“If I’m bothering you,” she began.
Oh, you are, he muttered to himself. “No,” he said.
“You looked deep in thought.”
“Was. I’m too edgy. Feel like I overlooked something.”
“I doubt that.”
He gave the half shrug. “Trying to figure out what they’ll try next.”
She seemed to ponder that. “What would you do?”
“What?”
“You’re the best at this. What would you do if you were on the other side?”
He drew back slightly. In fact, he often did just that, but he hadn’t expected her to come up with it.
She mimicked his one-shouldered shrug. “It just seemed logical that by now you’d know how they think.”
“You’re right.”
For a few minutes they sat in silence. It should have been comfortable, in this beautiful setting, but he felt as tightly wound as if he were heading into a fight against stacked odds. He didn’t know, wasn’t sure he wanted to know, if it was the situation or her presence that was making him feel this way. But the way he kept glancing at her, his own thoughts about her incredibly sexy nape rolling around in his head, told him which was more likely.
“Thank you,” she said.
Yanked out of that particular reverie, he reassured himself that he hadn’t really said that about her sexy neck aloud, so she couldn’t be talking about that. It wasn’t something she’d thank him for, anyway. Hardly.
He started to speak, then stopped, wondering when he’d started to feel everything she said needed an answer from him. With most people he simply let them talk until they got to the point, then answered if necessary, but with Grace he felt oddly compelled to respond to it all.
He compromised by staying silent but lifting an eyebrow at her in query.
“Marly. She’s changed, especially the past two or three days. She’s excited, enthused, maybe not cheerful but at least not sullen. And she’s talking, even to me.”
“Amazing.”
Her mouth quirked before she added. “She’s almost human again.”
“Scared.”
She drew back slightly. “What?”
“She’s scared.”
Grace frowned. “Of what?”
“Losing you.”
Her eyes widened. “Losing me?”
“Almost did,” he pointed out. “And she already knows her father doesn’t want her.”
“But she didn’t lose me. And that’s one of the reasons I brought her with me to this job, so she’d know it’s normally not really dangerous.”
“What shouldn’t happen doesn’t register when what did happen is taking up all the room.”
Her gaze turned inward, as if she were searching for truth in his words. Probably wondering where he got off espousing theories about her child. Or any child.
Finally she gave a slow, thoughtful nod. Still, it was another moment before she spoke again. “But if she’s afraid of that, then why is she pushing me away?”
He gave her the half shrug. “Trying not to need you so much, for when she does lose you.”
She stared at him until he did something he rarely did; he dodged her steady gaze by turning his face back to the sea.
“For a guy who says he knows nothing about kids, you’re awfully wise.”
“Some things are universal.”
“Like trying to avoid pain?”
“I’ve seen people who could withstand the worst kind of physical pain run like hell from the other kind. They don’t want to be on either side of it, so they make sure nobody gets close enough to hurt or be hurt.”
There was a long moment of silence, long enough to make him tense. When she spoke, in a soft, gentle voice, he knew he’d been right to be wary.
“Are you one of them?”
He drew in a breath. Made himself look at her. Made himself hold that steady gaze.
“Yes.”
She didn’t look surprised, only as if something she’d suspected had been confirmed. He supposed his reputation in this area preceded him almost as much as his reputation with Redstone Security. No one, but no one, got really close to John Draven.
He wondered why he’d admitted that to her. Why he had told her something that he normally wouldn’t even talk about at all, to anyone. When he realized it was by way of a warning, his gut knotted. He could only hope she would heed the warning and keep her distance.
Because the longer he spent with her, the less certain he was that he could.
And then she startled him by asking one more question, one no one else had ever asked. Ever dared to ask.
“Do you like it that way?”
He was saved from having to answer that one.
A bone-shivering yell came from the direction of the construction site.
So much for peace.
Chapter 8
It was easy to spot the scene of the incident once they were back on the site. Most of the crew was clustered around the area where the building supplies for the very small, single gate terminal that would eventually be built were kept. As they got closer, they saw that there was a man on the ground, with Nick and two others kneeling beside him, and several others leaning over him.
Grace started to run, and on the soft ground he saw the first real evidence of her injury. He doubted she would welcome an offer of help, so he smothered the instinct. Once she got on more solid ground her stride evened out and she picked up speed.
When they got there they found Chuck, the man who’d fixed the propane line, lying on the ground amid a pile of cinder blocks. A couple of the men were still dragging the blocks off of him, so Draven had to assume he’d been at least partially buried under them. But he was conscious, talking to Nick, and recognized Grace when she knelt beside him.
“I’m okay,” he said, but his face was pale and he winced when he sat up.
“I’ll take him into the clinic in town,” Nick said. “The doc there’s a Brit. He’ll check him out.”
“Just get him out from under all this,” she ordered, the sharpness of her voice the only outward sign of the strain Draven knew she had to be under.
His glance flicked to her. This was eerily reminiscent of the earthquake, and her own trauma of being trapped under building debris. It had to be sending hideous images racing through her head. Yet she stayed right there, her hand on the injured man’s arm, assuring him he would be all right and that everything would be taken care of.
He’d always known she had physical courage. She wouldn’t have come back the way she had if she didn’t. But what she was doing right now showed serious mental courage, and he marveled at her strength.
He couldn’t help thinking of their talk on the beach, when he’d as much as admitted he himself was an emotional coward. He felt even more of one now, witnessing this. True, in his case it was mostly habit and knowing that his work didn’t make for stability for anyone involved with him, but he couldn’t deny that not getting burned was a side benefit.
Reminding himself it was time to get back to work, he also knelt beside Chuck.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I saw the stack of cinder blocks leaning,” he said. “One near the bottom had gotten pushed way out of line. Stupid, I tried to push it back and the whole thing came down.”
“See anyone else around?”
“No.”
“Anyone leaving?”
“No. Ouch,” he said as, the last of the blocks cleared now, Draven began to check for broken bones by pressing his ribs. “We were done for the day. I was heading to sign out.”
Draven nodded and continued his inspection. He’d lost track of how many times he’d done this over the years, checked for injuries. Too often, he thought.
“Nothing obviously broken,” he said.
“Except maybe that hard head,” Nick joked.
“Yeah, yeah,” the injured man said in exaggeratedly insulted tones. But Draven guessed that if he hadn’t still had
his hard hat on, they might be looking at something a lot worse than scrapes and bruises.
Draven stood up and nodded at Nick. “He’s all yours.”
One of the others had run to get a truck. There was a brief dispute while Chuck convinced Nick that he didn’t need to lie down in the back, he could sit up just fine, then Draven watched as the crew helped get the injured man into a vehicle for transport to the small clinic in town. When Redstone was established, they’d provide an ambulance for the clinic, but for now they were on their own. He didn’t think the man’s condition would require anything they couldn’t provide, or he would have called Redstone for an airlift.
Grace closed the door of the truck, reached in and patted Chuck’s arm and told Nick to call as soon as they knew anything. Draven guessed she was not accompanying her crew-man only because Nick was already going. She felt the same loyalty to them that they felt for her.
When the vehicle had pulled out and the crew began to return to what they’d been doing, Draven and Grace headed for the trailer. Grace needed to make a report to Redstone headquarters, and he wanted to check the video monitors.
“Do you think this was more of the same?” she asked.
“I don’t know. This one was daytime. Not an obvious booby trap.”
“Obvious?”
He nodded. “Whoever it is, wants us to know. So we’ll know more is coming if we don’t stop.”
She stopped walking and turned to face him. “You mean they don’t want to slow the project down, they want to shut it down?”
“That’s my guess.”
She let out a sigh. “So much for my clever idea.”
“Idea?”
“I had myself half convinced this drug king or whoever it was just wanted time to move and after that things would calm down.”
She gave him a sideways look, as if expecting him to call her a fool.
“Not a bad theory,” he said. “But no sign of el mercader packing up the china.”
“You’ve checked?”
He nodded. “Lot of money sunk into that compound of his. And he’s worked at keeping his nose clean here.”
“So he won’t give it up easily.”
“No. If it is him.”
“You don’t think it is?”
“Not convinced yet,” he said, leaving it at that. They began to walk again.
“So, do you think this was an accident?”
“Could it have been?” he asked in turn.
She considered that, then reluctantly said, “Yes, it could have. We don’t usually have accidents like that, but I can’t say it doesn’t ever happen.”
“Reserve judgment on this, then.”
She nodded as they reached the trailer and went up the stairs. To his surprise Marly was there, and when they stepped inside she whirled on them.
“Where have you been?” she yelped. “I’ve been waiting and waiting so I could tell you.”
“Don’t be rude,” Grace began, but stopped when Draven held up his hand.
“Tell what?” he asked the girl.
After a triumphant glance at her mother, she looked at Draven and said, “I found something!”
“Found?”
She nodded excitedly. “I’ve been looking at the recordings, from the cameras.”
“What did you see?”
“I’ll show you!”
Eagerly she picked up a DVD case from the table that held the monitors. She seemed nearly giddy as she ran over to her mother’s desk, sat and pushed the disc into the drive on the computer. The software started up automatically, and quickly a small image appeared on the screen. For a moment it was simply the camera view of the area where the accident had happened.
“This was the day we put the cameras in,” she said. Then the picture flickered and steadied again.
“The block,” Grace said.
Draven nodded. In the clip, the huge load of cinder blocks was clearly visible. As was the block Chuck had talked about, far out of line with the rest. Looking at it, it was easy to see how the entire thing had toppled.
“So you see, it was already crooked by the time we turned the recorders on. And I figure most of the guys would notice that, just like Mr. Carlson did, so he must have been the first to see it, so it couldn’t have been that way long, maybe just since the night before.”
She finally stopped, probably because she had to take a breath, Draven thought. When Marly realized both adults were staring at her, she didn’t start up again. She stared back, waiting, her body wiredrawn with excitement.
“The propane,” Grace whispered.
Draven nodded. “Same night.”
“It could have been a diversion rather than an attack?”
“Both,” Draven said.
“We’d better look around for anything else like that stack of blocks, then,” Grace said. Then, to her daughter she continued, “That was great, honey. And you were clever, to figure that out.”
The girl only shrugged.
Draven nodded in agreement with Grace’s assessment. “Good job,” he said.
At his words, the girl beamed. Grace shot him a sideways glance. The difference in reactions couldn’t have been more blatant. He felt like telling the girl she was being beyond stupid, if she cared more about the opinion of some man she’d known all of a few days over her mother’s. Especially when that man was him. And that mother was Grace.
He didn’t dare look at Grace. He had a feeling this was the teenager trying to manipulate them, or at the least manipulate her mother, and he didn’t want to play into her hands.
“Now you can get an early start on sorting the last of those plants in the morning.”
She looked so crestfallen he wondered how any parent ever hung on to discipline.
“Oh, to be doing a nice, plain, gravel runway,” Grace said rather glumly.
“You always say that,” Nick said with a chuckle.
She smiled. He was right. And she also knew it was a sign of how much she’d relaxed that she’d slipped into the old habit.
And it was all thanks to Draven. The string of uneventful days had stretched into a week now, because of all he’d done. Chuck was back at work with a clean bill of health, no more accidents or sabotage incidents.
And a lot had been accomplished. Clearing, grading, leveling, it was all done. They were nearly at the point of putting down the first layer, the cement-treated base. Then would come the reinforced concrete layer, and finally a layer of extra-strength concrete made that way by a new additive the Redstone lab had come up with.
If it lived up to the advance billing, the runway should last twice as long as previous structures, with minimal cracking and half the maintenance, before it had to be resurfaced. And if it did that, the commercial applications for airports and roads were tremendous. They could save the public millions of dollars over the long term.
“Are you going into town for the mail?”
Grace turned to look at her daughter. Despite her changing attitude toward Draven, she still hadn’t let go of her resentment toward her mother, as evidenced by the abruptness and impatient note in the question. And her body language; the crossed arms and the angle of the chin practically shouted that she hated even talking to her.
With an effort Grace kept her voice even. “I may. Later.”
“Can’t I just get a yes or no?”
At the waspish tone of her voice, Nick cleared his throat and muttered something about a delivery and excused himself. He didn’t quite run, but Grace guessed it was a close thing.
“Congratulations, Miss Congeniality,” Grace said. She’d tried, but she was tired of being singled out for her own child’s scorn.
“Hey, it was just a question. I can’t help it if he didn’t like it.”
Grace reined in her temper and bit back the retort that was on the edge of her tongue. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
“I don’t care. I’ve had it. The other day was fun, with the cameras and stuff,
but now he wants me moving rocks.”
So, her rapport with Draven was conditional. As long as she liked what was happening, she liked him.
“If you quit, you’re going to have a hard time finishing paying back Mr. Ayuso.”
She shrugged. “You can pay him. You were about to anyway, before he stopped you.”
Grace went very still at the way she said it. “That was a fast turnaround. Just days ago Mr. Draven was your pal.”
Marly snickered. “Is that what you call him?”
“No. It’s what you should call him.”
The shrug again. She was getting mightily tired of them, both this one and Draven’s one-shoulder version.
“Whatever,” the girl said. “He doesn’t really like me. He doesn’t like kids at all.”
“He isn’t comfortable,” she corrected, “because he hasn’t been around them.”
“Right.” The girl waved her hand, in a gesture indicating how little she cared. “So, when you get the mail, you can pay the shop guy.”
Grace took a deep breath. Despite the fact that the change apparently hadn’t lasted, there had been a change, which was more than she’d been able to accomplish on her own.
“No,” she said. “No, I can’t.”
“What?”
“You heard me. You keep saying you’re not a child anymore. Handling your own responsibilities is part of that.”
“Fine!” Marly snapped. “Just fine. I should have known I couldn’t count on you.”
“To love you, protect you and be a parent, you can always count on me. To help you get off easy when you mess up, or be your buddy instead of your mother, no. I’ve tried that. And I don’t like how it came out.”
The girl muttered something under her breath, something Grace couldn’t make out. She let it pass, deciding one battle at a time was all she could handle. But when her daughter turned on her heel and marched off in an obvious snit, she felt a wave of near exhaustion overtake her. Nothing wore her out like conflict with the child she loved so much, but sometimes wanted to send away until she turned eighteen.
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