Saving Grace. RaeAnne Thayne

want to think about it right now.

      “My mama died when I was only two,” Emma confided. “She was in an airplane crash. She didn’t live with us but I still cried a lot.”

      “I’m sure you did.”

      “Who’s that?”

      Grace’s gaze followed the direction of Emma’s finger. She was completely unprepared for the agonizing pain that clutched her stomach at the sight of Marisa’s picture propped against a lamp on the bedside table. She must have been so focused on the pitcher of water she hadn’t noticed it before.

      She absorbed those little gamine features—as familiar to her as her own. The big dark eyes, the dimpled smile, the long glossy braids. The grief welled up inside her, completely blocking the physical pain of the burn.

      “Is that your little girl?”

      Grace nodded. “I…yes,” she whispered.

      “Where is she?”

      A cemetery, a cold grave marked by a plain, unadorned headstone, all she had been able to afford after the funeral expenses.

      “She died.” The words were wrenched from her. They sounded harsh and mean but the little girl didn’t seem to notice.

      “Just like my mama.” Emma’s face softened with concern and she patted Grace’s arm. “Did you cry a lot, too?”

      Buckets of tears. Oceans of them. Her heart hadn’t stopped weeping for a year.

      Before she could form her thoughts into an answer appropriate for a five-year-old girl, the door opened and the man who had come to her apartment, who had brought her Marisa’s picture, entered the room.

      He wore tan khakis and an icy blue polo shirt. With his slightly long, sun-streaked hair and tan, he looked like the kind of man who had nothing more pressing to worry about than whether he’d remembered to wax his surfboard.

      When she looked closer, though, she recognized an indefinable air of danger about him. He reminded her of a tawny cougar, coiled and ready to pounce.

      What had he said his name was? She sorted through the jumbled-up memories until she came up with it: Jack, wasn’t it? Jack Dugan.

      “Emma!” Jack Dugan said in a loud whisper. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here. What do you think you’re doing, young lady?”

      “I helped Grace get a drink, Daddy. She was thirsty so I poured her some water all by myself.”

      He turned his head quickly from his daughter toward Grace. “You’re awake.”

      She suddenly felt vulnerable, off-kilter, lying facedown in a strange bed, in an unfamiliar room, watching the world from this odd, sideways angle. Her stomach fluttered like it used to in the old days before she went out on an unknown disturbance call.

      She blinked at him but said nothing.

      “She waked up and I helped her get a drink all by myself,” Emma announced again.

      He gave his daughter a smile of such amazing sweetness it completely transformed him, gentled those lean, rugged features. His eyes warmed, darkened. Instead of a cougar, now he looked like a sleek, satisfied tomcat letting a kitten crawl all over him.

      The little girl dimpled back and Grace’s chest felt tight and achy at the obvious bond between the two of them.

      “What a good nurse you are, Little Em,” Jack said.

      “Just like Lily, yeah?”

      He chuckled and tweaked her chin. “Just like Lily but not so bossy.”

      Lily was the one who had put the “gunk” on her back, Emma had said. She gathered Lily was the sea-voice.

      From her sideways perspective, Grace watched him pull a chair to the side of the bed and tug Emma onto his lap. Those vivid green eyes studied her intensely, like a boy watching a bug trying to scurry along the sidewalk, and she again felt exposed, stripped bare before him, even with the soft quilt covering her.

      “How are you feeling this afternoon?”

      “Peachy,” she muttered.

      “I could probably round up some aspirin for you but that’s the best I can do. If you would let me take you to a hospital, you could probably get your hands on some kind of serious pain medication. I imagine something like that would hit the spot right about now.”

      No hospitals. Hospitals were anguish and death. Doctors who told you, without any emotion at all, that your world had just ended. “I don’t need a hospital.”

      “That’s a matter of debate, Ms. Solarez.”

      “What is there to debate, Mr. Dugan? I don’t want to go to the hospital and you can’t admit me without my permission.” She knew she sounded petulant, childish, but she couldn’t help herself. I don’t want to and you can’t make me.

      Exhausted suddenly, as if her brief spurt of defiance had drained her last ounce of energy, Grace rolled to her side, wincing as pain scorched along her nerve endings. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me but I—I just want to go home.”

      It was a lie. She hated that apartment, hated the gray desolation of the neighborhood. But it was as far as she could get from the cheerful little two-bedroom cottage near the university, with its white shutters and the basketball hoop over the garage and the wooden swingset in the backyard she and Marisa had built together.

      She had lived there for a month after her daughter’s death and then couldn’t bear it any longer. She had wanted to sell it but Beau had talked her out of it, so now she was renting to a married couple. Schoolteachers, both of them, with a son about Emma’s age.

      The hovel she lived in now was her penance, her punishment for the sin of not protecting her daughter.

      “You wouldn’t be able to take care of yourself for one day if I took you back to your apartment,” Jack said. “Sorry, but you’re stuck with us. At least until you regain your strength.”

      She could hardly think past the fatigue and pain battling for the upper hand but she knew she couldn’t stay in this house where there was such love. “You can’t keep me here.”

      “Don’t you like us?” Emma asked, her face drooping.

      What was she supposed to say to that? How did she explain to a five year old that being here—seeing this warm, loving relationship between father and child—was like having not just her back flayed open but her whole soul.

      She was spared having to answer by the return of the sea-voice.

      “What do you two think you’re doing in here?”

      “Uh-oh. Busted.” Jack sent a guilty look towards his daughter, then together they turned to face the woman glaring at them from doorway. Grace could see immediately why he looked so intimidated. Though an inch or two shorter than her own five-foot five-inch height, the woman had to weigh at least two-hundred pounds.

      She had the brown skin and wavy dark hair of a Pacific Islander, probably Hawaiian, and right now she looked as if she wanted Jack Dugan served up at her next luau with an apple in his mouth.

      “Uh, your patient’s awake, Lily.”

      “Didn’t I say she needed to rest? Didn’t I say leave her be?”

      “Well, yes—”

      “I go for ten minutes and what do you two do? Come in here and start pestering her. You even wait ’til Tiny and me pulled out of the driveway before you came barging in here?”

      “Yes,” he said defensively, then gave a rueful grin. “Almost.”

      She rolled her eyes at him. “Next time you want dinner, maybe I’ll ‘almost’ fix it, then.”

      Despite her annoyance, she looked