“Guess this’ll save us both from having baths tonight.”
“I don’t want to get wet again.” Her lip quivered, whether from her clinging shorts—which were saturated—or from fear, he wasn’t certain. “I don’t want to go in the water.”
“You don’t want Gracie to carry you?” he asked gently.
Charlie shook her head and then hid her face again.
Gracie’s butter-soft gaze swept over him. “She wouldn’t leave Hagrid. And I’m not the one she needs right now.” Her lips curved, tugging a warmth through his veins as Gracie’s meaning became clear.
His chest squeezed harder than his fists, which had somehow found their way uselessly into his pockets. He pulled them out and stroked a hand down Charlie’s shivering back.
“How about a piggyback ride home and a warm bubble bath?”
The red-rimmed solo eye returned. “Can Hagrid have one, too? He’s all sandy and cold.”
What could it hurt? There’d be bubbles from one end of the bathroom to the other. “Sure,” he said. “Maybe Gracie and William and I will join you in the tub.”
The softest of giggles. “There’s not enough room for all of us, silly.”
Owen crouched and held out his arms. Without a beat of hesitation, Charlie flung herself at him. He closed his eyes. Pressed his nose into Charlie’s hair and hugged her close. Salt, apple-scented shampoo, a trace of the scent of sunscreen lotion Gracie would’ve made sure his niece applied.
He breathed her in again; she was safe. And if his arms protested a little as she wriggled to be released, so what? He’d never denied loving his nieces or nephew.
Loving was one thing, considering keeping was another.
He shot a glance at the bulldog, now staring at him with a bug-eyed glare. Bet you’re in a hurry to dump me at the pound tomorrow, the mutt’s accusing gaze seemed to say. Are you in just as much of a hurry to get rid of your family in two weeks’ time?
Owen winced as Charlie pounced on him and crawled monkey-like onto his back.
“C’mon, Uncle Owen. Hurry.”
Owen stood, and Charlie thumped a little fist onto his shoulder blade. “What about Hagrid? He can’t swim.”
“All dogs can swim,” Owen said. Though, judging by the animal’s shuddering flanks as he edged farther away from the incoming tide, he had his doubts.
“Hagrid is like me.” Charlie’s voice was partially muffled by her mouth being squished against his back. “He hated his bath, and I got scared when he squeezed under the fence and ran down to the beach.”
“So you followed him?”
“I’m the warrior Princess Charlie of Doj’lon, and I rescue dogs when they run away.”
Gracie’s eyebrow winged up, her lips twisting into a worried-but-relieved scowl. “You should’ve asked a grown-up to go with you when Hagrid escaped the yard.”
Owen couldn’t see Charlie’s expression, but he felt her little body stiffen. “But you told us we should be re-pon-sible. I was being re-pon-sible ’cause Hagrid can’t swim, and he could’ve drownded with no one to help him. I was his lifesaver.”
Gracie’s long lashes swept down over her eyes, and a flush crawled up her cheeks. “Let’s just get back to the house,” she said. “I’ll piggyback Hagrid while Uncle Owen piggybacks you.”
“Hagrid can’t piggyback!” Indignation temporarily forgotten, Charlie giggled, thumping her fist on his shoulder again.
Gracie’s returning smile held as much enthusiasm as the dog’s did when she hauled him up into her arms. Owen turned and picked his way over the rocks to the channel. He glanced back as he waited for two sets of waves to surge past. Gracie watched him with a wariness that both irritated and confused him. Thoughts and emotions churned in his gut like the small pebbles tumbling around in the waves’ wake.
Gracie shouldn’t have brought the damn dog home in the first place.
What sort of responsibility was she teaching the kids if they forgot basic rules?
She should’ve kept a closer watch on Charlie—okay, they should’ve kept a closer watch instead of kissing each other stupid in the kitchen.
With that painfully guilty thought, Owen stepped off the rocks. Charlie’s hands squeezed his throat, and she squealed as a larger wave than the first two approached. In his annoyance, he’d mistimed entering the channel, and he braced his running shoes on the shifting pebbles and sand. He flicked a glance to Gracie, a few meters to the side and behind him.
Hugged close to her chest, the dog saw the oncoming wave and wrenched his stocky body away from it. Gracie tried to get a better grip on the animal, but she lost her balance and both she and dog disappeared under the oncoming wave. Charlie’s scream nearly ruptured his eardrums. He sucked in a ragged breath—but released it as Gracie’s head and shoulders popped out of the water. She coughed, her gaze skimming wildly through the rush of foamy water surrounding her. But it wasn’t only water swirling around her, it was Gracie’s arms stretching out, searching…
For the bulldog. Shit! Apparently the damn animal couldn’t swim.
“I can’t find him.” The panic in her voice sent him floundering to the exposed rock on the channel’s other side, but before he could peel Charlie off his back, Gracie disappeared under the water again.
Alison!
His mind screamed his sister’s name the same instant Gracie’s name roared out of his throat. Charlie continued to wail like an air-raid siren as he staggered the last few steps to the rock. Gracie still hadn’t surfaced.
Somehow, he found his voice. “Charlie, hop down.”
His niece slithered off his back and crouched on the rocks, a more-than-safe distance above the waves.
Owen twisted around, his gaze drawn to the last spot he’d seen Ali…he shook his head, eyes blurring from the splashes of salt water. Not Ali. Gracie. His gut cramped as if he’d swallowed a gallon of brine, and his leg muscles liquefied. Long strands of floating dark hair caught his eye a moment before Gracie—and the damn dog—exploded out of the water two meters in front of him.
Water streamed down Gracie’s face, her hair plastered to her cheeks and covering one eye. She coughed, and the dog did the same, spluttering water and drool over her. She scrunched up her face, but the disgust quickly turned to a wry smile.
“Got him, Charlie,” she called out then coughed again. “He’s fine.”
“I told you he couldn’t swim.” Charlie’s voice was one hundred percent smug, but at least the panicked shrieking had stopped.
Her panicked shrieking, anyway. An unmanly scream still simmered in Owen’s chest, fighting for space with his heart, which battered his ribs like a jackhammer.
He thrashed through the channel to reach her in two long strides. “What the hell were you thinking?” The words slipped out before he could moderate them into something resembling calm rationality.
The I’m okay smile Gracie had shown Charlie slipped. She flinched away, her arms tightening around the dog. The animal grunted but didn’t fight her. Instead he turned his panting glare on Owen—as if he were to blame for his unexpected dunking.
“Charlie would’ve been devastated if something happened to the dog,” Gracie said. “I was on the swim team in high school, Owen. I wasn’t in any danger.”
He knew Gracie wasn’t in any real danger. There were no rips on this beach, and the water was shallow. So why the over-the-top reaction?
You’ve already lost someone you love to the sea…you freaked at the thought of losing Gracie.
While the word “love” volleyed around his head, Gracie edged toward him, sympathetic eyes never leaving his face. She understood. She’d read the terror on his face and guessed he was reliving losing Ali—even though he’d been hundreds of miles away when the ocean claimed her life. Though Gracie understanding should’ve comforted him, it pissed him off a little.
Because he didn’t want the complication of loving her. Loving Gracie meant accepting the pain that would come with losing her. And lik
e hell would he voluntarily go through that again.
She placed a cool, wet hand on his forearm. Helpless to prevent every single skin cell on his arm from reacting to her touch, he stiffened.
“I’m sorry.” Her hand dropped away.
He stared into her eyes, swimming with empathy and something warm and tender he didn’t want to acknowledge.
The bulldog craned forward in Gracie’s arms and vomited copious amounts of vileness over him, saving Owen from any further contemplation of the complicated emotions spinning between them.
***
Inside the main house, all was dark and quiet.
Gracie paced the guest room like a caged tiger, checking over and over to see if an escape route had magically appeared. She’d left the moment Charlie’s Minion movie finished and Owen had scooped up the sleeping girl to take her to bed.
That had been Gracie’s cue to escape to her room. She’d needed a few minutes to prepare for the oncoming storm. Silence crackled and lay heavy in the air since they’d returned to the house. Charlie, being her usual drama-queen self, had wallowed in the excitement of having two police officers waiting for them at Owen’s house, along with Todd Taylor and her teary-eyed brother.
But so far—over two hours since she’d retreated, forty minutes since the lights inside the house were extinguished, ten minutes after she’d given up falling asleep—nothing.
Owen wasn’t coming. And she…she wasn’t brave enough to risk seeking him out.
No matter that her body ached for him in the worst way. Torn between guilt, sympathy, and, dammit, the undeniable desire to hold him, make love with him, until that wounded shadow in his eyes vanished, she instead did nothing. Paced. Wrung her hands so uselessly she wanted to scream—or jump in her car and drive recklessly until she ran out of road.
And just to make a sucktastic situation suckier, her father had left a voice mail, droning on about that stupid job opportunity. She’d stared at her phone as if it were about to gnaw a chunk out of her palm. At some point she had to make a decision, because her initial plan to fly off into a Rocky Mountain sunset no longer filled her with the same joyful bubbles.
Gracie turned from the sliding glass doors then whipped back when her peripheral vision caught a flicker of movement from the house’s darkened back door as it opened. Her pulse revved, heat circling her throat and spreading warmth down deep in her belly. Owen.
Yet, all of a sudden, she couldn’t talk to him because she suspected her stupid heart would just roll over and expose her every secret vulnerability. She’d seen the warning signs written on his face today, right before Hagrid, currently curled up in a makeshift bed in the laundry, puked everywhere. Owen cared about her, probably more than he realized, but he didn’t want to care about her. Didn’t want to need her and he certainly didn’t want to fall in love with her.
Footsteps sounded outside. Gracie fidgeted, glancing at the unlocked door then behind her at her rumpled bed. She took a step forward, froze, then whirled one-eighty and lunged—diving under the bedcovers in a perfectly executed action-movie roll.
Three quiet taps came on the glass. “Gracie? Are you awake?”
Gracie opened her eyes under the covers, goose bumps popping up on her skin from Owen’s deep voice. Goose bumps that prickled against the well-laundered cotton of Owen’s scrubs top. She’d filched it from among a pile of ratty tee shirts in the garage that were intended to be used as rags. There was still a faded but visible bloodstain on the front of the pale green fabric, but she didn’t care. Someone had bled on Owen, someone hurting that he would’ve helped. Someone he would’ve reassured, comforted, and taken care of. Tonight she needed his comfort and reassurance, so she’d taken it out of hiding from the bottom of her drawer and slipped it on, burying her nose in the soft folds that still smelled of him.
So even if she’d wanted a confrontation with the man, no way would she give herself away by answering the door in his stolen top. Surely he’d go away if she just stayed really, really still?
The door squeaked as it slid open.
Typical doctor, no respect for people’s privacy. Always barging into rooms and whipping aside curtains and sticking things into a person.
Gracie exhaled, letting her mouth sag open so a quiet but raspy snore reverberated out. She sensed him pausing just inside the door, so she repeated the sound, this time adding a little more pizzazz and going for realism with a I’m deeply asleep, leave me alone snort.
The mattress bowed beneath her as Owen sat on the bed’s edge, a short distance from her face. She kept her eyes slitted, debating whether rolling away from him would be a dead giveaway.
“Grace.”
The use of her full name, combined with the rough timbre of his voice, closed her mouth on the next fake snore. Her eyes popped open, and even in the room’s dimness— moonlight the only light streaming through the glass doors—the cords of tension winding around Owen’s braced forearm made her heart pound faster.
Looked like they were having this confrontation whether she wanted to or not. She sat up, keeping the duvet snug under her chin, gripping it with ice-cold fingers even though the evening was mild.
“What do you want? I was sleeping.”
“No, you’re weren’t,” he said. “I’ve heard the sounds you make during the night, and that Hollywood performance wasn’t sleeping.”
Yeah, she’d made all sorts of sounds during the one night they’d spent together. Owen had curled around her, all hot skin covering hard muscles, keeping her both warm and in a constant, low-fever pitch of arousal.
She clutched the duvet tighter. “I do so snore. I wake myself up sometimes.”
A brief glimpse of his straight white teeth. “Most women wouldn’t admit to that.”
“I’m not most women.”
Most women would’ve shed the covers and their nightgowns by now. Then they would’ve stripped him of his sleep pants and ridden him like a wild mustang. She wasn’t most women, but, dear God, she badly wanted to be. Because she wanted to be, and because she was still mortified her tongue-wrestling session with Owen had allowed Charlie to endanger her life, Gracie straightened her spine.
“And I’m not in the mood for a midnight booty call.”
She shuffled over to the other side of the mattress, slid down, and showed him her back. Subtle enough hint for him to leave? She thought so.
Apparently, Dr. Bennett was used to uncooperative people who ignored him. The mattress once again dipped as he settled himself farther onto it. The beautifully carved headboard creaked as he leaned against it. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Gracie stared at the wall, the skin of her nape prickling. Maybe, like her dad and big brother, he needed to vent, hear her apologize, and then he’d leave. Ten minutes of a lecture delivered at volume and then peace for the next forty-eight hours while she thought about what he’d said.
“If you’re here to ream me out, there’s nothing you can say that I haven’t already said to myself,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry, Owen. I take full responsibility.”
He blew out a long breath. “You can’t believe I blame you for anything, do you? We both weren’t paying attention. We’re both responsible.”
He toyed with a strand of her hair that spilled over the pillow behind her, the soft touch sending a flurry of tingles along her scalp.
“We’re both people who screwed up and got lucky. Someone was watching over her,” he added.
His sister. Gracie didn’t need telepathy to read his thoughts.
“I saw your face, after I found Hagrid,” she said. “You were terrified—and furious—imagining it could’ve been Charlie.” Her eyes burned with unshed tears, and she blinked rapidly. Pain sheared through her once more, taking her back a few hours earlier when she’d broken down in the shower, sobbing until she’d nothing left to give. “Reliving your sister’s death.” Her last words were a whisper.
Owen’s breath released in a jagged sigh, but he remained silent.
Gracie rolled over to find him staring straight ahead at the glass doors, his jawline rigid. Her chest squeezed tight, holding back so much emotion it hurt. Tongue biting down on the stupid question “are you okay?” when it was obvious he wasn’t okay—not even a little bit okay—Gracie covered his hand with hers. She found it warm but as inflexible as sun-kissed stone.
He held himself together so tightly, guarded his feelings so fiercely. He helped everyone else, was the man people depended on to not only save their lives, but to step up and make the hard choices when necessary.
Gracie sat up, the covers pooling at her waist. She didn’t care if he saw her dressed in his pilfered scrubs. What she did care about was the pain engulfing her man’s body, every muscle and sinew strung to the breaking point with it. That she cared about—that, she hoped to do something about. But in order to have any chance of lightening his burden, he had to find a way to share it.
“Owen?” She kneeled on the bed, cupped her hand along his jaw.
His gaze slid to hers. A blank, lost gaze. “Ali called me, the night before she and Shaun left for Aussie. She’d timed it so I should’ve been off shift, but, of course, I was doing a double and on my way to grab another coffee while I had a moment’s peace. She wanted to know if I’d take Morgan and Will out that weekend to give Mum and Dad a few hours’ break. I was impatient and stressed and just wanted to drink my damn coffee before the next ambulance rolled up”—his lips thinned, and a pulse throbbed in his throat—“so I lied and told her I was too busy, poking at her about going on holiday. I could tell she didn’t believe me, but she laughed her stupid, beautiful belly laugh, and said, ‘All work and no play makes my bro the dullest man in New Zealand. See ya, O.’ The last time I spoke to my sister and I acted like a total asshole.”
Regret, it was a killer. No doubt about it. Gracie closed her eyes because she couldn’t bear the broken expression on Owen’s face. When she opened them a few seconds later, she kept her gaze trained on the jerky up-and-down movement of his Adam’s apple. Scooting onto his lap, she straddled his thighs and leaned in to brush the softest of kisses on his mouth.
Teach Your Heart: A New Zealand Opposites Attract Romance (Far North Series Book 3) Page 21