Page 111 of Guilty as Sin
Something was happening in her stomach. She was either happy or nauseated. One or the other. “Sausalito. North of the city, across the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“Sausalito. How far is that from your station?”
“Twenty minutes. Half an hour. Depending on traffic. Really? You’d… you’d do that?”
He pulled out his phone. “I saw this one. While I was waiting in the queue at the airport.” He looked up, his eyes shining blue. “Nearly missed the flight. But then, I’ve always been a lucky fella.” Then he was clicking around and showing her. “End of the pier. Got a view of the mountains. Or hills, more like. What are these?”
She looked. “Marin County. Hills. It’s… that’snice.”
He nodded. “Hills. And water. I need a view, you see, to write. I don’t need many things. A laptop. Tobias. Coffee. And maybe you. But I do need to look out at something that isn’t manmade. The sea works.”
A houseboat. Jace. And Tobias. In another minute, she reallywasgoing to need that oxygen mask. “I should tell you, though,” she said. “I don’t think I’m good at being in love.”
“Luckily,” he said, “I find I am. At least I seem to know how to do it. Could be I’m a natural. And what do you mean, you’re not good at it? Who was that standing over Charlotte last night, telling her, ‘I have a shotgun. Move and I’ll blow your head off?’”
She was going to laugh. The most dramatic moment of her life, and she was going to laugh and wreck it. “That’s not what I mean. That’s not the way people are in love.”
“Says who? It worked for me.”
He went to put his phone away, and she said, “Wait. Let me look. Oh. That iscool.”
“Well, I thought so. I was a little proud of thinking of it, to tell you the truth. You don’t have to live there with me. If you need to go slow, you do. I just thought one of us had better have the guts to give this a go. Could be I’ll even be able to drag you along. If not? I’ll know I did my best. You want to know my philosophy of life, since you’ve told me yours? The ‘every minute counts’ thing?”
“Yes.” That bubble of laughter was trying to rise again.
He seemed to know exactly how she was feeling, because those lines around his eyes deepened with the smile he was holding back. “Do your best. There you are. My philosophy. So here I am. I’m doing it. If I fail, I fail. But meanwhile—I’ll be here doing my best. What do you think? Want to give it a go with me?”
“Yes,” she said. Shedidlaugh, then, and he smiled right back at her. Tough, bearded face, black hair, blue eyes. Scars and muscle and sinew, and something more. A tender heart that beat just for her. “Yes. I think I could give it a go. I think I could. And… Jace.”
“Yeah?”
His hand finally took hers, and she clasped it, held onto him, and said it. “Thank you for coming after me. I’m scared, but I’m going to try. I’m going to put it on the line and try my best. Because it counts. Because I love you. And you’re worth the risk.”
Ten months later
The end of March, and it was rainy in San Francisco. Paige should have been patrolling in the downpour. Instead, the temperature outside hovered right at eighty degrees, and she was getting dressed for the day in about the most beautiful house she’d ever seen. There were worse things in the world than a long, low house on a private white-sand beach in north Queensland, with a curved infinity pool flowing over the edge of nothing, lush strands of hot-pink bougainvillea climbing stone walls, green palms waving in the summer breeze, and an endless turquoise sea beyond dotted with white sails. Not to mention a motor launch moored at a private dock in case you managed to rouse yourself enough to do some snorkeling. Jace was normally a low-key guy, but this time, he’d pulled out all the stops.
She should still be nervous. Shehadbeen nervous when she and Lily had been flying all the way to Australia with Jace, and she’d known she was going to have to meet his whole family. He hadn’t taken her to meet his parents at Christmas, because they hadn’t had enough time. Instead, the two of them had spent the holiday at the Montana cabin. They’d cooked and eaten Christmas dinner with Lily, and Jace had seemed happy to share the day with her twin.
“I don’t know,” Paige had said lazily on Christmas night, stretching out after dinner on the new leather couch with her legs draped over Jace’s lap and Tobias curled on the rug beneath them. They should be playing a board game or something, but she seemed to want to go to sleep instead. “Maybe I’m feeling queasy because there are still scary people in Sinful, but I think it’s just that I ate too much ham. And whatever that white thing was.”
“Bite your tongue,” Jace said. “I told you, that’s not a ‘white thing’. That’s a pavlova. Of course, it’s meant to be eaten forsummerChristmas, when the strawberries would be sweeter. But a pav’s a pav all the same.”
Lily said from her spot curled up in the easy chair, “Not that many scary people here, not anymore, now that Charlotte’s in that facility. You have to feel sorry for her today. What must her Christmas be looking like? It has to be a prison in itself, being locked into your mind when it works that way. The personality disorder sounds horrible enough, but I can’t imagine having hallucinations, something you absolutely can’t control telling you that you have to hurt people. Terrifying. When I think of her holed up with her sleeping bag in that freezing-cold ski cabin with no power and no water, looking down at Jace’s house with her binoculars and all thatanger—” She shivered. “Awful.”
“Mm,” Paige said. “I find I can’t be quite so sympathetic. I’ll let you do it for me, how’s that? Since you’ve got the pink aura and all.”
“I think yours is getting pinker, though,” Lily answered. “And I know we still have some bee killers around, but I don’t have bees anymore, so I’m not worrying.”
“Chicken killers, too,” Paige said. Jennifer Turner and her husband hadn’t left town after the beehive escapade, choosing to keep their gym and ride out the wave of bad publicity after their nocturnal activities had become known.
Lily said, cynically for her, “Chicken releasers, that’s all. Nobody thinks what they did was all that awful, since Charlotte did all the violent parts. All they did was jump in there when they heard Jace had a stalker, and he started being seen with me. Nobody would even have known that Charlotte wasn’t responsible for the chickens and bees if you and Jace hadn’t caught Jennifer and Hal in the act. A lot of people probably thought I deserved it, and those that didn’t? Half of them have probably joined the gym just to check out all the excitement. Besides, when the new resort opens next winter, Jennifer and Hal will be in a great spot. They probably still think Brett is going to lease them the space for their spa, because they imagine he’s good-natured enough to overlook a tiny little lapse like a brick slipping out of somebody’s hand and going through a window. Like, ‘Whoops! How didthathappen?’ They don’t see what’s underneath his smile. He didn’t get where he is by being stupid.”
“Interesting,” Jace said. “So are we getting the rice ready?”
Lily only smiled. “I can like him. That doesn’t mean I have to marry him. I don’t have to date him, either. I’ll just be Paige’s cheering section.”
Paige wanted to say something, but she didn’t. Lily had been exactly right all those months earlier. Being with the wrong person was worse than being alone. Being with therightperson, though? That was something entirely different. Especially when he didn’t always want to talk, but he always wanted to cook. And go for a run in the redwoods on Mt. Tam with her on her days off, and teach her to sail. There was nothing so exhilarating, she’d discovered, as a fast, bumpy ride through the Golden Gate with the boat heeled all the way over to one side, feeling like you were about to capsize but knowing that it actually wasn’t going to happen, because Jace knew how to ride that edge all the way to the limit without the needle ever dipping into the red. Safe but thrilling. It was a fairly wonderful concept, and not just in the bedroom. It was pretty good in the bedroom, too, though. Every fantasy you’d ever wanted to explore, with none of the scary downside, like adventure camp for grown-ups. You didn’t get much better than that.
