Before either one of them could acknowledge the introduction, he walked away with long, purposeful strides.
She watched the lean-hipped gait for a moment, wondering just how he managed to make the simple act of walking across a room look unbelievably sexy, then realized what direction her mind was wandering into and gave herself a sharp, swift slap.
She was here to do a job and, dammit, she was going to do it.
Turning abruptly, she found Piper watching her, his eyes intense behind blue-tinted contact lenses.
“You’re Grace? The Grace?”
She floundered. “I don’t know. Am I?”
“You’re the one! The lady who pulled our little Emma from that burning car, right?”
Great. More gratitude she neither wanted nor needed. “I just did what anyone else would have in the same situation,” she mumbled, praying he would drop the issue.
Either the man didn’t hear the vexation in her voice or he chose to ignore it. One minute he was simply standing there, the next he grabbed her and pulled her into a tight embrace.
She was immediately enveloped in an odd mixture of oil and cologne.
“Thank you so much for saving our little girl. When I think about what might have happened to her if you hadn’t been there….” He shuddered and while he was busy pondering the grim possibilities, she managed to extricate herself.
His eyes had filled with raw emotion, she saw, and she found herself warming to the man. Even if he did seem to be trying to regain something that was forever lost to him, he apparently cared a great deal for Emma Dugan.
“Mr. McCall…”
“Piper. Everybody just calls me Piper.”
“Piper. I really don’t want to talk about this.”
“That little girl means the world to us. She would have died in that crash if you hadn’t come along, if you hadn’t been so brave.”
Bravery had nothing to do with it. She was about as far from a hero as a person could get, and she was really growing tired of trying to explain that to everyone.
If she were truly brave, she would have the courage to go on without Marisa. She wouldn’t have these endless days when all she wanted to do was curl up in bed and wither away.
“I’m just glad I was there,” she lied.
“We owe you the world. If you need anything—anything at all—just ask.”
I need you to drop this, she thought, but swallowed the words. “Jack said something about a tour,” she said pointedly.
“Sure. Right. I guess we can start in here.”
What was she looking for? She didn’t have the first clue. While Piper showed her around the four hangars that made up GSI, she tried to absorb everything around her, to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary. The problem was, she had no idea what was ordinary and what wasn’t.
From her perspective, GSI seemed like a clean, well-run, organized company. But what did she know? Obviously something—and someone—in it was dirty or it wouldn’t be the focus of scrutiny.
What she needed was a good briefing. She needed to talk to Beau and learn a little more about the progress of the investigation so she didn’t waste her time covering old ground.
By the time they walked through the entire company, it was nearly noon. They returned to the main hangar and Piper showed her into a large office filled with dark, elegant furniture that seemed very uncharacteristic of Jack.
One wall was glass, offering a view of the work going on in the hangar, and the other was dominated by a huge oil painting of a tropical sunset. She could believe he picked out the painting, but the rest of it looked entirely too formal for him.
“I’ve got an appointment in a couple of minutes.” Piper gave her an apologetic smile. “This is Jack’s office. Do you mind waiting in here until his meeting gets out?”
She glanced around Dugan’s territory with a small, private smile of anticipation that she quickly concealed and shook her head. “No problem. That would be fine.”
With luck, she just might have time to make contact with Beau and set up a little meeting of her own before diving into his files.
“Great,” Piper said. With another apologetic smile, he walked out of the office, leaving her alone.
She waited several beats, checked to make sure no one was coming, then sat in the leather executive’s chair behind the huge, gleaming desk and dialed the number of Beau’s cellular phone.
He answered with his customary, grouchy-sounding, “What?”
“Guess where I’m calling from?” she asked, without any preliminaries.
“The 50-yard line in the Kingdome?”
She snorted. “Ha ha, very funny. Not even close. How does Jack Dugan’s office hit you?”
“Like a runaway truck. You’re yanking my chain, right?”
“Nope. I’m sitting in his great big throne behind a mahogany desk bigger than my car, staring at a row of mahogany file cabinets I’m just itching to let my fingers wander through.”
“You’re all by yourself?”
She rolled her eyes, even though she knew he couldn’t see her. “No, Dugan’s sitting right in front of me, hanging on my every word. What do you think?”
Riley said nothing for several seconds. When he spoke, his voice was low, intense. “I think it’s good to hear that smart mouth of yours again. I’ve missed it, Gracie.”
For a moment, she didn’t know what to say. She realized suddenly that she’d missed it, too, their jokes and their banter and their comfortable, easy relationship. Even when they used to catch the most sordid and ugly of cases, Beau would always help her keep things in perspective.
She was suddenly profoundly sorry that she had put so much effort into trying to push him away for the last year. He had tried to offer comfort, but she hadn’t let him. She hadn’t wanted to heal.
She cleared her throat, uncomfortable with the realization and the guilt pinching at her, and chose to change the subject. “So what’s the status of the case on your end?”
“About the same,” he answered. “What about you?”
“I’m still trying to find my bearings. I’d probably be able to make more headway if I was up to speed on your case. That’s what I’m calling about, actually. I need to have you give me the bigger picture.”
“Right now?”
“No. Dugan might be back any minute. I don’t want to waste this chance to look around while I can. What about tonight?”
“You think you can get away from him without arousing too much suspicion? I can come out to Bainbridge and brief you while we grab a couple of burgers.”
“He’s my boss, not my keeper. I’ll just tell him I need to do a little shopping tonight and I’ll meet you in Winslow.”
Riley snorted. “If you think he’ll buy that excuse, he must not know you too well. You and shopping go together like peanut butter and anchovies.”
She gave a small, rueful laugh. He was absolutely right. She’d never had the patience required to spend hour after hour wandering through the mall—maybe because she was too busy being a mother when she was a teenager to get much practice at it. “I’ll tell him it’s for girl stuff and he won’t ask any questions. Guys hate that.”
Beau paused for several seconds. When he spoke, his voice sounded wistful. “Seems almost like old times, doesn’t it, Gracie? You and me, workin’ a case.”
A lump rose in her throat and she stared at Dugan’s oil painting, concentrating until the striated yellows and oranges of the sunset merged into one color. “Yeah,” she mumbled. “Yeah, it does.”
She was so busy trying to force the lump down that she didn’t hear the door open, didn’t realize another person had entered the room until an outraged female voice rang through the office.
“Who are you and what do you think you’re doing in here?”
CHAPTER 9
Grace swiveled around in the plush office chair to face a tall blond woman standing in the doorway wearing a power suit, killer heels and a militant
glare.
She cleared her throat. “I’ve, uh, got to run,” she said to Beau. “I’ll see you at seven tonight at the ferry landing in Winslow.”
She returned the receiver to the cradle and offered a cool smile to the blonde, who had walked into the room and now stood looming over her with an angry glare. “Hello. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
The woman’s face tightened even more. “No. We certainly have not. I repeat, who are you and why are you sitting in that chair as if you owned the place?”
She was trying to come up with a suitable answer when she heard the low rumble of male voices in the hallway. A few seconds later, Jack and Piper walked into the office.
“Grace, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting so long.” Jack smiled at her and she was annoyed to feel her pulse kick up a notch. In the hour since she’d seen him, she had forgotten the impact of that smile. “I guess you met Sydney Benedict. Part bulldog, part financial wizard and the best damn secretary in the whole state of Washington.”
The woman’s perfectly made-up lips curved into a peeved kind of smile. “Executive assistant.”
“Right. Executive assistant. Sorry.” He grinned again and Grace had the distinct impression this was a battle the two of them had fought before. “She knows that whatever I call her, I’d be lost without her. She practically runs the place. Syd, this is Grace Solarez. You know, the one from Emma’s car accident.”
That flawless mouth stretched into a wider smile that still fell a few yards short of genuine. “I’m sorry. You should have told me who you were immediately. I was just surprised to find someone in Jack’s private office, that’s all.”
Even the woman’s apologies sounded like an accusation. Grace bared her teeth in an almost-genuine smile of her own. “No problem.”
Now why would Sydney feel that she had to be so territorial of Jack? That was definitely the vibe she was getting from the other woman. Was it strictly the protectiveness of a secretary to a boss or did she have other, more intimate claims on him?
“How did it go?” Sydney asked. She turned her head and with her elegant upswept hairdo, discreet diamonds Grace would swear were real winked in her ears. Either Jack Dugan paid his personal assistants extraordinarily well or Sydney Benedict was independently wealthy.
Or she had another source of income. An illegal source. As Jack shrugged, Grace made a mental note to ask Beau about the woman’s background and whether she might be part of the arms dealing.
“Hard to say,” he answered. “They want to mull over our terms and meet again next week for another round of negotiations.”
Surprise flitted across Sydney’s coolly beautiful features. “They’re staying in Seattle until next week?”
“No. Apparently this trip to the states is part business, part pleasure, at least for Mr. Kim and his sons. They’re heading to Maui tonight for the pleasure part to play Kapalua. Big golfers, those Kims. They weren’t planning a trip to Oahu but I offered to fly them over in the Learjet toward the end of the week so they could take in some of the Waikiki nightlife.”
Grace blinked at his casual tone. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to have the kind of green to take a private jet to Hawaii on a whim, just to wine and dine a couple of clients.
Sydney frowned. “You can’t do that. You’ve got a flight to Mexico City scheduled Thursday.”
“Somebody else can take it. In fact—” his face broke out in a dazzling grin “—I just had a great idea. Why don’t you cancel everything from Monday on. I told Em we would try to take Grace with us to help us try to catch geckos at the house in Hali’ewa and Lily’s always eager for an excuse to go home and see her grandson for a few days. We can leave tomorrow.”
Just like that, without so much as a “How about it, Grace?” he was ready to cart her off to Hawaii. She bristled, but before she could protest, his personal assistant did it for her.
The woman’s mouth flattened into a tight line. “Jack, you can’t just drop everything and take off like this.”
“You can handle things, can’t you?”
If she couldn’t, she obviously wasn’t going to admit it. “Of course. But still…”
Jack didn’t wait for the rest of her arguments. “Piper, you want to come along with us and co-pilot for me? You haven’t been to Hawaii for a while, have you?”
If Grace hadn’t been watching Sydney Benedict, she would have missed the way her mouth opened as if to protest, then a strange, sly light flitted through her blue eyes.
“Yes, Piper. Why don’t you go along?” she said.
The older man sent her a swift, confused look and some silent message passed between them. What was the woman up to? Maybe she wanted the chance to be in complete control back on the homefront. She struck Grace as the power-hungry sort.
“Uh, sure,” Piper said. “That’d be great. It’ll give me a chance to look up that cocktail waitress from the Prince Kuhio I met last time we were there. What was her name? Kelly something-or-other?”
“How should I know? I can’t keep track of your cocktail waitresses,” Jack answered. “For that matter, you can’t even keep track of your cocktail waitresses.”
Sydney walked to the door. “I suppose I’d better begin rearranging your schedule then and handling your travel arrangements. Piper, shall I book a room for you on Waikiki?”
“Yeah. Sure. Try to get me in the Prince Kuhio, would you?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
The older man followed Syd out of the office, giving alternative resorts he wanted to stay at if his first choice wasn’t available—probably hotels of other cocktail waitresses he could look up, Jack thought with a grimace.
He would have thought Piper would start slowing down on the ladykiller front. But even as he neared sixty, he was clinging to his ways.
He was a damn good pilot—and he’d been loyal to Jack when he had no one else—but the man went through women like other men used drugs or alcohol or gambling.
In the fifteen years Jack had known him, he’d been married and divorced twice—and had one more ex-wife from before Jack met him. Now he dated a different woman every week.
The pace had to be wearing on him.
He pushed his worries over Piper away and turned to Grace. He knew she wouldn’t appreciate the observation, but she looked small and delicate in the huge leather chair Syd had ordered behind his back to replace the ratty old vinyl thing he hadn’t wanted to part with.
Even overpowered as she was by the chair’s dimensions, she took his breath away, with those huge dark eyes and that lush mouth.
Right now that mouth was drawn so tight against her teeth, they were probably leaving imprints on her lips, and those dark eyes had narrowed into thin slits.
It occurred to him that she seemed less than thrilled about the idea of going with him to Hawaii. Maybe he shouldn’t have sprung it on her so abruptly.
“I’m sorry, Grace,” he said warily, leaning a hip on the desk. “I didn’t even ask if a day would give you enough time to pack.”
“No. What you didn’t ask is if I would even go. You just naturally assumed I would.”
“You don’t want to go?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s Hawaii. You know, tropical paradise. White sand, blue water, gorgeous sunsets. Who would turn down a free trip to Hawaii?”
She glared at him. “Me.”
“Why?”
“I’m not part of the family, Dugan. I’m your employee.” She enunciated the words slowly, carefully. “You hired me to oversee security for you.”
“And so far you’ve been doing a hell of a job.”
“How can I do that job if I’m loafing around on the beach in some skimpy bikini, watching those gorgeous sunsets?”
A picture of her doing exactly that flashed through his head. A hard rush of heat hit him first as his imagination fired into warp speed at just the thought.
On its heels, though
, was a deeper image. Grace at peace, for once, relaxing on the sand while the sea rumbled a few yards away and trade winds rustled the fronds on the palms.
He had a feeling a change of scenery was just what she needed and wasn’t about to let her wiggle out of it.
With the way her mind worked, he was afraid the more he argued with her, the more she would dig in her heels. He pondered his strategy for a few minutes, then straightened from the desk.
“Okay,” he finally said. “If that’s the way you feel, I understand. Emma will miss having you along to help her go gecko-hunting, but you’re right. I hired you to overhaul security and that’s exactly what you should do.”
She frowned at him suspiciously, obviously geared up for a fight that wasn’t going to happen.
“Of course,” he added casually, “if somebody were really determined to harm me or my family, they wouldn’t find a better place for it than Hawaii. You think the security system at the house here stinks, you ought to see the one in Hali’ewa. Hell, a chipmunk with a fingernail file could break in over there.”
“Let’s hope there aren’t many chipmunks who’ve got it in for you, then,” she answered coolly.
“Fine. Make jokes.” He grinned, adoring this flippant side of her. “When I’m attacked in the night by a vicious ring of felonious squirrels, I’m going to hold you personally responsible.”
“I know what you’re trying to do and it won’t work, Dugan.”
“What?” he asked, the picture of innocence.
“You’re trying to play me and it won’t work. You’re not going to be able to guilt me into coming with you.”
“Who, me?”
“I’m your employee. You can’t just pack me along on a week’s vacation to Hawaii.”
“Lily’s my employee and she never complains about it.”
“That’s different. Lily is your…your… What exactly is she?”
He shrugged. “Housekeeper. Nanny. Surrogate grandma to Emma. Pick one.”
“Whatever. It’s just different.”
“Would it make you feel any better if I told you I bought the house in Hawaii for my employees?”
Saving Grace Page 10