Saving Grace

But the harder Grace tried to keep Jack Dugan and his little girl at arm’s length, the harder they tried to sneak through her defenses.

With Grace watching, Jack knelt down to slip a bracelet on his daughter’s wrist.

Grace was so fascinated by the sight of those broad, strong fingers performing such a delicate task that she forgot to keep him from putting her own bracelet on her.

“Your turn.”

With his head bent over her hand, his scent drifted to her on the sea breeze. His neck was tanned and strong. Would his hair be as soft as it looked?

Just before she would have reached her fingers to find out, the ferry horn sounded, and she snatched both hands away from him. What had she nearly done? Touched him, caressed him. Wanted him.

And for the first time in a year, she felt alive again.

Saving Grace

RaeAnne Thayne

To Donald and Janice Thayne, for sharing the beauty of the Islands, and for raising such a wonderful son.

Special thanks to Cissy Serrao of Poakalani Hawaiian Quilt Designs in Honolulu for her vast knowledge of this exquisite art form.

RAEANNE THAYNE

lives in a crumbling old Victorian in northern Utah with her husband and two young children, where she writes surrounded by raw mountains and real cowboys. She loves hearing from readers at P.O. Box 6682 North Logan, Utah 84341.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 1

If she was going to do this, it would have to be soon.

Grace Solarez crouched in the dirt and watched cars move in an endless rhythm past the orchards that marched along this desolate stretch of interstate.

Three-hundred-sixty-five days ago she would have savored the sensory assault around her: the sweetness of the apples just a few weeks away from harvest, the tweet-tweet-tweet of the crickets; the cool, moist night breeze kissing her face.

Now, she could only watch the headlights slice through the night and wonder which pair she would see right before she died.

A mosquito sunk its teeth into her right biceps, honed and toughened by the last few months of hard labor on the docks. She glanced down briefly at the first sharp needle prick of pain, then ignored it. What was the point in swatting it away?

She had blood to spare.

Her eyes felt gritty, as if she’d grabbed a handful of dirt and rubbed it across her face. And she was tired. So tired. For a year she had gone through the motions of living, functioning on only the most basic of levels. Breathing, eating, sleeping. She couldn’t bear it another day, another hour, another minute.

This grief was too huge, too constant. Nothing slipped through it, not even the smallest shadow of respite. She couldn’t survive it anymore. The grief and the guilt had become burdens too heavy for her to carry.

She pulled the snapshot from the pocket of her T-shirt one last time. Moonlight filtered across the image, washing out the colors to a grayish blue, but she could still see the mischief glimmering in her daughter’s eyes. She traced Marisa’s smile with her fingertip.

“I’m sorry, Marisita,” she whispered. “So sorry. I tried—I swear, I tried—but I’m not strong enough. I just can’t do it anymore.”

Looking at the picture—at the image of a laughing, beautiful child frozen forever in time—was too excruciating to endure for long. After a few moments she carefully slipped it back into her pocket. Her right hand lingered over her heart protectively while she watched the mesmerizing parade of oncoming headlights, trying not to wonder if she would feel the impact of the collision before she died.

What she was about to do was a mortal sin, she knew. If Padre Luis—the bitter old priest at Tia Sofia’s church—could be believed, she would be damned for eternity, consigned forever to a special kind of hell reserved for those who defied God’s will.

But what did she care? She’d already been damned in this life, why not the next one, too? Besides, she had no problem pissing off a God vengeful enough to take away the only thing that had ever mattered to her.

Now, a few minutes past midnight on the anniversary of the day her life had effectively ended, she might as well make it official.

Muscles tensed and ready, she scanned the traffic, trying to pick her moment. From the orchard elevated six feet or so above the roadway, she had a good view of traffic in both directions.

Headlights a mile or so in the distance caught her attention. Even in the dark—and even absorbed, as she was, in the unchangeable past—she could tell it was moving much faster than the other vehicles, weaving and darting crazily from lane to lane.

From this distance, it looked like some fancy foreign make. A Porsche, judging by the sleek, curvy lines. Probably some spoiled rich kid coming home drunk after a night of clubbing.

As it approached her spot in the orchard, she watched the little sports car come dangerously close to hitting the fender of a pickup truck. The pickup driver apparently didn’t like being tailgated and she saw the angry red glare of brake lights suddenly light up the night.

The sports car driver apparently saw them, too, but just an instant too late. He slammed on the brakes and yanked the wheel to the left, sending the car hurtling toward the wide barrow pit in the median.

Just before he would have slammed into a reflector post, the driver jerked on the wheel again, overcorrecting the car and sending it screeching back across the lanes of traffic.

At such a high rate of speed, the driver couldn’t possibly regain control of the vehicle. Just as it passed her, the Porsche rolled, flipping side over side until it came to rest upside down in the empty drainage ditch a few hundred yards ahead of her.

For an instant, she stood stunned, disoriented by the abrupt, jarring shift in her emotions, from weary despair to adrenaline-laced shock in a matter of seconds.

Smoke began to pour from the mangled carcass of the car and she could smell that scent peculiar to accidents: a combination of gasoline, scorched rubber and hot metal.

What were the chances of the drunk walking away from such a crash? It was hard to gauge. When she’d still been on the job, she had worked accidents she would have sworn no one could possibly survive where the victims came out completely unscathed. And she had worked simple, no-frills fender-benders that resulted in fatalities. Every situation was a crapshoot, like so much of police work.

She looked through the filter of leaves but couldn’t see any activity around the car. Her stomach churned suddenly, unexpectedly, as she fought the urge to check out the scene, to make at least some effort to help the idiot driver.

She didn’t want to get involved, couldn’t handle getting involved. She could hardly think past her own agonizing grief. But she had been a cop for almost a decade and it was hard to ignore those powerful instincts.

The battle with indecision lasted for only a few seconds. With a defeated sigh, Grace scrambled down the small slope toward the accident scene.

A few other motorists had already stopped and a small crowd had gathered around the periphery of the accident scene. They all looked stunned, with the kind of dazed disbelief civilians share during traumatic incidents.

Nobody seemed inclined to move closer, which was just as well. A shower of sparks rained down beneath the sports car’s hood and she was afraid it was only a matter of time before those sparks ignited the fuel line and the whole thing exploded.

Just as she reached the edge of the crowd, a man pulled himself out of the car, his face a bloody mass of cuts and his arm cradled against his side. He looked scruffy and ill-kempt, with dark, shaggy hair and a long, droopy mustache. Through a rip in his T-shirt, she could see a twisted tattoo, some kind of snake peeking through.

Not exactly what she would have expected from the driver of such an expensive car. Most likely it was hot.

Regardless, he would walk away, like so many drunk drivers, she thought with disgust. He weaved a bit and started to topple over, but righted himself just before she reached him. Grace grabbed his arm—the one with the tattoo—and helped him the rest of the way to safety.

“Anybody else in there?” Grace had to yell to be heard over the traffic still speeding past.

The man didn’t answer, just gave her a bleary-eyed stare, so she tried again. “I said, is anybody in there? Was there anybody else in the car with you?”

The question finally seemed to sink in. The man looked back at the car and she could swear there was perfect clarity in his red-rimmed eyes, then a strange, furtive look slunk across his battered features.

“No,” he said hoarsely. She could see a ruby earring glint through the shaggy dark locks when he shook his head. “Nobody else. Just me.”

A plump woman with teased blond hair and wearing surgical scrubs rushed over to them. “I’m a nurse,” she said, and quickly, efficiently, led the drunk farther from the wreckage.

Grace watched them for a moment then turned to give the vehicle one last look. The police would be here soon. She could already see the faint flicker of flashing lights off in the distance. Somebody in the crowd must have a cell phone to summon them so quickly.

She wondered if the patrol would be someone she knew, then discarded the thought. Not this far east. She doubted if she was even in King County anymore, although she didn’t quite know where she was, exactly. She’d been driving all evening trying to outrun her ghosts and it was only by chance that they had caught up with her here, on this isolated stretch of road. She knew she’d come some distance, though.

Wherever she was, she knew she didn’t want to be here when the police arrived. She turned and would have slipped back into the safety and solitude of the orchard when she thought she heard a tiny cry.

Marisa.

Her daughter’s voice called to her, haunted her. It seemed to float across the noise of vehicles whizzing by, past the crowd’s excited hum, above the scream of approaching sirens.

Was she the only one who could hear it? She must be—no one else in the crowd reacted at all.

Her head buzzed from the fumes and the noise and the emotional trauma of the last few hours. Maybe she was hearing things.

“Daddy! Help me!” she heard. Louder this time, but still faint. She frowned and shook her head in confusion. Why would Marisa be calling for a father she never knew, for a seventeen-year-old boy who had refused to take responsibility for the child he’d helped create in a brief, forbidden moment of passion.

It made no sense. Still, she had to find out.

“What are you, crazy, lady? That thing’s going to blow any second now.” A burly trucker tried to bar her way but she shoved past, barely aware of him, and slipped away from the crowd toward the wreckage, toward the beckoning call of her dead daughter.

She ignored the shouts of alarm behind her, focused only on following that tiny voice. Her daughter needed her and this time—dear God, this time—she would be there to help her.

The instant she reached the overturned car and knelt in the gravel of the shoulder to look through the window, reality hit her with a cold, mean slap.

It wasn’t Marisa calling her at all. It was a small blond-haired girl, several years younger than her daughter would have been, strapped into her seatbelt and suspended upside down in the passenger seat of the smashed sports car.

Smoke poured from the hood, obscuring her vision and burning her eyes and throat. Grace coughed and tried to wave it away so she could see into the vehicle.

“I want my daddy!” the girl cried, her voice wobbly with fear.

A cold fury swept through Grace. The driver had known the little girl was in there, Grace was sure of it. That moment of clarity had been unmistakable. Yet he had lied and said he was alone in the car, consigning his daughter to a fiery, gruesome death.

Not if she could help it.

“There’s a kid in here!” she shouted with a quick look over her shoulder. “I need help!”

The other motorists just stared at her, not one of them willing to risk death for a stranger. The flames licked the side of the car now, and the roar of the fire seemed louder. She was going to have to move fast. Conscious that with every passing second her chances of rescuing the girl—and of escaping the inevitable blast herself—diminished, Grace sank to her stomach and pulled herself in through the driver’s-side window. The rollover had smashed the other door and she could see no other way in or out.

She dragged herself along the overturned roof of the car, heedless of the scrapes and cuts she earned along the way. When Grace reached her, the girl appeared to be on the verge of hysteria. Who wouldn’t be, strapped upside down in a burning car?

The first order of business was calming her down, she decided, although she knew she had precious seconds to spare.

“Hi. I’m Grace.”

“Are you an angel?”

The soft question nearly destroyed her. “Nope,” she answered. The understatement of the decade. “Just somebody who’s going to help you. What’s your name, honey?”

“Emma. My daddy calls me Little Em.”

If we make it through this, Little Em, I hope your daddy rots in prison for the rest of his life for child endangerment. She let her fury give her strength while she battled to unhook the stubborn safety belt latch from this awkward angle.

Despite her efforts, the belt refused to give. She yanked and pulled for several more seconds, then knew she couldn’t afford to mess with it any longer.

“Okay, Emma, this isn’t working. Let’s see if we can slip you out of there.” Her heart pounding with exertion, she pulled the shoulder strap behind the girl’s back and supported her weight while Emma tried to wriggle out of the lap belt.

“Almost there,” she encouraged. “Just a little more. That’s it.”

With a small cry, Emma toppled free and into her arms. Grace cradled her with one arm and tried to slither back out to the window. Both of them wouldn’t fit through the opening at the same time, but when she tried to push the little girl through ahead of her, Emma’s little arms clung tightly around her neck.

“Honey, you have to let go. I’m right behind you, I promise.”

The girl must have finally understood because she let Grace push her through the window frame. She crawled out after her and scrambled to her feet.

Fueled only by adrenaline now, Grace lifted Emma into her arms and cradled the girl’s head against her shoulder as she raced away from the car. She made it only a few feet before she heard a hissing rumble behind her and knew with sick certainty that she wouldn’t be able to reach safety before the car blew up.

She wasn’t ready to die.

In that instant, her whole world seemed to shift, to spin crazily, and she discovered a fierce survival instinct lurking somewhere deep inside her.

She wasn’t ready to die.

It was the ultimate irony. She’d come so close to killing herself and now—when that bastard Fate finally decided to cooperate—leave it to her to change her mind.

Be careful what you wish for, Gracie.

With one last, tremendous burst of energy, she dropped to the pavement, her body curled protectively around the little girl, an instant before the explosion rocked through the night, shaking the pavement and rippling the leaves of the apple trees.

She cried out as something sharp and scorching hot ripped across the flesh of her back. For a moment, she could only concentrate on breathing past the pain.

After several seconds, when it faded somewhat and she could think again, she straightened. She must have been hit by flying debris. It hurt like hell but she was alive and so was the child she held.

“Wow. That was exciting.” Her voice sounded hoarse, not her own. “Are you okay, sweetie?”

She felt the little girl’s hair brush against her cheek as Emma nodded. “I think so.”

Grace hugged her, dizzied by the pain from her back and the waves of grief crashing over her at the feel of the warm, small weight in her arms, against her chest.

Oh Marisa, Marisa.

“There are people who can help you now,” she creaked out. She could see three highway patrol vehicles on the scene, as well as a fire engine and paramedics. Already, rescue workers were heading toward them carrying a stretcher for the child.

It was suddenly vitally important that she get away before they arrived. She didn’t want to face the inevitable questions, couldn’t bear to have anybody poking and fussing over her.

She pulled her arms away from Emma and climbed to her feet, ignoring the razor blades of pain slicing across her back where the blast had scorched through her clothing.

“Don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me!” the little girl begged.

Grace summoned the last of her energy and managed a facsimile of a smile. “You don’t need me now, sweetie. You’ll be just fine. I promise.”

The paramedics were almost upon them. In the bustle and confusion, it was easy for Grace to slip through the crowd. No one even tried to stop her as she made her way carefully, slowly, back to the cool refuge of the orchard.

The place was a dump.

Jack Dugan double-checked the slip of paper he held with the address on it. It was a shipping invoice, but it had been the only piece of paper he could find when Mike called an hour ago to give him the information they’d been seeking for a week now.

The numbers hanging crookedly against the cinderblock walls of the apartment building matched the numbers on the paper, but he found it hard to believe anybody actually lived here.

The place was falling apart. Weeds thrust through the cracked sidewalk and choked what likely had been a flower garden once. The peeling aquamarine paint of the roof and shutters had probably been cheerful—trendy, even—thirty years ago but now it made the building look just like the rest of the neighborhood: worn-out, tired, an area sagging into itself with a kind of quiet despair.

Grace Solarez lived here alone, according to Mike and the rest of the team of private investigators he’d paid a hefty amount to locate her. She had no husband, no kids, no pets. Just a failed career as a Seattle cop and a dead-end job hauling freight on the docks.

He shoved the Jaguar into Park and studied the building. Inside those walls could be the answers to the tangled quest he’d embarked upon a week ago. Inside, he would find either an amazingly heroic stranger who had faced almost certain death to rescue his daughter—an angel, Emma called her—or he would find the truth about Emma’s kidnapping.

Anticipation curled through him. Since that terrible night, he had tried to be patient while the investigators—both the police and his own—followed various leads to determine the identity of the mysterious stranger who had come out of nowhere to pluck his daughter from the wreckage of the stolen car her kidnapper had used to take her from him.

They’d had precious little to go on—just a few eyewitness descriptions of a slim, wild-eyed Hispanic woman and a well-handled snapshot that had been left at the scene, a photograph of a little girl in two thick dark braids giving a mischievous smile to the camera.

It hadn’t been much, but it had been enough. He now had a name to put with the woman. Grace Solarez. And it was only a matter of time until he could find out more, until he could learn whether she had helped the “bad man” Emma described as her kidnapper escape in the noise and confusion after the accident.

No one remembered seeing her drive up before the accident or drive away after it. It was as if she appeared out of thin air then disappeared into it again. What had she been doing there? How had she managed to slip through the crowd? And had she taken the kidnapper with her?

One way or another, he would get to the bottom of it.

A cool September wind, heavy with impending rain, rattled the rusty chains of an old metal swingset in what passed for a play area as he made his way across the uneven pavement to apartment 14-B.

Did the little girl in the snapshot play there? he wondered. It hardly looked safe, with two swings barely hanging on and the bare bones of a glider with no seats swaying drunkenly in the wind.

If Grace Solarez turned out to be just as she appeared—a brave stranger who had risked her own life to save his daughter’s—he planned to do whatever it took to ensure she wouldn’t have to live in this bleak place anymore.

If not—if it turned out she had a role in his daughter’s ordeal—he would see that she paid, and paid dearly.

As he climbed the rickety ironwork stairway to the second level of the building, he thought he saw a curtain twitch in the apartment next to 14-B. Other than that, the place seemed eerily deserted.

He rang the doorbell and heard its buzz echo inside the apartment, then waited impatiently for her to answer. She had to be here. He’d called McManus Freight, her employer, as soon as he hung up from talking to Mike and had learned Grace Solarez hadn’t reported to work since the night of the kidnapping, eight days ago.

Besides that, Mike said she had one vehicle registered in her name, an old junkheap he could plainly see decomposing over in the parking lot.

He rang the buzzer again and added several sharp knocks for good measure. The curtains fluttered next door again and he was just about to see if the nosy neighbor might be able to tell him anything about his quarry’s whereabouts when he heard a faint, muted rustling behind the door inside her apartment.

It swung open, barely wide enough for the safety chain to pull taut. Through the narrow slit, he could make out little more than tangled brown hair and a pair of huge dark eyes, very much like the pair belonging to the girl in the snapshot he held.

“Grace Solarez?”

The eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Yes?”

Now that he was here, he hadn’t the faintest idea where to start. He cleared his throat. “Hello. My name is Jack Dugan. I need to speak with you, please.”

“About what?” Her voice sounded thready, strange, as if she’d just taken a hit of straight oxygen in one of those hip bars downtown.

Maybe she was a junkie. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t waited around long enough to give a statement to the police and maybe that’s why she was no longer with the Seattle PD.

Would a junkie have stuck around the scene long enough to rescue a terrified little girl?

So many damn questions and she held the key to all of them.

He pushed them away for now. “I’ve had investigators working around the clock for the past week, trying to locate you.” He watched carefully for some reaction in those eyes: curiosity, guilt, anything, but they held no expression, as deep and fathomless as a desert canyon.

The nosy neighbor was at it again. He could see movement in the window and fought down annoyance. He didn’t care for an audience and somehow he doubted she would either. “May I come in?” He tried a friendly, casual smile he was far from feeling. “I swear, I left my ax-murdering kit at home.”