Out at Night (2 page)

“And you know the bad guy’s gone because?”

“I have the money and resources to figure things like this out, that’s the because. He’s not getting back into the States, don’t worry.”

“We’re not in the States.” She glanced around the quiet beach and saw a sand crab busily dragging the corpse of a small sea anemone across the sand.

“Still.”

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” Katie crooned. She clasped her small hands together as if she were holding a Mr. Microphone in a karaoke bar. “I just want my daddy.”

“I’m coming, princess.”

Pet names. He’d met Katie face-to-face for the first time exactly twenty-four hours before, and already he had a raft of them. Little dimple toes. Miss periwinkle flippy hair. Sunshine happy girl.

He clambered to his feet and reached for a towel.

“Do you remember that old movie, A Man and a Woman?” Grace twisted the cap back on and tossed the suntan lotion aside.

“I wonder if I should take off my sunglasses.”

“Remember, Anouk Aimée, and she loses her husband, and then she meets this race car driver, and they both have adorable kids and then they all go out to dinner? Or maybe she lost her race car driver husband, and met somebody else, I can’t remember.”

“She’ll probably splash all over them, right?”

“Well, it’s not like that here.”

“What are you talking about?” Without the sunglasses, his eyes were a brilliant green against his skin. He dropped the sunglasses onto the blanket.

“The kids. In that movie. They were there. But somehow in the background. They were present, but didn’t take over the whole thing. The grown-ups still had a nice, normal dinner and they were flirting to beat the band and—”

“So.” Mac shot Grace a swift, evaluating look. “Are you thinking about the dinner or the flirting part?”

“I am hungry.”

He smiled, his teeth very white, and she felt her body flush.

“Daddy.” Katie flung her arms wide.

“I’m coming, sweetie girl,” he called, his eyes still on Grace. “Ten minutes. Then I take you and your mom back to your place so you can get changed for dinner.”

They’d already agreed to that; it was just that he said it with such authority, and she thought about that as she gathered up the blanket and stowed it in the car. What she didn’t want was Mac upsetting the balance she had with her daughter, and it was already too late for that.

He had come over in the morning in his rental—a classier, cleaner car than the cheap one she’d rented before he got there—and picked them up, and now he was driving them back, and it seemed, incrementally, that he was in the driver’s seat a lot. She still wasn’t certain how she felt about that.

From the moment yesterday when Mac had flown in and found them, the life she’d shared for five years with Katie had been over. She’d stepped over a threshold into another world, and it scared her.

What was worse, she had no idea what it was doing to Katie.

Katie had been subdued—shocked—when she’d met him, stealing quick looks up at his face before moving out of reach. Mac had taken it slowly, never pressing, and that, too—his restraint—pressed a guilty place in her heart and made Grace want to run.

That first night, they’d eaten dinner in a small local café, the only outsiders. The wife of the cook served them steaming plates of rice and fish and when Katie yawned as the plates were cleared, the server said in a musical voice over her shoulder as she swayed back to the kitchen, “Looks like it’s time to get your little one home.”

Home.

They were so far from that, all of them. Far from the safety of home. From the idea of it. And Grace feared she’d never find her way back, and that even if she could, she might be returning empty-handed. Losing the one thing that mattered most.

She watched as Mac and Katie came up the beach toward the car, wrapped in damp sandy towels, Katie chattering. There was a warm gusty wind but suddenly Grace felt chilled, the growing tug of distance, separation.

She gripped the side of the window as Mac bumped the car down the narrow rutted road that led to her bed-and-breakfast. They turned a corner and a haphazardly built octagon painted a startling shade of Creamsicle purple appeared, set back in a tangle of undergrowth.

A truck idled in the drive. The back looked like a flimsy covered wagon held together with duct tape. A sunburned man with a nest of red dreadlocks sat hunched in the driver’s seat, talking on an iPhone. He clicked it off and sat up and eased out of the truck as Grace and Mac got out of the car. Mac was taller and bigger through the shoulders but the other guy was younger. He smiled.

Grace made a sound. “He’s back. That’s my landlady’s son. Clint. He likes to stop by unannounced.” She reached into the backseat to help Katie out.

“Swell,” Mac said. “And he has the key, right?”

“Actually the door doesn’t lock.” Grace unsnapped Katie’s seat belt and she scrambled free.

“Ah.” Mac nodded.

Clint plodded over and pulled a crinkled envelope out of the pocket of his board shorts. The flap had been opened and resealed with a piece of cloudy Scotch tape.

“Here.”

She ripped the envelope open and pulled out the single sheet, scanning it.

“Is that who I think it is?” Clint’s voice had a lilt to it, as if he’d had a couple extra beers and couldn’t quite shape the hard vowels anymore.

She glanced up.

Clint was staring at Mac.

“No, Clint, you’re getting them mixed up.” She refolded the letter and put it in the pocket of her cover-up. “The other guy’s better-looking and works for FOX.”

Clint frowned and brightened. “Oh, I get it. A joke. Very funny.”

Mac touched her arm. “Okay?”

She knew he was talking about the letter. She shrugged. “Why don’t you ask him, he’s already read it.”

Clint ignored her, hitched up his board shorts and padded over to a twisted tree that stood in the yard.

“It’s from my uncle Pete,” she said to Mac. “Wants me to call him. Said it’s business. He works for the FBI in Palm Springs. Whatever it is, it can wait.”

“I didn’t know you had an uncle in the FBI.”

“He’s not even a blip on my radar, Mac. We haven’t talked in years.”

“Forgot to tell you, Grace, about this tree.” Clint cleared his throat importantly. “Katie, this is important for you, too.”

Katie started to trot forward and Mac shot out an easy hand and stopped her.

Black sap oozed from creases in the bark. Clint scooped a finger of sap and held it out. “See this sap? Don’t touch it. It’s called a poisonwood tree, because that’s what it is.”

“Poison?” Katie cried. Grace instinctively reached for her but Mac was there first. He rested his palm on Katie’s curls.

“Yes, Katie, it can kill you.” Clint leaned on the word kill like it was a horn. “Some people are immune, like me.” He wiped the sap onto his board shorts and left a trail. “But no worries! It stands next to this tree.” He patted an ashy colored tree with flaking bark. “It’s the antidote. I haven’t figured out how to use it yet, but it’s here, if you need it.”

“Ah,” Mac said again.

A black snout poked through the slats of the truck, followed by a second, more massive head.

“Oh, and don’t worry about those guys.” Clint gestured grandly to the dogs. He walked down the path toward the front door of the B-and-B. “They only attack if they smell fear.”

He pushed open the door. “Got anything to drink?”

“Okay,” Mac said. “We’re done.”

Half an hour later, Mac moved them. He turned in both cars, took them by water taxi to Harbor Island five minutes away, and relocated them to the Pink Sands Hotel, owned by the man who started Island Records. Now they stood in the living room of a villa.

Katie dropped her backpack, her eyes wide. “Wow. It’s got flatscreen.”

“And movies, Katie. I can rent whatever you want.”

Katie flung her arms around Mac’s legs and Grace looked away. The windows and French doors opened onto a patio that faced a three-mile pink-sand beach dotted with lavender beach umbrellas, sand as soft as corn silk, the water a turquoise that slid into mauve at the horizon.

“Come on, I’ll show you where you’ll sleep.”

Katie took his hand and skipped beside him and Grace trailed behind, the sherpa hauling suitcases. It occurred to Grace that Mac already knew where the bedrooms were.

“Here’s where you and your mom can stay.” The room held two queen-sized beds with a view of the beach. “My room’s on the other side, and the bathrooms are in between. Want to see?”

Katie nodded, her eyes round.

“I’ll wait,” Grace said. Mac shot her that look again and she flushed.

That night they ate in the hotel dining room at a small table covered in brocade, next to a plaster wall of vivid pinks and oranges, wooden mermaids hanging in the archway. Katie sat next to Mac and insisted he cut her chicken, and he bent over it as if it were a sacrament. Nobody bothered them.

Clemens, the manager, explained that their villa had housed kings and queens, heads of business and Hollywood royalty, and that one of the hallmarks of the place was the other guests’ exquisite ability to leave those whose faces were familiar alone.

That, and the staff’s attention to detail, anticipating every need and silently meeting it.

It was as if the ground were slipping, but it was quality ground, a finer silt than Grace was used to. Even the towels she used to dry Katie after her bath felt better. Fluffier. Softer. Whiter. Part of Grace loved being taken care of. And part of her feared it. But Katie seemed to be slipping into this life with Mac effortlessly—and that, too, scared her.

She’d been alone for so long, making every decision about Katie, and now here was a man—her man, he’d been, a long time ago—reverently embracing his role as dad. Daddy. The big guy. Mr. Right who could do no wrong. At least not in Katie’s eyes. Part of her wanted to yell, Hold it! Wait! Who’s the parent here, anyway? Not wanting to hear the answer.

Some uneasy thing tremored under the surface and Grace knew what it was.

Sometime soon, Katie would look her right in the eye and ask out loud why Grace had lied to her about her dad. Lied about the most important thing in Katie’s life.

And Grace didn’t have a good answer.

She doubted she ever would.

___

“How do you want to handle this?” They were sitting on lounge chairs on the patio. From the bedroom, Katie murmured in her sleep.

Mac reached across the dark expanse and took Grace’s hand, his fingers warm, touch solid.

Past the railing and down the terraced walks, waves foamed whitely against the dark expanse of sand. Landscaping lights illuminated the palm trees and Grace saw a man and woman wading along the edge of the waves, holding hands in the growing dark.

The setting sun was turning the water a soft pink that glowed as if it were lit from within, and the air was heavy with the scent of hibiscus and the sea.

“We have to take it slow,” Grace said.

And then she got up and sat down next to him on his lounge chair, placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him. He kissed her back, and pulled her on top of him. The rush was instantaneous, greedy, joyous, drugged with heat and desire. He rolled to his feet, picked her up, and carried her to his bed.

The clothes came off, and she wished again she’d packed better underwear, but who knew that instead of playing four rounds of Candyland she’d be sliding her hands over a man voted by People magazine as one of the top 100 sexiest men in America?

Last year’s list, she reminded herself. Although he still looked pretty good. His chest gleamed with a fine sheen of sweat. He shifted and she felt him against her. Liquid fire.

“Oh, brother,” she said. “Oh, oh, brother.”

She rolled away and wrapped a sheet around her. She took a long shaky breath. She rolled back toward him and put her hands on the flat of his chest. His skin burned the palms of her hands and that close, his eyes were heavy-lidded, his gaze intense.

“Grace.” He kissed her shoulder blade, the hollow in her throat where her heart was beating. “Talk to me.”

“It means too much.” Her voice was quiet. “If we made love and it didn’t work—and it would be making love, Mac, not just the physical part, what it means.”

He slid his hand under the sheet and cupped a breast and she sucked in a breath, almost in a panic, her body flooded with warmth.

He removed his hand with effort. He was breathing through his mouth. He had a nick on an incisor. He’d chipped it as a kid using his teeth to cut a fishing line. She was doomed. She already knew how he’d gotten all his childhood injuries. His knees touched her shins and shifted away.

He regarded her, loss and desire on his face. “What do you want, Grace?”

Her eyes filled. She felt his breath, soft, on her face. He searched her eyes. All the bones in her body seemed to soften; she was warm wax in his hands.

“For the last five years to go away. Not the part with Katie. The part without you.”

He shifted onto his back and stared at the ceiling. In the moonlight, his eyes glowed bright. “But see,” his voice was low. “That’s just it, Grace. That was the part without Katie. For me. That was the part.”

She couldn’t breathe. Her throat closed. The night air felt heavy against her face. She had done this, she had done this. And there was no fixing it.

She rolled away from him with effort and slid free of the sheets. She stood. Her legs trembled. Their clothes lay in a jumbled trail across the Saltillo tile floor and she took a shambling step.

“You bolt at the first sign of trouble.” There was no accusation in his voice; it was as if he were tracking the beats of a song, figuring out its rhythm. She realized her heart hurt.

“I bolt.” The floor was cold. She found her T-shirt and put it on. She needed underpants. She needed distance. She needed to remember to take her birth control pills.

“It’s as if you’re there one moment, and then you flip a switch and you’re gone. I don’t want you to go.”

Mac flung off the covers and stood. The heat between them was old, and raw and real. She looked away, but not before she’d seen that he’d seen it, too, in her eyes, on her face.