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.
Saving Grace Page 2