Five Days Grace (5 page)

"Okay, I gotta tell you, if there was a test about what not to tell the man holding a gun on you, you'd have flunked right there, Princess."

She practically growled, then turned her head as far to the right as she could, trying to look at him. He thought she'd have slapped his face right then if she could.

"Oh, stop. I'm not going to hurt you."

"Then get off me."

"I will, but this is how we're going to do it." He decided as he spoke. "Slowly, no sudden moves. I'm going to take my weight off of your back completely, and I want you to stay on the floor and slide forward on your belly until you get to the refrigerator. Then you can turn around and sit up. You stay over there. I'll stay over here. Everything will be fine. Got it?"

"Yes, I do."

"Good. Here we go." He put one hand flat on the floor beside her shoulder to brace himself and then put his weight on his knees instead of on her. "All right. Not too fast."

She got her hands up beside her face and used her arms to slide forward, her body catching a bit on his as her hips slid past. He pulled his knees in tighter against her legs and kept a heavy hand on them, to make sure she didn't try to kick him at the last minute.

She didn't. She slid all the way to her corner and sat down on the floor. The dog followed along, whining and pawing at her side, obviously thinking it was some kind of a game.

"Tink, no!" he said forcefully.

To his surprise, the dog stopped and at least looked at him, cocking his head as if to ask,
Why not?

"Tink? The guy with a gun named his dog Tink? As in Tinker Bell?"

"I know, not very dangerous-sounding, is it?" Aidan said. "The thing is, he's not my dog."

"Oh. Okay."

Aidan had gotten slowly to his feet while she was busy sliding across the floor and couldn't see the effort it took him to do it. He walked over to his corner and eased down into the ancient recliner there, still holding the gun but not pointing it at her. Reaching up, he flicked on the light, which wasn't all that good, especially through the gloom of the day amidst all the trees and the stormy sky.

She was young, but not a teenager. Twenty-something, he decided, and probably beautiful when she hadn't been crying her eyes out. If he knew women, hers was the face of one who'd been crying for hours. She was red and splotchy, with puffy eyes and frown lines on her forehead, but still defiant and mad. He suspected it had been a very bad day for her before he'd grabbed her and scared her.

The dog was practically in her lap, sniffing all over her and smiling, begging for attention. She made a face at him, clearly horrified by his condition, by the wet and the mud. "Ooh."

"Tink, sit," he said.

And the dog did, right next to her, wagging his silly tail and looking like he'd fallen in love with her on sight and was her devoted servant from this point on.

"Okay. We can be friends, I guess," she said, smiling skeptically at the dog. "What kind of dog is he?"

"I have no idea. He lives half way around the lake. His owner had a tree come through her roof this morning, breaking her leg. Compound fracture, so she'll be hospitalized for a while, and there wasn't anyone to take care of the dog."

"You're trying to tell me you're such a nice guy, you volunteered to take care of this... thing?" she asked.

"I'm telling you I'm not a bad guy, and I got stuck with him. Oh, and I did help get his owner out from under the tree, if that makes you feel any better about... well..."

"Being held at gunpoint by you?"

"I'm not pointing the gun at you anymore," he reminded her.

She pouted a bit. "You have to be careful with something like that. It's dangerous, unless you really know what you're doing—"

"I really know what I'm doing."

"Did you put the safety on, at least?"

He held up the weapon. "It's on, Princess. Let's talk about you."

"Call Zach," she insisted.

He frowned at her, but pulled out his phone, changed the settings to speaker and scrolled down to Zach's name. They both heard the phone dialing, the line crackling, and then... Maybe Zach answering?

"Zach, it's Aidan. Zach?" And then the line went dead. He looked at her. "Try your phone, Princess."

She gave an annoyed sigh. "No one calls me Princess."

"Really? Why do I find that hard to believe?"

"They don't!"

"Then what do they call you?"

"Grace."

He scoffed. "No, there's something else. Come on. What is it?"

"None of your business."

"I'm babysitting a giant, goofy-looking dog named Tinker Bell. How bad can it be?"

She rolled her eyes. "Angel. Sometimes, they call me Angel."

Oh, yeah.
He could see that.

The golden hair, blue eyes and pretty face she was bound to have if she ever stopped crying.

Yeah, that worked.

"And sometimes, people call me Sunshine," she admitted.

Which was even better. An angel was all well and good, but just a little bit too good.

Sunshine.

A woman named Sunshine would have a little heat, a little fire.

"Although, I doubt you believe the last one," she said. "I'm not feeling very sunny right now."

Not today, but he'd bet the girl could shine when she wanted to.

"Call Zach," he said. "Same deal. Speaker phone, so I can hear."

She pulled her phone out of the pocket of her jeans and dialed, getting the same result, static.

"So, now what?" she asked as she clicked off the phone. "We just sit here until we get him?"

"You have somewhere you're supposed to be, Sunshine?"

"No, I just... People have never really been scared of me. I'm not a threatening woman. There's really nothing here worth defending with a gun. It seems obvious that if you wanted to overpower me, you could easily do that all on your own. So, I don't get it. Why the gun?"

Great,
Aidan thought. He got a woman who could think at gunpoint.

He sighed, shifted in his chair hoping to get a little more comfortable.

"Oh, my God, you're hurt! You're bleeding!" she cried, pointing to his side.

He looked down and saw that she was right. Blood was soaking through his shirt just above his hipbone on his right side, or if he was lucky, a combination of blood and mostly rainwater.
Shit.
Right over the damned incision. He hadn't even felt it bleeding, because he was soaked through and through and cold as hell.

"Did I do that? Did I hurt you?" she asked. "I'm so sorry."

"Honey, I had a gun at your back and my arm hooked around your neck. You're allowed to try to get away."

Her expression was almost comical then, like the angel-girl couldn't stand the thought of hurting anyone, even when she was scared half out of her mind and trying to get away from a guy with a gun.

"Relax, it's an old injury. And I might have done it earlier today. I did help pull a tree off Tink's owner, and getting the tarp over the hole in the cabin roof was no picnic."

She was up on her knees, looking like she just had to get to her feet, couldn't stand to do nothing. "You can't just stay there like that, bleeding."

"Believe me, I've been hurt much worse than this and survived."

She looked around the cabin. There really wasn't much to it. "There must be towels in the bathroom. I could get you one."

"Grace, I'm in no danger of bleeding to death," he insisted.

"Are you in some kind of trouble? Is there some reason you think someone might be looking for you? To hurt you?"

Give the angel-girl a prize.

"I doubt it," he said, because he truly did doubt it.

"Because, I'm really not scary," she went on.

"Yeah, I get that. I'm sorry about the whole gun thing. It's highly unlikely that anyone's looking for me or trying to hurt me. But it's possible, so I'm being extremely cautious right now. That's all."

Well, that and the fact that Maeve, injured and pinned under a tree, had brought back some really bad memories, and he was still jacked up on adrenaline from both what had happened today and three and a half months ago. But he wasn't going to explain that to a girl who actually had him apologizing for defending himself against what he had every right to believe was an intruder who'd broken into this place.

"Okay." She sat back down, as if that made it all seem perfectly reasonable and she'd wait right there, pleasantly even, until he was sure he had nothing to fear from her. "Would you like to tell me what you did?"

"No." He laughed in spite of himself. "But I'm not a criminal, Grace. The cops aren't looking for me. And I'm not some guy Zach freed from death row and is hiding here until the media circus dies down."

"Zach told you about that? Because he never actually told me that much. I mean, people in the family suspected at times, but..."

"I'm not a criminal," he said again.

"Okay."

The dog whined and nudged his giant head against her, and she petted him, despite all the mud, happy as could be until she lifted her head and looked back at Aidan.

No, not him. She was staring at the blood that had soaked through his shirt.

"This is ridiculous," she said. "I'm not that scared of you anymore, and I really don't think you're that scared of me, are you?"

"No," he agreed.

"So there must be some way we can work this out. You're wet. You're bleeding. You've got to be freezing because I'm not as wet as you are, and I'm really cold. Let's come up with a plan we can both live with."

"You said your family owns this place, which means you must be related to Zach in some way. Why don't you want to tell me exactly what your connection is to him?"

"Because most of the people who know Zach know me. They have a lot of preconceptions about who I am and what my life is like, and... It's not like that anymore, okay? It's really not like that. It's worse than most anyone knows, and it's hard, to think of everyone knowing and worrying even more and trying to take care of me even more."

"You shouldn't worry so much about what people think. It's none of their damned business," he tried to tell her.

She shook her head. "I told you, they watch me. All the time. It's like I can feel them watching, worrying. I spend a lot of time trying to put on this public face, to show everyone I'm okay, when I'm not, and it's exhausting. I'm sick of it."

"Then stop."

"I am. I'm stopping right now. With you. My husband was seeing another woman. You're the first person I've told, the only person." She had tears in her eyes, but blinked them back and glared at him. "Oddly, I'm just not feeling better yet."

"God, you're not Zach's wife, are you?"

"No! His wife's name is Julie. He's crazy about her. You don't even know his wife's name?"

He shrugged. "Never met her. Never came up. Look, I didn't tell you before, because I didn't see any reason why you'd believe me. I was just the guy holding a gun on you. But if it makes you feel any better, my little brother, Tommy, went to law school with Zach. I don't know him well at all, but my brother does. He spent a couple of breaks from school at Zach's parents' house."

"Oh," she said, looking like she was trying to place him.

Did she actually think she might know Tommy? Who was she?

"Anyway," Aidan went on. "I guess Tommy once represented a battered woman who needed to hide out from her husband for a while, and Zach let him stash her here. Tommy knew it was quiet, isolated and empty a lot in cool weather. That's how I ended up here. Feel better?"

"What law school?" she asked.

He frowned. "Not a good test of whether I'm telling the truth, Grace. Zach McRae is kind of famous in legal circles for his work in death penalty cases involving juveniles. His credentials are probably all over the web, a click or two away for anybody to find."

"What law school?"

"You think you've tripped me up?" He grinned.

"No, I think if you're... let's say, someone dangerous, who broke in, even if you knew this cabin belonged to the McRaes, you wouldn't have gone to the trouble of looking up where Zach went to law school first."

"Okay. Good point. University of Chicago."

She nodded. "Okay. If we're feeling all trusting toward each other, would you please, please, let me get you something to maybe stop the bleeding on your side? You can point your gun at me the whole time, if you still want to, while I find a clean towel."

He grinned. "It's sweet the way you worry, Grace."

"And then maybe we could both put on some dry clothes and build a fire? Maybe get warm? What do you say?"

Tink yowled and pawed at her, like he couldn't stand to be ignored.

"And give the dog a bath," she added.

"No bathtub here. Just a shower."

"Oh." She turned to the dog. "Sorry, baby. Maybe we'll try the shower. My sister gets her dogs clean by taking them into the shower with her when it's too cold to bathe them outside."