s value and profits came from its holdings and stock transactions.

  But the company had two other divisions: Research and Special Affairs, both based in Tassamara. And only the Special Affairs division used the generic cards. One of GD’s coterie of unusual talents had given Noah Blake a card. But who? And why?

  Did he need someone with their specialized sets of skills? GD’s psychics weren’t the kind that took walk-ins. Most of their work came through their government connections. But if he was with the FBI or DEA or even the State Department, why wasn’t he going through the usual channels?

  “Stocks? Like Berkshire Hathaway? Warren Buffett?” Noah said.

  “Not in the same league, but yes, the same idea.”

  He tapped the card with one finger, frowning thoughtfully.

  If Grace had to guess… her eyes narrowed, considering him.

  Not State Department. He didn’t have the right air of arrogance. And his eyes were too shadowed, like he’d seen too much. Maybe the State Department guys had seen just as much, but it didn’t usually crack their complacency.

  Not FBI. He was wearing blue jeans, a plain black t-shirt, and a worn leather jacket that looked like he’d owned it for years. No FBI guy ever showed up in Tassamara wearing anything other than a white shirt and tie. They were as bad as missionaries that way.

  That left DEA, but it didn’t feel quite right. Something outdoors, though, and probably in uniform, because his casual t-shirt revealed a line of lighter skin at the base of his neck.

  Military? Maybe, although the way his dark hair curled on his nape was decidedly non-regulation.

  “Are you looking for someone specific there?” she asked cautiously. That battered card could have been sitting in someone’s wallet for years. Maybe someone outside the company had referred him to GD.

  He looked as if he was debating his response, before saying, “A guy named Akira.”

  Okay, that was odd. A guy? The Akira she knew — her brand new sister-in-law — was not a guy. Nor was her ability to talk to ghosts public knowledge. Akira had firmly resisted formalizing any professional arrangement that utilized her gift: she was a research scientist and happy to stay that way.

  “I can’t say I know a guy named Akira,” Grace said slowly. It wasn’t a lie. Not really. But she doubted he was listening closely enough to hear the emphasis she placed on the word ‘guy.’ Keeping her voice casual, she asked, “So why are you looking for him?”

  “I was told he might help me.”

  “Help you with what?” Grace asked the obvious.

  Noah’s mouth twisted as Emma, the waitress, slid a bright blue mug of coffee in front of him. He blinked down at the steam rising off a milky swirl in the mug, saying, “You put milk in my coffee.”

  “Cream, actually.” Emma looked worried. “Isn’t that the way you like it?”

  “Yeah, but…” Noah pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes for a second. Then he shut the menu he’d opened and stuck it back into the bin of random restaurant menus that Maggie kept around for the tourists. “I’ll take the special.”

  “Good choice.” Emma threw him a cheerful smile, and called over her shoulder into the kitchen behind her, “Another special, Maggie.”

  As Emma headed away, Grace asked, “Is that not how you take your coffee?”

  “I’m used to drinking it black,” he said. “On deployment, we usually only have powdered creamer. That stuff makes better fireworks than coffee.”

  Military. She’d called it right. Grace was on the verge of thanking him for his service, when he shot her a sideways grin.

  “I do like it with cream, though. I just didn’t remember saying so.”

  Grace felt a flush of heat run through her, head to toe.

  Wow.

  She’d been admiring him, but in the abstract, amused by stumbling upon such a beautiful man in such an everyday place. But his smile… it crinkled his eyes and softened his features and warmed his face. Suddenly, he was a different guy. Not just attractive, but appealing.

  Really appealing.

  It felt like every cell in her body sat up and took notice, and every hormone sprang to life and said, “Him. That one.”

  Her voice was more breathless than she liked when she said, “So what sort of help are you looking for?”

  He picked up the mug. His smile was gone and his voice brusque as he said, “Nothing. It’s not important. It’s…” His voice drifted off into a mumble, as if he were talking mostly to himself. “… a stupid idea, anyway.”

  “Well.” Grace stood. “I should get to work.”

  He dipped his head, not looking at her. “Have a good day.”
<
br />   “You, too,” Grace replied cordially, but without warmth.

  But then she paused.

  He was looking for Akira. He clearly wasn’t going to share his story with her, but someone had sent him to find a person who talked to ghosts. And he was military, or maybe ex-military.

  Maybe she owed him more than the quick brush-off she’d been about to give him. Not because of his smile, not because of the rush of attraction she’d felt, but because maybe he did need help, of the kind that she and her family had also once needed.

  Would she scare him away if she started talking about dead people?

  She leaned forward, reaching across him to grab a guest check pad sitting next to the cash register. Her awareness of him registered as a tingle of sensation along all the nerves closest to him, her arm, her shoulder, her cheek.

  She pulled back, faintly flustered by the feeling and inwardly scolding herself for it. He was just a guy. A guy who maybe needed help. A really hot guy who maybe needed help. She pulled her purse around and began to rummage through it, not looking at Noah. “I’m sure I have a pen here somewhere,” she muttered.

  He cleared his throat. She looked up. He was holding a pen out to her. He made a tiny motion with his head, gesturing toward a container of pens sitting next to the register and the spare guest check pads. A glimmer of amusement in his eyes made her own lips twitch in response.

  Great. Too pretty for his own good, problems in need of solving, and a sense of humor. He might as well be wearing a label with ‘Grace’s catnip’ scrawled on it.

  “Thanks.” She bent her head to the pad, drawing a quick map. She wrote in the street names, then, frowning, added mileage in parentheses under the names. She wasn’t as sure about the distances as she should be, but she’d been driving to the GD offices all her life. The route was too familiar for her to need to know exactly how far one turn was from the next. Ripping the map off the pad, she handed it to Noah. “My distances might be off, but after you eat, you should go check it out.”

  “Thank you.” He didn’t look at the map but set it on the counter, his eyes on her. The directness of his gaze held a question, and she felt her cheeks getting warm. Who was this guy?