Page 11 of Two Hearts
They moved around, and other people began dancing, too.But when the dance ended, she didn’t step out of Jack’s arms.She seemed content to stay where she was.
“Gracie?”
“Hmm?”
He smiled, he couldn’t help it.“Hon, our song’s over.And there are about fifty guys waiting in line for the next dance.”
Right on cue, some reed-thin, peach-fuzz-faced frat boy tapped Jack on the shoulder.“Don’t forget, Gracie, you promised me a dance, too.”
Gracie smiled at him, took a step and then stumbled against Jack’s chest.An event that sent bolts of heat sizzling through him and startled him at the same time.“Ow!”
Jack closed his hands on Grace’s shoulders to hold her up and searched her face.“You okay?”
“Oh, darn,” she said.“My ankle!Not tonight of all nights!”Several heads turned in their direction as Jack’s innocent dance partner leaned on him, holding up one foot.“I’m sorry, Greg,” she told the punk.“I was so looking forward to that dance, too.”Then she looked at Jack again, putting her back to the guy as if he’d been dismissed and no longer existed.“Help me to a chair, would you, Jack?”
People crowded closer, one of them handing Grace an ice pack, but Jack barely saw them.He couldn’t take his eyes off Grace, and he saw the playful gleam lingering in hers.
That might have been the moment he fell in love.Right then.That playful little prank that seemed so out of character.He scooped her right up off her feet, carried her to a chair and then sat in the one beside her.She propped her injured ankle across his legs and asked him to hold an ice pack on it for her.
Of course, he happily obliged.
Eventually, wounded-looking suitors faded away and stopped with their wimpy questions.And when Jack could speak for her ears alone, he said, “So, you want to tell me what this was all about?”
“I didn’t want to dance with any of them, Jack.What would have been the point?”
His throat went dry, and a little flame of panic—and something else—started licking at his belly.
Jack let the ice pack slide to the floor.The only thing on her cool wet skin now was his hand, rubbing slowly, massaging a nonexistent injury.He wanted to slide off her shoe and caress her foot, her toes.He wanted to run his hand farther up her leg, feel the curve of her calf and the power of her thigh.And he thought she knew it.The way her eyes clung to his, and the dancing heat he saw in those blue depths—the little catch in her breathing told him as much.
He didn’t know how long they’d been sitting there when she said, “We’ve got some awfully impressive gardens out back.”And her voice was the barest whisper.
“I’d dearly love to go out there and see them,” Jack said, his voice equally raspy.
She looked a little afraid but mostly excited as she lowered her foot to the floor, got to her feet and, taking Jack’s hand, limped to the patio doors.
CHAPTER 4
Jack walked with her onto the patio, where some of the party guests milled around, sipping drinks from cut-crystal glasses.Grace leaned on him, but she was the one leading the way.They moved slowly to the farthest corner from the house, and down the steps to the ground below.The beautiful people glanced their way, but no one made comment.This was the golden child of Harrison Phelps and one of the men from his group of chosen ones.At least, that must be how it appeared to them.So what could they say?
They took a path lined in white gravel, and the moment they were out of sight, Grace’s mysterious limp vanished.She stopped leaning on him and walked easily, sending him a mischievous smile.
“You never fooled me for a minute, you know,” he said, his voice low, his body at odds with his mind.Hell, he knew she was too good for any kind of fling, and he also knew anything more was impossible.She wasn’t cut out to be a cop’s wife.Hell, they’d had seminars on this kind of stuff.The divorce rate, the depression rate, the suicide rate.But Jack didn’t need seminars.His father had been a cop.And he’d watched the stress and the strain of that reality slowly wear away at his mother, making her old, making her hard long before her time.And his mother had been tough.Strong, cut from burlap…not silk, like Grace Phelps.
Yet, here was Grace, looking up at him with eyes bluer than the sky…waiting for him to…kiss her.
Yeah.That was it, no doubt.She’d stopped walking, and was leaning now with her back against a flowering apple tree, all in blossom.The smell of the flowers was intoxicating and heavy and sweet.Little paper petals of white with a touch of pink tinting them at the edges.Growing in bunches, and raining down like confetti every time one of them moved.
And Jack thought for the thousandth time that he was only human.So he leaned in, and he kissed her.She slid her arms around his neck, and she kissed him back.And he fought with everything in him to keep it sweet and tender.No tongue, no grinding of hips, though damn, how he wanted to add those elements.She wasn’t like that, though.She was crystal glasses and he was paper cups.She was as pristine and delicate as one of the petals that drifted to the ground around them.Still, her body pressed to his, and his to hers, and his arms held her tight, and he kissed her long and slow amid a shower of apple blossom petals.
And it was just like magic.
* * *
A month later Jack sat in the Five-Alarm Diner on Main, across from his partner of more than a decade, and he broke the news.
“What do you mean, you’re quitting?”JW sat there looking at him as if he’d grown a second head.
“Look, I can’t start out married life with a lie this big hanging between us.I just can’t.”
