He thought about what Lily had said, about her hurting too big for words. How would he bear it if he lost Emma the way she had lost her daughter?
If he hadn’t been holding the tray of food, he would have rubbed his chest at the sudden ache there. The startling depth of his compassion made his voice more curt than normal. “Are you supposed to be out of bed?”
She glanced up and those too-serious dark eyes blinked at him. “Beautiful view you’ve got here, Dugan,” she said, instead of answering his question.
He looked over her shoulder at the garden with its colorful late blossoms, framed by the vast blue of the sky and the water. It was one of those perfect, unusually clear fall days in the Northwest, and it looked like everyone on the Sound had decided to take advantage of the great weather. Dozens of pleasure boats—everything from sailboats to yachts to sea kayaks—dotted the water.
He had fallen in love with the view the first time he’d seen it, from the back of a motorcycle on the other side of the Sound. He’d been a badass seventeen year old, angry at the world and at himself. And most of all, hurting and furious over his father’s betrayal.
Trying to go as far and as fast as he could from the chaos left in the wake of his father’s, William Dugan, suicide, he had spent six days on the back of the bike. He remembered stopping on the water’s edge and staring out at Puget Sound, knowing he couldn’t go any farther, that he would have to stop here or go back the way he had come.
Suddenly, it was as if the anger and the grief fueling him through the trip had kept right on going without him, had slid into the ocean and washed away with the tide.
His father had left him with nothing but obligations, debts he had spent years paying off. But he had done it. And when it looked like the shipping company he had created out of the wreckage his father had left behind would survive, the first thing Jack had purchased had been this strip of land on the shore of Bainbridge Island.
“I like it,” he finally murmured to Grace Solarez. It was a vast understatement and couldn’t even begin to describe the tie he felt to this place.
He held out the tray to her. “I come bearing food.” He scanned the contents of the tray, pulling lids off of containers to snoop underneath. “What do we have here? Looks like soup, homemade bread, a fruit salad and some juice.”
She drew her bare toes even farther under the edge of the muumuu until they disappeared. “Please tell Lily thank you, but I’m not very hungry right now.”
He set the tray down on the bed. “You need to eat to get your strength back.”
“If I eat all that, will you let me go home?”
“Why are you in such a big hurry?”
“I don’t belong here. We both know that. While I certainly appreciate all you’ve done for me, I’m feeling much better now and would like to leave. I’m not used to having all this time to…to do nothing. Besides, I have a life to get back to in the city.”
Not much of one. A slum of an apartment, a job on the docks. No friends, no family who would worry about her. She couldn’t possibly be happy in that bleak existence.
“Can’t you just look at this as a well-deserved vacation?”
Her mouth pursed into a frown. “Why are you so insistent I stay here?”
“I just want you to be comfortable, for you to have someone to look after you while you heal.”
“Why?”
“You earned those burns saving my daughter’s life. I can never repay you for what you did for her. For me. The least I can do is make sure you have people to look after you while you recover.”
Her short laugh sounded harsh, caustic. “You don’t owe me a thing, Dugan.”
“I owe you everything,” he corrected softly.
She studied him for a moment, those big dark eyes murky, then she shrugged. “Fine. You’ve repaid me by giving me the royal treatment for a few days. It’s been a real blast, believe me, but we’re square now. Why don’t you just give me a lift to the ferry and we can call it even.”
They weren’t even close to being even. Besides that, he didn’t want to let her out of his sight until he could be absolutely sure she wasn’t involved in the kidnapping, until they had a suspect in custody.
Jack couldn’t shake the gut instinct someone else besides the man Emma described had been involved in her kidnapping. He didn’t want that person to be Grace Solarez, but he couldn’t let what he wanted interfere with the investigation.
He sat on the bed, careful not to tip the tray. “I understand you used to be a cop in the city.”
The gentle movement of the rocking chair ceased and her expression became closed. “Used to be. A long time ago.”
“Not so long. You resigned about a year ago, didn’t you?”
“Your snoops were efficient.”
“It wasn’t exactly a state secret.”
She was silent for a moment, then turned curious eyes to him. “How did you find me, anyway?”
“The picture.”
She stared at him. “What?”
He gestured to the photograph still propped against the lamp by the side of the bed. “Your snapshot. You dropped it at the scene. We were able to identify the park in the background of the photo and then hit all the film processing places in the general area. I thought we had hit a dead end but it turned out a photo technician at the QuikPic where you developed the film knew you.”
“Pham Leung.”
He nodded. His private investigator told him the clerk hadn’t wanted to talk at first. He had been fiercely protective of Grace—to the point of rudeness—but had cooperated after Mike told him she had saved a little girl’s life, that the girl’s father only wanted to thank her.
“Once we had a name,” Jack continued, “the rest was easy.”
“You had no right asking questions about me.”
“Maybe not. But I had to find you.”
“Fine. You’ve found me, you’ve patched me up. Now let me leave.”
“Why are you so uncomfortable with my gratitude?”
“Why can’t you clue in that I don’t want it?”
At an impasse, they gazed at each other across the length of the room. Anger sent a flush of appealing color to her cheeks, turning her eyes almost black. Now that she was on the road to recovery, she looked much less the injured waif and much more a lush, soft woman.
There were curves somewhere in that voluminous robe, he remembered. They had been hard to miss when he carried her to his car that day. Now, with her spine stiff and her chin at an angle, he could see the high, firm outline of her breasts beneath the bright Hawaiian print.
To his shock, his body began to stir, to sizzle to life. He felt his blood begin to thicken, begin to churn through his veins like golden honey through a straw.
Where the hell did that come from? She wasn’t at all the kind of woman that usually attracted him. If he had a type, it was tall, willowy blondes, not scrawny ex-cops with wild dark hair and big, wounded eyes.
The situation between them was complicated enough. The last thing he needed to do was toss his suddenly unruly libido into the mix. With fierce determination, he clamped down on the burgeoning awareness.
His gaze found the photo by the bed, the one that had brought him to her. “I didn’t have the chance to tell you this before,”