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.”
Those eyes studied him for a moment longer, then she pushed up the safety latch and opened the door.
The inside of the apartment was as depressing as the exterior. It had the unlived-in air of a seedy motel room, the kind where they charge you extra for sheets.
A particularly ugly gold-and-blue couch ran the length of one wall and a matching chair faced it, but they were the only pieces of furniture in the room. The only anything in the room. He frowned. There were no pictures on the wall, no books, no knickknacks. None of the little personal items people liked to scatter around the corners of their lives.
So Grace Solarez wasn’t much of an interior decorator. There was no law against that.
He shifted his attention from her home and looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time. She appeared as tired and worn-out as her surroundings, with sallow skin and huge purple shadows under her eyes.
And she was younger than he would have expected. Late-twenties, maybe. Certainly too young to have that look of fragile despair haunting those big dark eyes.
She wore a thin T-shirt, faded gray from many washings, a pair of worn cutoffs and nothing else. His gaze was drawn to her long, slim legs, to the soft curve of her breasts under the threadbare cotton, and Jack was astonished—and disgusted—at himself for the little kick of awareness in his gut.
Maybe Piper McCall was right. His business partner was always telling him he’d been too long without a woman. There might be some truth to that, especially if he could get all worked up about one who looked like she’d been on the wrong end of a runaway bus.
She had left the door open, so she could call for help if he decided to attack, he imagined, and now she clutched the frame as if she couldn’t stand without it.
“Why did you say you’ve been looking for me?” Her voice again sounded thin, disoriented.
“I don’t believe I said.” He decided to put his suspicions away for now. Whatever her reasons for being there, whatever her involvement, she had plucked Emma from that burning car where the man who took her would have been willing to let her burn.
“I’ve come to thank you,” he finally said.
“For?”
“For saving my daughter’s life,” he said quietly.
She frowned and he noticed her knuckles were bony and white on the doorframe. “Wh-what?”
“Oh, and to give you this.” He thrust out the picture.
At the sight of it in his hands, those huge dark eyes widened even farther and what little color he could see in her face leached away like sheets left hanging too long in the sun.
With a soft, almost apologetic moan, Grace Solarez collapsed in a tangled heap on her gold shag carpet.
Chapter 2
For an instant after she fell, Jack just stared in shock at the tangle of dark hair hiding her face. Maybe she was a junkie coming off a bad trip. Maybe that’s why she risked almost certain death to save Emma—because she was too high to know any better, so whacked out she had lost all sense of self-preservation.
The reminder of how very much he owed Grace Solarez—junkie or not—spurred him to quick action and he knelt by her side. “Ma’am? Ms. Solarez?”
She didn’t answer. He pushed back a thick hank of hair to find her eyes closed, her face the color of faded news-print. Her skin felt hot, and up close she looked even more haggard than she had at first, with those dark circles ringing her eyes and cracked, swollen lips.
If not for the slight rise and fall of her chest under the thin shirt, he would have thought she was dead. He started to roll her over but a tiny cry of pain slipped from her dry lips, stopping him cold.
He sat back on his haunches. What could be wrong with her?
How the hell was he supposed to know? he answered his own question. He was a pilot, not a damn doctor.
Should he slap her, see if that would rouse her? He started to, then stopped before his hand could complete the movement. It seemed highly presumptuous to strike a woman he had just met.
Cold water might do the trick. That’s how they did it in Hollywood, anyway. He stepped gingerly over her prone form to reach the sink in the small kitchen area and found a clean drinking glass in the dish drainer next to it. After filling it quickly with rusty-looking water from the tap, he turned back toward her.
And caught his first sight of her back.
He growled a raw expletive, the water glass nearly slipping from his hand. What the hell had she done to herself? The cotton of her shirt was soaked with what looked like fresh blood and it seemed to stick to her back in spots. If that was as painful as it looked, no wonder she had passed out. She needed medical attention and she needed it now.
Before he could find the phone to dial the emergency number, she stirred again. This time she started to roll to her back. The pain must have stopped her because she moaned and froze at an awkward angle.
“Easy now,” he murmured. “Let’s just roll you to your stomach.”
Grace Solarez whipped her head around at his voice, her eyes wide with disoriented panic. “Who…” The single word seemed to sap her energy because her eyes closed and for a moment he thought she had passed out again until they fluttered open again. “Who are you?” she finally asked.
“Jack Dugan. Remember? Right before you decided to take a header on me, I was trying to explain why I was here.”
The confusion faded a bit from her dark eyes. “You have my picture,” she whispered. “What have you done with it?”
She tried to prop herself up but he laid a hand on the hot skin of her forearm to stop her. “Easy. I don’t think you ought to be moving around too much right now. Here’s your picture. I haven’t done anything with it. It’s just like you left it.”
He pulled the photograph from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. She gazed at it for a moment, then clutched it to her as if he had just handed her a briefcase full of diamonds.
“Thank you.” Her voice was even huskier than before. “I have others, but this…this is my favorite.”
The raw emotion on her face made him shift uncomfortably. “No need to thank me. I’m just returning what belongs to you. Now why don’t you tell me what you did to yourself. Is it a cut?”
Her cheek rubbed against the ugly carpet in what he took for denial. “Burn,” she murmured. “Tried to put something on it but I couldn’t reach the whole thing. Think it’s infected.”
“How did it happen?”
She closed her eyes again. “Car exploded. Couldn’t run fast enough.”
His heart seemed to stutter in his chest as he stared at her. She did this to herself pulling his Emma out of the crash? He reached blindly for her hand and squeezed it tightly. “We need to get you to a hospital.”
Grace lifted her head, the panic back in the flaring of her pupils.