Page 86 of Guilty as Sin
He kissed her forehead, but kept his hand working the muscles that had tensed again under the burden of her pain. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It is. Everybody gets to be somebody’s baby sometimes. Seems you were meant to be mine.”
When he was winding his way down through the foothills to Kalispell, the night drawing in around the truck, the headlights showing him the way, he thought a few things.
First thing.Tobias is with her. The alarm’s set, and if it’s tripped, it doesn’t just go to the cops. It goes to me, too.He trusted his reaction time, and he’d bet he could trust Paige’s. But he trusted Tobias’s more than either one.
Second thing.You’re in too deep, mate.The water was closing in over his head, and he was going down fast. Tonight being a sterling example. Drifting off to sleep with her thigh under his hand, his thumb resting in the indentation that was proof of her courage and her determination, hearing her soft breathing and the trust in the body that curled toward him in sleep. Thinking about a woman crawling toward her fallen partner, leaving her blood on the pavement, intent only on getting him to safety. A woman ignoring her own wounds, her own pain, telling that man that she had him, and that she’d stay.
A woman, her badge and her service weapon locked in a drawer, banished from the job she’d sacrificed so much for, feeling every bit of her failure, deciding that the most important thing to do now was to help her sister, no matter what it cost her.
A woman with every bit of strength he’d ever fostered in himself. He knew exactly what that journey looked like, because he’d taken every step of it himself. People called it “the hard way,” but they didn’t know. They couldn’t see that every piece of it was born of weakness and pain, and the struggle to overcome it.
You built a muscle by tearing it into a thousand tiny places first and letting it heal stronger, and you built courage in exactly the same way. Every fight left its mark, like an oyster forming a pearl one hard-earned layer at a time. Until it was strong. Until it was beautiful.
As for what he was doing now? Putting himself and his battle-weary heart on the line one more time, knowing that this could be the hardest blow he’d taken yet?
That was the other problem. When you were built this way, you had no choice.
Jace was early. That was usually a better plan. Gave you a chance to evaluate the situation. He leaned against a wall in the echoing, nearly deserted Kalispell Airport and watched the status indicator change overhead.
On Time.
On Approach.
Landed.
Five minutes. Ten. And a weary straggle of after-midnight passengers coming through the gate, headed out the glass doors to the parking lot or over to baggage claim. One more stop, and then home and to bed.
He didn’t even pick her out at first. Clunky athletic shoes, jeans that were nothing in the world like “trendy,” a blue-checked flannel shirt hanging loose over them, and a khaki baseball cap pulled low over stubby blonde plaits.
The cap didn’t even match the shirt.
She didn’t look around, just made for the baggage carousel with the crowd. They didn’t need a meeting here that anybody might notice and comment on later, so Jace stepped out of the terminal and did the rest of his waiting with the sole of one boot planted against the concrete wall, gazing at a nearly empty curbside and a couple of hopeful taxis, and kept wide awake by the midnight-cool air here at the base of the Rockies.
She came out pulling a single medium-sized suitcase. Black. He pushed off the wall, still keeping it quiet, and said, “Lily.”
She whirled, dropped the handle of the suitcase so it banged to the pavement behind her, and lifted a hand to her heart. “Oh,” she said on a gasp. “You scared me.”
“I see that.” He picked up the suitcase and said, “We won’t hang about. Probably best.”
“How’s Paige?” she asked. Instantly, the same way her sister would have.
“Doing well. No worries. Wait until we’re at the truck, though.”
Paige would have argued, or at least have looked like she wanted to. Lily didn’t. It wasn’t far, and he tossed the case into the bed of the ute, opened her door, and watched her climb into it. Looking everything like Paige, and nothing like her. How did a woman climb into a truck in a feminine way? He couldn’t have said, but however it was, that was how she did it, unfashionable jeans or no.
When he’d started the engine and had the doors locked, he said, “Your sister’s good. I left her asleep in your bed.”
“Thank you,” she said. “For coming to get me, and for helping her. I never would have let her switch with me if I’d thought this would happen. Never. It’s not worth it. It was never worth it.”
“And if she’d known it would happen,” he said, pulling out onto the road and starting north with no company but the streetlights, “she’d never have done anything else.”
“Oh.” He could feel her gaze on him. As keen as Paige’s, but looking somewhere completely different. “You know that.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t say anything else, because he didn’t know her, however familiar her face was.
“I was worried once I got to the gate in San Francisco,” she chose to say next, “that somebody from Montana would know me on the flight, but nobody did. It’s a big state.”
“The ugly clothes worked as well,” he said. “I had to look twice.”
