Saving Gracie (9 page)

“I do, Jake.” She walked to the front window and looked out across downtown. “Thank you. I hope I can make this work.”

“Great.” The real estate agent picked up a black leather portfolio off the table and began to write down a few notes. “I’ll be waiting for the go-ahead call from you, Gracie, and the reference letter from you, Jake. We can present the offer this afternoon.”

The three of them headed back downstairs. Gracie stopped a few steps down the sidewalk and looked back at the building.

A gulf breeze caused the wide ruffle of her long white sundress to flutter around her ankles. The sun’s rays brushed across Gracie’s shoulders, causing her cappuccino complexion to take on a golden glow. Another small puff of wind picked up the ends of her thick ponytail, then dropped it down in a casual tousle.

Jake couldn’t turn away. “Gracie? You sure I can’t take you to lunch? We’re less than a block from the Starfish Grill.” He couldn’t stand to let it end.

“I really should get back and start plugging in those numbers, Jake. I’d like to have an answer for Melissa today. Plus, I still need to go to the post office and check my mail.” Her dark eyes met his and dropped kindling on the fire inside him.

“You can’t think on an empty stomach. I’ll even pick up the tab. And then, we’ll swing by the post office on our way back to your school.”

“I don’t know, Jake.” Gracie’s gaze began to dart around in a distracted manner.

“Yes, you do. Don’t look for a reason to say no. I’ve made you an offer you can’t refuse.” Jake unlocked the truck. “Take the cannoli.”

“Take the what?” Her head tilted, one eyebrow raised skyward, the other crinkled inward toward her nose. Confusion was spelled out gently across every inch of her face.

“Cannoli. It’s a line from
The Godfather.
I said I’d made you an offer you couldn’t refuse...” Jake trailed off, seeing she still didn’t know what he alluded to. “It’s a movie.”

“I haven’t seen a whole lot of movies. When I was younger, my parents were pretty strict about what Gloria and I could watch. And now that I’m older, I just don’t have the time.”

“But do you have the time to go to lunch with me?” He opened the passenger-side door with a small flourish.

She raised her hands halfway, in an abbreviated gesture of surrender. “You drive a hard bargain, Jake.”

“Always.”

Maybe he did have some of his old man in him after all.

* * *

Jake’s weekly dinners with Nana usually took place at the Starfish Grill. He knew what he wanted to eat before he even walked through the door. Gracie, however, took her time. She opened the menu, closed it to read the specials on the back, then opened the folder again without ever saying a word.

“Want me to recommend something?” Jake offered.

“That would be great. I’ve never been here before, although its reputation precedes it.” She looked over the top of the menu. Her warm, brown eyes stoked a reminder of his favorite item on the dessert tray, molten chocolate cake.

“Do you prefer seafood, or an entrée like chicken?”

“I like seafood. I’m always pushing
Mamí
and
Papí
to add more daily specials with local catches at their place, Huarache’s.”

“Then you’ll love the snapper à la Starfish. It’s red snapper, caught right out there in the Gulf of Mexico, grilled to perfection and topped with a cream sauce containing shrimp, scallops and asparagus.”

“Sounds rich.” She closed the menu and laid it gently on the table. “Decision made.”

“You won’t regret it. I usually tell myself to try something different, but then I remember how heavenly the snapper is. My order never changes.”

The waitress came and brought the Caesar salads they’d decided on as an appetizer, then took the order for two snappers à la Starfish.

Jake watched Gracie from across the table. Her posture seemed more relaxed than he’d ever seen it, including during their walk on the beach.

“I want to thank you for setting up the showings with Melissa, Jake.” She speared a piece of romaine lettuce. “That went above and beyond what I could have expected from this whole mess.”

Jake gave complete honesty in return for her compliment. “Look, Gracie, I didn’t give much thought to how presenting that eviction notice would affect you. But in the meantime, I was forced to think about it. But I don’t want to make you uncomfortable right now by talking about the eviction paper. Let’s just enjoy lunch as friends.”

“Thank you. Your big meeting is tomorrow, right?” She took the opportunity to change the subject.

“Yes. I’ll be presenting my work on the Provident Plaza Condominiums to the board of directors of the Peoples Property Group as an interview of sorts. I’ve been the interim CEO for a little while now, but I need their approval to make the position official. It’s more or less a formality. The company is run by the family, but the board has to give their thumbs-up. In my case, though, there’s a lot of bad history between my father and me that needs to be overcome. Sometimes I’m afraid the board will dig up some second cousin of mine and say they’d rather have him as CEO than me because he comes with less baggage.”

The waitress brought their entrées and set them carefully on the table. The smell of garlic and spices combined with the sweet aroma of pan-fried snapper almost made Jake lose his train of thought.

“This looks wonderful, Jake. I can’t wait to taste it.” Gracie pushed her fork into the fish and swirled the bite around in the sauce. “I remember you said you’d been living in Austin. What brought you back to Port Provident? The job?”

“After my dad died, Nana asked me to come home. My law practice in Austin had folded and, as I told you, I’d filed for bankruptcy because of it. I needed a job to pay off my settlement. I didn’t have any good reasons to tell her no.”

“Your family’s company has been around for a long time. I guess you always knew you’d run it some day, right?”

“That’s a logical assumption, but no.” Jake assembled a final bite of the succulent snapper as he talked. “My father and I didn’t get along. I went to law school just so I wouldn’t have to work for the company. He didn’t care who he stepped on, as long as he got his way. After eighteen years of growing up with that, I left for college and never looked back.”

The years peeled away as he spoke. In his mind, Jake saw every detail of that last showdown with his father before leaving for the University of Texas. “In my heart, I always wondered how we could be related. I’ve never been able to treat anyone—especially family—the way my father treated his only son. I don’t have that innate ruthless distrust. Anyway, there came a point when I wanted to remove myself from his presence and stop the doubts in my head about why we never got along. I needed a change of scenery to do that.”

“So that’s why tomorrow is so important to you? You need to prove your father and those who listened to him wrong.” Gracie laid her knife and fork carefully at the top of the plate. “I understand the need to prove doubters wrong.”

She reached her hand across the table, then covered Jake’s own and gave it a quick pat. The spontaneous gesture of solidarity surprised him. “I once had someone in my life who said I was important to him,” she said. “Then, little by little, David started to treat me as though who I was, where I came from and the people who made up my friends and family weren’t good enough for him. He thought I should have been grateful to him to become a part of his world and leave my own behind. It took a while, but I had to learn to stand up for myself and the things that made me the person I am.”

Jake almost couldn’t believe Gracie’s story. What kind of man could tell a woman he cared about her, but she’d have to change in order to keep his affections? The cruelty inherent in that made Jake think back to a different relationship in his own life—the one with his father. He never knew exactly why his father treated him coldly, but from his earliest memories, he knew he didn’t measure up.

Jake knew what it felt like to be rejected for who you were, and the knowledge that someone would try to crush Gracie’s fiery spirit and the dreams that her family and culture had shaped infuriated him. Jake had brought Gracie to see new properties today as an olive branch, an opportunity to do the right thing. But now, he wanted more. He wanted to protect Gracie from people who didn’t show her the proper respect—a mistake he’d made when he first showed up on her doorstep.

Frustrated, he pushed back from the table, the shove to the chair having to substitute for the shove he’d like to give this David character.

Learning this new facet of Gracie’s past made Jake see just why she wasn’t backing down in the present. Jake had once doubted Gracie and her motivations. Not anymore.

Tomorrow, he hoped the board of directors of Peoples Property Group would say the same about him.

Chapter Six

G
racie shuffled through the collection of envelopes in her post office box. She saw letters from relatives in Mexico, a few bills, and some other correspondence—but not the one item she really hoped for.

Another pound of weight settled on Gracie’s shoulders with each step she took back to the truck.

“So?” Jake’s good-natured inquiry came as soon as Gracie opened the door.

“The letter still hasn’t come.” She held on to the door handle and boosted herself inside. “I can’t move forward with leasing that new place until I know if I’ve been awarded the grant. Without it, I’m back at square one. I hate this.”

She would give anything to lose this heaviness and stand up straight again.

Jake pushed a button on the dashboard, silencing the stereo system. “What do you mean?”

“At the beginning of the week, I was the proud owner of a small business that both made ends meet—albeit tightly—and made a difference. Now, all I can think about is how I don’t have enough money to continue my work.” She placed her elbow on the edge of the door and rested her chin in the cup of her hand, looking blankly at the ocean as they turned onto Gulfview Boulevard. “I never used to think about money all the time. I used to believe that, like the lilies of the field, God would provide everything I needed.”

Jake steered the car into a U-turn. “What’s changed, Gracie?”

“What do you mean?” Jake’s sudden deviation from the route back to her school made Gracie’s sense of control fall even more.

“I mean, why can’t you trust anymore?” He continued west on Gulfview, toward the end of the island. “It seems to me that not much has changed. You were pinning your hopes on that grant check long before my company’s condo project ever entered the picture.”

The reality of Jake’s words hit Gracie with full force, buffeting her with the impact of his truth.

“Gracie, when I was in Austin watching my career and my law practice go through the shredder, I thought I couldn’t stop moving. I was afraid that if I quit pushing forward, I’d lose my momentum and it would all crumble. It all fell apart anyway, and when the last card came down, the exhaustion of not taking the time for myself consumed me.” Jake pulled the car into the entrance to Surfside Beach. “You said your sister was here at the beach. I’m taking you for a break.”

Gracie began to protest, then stopped herself. Maybe Jake had the right idea. Maybe she needed a few minutes to refresh.

“Thank you, Jake,” she said simply.

“Which one is your sister’s car?” Jake pointed at the front edge of the sand-covered parking lot.

“Um...that one.” Gracie scanned the rows of cars. “The red Chevy SUV in the far corner.”

Jake gave the truck some gas, pushing it across the top of a patch of powdery sand. The maneuver marked Jake as an experienced beach driver. Going any slower on the soft surface would have been a sure way to get the heavy vehicle stuck.

“Here you go.” He pulled up behind Gloria’s car, applied the brake and unbuckled his seat belt. “Do you see her out there?”

“Actually, I do. That purple umbrella near the shore is hers.” Gracie looked forward to seeing no-nonsense Gloria, who always knew just what to say when her little sister needed words of wisdom. At the same time, Gracie felt reluctant to leave Jake’s presence. He’d proven to be so much different than her original assessment.

He wasn’t a heartless privileged son. Jake Peoples was a man who wanted to do the right thing. He wanted to take over his family’s company so he could set the record straight about his own life and to ensure that the business was run fairly. He believed in people, even sometimes to his own detriment. And he would go the extra mile to do the right thing.

They came from different worlds, but she and Jake had a lot in common.

The realization made Gracie smile.

“You look really pretty when you do that, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Smile. It lights up your face. You’re a beautiful woman, Gracie. Especially when you forget to be worried.”

“Oh, Jake, I don’t know about that.”

“You shouldn’t sell yourself short. Surely there’s been another man who’s told you that.”

She lowered her gaze. “Not for a long time.” She’d originally thought David found her attractive, but then discovered he really saw her as some kind of ugly duckling he needed to turn into his own version of a swan.

Jake had brought her to Surfside Beach for a break from the last few days of uncertainty. But more than that, Gracie wanted a break from the years since David, years where she’d guarded her heart and never let anyone close. But why should she trust Jake? He and David both came from the same kind of world—one where people didn’t speak with accents, didn’t wear blue collars, and vacationed in posh resorts of foreign countries—not in the modest neighborhoods of the relatives who worked at those posh resorts.

“Then someone’s missed an incredible opportunity.” His voice lowered, barely audible above the faint stirring of the car’s engine. His green eyes turned a shade darker, like the peel of an almost-ripe avocado. The seriousness of his gaze commanded her attention.

“When I called you this morning, I said I wanted to apologize for putting you in an awkward position last night.”

She needed to jump in and rescue him from saying things that would make them both feel awkward. “Jake, you don’t need to apologize. I—”

“I’m not going to apologize, Gracie.”

“You’re not?” Surely her elevated heart rate must be affecting her hearing.

“Can’t you tell, Gracie? After I told you about the City Council’s upcoming vote, I planned to just write you off. But I couldn’t. And not because of anything extraordinary. Just because of who you are.” He smiled at her with a sincerity that even the nagging whisper in her head couldn’t deny. “You convinced me that not only was your school worth saving but you were worth getting to know better. I hadn’t set foot in a church in almost a decade until last night. I came because of the school you created from nothing. I came because of you.”

“Jake, that’s not because of me, that’s because of God. He puts people and circumstances in our lives for a reason.”

As the words rolled off her tongue, a light clicked on for Gracie as surely as if she had tripped an entire box of breakers.

“What?” Jake tilted his head and stared deeply at her, studying her face. “You look like you have more to say.”

“Well, maybe I just answered my own question. I’ve spent the past few days so worried about the circumstances surrounding you and
El Centro
that I forgot He’s in control.” Gracie could hear the animation coming back into her voice, like the moment in
The Wizard of Oz
when the scene changes from black-and-white to glorious color. “Maybe He’s put you in my life for a reason. Maybe I needed you to show me those new properties, to push me out of my comfort zone and into a new direction. Maybe it’s the start of a new and wonderful chapter for
El Centro.
”

“It certainly could be, Gracie. I don’t know much about God, but I do know the place we found today is a great location for you to both live in and teach. And maybe there’s more. If there’s one thing I’ve learned recently, it’s that good friends are a gift, especially when times are uncertain.”

Jake’s hand rested back on the gearshift. Gracie reached out and covered it lightly with her own.

She couldn’t deny his observation. She worked so much that she had more acquaintances than true friends. But the butterflies fluttering in her stomach seemed more than just friendly.

“Sí. Todos necesitamos amigos.”
She smiled, ready to release the apprehension that had dogged her for days, then remembered she needed to translate. “We all need friends.”

* * *

The three quick raps on the window, each progressively louder, were a calling card Gracie did not want to receive. Even with her back turned toward the window, Gracie knew she’d just been caught.

“Graciela? Is that you?” Gloria’s voice sounded muffled through the glass.

Although technically asking a question, no quizzical inflections punctuated the sentence. Gloria already knew the answer.

Gracie turned around and punched the button to lower the window, wishing she could face any music other than her sister’s.

“Hi, Gloria. How’s your afternoon at the beach?” Gracie tried to keep her voice from taking on the tone of a teenager coming in after curfew.

“Oh, it’s been good. Peaceful. Lots of sun.” She lowered her head and looked straight across the small cabin at Jake. “But walking back to my car, I’ve noticed some storm clouds rolling in.”

The only chill in the early summer air Gracie could sense came from directly outside the passenger door.

“I see.” Gracie didn’t want to discuss this right now, not while she could still remember the closeness she and Jake just shared. “Jake was about to drop me off for a little R&R with you, but since you’re packing up, I guess I’ll just find something else to do.”

“Well,
Mamí
is making fresh tamales tonight for the church fund-raiser tomorrow. She’ll need all the help she can get. Why don’t we all meet at Huarache’s?” Gloria popped her head through the window opening. “I don’t know how it is in your family business, Mr. Peoples, but in ours, we all pitch in. When you’re cooking, you can get distracted easily. If you mess with the recipe, things won’t turn out how you want them to. It’s good to have someone who can keep you from making a mistake.”

Gloria’s raised eyebrows and knowing smile only underscored the true meaning of her carefully chosen words. Gloria had smelled a rat early on in Gracie’s relationship with David. She wanted Gracie to know her radar was on high alert again.

“I’m going home to take a shower and wash this sand off, and I’ll call
Mamí
to let her know what the plans are. See you both around six.” Gloria tapped the car door with the palm of her hand. It reminded Gracie of a judge’s gavel after the verdict. There would be no pleas for leniency, no appeals.

As Gloria walked back to her car, Gracie could only shake her head. “You must think my sister is nuts.”

“Not at all. I think she’s one of the shrewdest negotiators I’ve ever faced. So, it seems we have plans tonight.” Jake rolled up the window from the button on the driver’s side of the truck, then shifted the transmission into gear. “I have a sister, too, you know. She and Gloria could fight for the front-row seat at Overprotective Siblings Anonymous.”

The way Jake took Gloria’s suspicion in stride eased Gracie’s discomfort. “Well, what do you want to do now? It’s only three-thirty.”

“Would you mind if I dropped you off at your place, then came back to get you around five forty-five? I’d planned on reviewing my presentation for the board tonight, and if I’m going to be facing the Garcia family instead, I need to go to the office and get some work done.”

“Sure.” The time would give her the opportunity to compose herself before seeing her parents and Gloria.

Gloria...
Frustration and a little bit of anger mixed in Gracie’s emotional pool. No matter how hard she’d tried not to, in Gloria’s unbending presence, Gracie wound up feeling like a high schooler going to the prom who needed approval to stay out past curfew.

It didn’t take long to drive from Surfside Beach to
El Centro.
Jake pulled to a stop in the small parking lot. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. It’s working out for your school. This will work out, too. Remember what you said earlier?”

“Oh, I remember,” Gracie said as she gave the door handle a gentle tug. “But in our family, we’ve always joked that
Mamí
has God Himself on speed dial. She’s probably giving Him an earful right now.”

“Don’t worry, Gracie. I’ve met plenty of parents before.”

“Maybe so.” She got out of the car. “But were any of them Mexican?”

He shook his head.

She had him there. Experience—and even a law degree—would be no match for a
mamá
from Mexico.

* * *

“Your grandmother has left several messages for you.” Jake’s administrative assistant, Anne, stopped him before he even reached his office.

“Thanks. Did you get my voice mail about the letter of recommendation for Gracie Garcia?” He thumbed through the short stack of pink while-you-were-out messages Anne had thrust into his hand.

“Yes, Jake. I’ve already drafted it and faxed it over to Melissa Miller’s office.”

“Great.” Concentrating on tomorrow’s presentation would come more easily now that he knew Gracie was taken care of.

Jake tossed his laptop bag on the brown leather couch near the office door. He would check on Nana, then get to work. He sat on the other end of the couch and pushed Nana’s speed-dial button on the phone that sat on the nearby end table.

She picked up after only one ring.

“Jake, where have you been?” Her voice did not contain any trace of its usual sunshine.

“Good afternoon, Nana. Is something wrong?”

“I’ve been calling you for hours. Did you turn off your cell phone?”

Jake dug in his pocket. The phone didn’t come to life when he pressed the button. “Looks like the battery died.”

No wonder he’d had such a pleasant afternoon—no distractions. Except for Gracie and her charming smile, that is. How strange that in less than a day’s time, he’d gone from thinking of Gracie as a nuisance—a roadblock to his personally constructed plans—to thinking of her as a friend.

“Well, I’ve been talking to Milton Brashear, and things are not looking good for tomorrow. Sam Pennington has gotten his little group on the board together and he’s finally managed to convince them to vote against you.”

Great. Sam Pennington had been Jake’s father’s best friend. No doubt Sam had been told every story Jake’s father had concocted. With details.

“Nana, I thought you and Milton were working on him.” He’d felt so confident this morning after helping Gracie find a suitable place to move. Once again, he’d tried to save everyone else and forgotten to save himself.

“We tried, Jake. Milton’s had lunch with him three times in the past two weeks. Last week, he said he had concerns, but ultimately felt the company needed to remain headed by someone in the family for stability’s sake in these crazy economic times. Today, he told Milton he’d thought about your father and changed his position.”