As soon as they arrived, Emma insisted on going to check for the mynah bird she had made friends with the last time they were here. She had named the bird Mr. Squawky and insisted he could say hello if he tried hard enough.
Lily was the first to break the silence now. “Did Jack tell you he bought this place for me and Tiny?”
“He mentioned it. I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.”
“He did. Mikia, our kaikamahine, or daughter, she got married and had a baby boy. Little Puakea. He’s almost three now. After he was born, Jack knew how hard it was on us not seeing the keiki very often so he bought the house for us to stay in. We fly over all the time, maybe four, five times a year. He’s a good man.”
She would have thought him a better man if he had just given the couple a healthy pension and let them find their own home near their grandson. “Why didn’t you just move back here permanently after your grandson was born?”
“And leave Jack and Emma?” Lily’s shoulders shook with laughter inside her maroon-and-white muumuu. “What would he do without us?”
Pay someone else to do your job, Grace thought, then felt ashamed of herself. Even she had to admit Lily and Tiny were more to Jack than just employees. He treated them more like treasured members of the family.
“You know what ’ai’e means?”
Grace shook her head.
“It means loyalty. It means we won’t come back home for good until Jack and that little girl of his don’t need us anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
Lily tucked a pillow into its case and fluffed it before answering. “It’s a long story. Want to hear?”
“Um, sure.” She perched on the edge of the bed as the older woman moved the remaining linens aside so she could sit in the chair.
“Tiny used to work the sugar cane. Never made much money, but we always had enough. About ten years ago, the sugar cane market went bad. Now you won’t find hardly a cane growing on any of the islands. Lots of people lost work.”
“Tiny as well?”
Lily nodded. “He couldn’t find nothing else around here. Nothing else he knew how to do, anyway. I was working as a nurse down at the hospital in Kahuku, so we had enough to get by, but it’s hard on a man when he can’t support his ohana, his family. He started to drink pretty good.”
She paused and looked out to sea. “Then I had some hip trouble and lost my job, too. It was a bad time. Tiny went drinking more and more and one day decided maybe he could get easy money off some haole. Only he was too drunk to pick a good one.”
“Let me guess. He tried to mug Jack?”
Lily nodded. “Stupid, huh? Jack was stationed at Hickam then with the air force. Instead of turning Tiny in to the police like he deserved, Jack bought him a coffee and a meal.”
Grace felt a soft, warm tug at her heart, but as soon as she recognized it, she frowned. She couldn’t afford this softening toward him. She shouldn’t be sitting here and listening to the woman sing Jack’s praises but she had no idea how to prevent it.
“And then the crazy man hired Tiny to do things around his apartment,” Lily went on, oblivious to Grace’s inner struggle. “Painting, fixing things. Stuff he didn’t really need doing or could have done himself. And when Jack heard Tiny had a wife and daughter at home, he hired me to cook and clean for him. And we been taking care of each other ever since.”
She couldn’t say she was completely surprised by the story. When she thought about it, he seemed the kind of man to gather in strays, although she didn’t think he would appreciate the observation.
But would a man who helped out a would-be attacker and his family be the kind of man willing to break the law for his own gain?
“He’s a good man,” Lily repeated. “I don’t know what kind of mess we would have been in if he hadn’t come along and helped us, even when he didn’t have much money himself.”
Before Grace had time to digest this new side of Jack Dugan, Lily slapped her hands on her thighs and rose from the chair. “Listen to me, sitting here talking story with all I got to do.”
She stood to finish making the bed and unfurled the remaining linens in her lap, which turned out to be an exquisite Hawaiian quilt, a red-and-orange outline of chrysanthemums on a white background.
Grace ran a hand over the bright fabric, her fingertips skimming the raised edge of the design, appliqued with thousands of tiny, perfect stitches. “This is gorgeous!”
“It’s a pattern called Pua Pake. Chinese Flower.”
“Did you make it?” she asked.
Lily nodded. “Long time ago. When I was still a girl.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It must have taken you a year of work, at least!”
Lily shrugged her massive shoulders. “It’s not that hard. I can show you while you’re here. You could make a panel to hang on the wall. It wouldn’t take you that long.”
“I’d like that,” Grace said, and realized with a little jolt that she meant the words.
Now what on earth would have compelled her to say such a thing? She was definitely not the sort for handiwork projects.
She had tried to learn to knit when she was pregnant with Marisa, imagining cute little baby booties and tiny wool sweaters. With the typically minuscule attention span of teenage girls, though, she hadn’t even been able to complete one yellow bootie before giving up, bored senseless with the whole thing.
This seemed different, somehow. The color and vibrancy of the native quilt called to her in some raw, elemental way. It seemed to represent beauty and life, the polar opposite of the ugliness, the terrible emptiness of the past year.
To her shock, she discovered a fierce need to create something lovely, something good, as if in some small but tangible way she might begin to fill that emptiness.
“Good.” Lily nodded her head, as if she’d expected no other answer. “I’ve got plenty of fabric here. I can help you come up with a pattern tonight and help get you started cutting it out.”
Grace had the craziest feeling that she was teetering on the brink of something important. Momentous, even. Her stomach fluttered and spun, and she was suddenly not at all sure she was ready for whatever that something might be.
She forced a laugh that sounded small and hollow. “You don’t waste time, do you? We’re all tired after that long flight—why don’t we wait until tomorrow before rushing into any grand projects?”
Lily studied her out of brown eyes that were entirely too perceptive. Grace squirmed under the scrutiny until the Hawaiian’s features softened into a compassion that made her even more uncomfortable.
“Up to you,” Lily said. “Tomorrow can be just as good as today. Sometimes even better.”
She turned to leave just as Emma brushed past her into the bedroom, trailing sand across the floor and carrying a plastic toy bucket. Grace felt every muscle tense, as they always did in the little girl’s presence.
“Hey, Grace, guess what?” Emma chirped. “My daddy and me found three hermit crabs. You can have one, if you want.” She thrust the bucket out and Grace could see three tiny, bewildered-looking crabs trying to scale their pink plastic cage.
Mommy, look at the kitty I found at the park! Can I keep it?
The strand of old memory, sharp as coiled concertina wire, twined around and through her—Marisa’s brown little face animated with excitement, her eyes eager and bright, as she held a scraggly gray-striped kitten in her skinny five-year-old arms.
The kitten had grown into a fat old tom Marisa named Gordo. He slept on her pillow, patiently endured being dressed up in doll clothes and lugged around by his armpits, and ate anything as long as Marisa had been the one to feed him.
Grace hadn’t been able to stand having him around after and had finally made Beau take him away.
“Want one?” Emma asked now. “You could keep it in a bowl by your bed.”
“No.” Wrenched back into the present, her voice was cold, cruel. “
Crabs don’t make good pets.”
Like a flower hit by frost, the excitement on the little girl’s face shriveled and died. “Oh,” she said softly.
Remorse over her harsh words swamped Grace and she wanted to gather Emma close and apologize. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t. Her emotions were too raw suddenly, too close to the surface and she didn’t want to risk them blistering over.
“Grace is right, pumpkin.”
She turned at the deep male voice and found Jack standing in the doorway. He gave her a swift frown then knelt to his daughter’s level. “Remember what I told you? It’s all right to study the crabs for a while, but they really belong on the beach. We’ll go take them down and you can let them go.”
“Okay.” With the quicksilver mood swings typical of a five year old, she wriggled down and followed Lily down the hallway.
After another long, searching look, Jack left as well, leaving Grace alone with her guilt.
Alone. Always alone.
CHAPTER 11
The mythical Hawaiian sunset had nothing on a tropical dawn, as far as Grace was concerned.
With her bare feet buried in damp sand, she sat on a straw mat she found in her room and watched the sky put on a dazzling display of color as the sun continued its climb above the horizon.
The ever-present trade winds stirred the feathery fronds of coco palm trees spearing into the sky and rattled the leaves on the other thick vegetation surrounding her.
There were no other houses on this part of the beach, only Jack’s, and she felt as if she were the only person alive here in the pearly light of early morning.
The ocean dominated everything, overwhelming in its majestic beauty. It was a feast for every one of her senses; she inhaled the salty spray and tasted it on her tongue. The low musical murmur of the surf filled her ears with its ancient song.
And she couldn’t look away from the endless, stunning blue.
She found it difficult to believe this was the same Pacific that battered against the Washington coastline. This sea was softer, somehow, gentler, despite the legendary North Shore waves so sought after by surfers.
It soothed her. Calmed her.
She felt a tickle and looked away from the water to find a tiny crab scuttling over her toe. It inevitably reminded her of the scene in her bedroom the night before with Emma.
The calm the ocean had given her receded and guilt washed over her like the sea licking at the sand. She had been cold and unkind and the memory of it pinched at her with claws sharper than any crab’s.
As tired as she had been from the long flight, she spent most of the night staring at the clean, white-painted walls of the guest room, listening to the surf and feeling ashamed of herself.
All Emma wanted from her was friendship. Would that be so terribly hard to give? Was she going to spend the rest of her life avoiding any kind of association with children, being needlessly cruel because she couldn’t find her way past remembering all she had lost?
She thought of the hurt in Emma’s big green eyes when she had snapped at her, then the disapproval in Jack’s identical pair, and again felt small and mean.
She couldn’t do it anymore. It wasn’t fair or right. She couldn’t continue to blame an innocent child for simply living—for having skin and breath and substance.
Somehow she would have to find a way to break away from her memories and change her behavior toward the little girl.
She didn’t have to open her heart to her, didn’t have to let her in at all, really. She just had to be kind. She just had to force herself to deal with Emma as herself instead of projecting Marisa onto everything she did.
She could do it. She would. It was only for a few days, just while they were here. She could survive anything for a few days.
Above the sea’s deep purr, she suddenly became aware that she was no longer alone on the wide stretch of beach, that her temporary sanctuary had been invaded.
She didn’t know what alerted her to it—the snick of a sliding glass door, perhaps, or just a shift in the breeze—but she turned and looked through a break in the dense growth just in time to see Jack walking out onto the lanai of his beach house a hundred feet away.
So much for her solitary peace. She frowned in annoyance. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, especially not him. And if she returned to the house now, she would have to pass him and be forced into conversation.
Maybe he wouldn’t notice her. She was screened on all sides except the ocean by thick bushes. She backed against a tree with a trunk that looked like vertical strands of twined rope, hoping its large, oval-shaped leaves would conceal her.
A few moments later, he padded down to the beach wearing only baggy maroon surfer trunks and carrying a fluorescent blue boogie board under one arm.
To her relief, he didn’t seem aware of her presence at all as he stopped at the water’s edge and exchanged flip-flops for flippers.
He stood there for a moment silhouetted by the rising sun, looking out toward sea, and awareness bloomed in her like the plumeria and ginger surrounding her.
She thought about the first time she had seen him, all sun-bronzed and golden. It was funny how they had come full circle—she remembered thinking then that he looked like a surfer. She never would have imagined that one day she would be sitting on a Hawaiian beach, watching him prepare to challenge the waves.
It seemed as if a lifetime had passed since she had awakened in his home with her back on fire and her spirit as cold as death.
After lifting his face to the rising sun one last time, he waded into the surf. When the water was deep enough, he shoved the boogie board under his chest and began to swim toward the first line of breakers with clean, powerful strokes.
She watched, mesmerized by his strength and skill as he rode wave after wave. Jack embraced life, she thought as she watched him coil and twist on a swell. He challenged everything like he did those waves, with boldness and daring. Head-on, unafraid.
Everything she wasn’t.
By the time he headed for shore, the sun was well above the horizon. She shrank back against the tree, hoping she could blend in enough that he wouldn’t see her.
She might have made it undetected but a mischievous mynah bird—maybe even Mr. Squawky himself—called from the tree above her. Jack turned toward the sound and his features brightened when he saw her.
Water drops caught the sunlight and gleamed on his skin as he took off his flippers and headed toward her. Her mouth suddenly felt dry, her limbs heavy, ponderous.
“Morning. I didn’t realize I had an audience.”
“You put on quite a show.”
He looked faintly embarrassed. “I haven’t been on a board in a long time so I’m pretty rusty. Have you been out here long?”
She nodded and decided not to tell him she had already staked out the beach as her own before he arrived. “A while,” she answered.
“I thought everybody would be sleeping off jet lag this morning.”
“I couldn’t sleep through such a glorious sunrise.”
His teeth flashed as he smiled, sending her pulse churning through her like a riptide.
He didn’t help matters when he sat next to her, entirely too close, with his elbows resting on his bent knees. “Dawn has always been my favorite time in the islands. I’m sorry I disturbed your view of it.”
She was disturbed, but not in the way she was sure he meant.
“It’s your house,” she pointed out. “I’m the intruder here.”
“You’re not. I hope you know that. I wanted you to come.”
“Why?” she muttered, thinking of her morose silences and her bad tempers.
Instead of answering, he gave her a long, searching look. As his gaze traveled over her, she became painfully aware of her bare feet in the sand and the faded yellow-flowered sundress with the ragged hem she pulled on before heading to the beach. She probably looked like a refugee from some forlorn country.
“How’s yo
ur back feeling these days?” he asked, switching gears. Or maybe not, since the reason he probably claimed he wanted her here had more to do with that blasted sense of obligation he still seemed to feel over Emma’s rescue than because he derived any pleasure from her less-than-cheerful company.
She looked out to sea. “Fine. It’s just fine. Almost back to normal.”
“Do you think you might be up to doing a little snorkeling today? I thought maybe we could go off Pupukea Beach, not very far from here. This time of year it starts to get a little rough, but I think we’re still okay for a couple of weeks. It’s one of Emma’s favorite things to do and I know she’d like to share it with you.”
“I don’t know how to snorkel.”
“You can swim, can’t you?”
At her nod, his mouth twisted into a grin. “If you can swim, you can snorkel.”
In the slanted morning light, he looked golden and beautiful—as breathtaking as the sunrise—and she couldn’t look away.
His green eyes met hers. Something of her sudden sharp awareness must have shown on her face. A strange light kindled in his eyes, and she watched the expression there shift, take on a new intensity.
The ocean suddenly seemed to roar louder in her ears. Or maybe it was the slow, thick pounding of her pulse as his gaze fixed on her mouth, as the currents between them shifted and stirred like palms in the trade wind.
He murmured her name and then angled his tawny head, and she forgot to breathe, to think, as his mouth settled on hers.
His lips were cool and tasted faintly salty from the water. Hesitation held her motionless for a moment. She knew she shouldn’t let him kiss her, that this was a dangerous game she was playing with herself. But it seemed so completely perfect to be sitting on this secluded beach in the early-morning light with him that she shoved her doubts down where she didn’t have to look at them right now.
It was only a kiss, after all. A kiss couldn’t hurt anything. Okay, so it made her toes tingle and her knees weak, but it was still just a kiss.
Her hands were trapped between them when he pulled her close, and now she pulled them free and slid them across the hard, smooth muscles of his chest to wrap around his neck.
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