Second-Chance Hero Read online

  Things happened quickly after that. She signed some papers, trying not to let her eyes tear up as she realized that but for the kindness of a shop owner she’d met only once, her daughter would have had a criminal record. Then she accepted a copy of the list of the stolen items, showing a total cost that surprised her until she realized the prices no doubt reflected the complications of getting products out here—or the prices of the Nunez brothers, she amended wryly.

  She also asked for and got the phone number for Mr. Ayuso, although Espinoza reminded her that while cellular service on the cay was good because of the new tower that had been built, landline phone service was unreliable.

  “Redstone will be upgrading that,” Draven said.

  Espinoza gave him a wry look. “That will be good for your facility, but I doubt it will help Mr. Ayuso.”

  Draven smiled. Grace realized she’d never actually seen him smile before. It was charming, and pure Redstone munificence. It also made her heart do that crazy leap again.

  “I meant for the whole island.”

  Espinoza blinked. “The whole island?”

  “New system, from the ground up. Underwater cable from the mainland.”

  Espinoza’s jaw dropped. “But why would you do that?”

  “Because Redstone believes in improving the lives of those who welcome us.”

  “The golden touch balanced by the golden rule,” Grace said, quoting the motto the media had hung on Josh Redstone long ago. It had been mocking then, but over the years he’d shown by undeniable example that it fit.

  “St. Josh,” Marly muttered.

  Draven spun around to face her so quickly that Grace jumped and Marly gasped.

  “Not. Another. Word.”

  His voice had gone from cold to icy. Grace couldn’t see his expression, but if Marly’s widened eyes and sudden paleness were a reflection of it, she was probably better off. Again she felt the urge to leap to her little girl’s defense. But she’d nearly snapped at her daughter herself for her words and tone when Josh Redstone had done nothing but help them.

  Marly looked at her, eyes full of pleading and indignation. The pleading made her waver, but the indignation when she was so clearly in the wrong, here and in the whole situation, decided her. She’d let Draven play this out. Her tactics of patience and indulgence certainly hadn’t been working.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Draven kept looking at the girl. “Perhaps she should walk back. Get used to it.”

  “No,” Grace said. “I want her within my sight for the foreseeable future.”

  His gaze flicked to her then, and she thought she saw a glint of approval there.

  “Good point,” he acknowledged. “With who?”

  Grace didn’t miss the change in his voice. He was asking much more than a simple logistical question. She answered the unspoken query.

  “You. You heard Sergeant Espinoza. You’re in charge.”

  Marly made a tiny movement, but she kept her mouth shut. That alone gave Grace the strength to hold steady when her daughter looked at her as if she’d betrayed her.

  “I will always, always love you,” she said softly, “but right now you’re not very likable.”

  Marly lowered her gaze, and Grace’s stomach knotted.

  By the time they got back to the site, Grace had worked herself into quite a state wondering if she had just made the biggest mistake of her daughter’s life. But she soon had a distraction.

  They’d been hit again.

  Chapter 5

  Grace walked out onto the pier, looking down into the crystalline water. Marly walked beside her, also watching. They stopped a few feet short of where Draven and Nick were in deep discussion. Although she was glad the girl had trailed along automatically to the site of all the activity, so that she could keep an eye on her, she didn’t want her overhearing anything that might frighten her. So far she’d managed to keep her worries about the sabotage from the girl, passing it off as just local mischief, and she’d like to keep it that way as long as possible.

  She peered into the water. It was hard to judge how far down the Zodiac was, but she knew it had to be at least twenty feet deep here where it had been slightly dredged, because a couple of the small cargo boats that had pulled in here drew at least seven or eight feet and had been able to dock at low tide.

  She looked up to ask Nick what had happened. At that moment a movement caught her eye and when she looked, coherent thought fled.

  Draven had kicked off his boots and peeled off his shirt. She knew she was gaping at him, but couldn’t stop herself. It took her a moment to get past the muscular, ribbed perfection of structure and notice the collection of scars that marked the tanned skin.

  “Wow,” Marly said, her first words since they’d left town. “He’s buff, but, man, he’s beat up.”

  “Yes,” Grace agreed absently.

  Since he wasn’t even glancing their way she continued to stare as he walked to the edge of the pier at the spot where the Zodiac had been tied up. She’d never been so aware before of how a man was put together. Perhaps, she thought, because she’d never seen one put together so well before.

  Stop it! she ordered herself. She couldn’t believe she’d even thought that.

  He dove into the water in a clean, controlled arc that barely sent up a splash.

  “That’d win a dive meet,” Marly said; apparently Draven was no longer—or wasn’t yet—on her most-hated list.

  He went straight down to the inflatable, his image oscillating along with the boat’s as the water rippled. He swam around it, checked the outboard motor that was half buried in the soft bottom, touched the side tubes in several places. Once he even dug into the sandy seabed, to see the bottom of one of the tubes. Then he checked the mooring line, hand-over-handing the length of it until he reached the end.

  “Damn, how long can that boy hold his breath anyway?”

  Grace heard Nick’s exclamation, which voiced what she’d just been wondering herself. But finally, with the bitter end of the mooring line still in his hand, he headed back up.

  When he broke the surface, Grace expected to hear an explosive gasp for breath. Instead it seemed as if he were barely breathing hard. Without even a pause he tossed the rope up to Nick. As Draven slicked back his wet hair, Grace glanced toward the ladder that went from the water to the deck of the pier, some twenty feet behind them, where Draven would have to go to get out, or swim the hundred feet to the beach.

  When she turned back, he was already on the pier.

  Marly said a word Grace would normally have chastised her for. “Did you see that?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she admitted, forgoing the motherly instruction for the moment.

  “He came up out of that water like a dolphin, high enough to grab the edge of the pier. And just pulled himself up like it was nothing!”

  “Stay here, please,” she told her daughter, and headed off the instant protest with a simple glance toward Draven.

  Great, she thought. I finally find somebody who can control her, and it has to be him.

  She buried her emotions as she joined the others, and asked briskly, “What happened to it?”

  “Very large, very sharp knife.”

  “Reparable?”

  “More than it’s worth,” Draven said with a shake of his head.

  The movement drew her eyes to the water streaming off the dark strands of hair and over that body that had taken her breath away. Up close the scars were even more prominent, a long, heavy, puckered mark across his belly, a round indentation that she recognized as probably a bullet hole and a thin one down his left arm that looked like the one on his face. She’d seen a worker sliced by a sharp blade once, and the scar had looked like that. A knife fight?

  She shuddered, and with an effort yanked her unruly mind back to the matter at hand. “Did anyone see anything?”

  Nick shook his head. “Not a thing.”

  “Probably came underwater,” D
raven said.

  “So we don’t know when, either,” she said.

  “No,” Nick said. “We don’t know how long it’s been down there. Nobody even noticed it missing until he—” he gestured at Draven “—told me to check on it.”

  “You told him to check on the inflatable?” she asked.

  He nodded, flicking a quick glance at Marly, telling Grace just what Draven had suspected, that her daughter might have taken the boat. The thought of what could have happened if she had, with her very limited experience with boats, made Grace’s stomach churn. It could have been Marly’s lifeless body he’d gone into the water for.

  She suppressed a shudder. With a tactfulness that surprised her, he began to issue instructions to Nick, giving her a chance to recover her composure.

  “Search the site for the weapon. Any wet clothes stashed. I’ll head that way.” He gestured up the beach.

  Nick nodded. “Think maybe he went into the water up there?”

  “Too visible the other way.”

  She saw what he meant; the brush was heavy there, providing lots of cover. To the south was mostly open sand, with the vegetation far enough back from the waterline to make it hard to get out there without being spotted.

  Draven reached for his boots, started to pull one on, then obviously realized his still-wet feet were going to be a problem. He grabbed his T-shirt off the pier and used it to dry his feet. And only then did Grace see what had been covered by the shirt: a deadly looking handgun in a holster with a belt clip lay on the boards of the pier.

  Even as she stared at it, he picked it up and clipped it on the back of his wet jeans. She realized how long she must have been gaping by the fact that he’d gotten his boots back on and she hadn’t even realized it.

  She watched him head up the beach, walking as smoothly on the sand as on a paved road. She shouldn’t have been surprised about the gun, she realized. Of course the head of Redstone Security would be armed. Probably at all times.

  Probably the first time she’d ever seen him, her harsh angel had been carrying a gun.

  Too bad there hadn’t been anyone or anything to shoot, she thought. Just an earthquake. A natural disaster.

  And a very personal one for her.

  Draven saw the light still on in the construction trailer when he got back to the site just after 10:00 p.m. He’d found a spot north of the pier where the brush had looked trampled, but nothing else. After that, he’d gone into town and engaged in casual conversation with a few people, slipping in some low-key questions and getting some interesting answers. With some thinking to do, he headed back to the site.

  He went up the steps and pushed the door open, not expecting anything untoward because the light was on at this hour, but his hand on the butt of the Glock nevertheless.

  Grace was sitting at the desk she used, and it was her light that was on. She had some design drawings spread out in front of her, and something labeled Wind Study, but she wasn’t looking at any of them. In the split second before she heard him and turned around, he’d seen her slumped shoulders and her head cradled in her hands.

  A sudden, aching feeling flooded him. It was unfamiliar to him, and when he finally recognized it as the need to comfort, he was stunned.

  “It will be all right.” The words were out before he’d even realized they were coming.

  “Marly will be,” she said, obviously not realizing the momentousness of what had just happened. “She’s a good kid at heart, she’s just having a tough go right now.”

  “Teenager,” he said succinctly, and was rewarded with a slightly wobbly smile.

  “Yes, but with her it’s more than just that.” She jammed her fingers through her hair. It should have messed it up, he thought, but instead it just seemed to make it more sexily tousled.

  Sexily?

  His own startling thought ricocheted around in his mind, and he could almost feel it chewing its way through neurons long inactive.

  Damn.

  Hastily he spoke again, hoping her answer would give him time to reel in that unwanted, unwelcome and poorly timed thought.

  “More?”

  Grace sighed. “That bit about her father, in the mayor’s office?”

  “I heard.”

  “We went that route once. Marly was angry because I wouldn’t let her…I forget, do something that her friends were doing. She said she wanted to go live with him, even though he hadn’t even talked to her in months. I said, ‘Fine, call him.’ She did.”

  “He didn’t want her,” Draven said softly.

  “No. And he told her so, very bluntly. She never told me exactly what he said, but it was something about why would he want to ruin his lovely new life by having a brat around.” She sighed again. “I still feel guilty over that one.”

  That made no sense to him. “You?”

  “I had a pretty good idea what he’d say. I should never have let her ask him. I knew she’d be hurt. I guess I just got tired of her yelling about how much better her life would be if she lived with her father.”

  “Some fantasies need to be ended.” He thought about the name he’d seen on the passport, the name he assumed was her father’s. “You can’t live in them.”

  She leaned back in her chair and looked up at him. She seemed to be studying him with a new intensity. “I expected you to say something simple like ‘She’ll get over it.’”

  “She will.”

  She rolled the pen she held between her fingers. It seemed a nervous gesture in a woman who projected such calm.

  “I never had the chance to thank you for your help today,” she said finally.

  “Not necessary.”

  Her mouth quirked. “You are the proverbial man of few words, aren’t you?”

  He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug.

  “It bothers you?” He knew his brusqueness bothered some, was misinterpreted by others, but the people whose opinion mattered understood it was just his way.

  “No,” she said. “It’s really rather efficient.”

  He blinked. That was a new one. Of all the comments, gibes and observations he’d ever gotten on the subject, there had never been one that was actually a compliment.

  “Besides, I know you can speak in full sentences. I’ve heard you.”

  He smothered the beginnings of a smile. “Yes, ma’am. Even went to college.”

  “Now there are some term papers I’d like to read,” she said, startling him once again.

  “Tossed them,” he said, the image of her reading that long-ago work rattling him in ways he didn’t fully understand. “Profs and I were rarely on the same planet.”

  She grinned at that, and that he’d managed that warmed him far too much. “I can imagine.”

  He walked over to the corner of the trailer and pulled out his bedroll. She glanced at the small bundle, then at him, brows furrowed.

  “You’re sleeping here?” she asked.

  He nodded. “It’s easier.”

  “I’ll finish up quickly, then.”

  “Don’t rush.” He pulled out the spare chair beside her desk, reversed it and sat, crossing his arms over the back. “Working late?”

  “Just going over some things. I had to spend some time with the mayor this afternoon, showing him around, so I’m a little behind.”

  “On what?”

  “Inventory, mostly. I need to be sure we have all the supplies and equipment we need, since without the inflatable there won’t be any quick runs to the mainland, or over to San Pedro on Ambergris Cay. Frankly, Jorge Nunez charges too much to use that speedboat of his.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “What?”

  “Josh is sending a replacement inflatable and motor, plus a backup.”

  “He is?” she asked.

  “Should be here by tomorrow.”

  “Oh.”

  She was silent for a moment, and he wondered if she was bothered by being cut out of that transaction.

  “Didn’t mean
to step on any toes. I was already on with him, so I asked.”

  She blinked. “What? Oh, no, I wasn’t thinking about that. I should have asked myself, I guess. But I was feeling responsible for the thing being destroyed.”

  “Josh doesn’t work that way.”

  “I know. But I still felt I should have stopped it somehow.”

  “You’re not responsible for everything and everyone. Just getting this field built.”

  “And my daughter.”

  “Yes.”

  She seemed to hesitate, then spoke again, lowering her gaze as if she couldn’t look at him when she asked her next question.

  “Why did you help today?”

  “You’re Redstone.”

  “Yes. But Marly isn’t. Why did you help her?”

  “She’d argue that I didn’t.”

  A smile flickered again, but she wouldn’t be distracted. “Yes, she would. Why?”

  Did she not remember? he wondered. Had the trauma wiped out the memory of what she’d wrung from him that day? Should he say something generic, to avoid reminding her of it? Should he lie by omission?

  He gazed down into blue eyes he’d first seen looking up at him from a pile of devastation. They’d been full of pain and fear that day, but nothing could vanquish the fierce life he’d seen there. And he knew he couldn’t lie, even by omission.

  “I promised you.”

  Her eyes widened, her face paled and she dropped the pen onto her desk. “Oh, my God.”

  “You remember.”

  She sucked in an audible breath. “I remember everything about that day.” Her gaze narrowed. “And I remember it exactly. I asked you to take care of my daughter when I…”

  “Died.” He said it bluntly.

  “I was sure I was going to.”

  “I know.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  He grimaced. “At great cost to you.”

  She shook her head as if that were negligible.