Saving Grace

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She had nothing to offer him. Absolutely nothing but a whole damn cargo plane bursting at the seams with her emotional baggage.

  He didn’t need to be saddled with a woman whose heart was a barren, empty wasteland. He deserved someone who was unafraid to love him, someone who could feel joy again.

  Besides that, she had to consider Emma. He and his daughter were a package deal—a matched set—and she knew she would never be able to love the little girl as she needed.

  Although she had begun to heal, Grace knew that a portion of her heart—the maternal part that cherished silly jokes and crayon drawings and sticky, wet kisses—had been broken forever by Marisa’s death.

  It could never, ever mend enough for her to let Emma in.

  She glanced across the length of the jet at the little girl with the blond curls and the mischievous dimples.

  Emma had been restless and hyperactive the entire flight, racing up and down the aisle, laughing loudly at the same two videos they’d watched on the flight over, and pestering everyone with questions.

  “Do whales swim in their sleep?” “Who thought up mayonnaise?” “When can I learn to fly an airplane?”

  Now, all questioned-out apparently, she slept peacefully with her pillow wedged into the corner and a blanket tucked up to her chin.

  She was a sweet little girl and Grace suddenly wished that she could love her. With a fierceness that brought an ache to her throat, she wished that she could be free to push those blond curls out of her eyes and kiss that forehead and gather her soft, sleeping weight against her.

  She jerked her gaze away. It landed on Lily, across the aisle from Emma, who returned the look solemnly.

  After a moment or two, Lily set down the magazine she’d been reading and pulled her bulk out of the seat and crossed the cabin to take the empty one next to Grace.

  “We ought to be landing soon,” she said. “It’s been a pretty good flight, yeah? That Jack, he sure knows what he’s doing.”

  “He does,” Grace agreed.

  “How are you doing with the quilting?”

  The woman was worse than a damn slave driver when it came to this blasted thing. With a sigh, she pulled it from her lap and held it up for Lily’s inspection.

  “Wow! Look at this!” Pleasure lit up Lily’s dark eyes and her plump cheeks rounded with her smile.

  Even Grace had to admit it was beautiful. When she and Lily were going over patterns, this one had called to her in some inexplicable way—a ring of dolphins leaping and dancing joyously, surrounded by a border of intertwined conch and coral and starfish.

  Marisa had loved the sea, and she would have adored this.

  “You’re just about done,” Lily said. “A few more days and it’ll be ready for framing. If you want, I can have Tiny make you a nice one out of koa. He’s done a couple of pretty good ones for me.”

  Grace grabbed the square back, knowing she was more protective of it than she ought to be. “It’s not ready for framing. Not even close. I still have a long way to go. And, you know, once we return to Seattle I won’t be able to give it the time I did in the past few days.”

  Lily shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. You’ll finish it when you’re ready to finish it. Then you can say good-bye.”

  She set her teeth against the arguments hovering there, knowing they would be useless against the Hawaiian, who could be as stubborn and immovable as the sharp, steep mountains near Hali’ewa.

  For some bizarre reason, Lily seemed to think that once she finished the quilted square, she would be free of her sorrow. That while her fingers worked the cloth, her mind worked through her grief.

  She wasn’t buying it.

  This past week had gone a long way toward helping her accept the finality of Marisa’s death, but she knew she would never stop grieving, no matter how many blasted quilted squares she finished.

  She would always feel that a part of her—the very best part—was gone and could never be regained.

  “Everybody buckle your seat belts,” Jack called suddenly from the cockpit. “We’ll be heading down pretty soon. We’re almost home.”

  Home. She stared out the window as they began their descent. The lights of Seattle glimmered through the clouds, but it looked as if the city would welcome them back with a cold, wet rain to match her mood.

  She would tell him tonight she was going back to her own life. He would protest, she knew, would try to persuade her to stay, but she would have to stand firm.

  Any debt between them for what had happened on that dark highway had more than been repaid. If he was still concerned about security, he could find someone else to protect his family.

  She needed to protect herself.

  She grimaced. How selfish was that? But there it was. The real reason she needed to leave, the real reason she was trying so hard to steel her heart against him.

  She was afraid.

  Terrified.

  She had barely survived the endless pain of the last year and she couldn’t bear the idea that she might be vulnerable again.

  * * *

  “Hey, sleepyhead.”

  The soft voice yanked her out of a dream of white sand beaches and the calming song of the sea and she awoke with her cheek pressed to the leather of Jack’s family room sofa and his face just inches away from hers.

  He crouched by the sofa, his face bathed in the unearthly blue light from the flickering television set and his green eyes gleaming with an emotion she couldn’t place.

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” he asked

  She blinked at him, still feeling disoriented. “What time is it?”

  “A little after three.”

  She pulled herself up and stretched the kinks out of her back. It had been almost midnight when she, Emma, and the Kihualanis returned to the house on Bainbridge Island.

  She had planned to stay up and talk to him when he finished his post-flight procedures at the airport. Even though she would have given anything to avoid it, she knew she had to tell him she was leaving in the morning.

  She remembered turning on the television set and stretching out on the couch but nothing after that. She must have fallen asleep and now it nearly was morning.

  She caught herself just before she asked what had taken him so long. It was none of her business. If he wanted to stay out all night, it had nothing to do with her.

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” he asked again.

  “I wanted to wait for you.”

  That strange light in his eyes deepened and she finally realized what emotion she could read there. Tenderness. He watched her with a smile on his face and tenderness in his eyes.

  He leaned forward. “I’m glad you did,” he whispered, and tangled his mouth with hers, and she forgot all about the reason she had stayed up, about the grim knowledge that she would be leaving him in just a few hours.

  “Ah, Grace,” he murmured against her mouth. “I’ve missed you today.”

  “We just spent seven hours together on an airplane.”

  “Yeah, but I was too busy piloting the plane to do what I’ve been dying for all day.”

  “What’s that?” She managed to hold on to her thoughts long enough to ask.

  “This.” He deepened the kiss and pulled her to him, molding his body to hers. The hardness of his arousal nudged against her hip and her body sighed in welcome.

  She shouldn’t do this. The thought flickered across her mind briefly, reluctantly. She chose to ignore it.

  Just one more time. That’s all she wanted. Just one more chance to savor the haven she found in his arms, to store up memories for the bleak, empty days ahead of her without his teasing grin and fiery touch.

  Was that too much to ask?

  CHAPTER 16

  She was packing when Beau called.

  Lily brought the cordless phone to her room. When Grace opened the door for her, the Hawaiian saw the pile of folded clothes in Grace’s hand then looked past her to the suitcase on the bed.


  She gazed back at her and said nothing, just frowned with a look of deep disappointment in her dark eyes.

  Grace squirmed under the weight of that scowl. “Lily, I’m sorry. But I have to go.”

  The housekeeper’s lips firmed into a tight line and she handed the phone to Grace. “Not my business if you run away.”

  “I’m not running away,” she lied. “I just…”

  “Not my business,” Lily repeated more firmly.

  “Look, I haven’t had a chance to tell Jack yet.” When she awoke in her bed, she’d been alone with just the scent of him, that pine and sandalwood fragrance that had imprinted itself on her synapses.

  She would never again be able to walk through a forest without remembering him.

  Besides his scent, the only other trace she could find that they had spent the night in each other’s arms was a terse note on the bedside table: “Had to run to Seattle. Need to talk when I return. Jack.”

  Need to talk.

  The words sounded ominous and she had a fleeting, cowardly wish that she could leave before he returned to avoid what she knew would probably be a ugly scene.

  But how could he argue with a packed suitcase?

  “You going to tell him?” Lily asked now.

  “Yes!” Too late, she remembered the phone and covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “Yes,” she repeated quietly. “I’ll tell him as soon as he comes back. So don’t say anything until I can talk to him, please?”

  “What about the quilt?”

  Didn’t the woman ever think of anything else? She gritted her teeth. “I’ll take it with me, okay? I know the stitches now and I can work on it anywhere. It’s time for me to get back to my real life, anyway, and I probably won’t be able to finish it for a long time.”

  Lily studied her for a moment out of eyes dark with disillusionment, then without another word she turned and walked down the hall with her colorful dress floating behind her.

  She couldn’t have made it more plain that Grace had let her down. Guilt and failure pulled at her. She felt them and she stiffened. It wasn’t her fault if Lily was superstitious enough to believe she could somehow stitch all her emotions into a stupid piece of fabric.

  She remembered the phone suddenly, that she had a call, and pulled her hand away from the mouthpiece.

  “Hello?” she snapped.

  “Jeez. About damn time. What took you so long?”

  Beau’s typical impatience grated on her already frayed nerves but she clamped down on her sharp retort. “What’s up?”

  The impatience changed to barely concealed jubilation. “We got him!”

  “Who?” she asked, feeling not only dense but terribly ungrammatical.

  “Dugan! Who did you think?”

  Her face suddenly numbed and a deep, terrible chill settled into her bones. For an instant she forgot how to work the muscles of her mouth, as if they’d suddenly locked into place.

  “What…what are you talking about?” she finally asked.

  “Your little trip to Hawaii is going to be the last damn nail in Dugan’s coffin. Word on the street is that wasn’t any pineapples he brought back from the islands.”

  This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be. “What?” she asked urgently. “What was it?”

  “We’re still working on the search warrant. Damn judges.” He paused, probably pondering on the vagaries of the legal system, one of his other favorite rants, until she wanted to scream at him.

  She forced herself to speak calmly instead. As calmly as she could manage, anyway, when her heart felt as if it were going to explode into a million pieces. “What do your sources tell you he brought in?”

  “Chinese-made AK-47s that took the roundabout way through Honolulu airport. Our guess is they slipped through Customs hidden under genuine computer parts.”

  She wouldn’t believe it. He had to be wrong.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Pretty damn sure. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure. We got it from a reliable source.”

  So there was still some doubt. She had to cling to that doubt. She refused to contemplate the possibility that Jack might be involved in something this dark and sordid.

  He couldn’t be.

  A man who treated an old Hawaiian woman with such teasing affection and whose day revolved around story-time with his five-year-old daughter couldn’t possibly be capable of this kind of heartlessness.

  The Jack Dugan she had come to know these last few weeks would never be willing to trade other people’s lives for cold, hard cash.

  Her complete conviction stunned her, but she couldn’t deny it. She was absolutely certain he could not be involved, that he would never have the kind of callous indifference to both the law and to human life to perpetrate something like this.

  Beau didn’t know him as she did. He couldn’t know. As far as he was concerned, Jack was just as she believed when she first came here, a crass opportunist without thought for anyone else but himself.

  If she didn’t do something, Jack would be arrested today. She blew out a shaky breath. This was all her fault. All of it. Instead of working the case like she should have been doing these last few weeks, she had been completely self-absorbed. She had let her own emotional uproar cloud her vision of anything but her own problems.

  If she could have looked beyond herself, she might have found evidence by now that would clear Jack. She might have been able to figure out who at GSI had the guts to pull off a smuggling ring right under everyone’s noses.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe she could still do something.

  She had to clear away the fear from her throat before she could speak. “So what happens next?”

  “We should get the warrant by this afternoon, then we can move in and search GSI. I imagine we’ll probably hit the house by early evening.”

  “That soon?”

  “Yeah. The reason I called was to warn you so you can get out now. The sooner the better—I don’t want you there any longer than you have to be. It might raise questions I’m not too crazy about having to answer right now. You think you can leave without tipping him off?”

  No, no, no. She couldn’t just run away. She had to stay and do what she could to help him. She looked at her suitcase on the bed, then out the window at the cold, gray water.

  “I don’t think so,” she mumbled.

  He was silent for a moment, then his voice sharpened. She had forgotten how well he knew her. “What’s up? Jeez, Gracie. I thought you’d be happy about this.”

  “I’m just surprised things are moving so fast.”

  “Yeah, we’re ready to bust the thing wide open and you don’t want to be caught up in it. Get out while you can.”

  She was already caught up in it. So ensnared she didn’t know how she would break free.

  She murmured something noncommittal, then said goodbye to him and hung up. He sounded like an excited little boy, the way he always did when they used to be close to an arrest in a big case.

  Dear God. Jack was going to be arrested. What was she going to do? She had to move fast if she had any hope of preventing it.

  And then she would leave and return to the loneliness and solitude of her life without him.

  * * *

  So this is what it felt like to be in love.

  It was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to him, including the time he’d had to bring down an F-15 on a bare stretch of tundra in the Yukon without landing gear.

  There were definite similarities between the two experiences. His stomach was tied up in the same knots as it had been right before the belly of the F-15 scraped permafrost. His chest was just as achy, his palms just as sweaty, his nerves every bit as jumpy.

  Actually, being in love was worse, when it came right down to it.

  At least up in that plane, he had enough experience on his side to give him a rough idea what he would need to do to walk away from the impending disaster in one piece.


  When it came to Grace and this vast, profound tenderness, he felt like the greenest of rookies soloing for the first time.

  All he knew is that he had held her in his arms all night long as she slept and hadn’t wanted to let her free. He didn’t know what had happened to the anxiety he had always felt before at the idea of settling in to forever with a woman.

  He just knew he wanted to hold her like this for the rest of their lives, to watch over her if she’d let him and do all he could to bring that soft, fleeting smile to her face.

  He knew she cared about him. He could see the softness in her eyes when she looked at him, and the trust there humbled him.

  She probably had no idea she did it, but when she slept, she clung to him as if he was the only thing standing between her and a turbulent, untamed ocean.

  He loved it.

  And he loved her.

  He adored everything about her, from the little frown that furrowed her forehead whenever she worked on that quilted thingy to the strong core of courage inside her to that sly, quicksilver sense of humor that sometimes sneaked out, surprising both of them.

  He loved her as he had believed he would never love a woman, and he couldn’t imagine anything more perfect than spending the rest of his life watching for that sense of humor to erupt.

  While he steered with one hand around the curving road toward home, he felt in the pocket of his leather jacket with the other to find the jeweler’s box there.

  The square, satiny package he’d driven over to Seattle to buy probably should have reassured him, but all he felt were these raw, cold nerves.

  He was rushing things. He knew damn well he was moving faster than she would find comfortable. She still had issues to work through about her daughter’s death, issues of guilt and accountability and grief.

  And then there was Emma.

  He frowned as he pulled the car into the driveway.

  Emma.

  What the hell did he think he was doing? Grace wouldn’t let Emma close enough even to get to know her, forget about coming to care about her enough to take on mothering her.

  The minute he pulled out the ring, she would take off faster than the Concorde. He knew damn well that’s what she would do. His Grace had the most finely honed fight-or-flight instinct he’d ever seen, and in this case, he didn’t have the slightest doubt which one she would chose.