tightening his arm around her. There was nothing else he could do; he practically had to hold her up. If he let go she’d probably fall to the floor. He held her tight with one arm, placing his hand against her spine. His other hand, the one with the Colt in it, hung at his side. He clicked the safety into the on position.
He could feel and hear Grace’s breathing return to near normal. She took one deep breath and then another, inhaling slowly, exhaling warmly against his chest. The trembling subsided, but her heart continued to beat against his chest; too hard and fast.
Grace was fragile, feminine and delicate, but she’d never been helpless. It wasn’t like her to fall apart. She was falling apart now, right here, with her head buried against his chest as if she were trying to hide from the world. Still, he found the time to note, again, that she smelled like heaven, that she was soft and sweet and alive. And here.
Suddenly he wished he’d taken the time to step into a pair of jeans, maybe a shirt as he made his way to the door. All he’d grabbed as he left his bed to the jarring ring of the doorbell was his pistol. Standing here practically naked, wearing nothing more than a pair of boxer shorts while he held a woman he’d tried his best for the past six years to forget, was almost more than he could stand. For a moment his mind flitted to impossible notions; about kissing her to calm her nerves, about holding her close long after whatever had scared her into his arms was gone.
And then he noticed the canister of pepper spray in her hand.
“Gracie,” he whispered hoarsely. “What happened?”
She lifted her head, stared warily at him, and stepped back; as if she’d just realized where she rested. “I saw a man murdered,” she said, her voice so soft he could barely make out the words. “The killer, he just…snapped this poor man’s neck like it was nothing.” She swallowed hard and lifted her hands to look at them, as if she couldn’t understand how anyone could have so much strength, or could use their hands in such a way. “He chased me, when he realized that I’d seen what happened. I thought he was going to catch me, so I used the pepper spray, and then I kicked him. Twice.”
“Good girl,” he whispered.
“And then I ran.”
Here, she didn’t say. She didn’t run home, didn’t run to the nearest phone to call the police. She ran here.
“First things first,” he said, gently taking her arm and leading her to the couch. She apparently didn’t need to hang on to him anymore, but he wasn’t sure she was ready to stand on her own, either. Not just yet. As she sat, tense and shaky still, on the edge of the couch, he grabbed the phone and dialed Luther’s home number.
“Did he follow you?”
She shook her head frantically. “No. I didn’t look back for a long time, but when I did…he wasn’t there. Not the man or the car.”
He nodded. “That’s good. Now, where was the murder?” Luther still hadn’t picked up the phone.
“The corner of Magnolia and Lincoln on the park side,” she said. “He just snapped the guy’s neck and let him fall to the sidewalk.” Once again, she numbly stared down at her own hands.
Luther finally answered with a low growl.
“Meet me at the corner of Magnolia and Lincoln,” Ray said curtly.
Luther mumbled into the phone. “When?”
“Now.”
He hung up while Luther complained, profanely, into the phone.
“Luther’s been in the homicide unit for almost two years now,” he said, watching as Grace relaxed until she looked nearly catatonic. He almost preferred the fear. Right now she looked like she could feel nothing, like what she’d seen had numbed her.
But then she turned clear, intelligent eyes to him. Her brown eyes were so dark, so warm, there were moments he wanted to fall into them. He’d always loved her eyes; he’d never told her so.
Sometimes the years melted away. When he said something funny at lunch and she laughed, when they argued about her working for Dr. Doolittle, when she smiled in a certain way or looked at him…the way she looked at him right now. It was, for a moment, as if she’d never left him, as if nothing had changed.
She took a deep breath. “Thank you.”
He shrugged his shoulders as he turned his back on her. Who was he kidding? Everything had changed. “For what? Look, I gotta get dressed. It won’t take Luther more than fifteen minutes to get downtown, and he’ll be pissed if we aren’t waiting for him.”
“Sure,” she said, and then she sank into the soft cushions of the couch.
“Right here,” Grace said, pointing down to a perfectly innocent-looking section of the sidewalk. “A man jumped out of a moving car…at least I guess he jumped. I didn’t see that part. When I first saw him I thought maybe he’d fallen out of the car.”
She noted the skeptical glance Luther cut in Ray’s direction. No longer frightened out of her wits, she was offended by his obvious disbelief.
“What kind of car was it?” Luther asked, holding the tip of a pencil to his small notebook.
“Dark,” she said, “and kind of big.”
Luther glanced up at her and wrote down nothing. “Dark and big. A van or a SUV?”
She shook her head. “No, it was a car.”
Okay, it was a poor description, she admitted silently, but she’d never been good with cars. Darn it, she’d been surprised and terrified. Noting the make and model of the car idling at the curb hadn’t been her major concern at the time.
The weary homicide detective apparently decided it would be a waste of time to write “big dark car” in his notebook, so he snapped it shut and looked around with sharp, narrowed eyes. Light traffic whirred past on the street, and a few early morning walkers claimed the sidewalk. All was apparently perfectly normal here. In bright sunshine, it seemed impossible that a murder had recently taken place in this very spot.
Luther reached into the pocket of his dark suit jacket and pulled out a piece of hard candy, slipped off the cellophane wrapper and popped the sweet into his mouth. “I’m trying to quit smoking,” he explained as he placed the wrapper back into his pocket. “It’s hell. Pure hell, I tell you.”
He looked like hell, to be honest. Tired and haggard and worn out, he showed the years Ray did not. They were the same age, within three months, but today Luther appeared to be several years older. He’d always been the more serious of the two, the cop who took everything to heart, who wanted to right every wrong. Maybe he’d finally figured out that he wasn’t going to change the world after all. Life’s disappointment showed on his face.
Ray hung back while she answered Luther’s questions, but he stayed close enough for her to feel he was with her, that he supported her. Silly notion. She hadn’t leaned on Ray, hadn’t depended on him, for years. The lessons weren’t always easy, and some days they were damned hard, but she had learned to depend only on herself.
“Tell me what the man looked like, the one who was driving the car,” Luther asked as he sucked on his candy.
She did have a better description of the killer than of the car. When she’d turned to attack him with the pepper spray she’d gotten a pretty good look. “He was a big guy, maybe six-two or-three, with kind of a Neanderthal face. Lots of forehead, square jaw.” This Luther deemed noteworthy. “He looked strong,” she added. “Like maybe he works out.”
“Hair?” Luther asked, raising his eyes from the notebook.
“Under a baseball cap, and since I didn’t see much I’d guess it’s pretty short. Brown,” she added. “Not as dark as yours, not as light as Ray’s.”
She described what he’d been wearing, his broad face, his pale eyes—those