Saving Grace

by RaeAnne Thayne

  The last thing she wanted to do was sit here and chitchat with him, especially when she was wearing nothing but one of Lily’s muumuus. She had been in too much pain at first while she was still recovering from her burns to let it bother her. Now that she suffered only the occasional twinge from her wounds, though, she felt awkward and exposed in the robe, despite the fact that the thing completely swallowed her up.

  On the other hand, she needed to remember the investigation. Any chance she had to learn more about what he did and who he associated with could lead to the information that would help bring him down.

  She inched back in the rocker and covered her bare feet with the hem of the robe, feeling about as far from a hard-nosed police detective as she possibly could.

  She tried to ignore her discomfort and forced her features into an expression of casual inquiry. “Are you having problems at the company?” she asked.

  “Just the usual hassles. A shipment of circuit boards from Korea got stalled in Customs because of some lost paperwork, so I’ve spent the last four days trying go-between an angry customer and a frantic supplier and convince the feds to bend the rules a bit.”

  Did he have any idea at all that he was under investigation? she wondered. And just how far was he willing to bend the rules? Far enough until they shattered?

  “Do you have many problems with Customs?” she asked.

  He laughed. “Show me anybody in the business who doesn’t have problems with Customs and I’ll show you somebody who’s slipping some serious money under the table. Yeah, I’ve had problems with Customs before. It goes with the territory.”

  “How big is GSI?”

  “Big enough to be a major headache most of the time. But not as big as I’d like it to be.” He grinned. “We’re the second largest private shipping company in the Northwest. I expect to take over the top spot within the next year. From there, who knows?”

  “Nobody would say you’re not ambitious, would they, Dugan?”

  “I don’t think I am. I started out with one tiny single-engine plane I bought when I left the air force. I never intended things to work out like this, I just wanted to fly.”

  “So why didn’t you stay in the military?”

  She heard the hard, accusatory note in her voice and gave an inward wince. Good grief, she was rusty at this. She used to be pretty good at undercover work. There was a time the guys in the squad used to beg her to run stings with them.

  But sitting here with Jack Dugan in her bare feet and a borrowed muumuu, she was afraid she had completely lost her touch. Instead of skillfully weaving her questions into the conversation, instead of subtly leading her prey in the direction she wanted him to go, she sounded exactly like she was grilling a suspect under hot lights in one of those airless little interview rooms at the station house.

  Jack didn’t seem to notice, though. He just shrugged. “It took me a few years but I discovered I’m not crazy about following orders.”

  Oh, big surprise there. “So you quit and went off on your own, naming your company Global Shipping Incorporated, even though you had no ambitions whatsoever.”

  He grinned again at her sardonic tone. “The name started out as a joke. For the first six months we only had one account, a restaurant in Utah who wanted to be able to claim they had fresh seafood flown in daily. They didn’t seem to care that it was flown in on a rickety old plane with no seat belts and duct tape on the windshield. We were barely able to afford fuel with what they paid us, but for some strange reason we made the brilliant business decision to incorporate. Piper and I came up with the name. I’m pretty sure at least one of us was drunk at the time.”

  “Piper?”

  “Piper McCall. My partner. I’m sure you’ll meet him eventually. He’s always in and out.”

  She filed the name away to ask Beau about as Jack went on. “Anyway, I guess you could say the name turned out to be some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. We picked up a few more accounts, eventually leased a 727, and found our niche in the market; delivering computer components to startup companies here in Seattle who needed a faster turnaround than they could get by boat. Now we have over a hundred-fifty employees, fly into thirty-five different countries and—” he broke off and she was fascinated to see a ruddy tinge climb his cheeks.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bore you. I tend to ramble on when I’m talking about the company.”

  Keep rambling, she thought. Tell me all your secrets.

  But he seemed to think he’d said enough because he cleared his throat and abruptly changed the subject. “How’s your back?” he asked.

  She swallowed her disappointment. “Fine.”

  “Lily says it seems like it’s healing.”

  Why did he bother even asking her when he’d probably been getting daily progress reports all along? She barely refrained from glaring at him. “It is, so I would appreciate it if you would stop treating me like some kind of invalid now and let me do the job you hired me for.”

  “I just don’t want you to overdo it.”

  “I’m perfectly fine,” she repeated. And anxious to start digging into all the dirty corners of your life, Dugan.

  “If you’re sure you’re up to it, you can officially start tomorrow, then. As you said the other night, I think the alarm system here at the house is the logical place to start. After you’ve made whatever improvements you think are needed here, you can take a look at the company’s system.”

  She would have preferred it the other way around but knew she couldn’t protest without sounding suspicious. “Great,” she replied. “I only have one problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  Although she hated drawing more attention to it than she absolutely had to, she pointed to the tropical tent she wore. “I don’t have anything to wear. Everything I own is at my apartment, except for the clothes I was wearing when you brought me here. And as much as I appreciate your housekeeper’s generosity in lending me some clothes, I believe I would feel more comfortable in something a little less, um, roomy.”

  He cocked his head and examined her. As his gaze traveled from the loose neckline—with its tendency to slip off her shoulder, since it had been made for someone more of Lily’s ample proportions than her own—to her toes that insisted on peeking out from under the hem, something hot and glittering sparked in his eyes.

  Definite male interest. She could read it in those sea-green depths as clearly as a blinking neon sign.

  And even though her mind had built up plenty of blockades to protect her from Jack Dugan’s appeal, her body apparently didn’t give a damn. She felt an answering heat flash through her like lightning arcing across Puget Sound. Her stomach fluttered and the room seemed a great deal smaller suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” he murmured, a small, intimate smile dancing at the corners of his firm mouth. “There’s something to be said for roomy and what it leaves to the imagination.”

  A slow, sensuous shiver rippled down her spine at his low words. She felt it and frowned. Where was this coming from? She didn’t want it, couldn’t handle it. She never wanted to feel anything like this again, especially for a man who could very likely be a criminal.

  She sternly ordered her hormones to behave and decided the best way to handle this attraction between them would be to completely ignore it. Maybe, if she was really, really lucky, it would go away.

  “What about my clothes?” she asked.

  He studied her for a moment longer, then nodded. “I should have thought about this before and had Lily pick something up for you.”

  “I have plenty of clothes. Just not here.”

  “I’ll drive you to your apartment after dinner and you can pick up what you need.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said quickly. “I could ask Lily or her husband to take me. Or I can just catch a cab.”

  “It’s no problem at all.” He grinned. “Em loves any chance to ride the ferry and she’ll be thrilled to come with us to
your apartment. Just let me know when you’re ready.”

  She wouldn’t ever be ready, she thought as he walked out of the room. Emma might be thrilled to come with him, but she definitely couldn’t say the same to have the girl tag along. Hadn’t she just told herself the only way she could handle this job would be if she could manage to avoid his daughter? How was she supposed to do that when Jack Dugan insisted on shoving them together?

  CHAPTER 6

  The rain had stopped by the time Jack drove his car onto the ferry heading for Seattle and Grace’s apartment. Although it was still cloudy, the sun was beginning to set in a fiery blaze of color.

  He started to point it out to Grace, then decided against it. She probably wouldn’t care. The woman who had carried on such a lengthy, interested conversation with him back at the house had disappeared like the fog.

  Now she sat silent as a ghost beside him in a pale blue sweater and a pair of too-big jeans of his she had borrowed, her face set in stiff lines.

  “Daddy, can we go watch for mermaids?”

  He glanced in the back seat where Emma practically jitterbugged with anticipation.

  Mermaid-watching from the ferry was one of their little rituals, like Eskimo kisses at bedtime and piggyback rides around the pool.

  “Can we, Daddy? Can we?”

  “We’ll have to see what Grace wants to do,” he answered. “She’s our guest.”

  Right now their guest looked as if she would rather be having her toenails plucked out one by one than find herself sitting on the Bainbridge-to-Seattle ferry with the two of them.

  She had barely spoken the entire ten minutes from the house to the ferry, had kept that delectable mouth in a tight, tense line nearly the entire drive.

  He wasn’t sure what, exactly, was responsible for this abrupt change in her, but he was afraid it had something to do with Emma and her constant chattering.

  Being around his cheerful little girl couldn’t be easy for her. He hadn’t missed the awkward way Grace had held her back at the house while she read the gecko story or the pain she had been unable to conceal that darkened those huge mocha eyes.

  He ached whenever he thought of all she had lost, but her distance unquestionably put him in protective-father mode.

  Emma was a sweet, joyful little girl who was happiest when she had somebody new to love. He wasn’t willing to sit idly by and watch her new favorite person break her heart into little pieces.

  Em’s own mother hadn’t wanted the inconvenience of raising her and had only consented to marry him and go through with the pregnancy if he would agree to pay her an obscenely large divorce settlement.

  He couldn’t completely blame Camille—her pregnancy had been a mistake, something neither one of them had expected.

  By all rights, theirs should have been a short-lived, if passionate, relationship. That was all both of them had wanted at the time. He had been overwhelmed as GSI started to become more successful and Camille had been a wild, thrill-seeking pilot—even more thrill-seeking than he had been before Emma was born. She had been much too reckless and ambitious to be content as a corporate wife and dutiful mother.

  Things hadn’t worked out that way. Even though Emma had only been three days old when Camille left—much too young to know rejection from her mother’s desertion—he had known.

  And he had done the hurting for her.

  He’d be damned if he’d let another woman treat her the same way, even if Grace did have reason for her coolness.

  Because he was worried over his daughter’s feelings, his words sounded harsh, curt. “Would you prefer staying with the car or walking around on deck with us?”

  Grace stared straight ahead at the gleaming rows of cars. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

  Emma seized on the answer. “See, Daddy? She said it doesn’t matter. Let’s go! I just know we’re going to see Ariel and her sisters today.”

  How could he refuse, in light of such absolute faith? He glanced across the length of the car at Grace again. “You’re welcome to come along if you’d like.”

  He fully expected her to stay with the car. When she opened the door of the car and climbed out, he had a feeling it surprised her as much as it did him.

  She stood by the passenger door looking a little lost for a moment, until Emma opened her own door and slipped her little hand into Grace’s larger one. “We always watch for Ariel when we ride the ferry, don’t we, Daddy? Have you seen The Little Mermaid? It’s me and my daddy’s favorite movie. We’ve seen it a billion times.”

  Confronted with such relentless cheer, Grace seemed to soften. Instead of pulling away from Emma’s hand, she just raised an eyebrow at him, over the top of his daughter’s blond head. “The Little Mermaid, Dugan? Hmm. Somehow I would have figured you more for a knock-’em-down, shoot-’em-up kind of guy.”

  He laughed because he basically was a knock-’em-down, shoot-’em-up kind of guy. “Not me,” he lied. “Give me a good animated feature and a big bowl of buttered popcorn and I’m happy as a flea on a dog.”

  He almost got a smile out of her with that one. Almost. The corners of her mouth tilted up just a bit, as if the muscles were trying to remember how to work right.

  Before a smile could break free, though, her lips slipped back into that tight, uncompromising line.

  He sighed his disappointment. It was rapidly becoming an obsession, this desire to see what it might take for her to forget herself long enough to smile at him or, heaven forbid, actually laugh.

  Looks like he had a long, long way to go.

  With Emma tugging them along, they climbed the metal stairs to the deck. The sun had slipped a few more inches behind the pines on the island, enough to send brilliant peach rays peeking beneath the clouds to shimmer across the water. Ahead were the lights of the city, beginning to gleam in the twilight.

  There weren’t many others on the ferry. Most of the ferry business this time of evening consisted of commuters coming in the other direction, from jobs in Seattle back to their homes on the island, so they had the deck to themselves except for a group of teenagers on the other side.

  Grace seemed to relax even more as the ferry lifted anchor. Elbows on the railing, she leaned into the brisk fall wind while it caught strands of her dark hair and twirled them around.

  A couple of sea kayakers glided by out of range of the ferry’s wake, their paddles barely rippling the surface, and she watched their progress until they were out of sight on the other side of the vessel.

  To his amusement, Emma copied Grace’s pose exactly, right down to the chin lifted defiantly to the elements. Her little elbows couldn’t quite reach the railing, but that didn’t seem to bother her. “Can you see any mermaids yet?” she asked him.

  He shaded his eyes and scanned the horizon in all directions with exaggerated movements. “Not yet. You?”

  She mimicked his actions, peeking through the bars of the railing. “Nope. Not yet. I wonder where they are?”

  “Maybe they’re having a party down there. Watch for party hats sticking out of the water.”

  Emma giggled. “I don’t see any. Grace, what about you? Can you see any mermaids yet?”

  He held his breath, expecting her to pull away. To his surprise, she played along. “Nothing here.” She paused, then focused hard on a spot to starboard. “Wait…is that one? Nope. Just a piece of driftwood. I’ll keep looking, though.”

  As he expected, Emma soon tired of mermaid-watching. Her attention span could just about stretch across a paper cup. “Can I get a treat, Daddy?” She pointed to the row of vending machines lining the inside wall.

  He fished some change from the pocket of his jacket and handed it over. “One, that’s all, or Lily will cook me for breakfast.”

  Emma snickered. “She will not. You won’t fit in any of her pans.”

  He tweaked her nose. “You’re too smart for your own britches, aren’t you?”

  “Yep.” She put the change into the front pocket of he
r overalls and hopped on one foot over to the vending machines.

  “Do you really think that’s wise?”

  He turned back to Grace. “What?”

  She craned her neck to watch Emma gazing up at her treat choices. “Letting her go alone like that.”

  “It’s just a dozen feet or so. She’s not even out of sight.”

  “Not now, but what if the ferry were crowded with people?”

  “Than I would probably go with her.”

  “Do you have any idea how easy it would be for you to lose sight of her, for someone to just grab her and walk away?”

  “And go where? In case it’s escaped your attention, we’re surrounded by water here.”

  “We won’t be for long. If somebody wanted to, he or she could hide her in the trunk of a car or under a pile of blankets. Before you figured out that she hadn’t simply wandered away, they could drive off the ferry once it reached the city, with no one the wiser.”

  His stomach lurched sharply as he contemplated the possibilities. He had tried to convince himself that her kidnapping had just been a fluke. A random criminal act.

  He made a comfortable income with GSI, but there were plenty of others in the Seattle area with a whole hell of a lot more money than he had.

  So why had Emma been a target? And if it happened once, what were the chances of it happening again?

  The police were no closer to answers and neither were his private detectives. The frustration over having no one to blame but some nameless, faceless stranger willing to let his daughter burn to death only added to his anger.

  “What do you suggest I do to keep her safe?” he asked, with his gaze now fixed on Emma.

  “You could hire a bodyguard, I suppose, but even that’s not completely foolproof. If she could slip away from you, she could probably slip away from a bodyguard.”

  “For the rest of her life?”

  “Or at least until the kidnappers are caught, I suppose.”

  “I don’t want her to have to live with some hired goon constantly shadowing her. What the hell kind of life is that for a little girl?” His knuckles whitened on the railing. He hated this. It wasn’t right that his daughter should have to live this way, as a prisoner to other people’s greed.