a Touch of the Past (An Everly Gray Adventure) (5 page)

He tucked my cell in his front pants pocket.

I leaned toward him, one foot braced on the edge of the tub for balance, and l reached for it. No way was he confiscating my phone. Not when it stored secrets. Like my call to Annie. Or was that a secret?
 

His eyebrows hiked up a notch. "There’s more in that pocket than you can handle, Everly Gray."

Anger simmered, stung the back of my throat, and my arm moved into a Hapkido position.

Pierce’s lips twitched in an almost-smile. "Not the time or place to practice your new defense techniques."

The attendant chose that moment to sidle up to him with a frosty glass of pale liquid that was topped with a sprig of mint. Reality snapped into focus. Fight Pierce? A totally insane move. It’d be a hell of a lot smarter to steal my phone from him when he was in the shower. Or sleeping. Anything but hand-to-hand combat.

My anger slipped into determination as I settled both feet back into the fragrant water, and jiggled my toes, releasing the sweet scent of jasmine. Might as well enjoy the pedi while I worked on a plan to lure Pierce into a less vigilant behavior pattern so I could retrieve my phone without unnecessary complications.
 

The attendant stepped between his chair and mine. Ice cubes clinked against glass as she arranged a slip of paper on the bamboo tray. "Sign here, please, Miss. Gray."
 

I picked up the pen and glanced at the…not a bill. A folded sheet of heavy linen paper rested on the tray—my Hawaiian name scrawled across the surface in a shaky script. I glanced at the attendant. She blinked, shifting slightly to better hide my movements from Pierce. I slipped the note into my pocket, and quickly scribbled
thanks
on the thin sheet of paper that lined the serving tray.
 

The awareness of the note weighed heavy against my thigh and held my complete attention, even during the foot massage. I decided to slip into the ladies' room between my pedicure and manicure to read the secret missive.
 

Maybe.

Pierce would probably follow me in there too. Absolutely
nothing
embarrassed him. Besides, it wasn’t a good time to antagonize him—not with his feet in a tub of water and barely constrained impatience rolling off him in waves.

His pedicure was finished before mine.
 

No polish.
 

He leaned against the wall, arms crossed, jaw clenched, my phone a distinct rectangular outline in his front pocket.
 

"Bathroom," I said, turning away from him.
 

He followed, stepped in front of me, rapped on the door and looked around. Yes! I slid my fingers into his pocket and nabbed my phone, but he caught my wrist before I pulled it free.
 

"No pictures. Not ever." The shadows behind his eyes left an ache in my chest.
 

"No one knows what you look like. Is that it? There can’t be any links between your name and your face?"

He nodded, dropping my wrist, and then he slid his hands down my body. Heat shot through my veins, and fear trapped my breath somewhere between my belly and my lungs. The note crackled as he pressed the paper against my thigh.
 

"Let’s see it," he said, flicking his finger against my pocket, making the note crackle again. I pulled it out, opened it and read the few words that were written in pale blue ink.
 

Your grandmother is here.
 

It was followed by an address.
 

I offered the note to Pierce, confused. "No one knows I’m in this hotel getting my nails done. Well, except you, and the government."
 

He took the note from my limp fingers. "There’s a complex underground in Hawaii," he said, reading. "Let’s go."
 

"Nails first," I said, tossing the words over my shoulder as I pushed through the door into the ladies’ room. Normally, I’d have been hailing a cab instead of getting a manicure, but I needed time to plan before blindly following directions from a secret note. It was too easy, and my grandmother’s life could be at stake. The way the note was delivered told me I was supposed to go alone, but there wasn’t a chance in hell Pierce would let me out of his sight.
 

"The underground?" I asked him when I came out of the bathroom. "Is that why they assigned you to this detail? Because you know how to work within the internal structure?"

"Partly. I had the required skill set, so requested the assignment." A shiver of finality hitched on Pierce’s last word that told me the topic was permanently closed.

When we left the spa forty-five minutes later, I had a French manicure and pale pink toenails. The technician who worked on my hands was young and without much personal baggage, so I didn’t have to sweat through any negative images. I rarely had manicures—for obvious reasons—but it was worth the possible bombardment of horrid images to keep Pierce off guard.
 

When we got back to our rooms, I set my handbag and the note on the desk and opened my closet, trying to decide if I should change for our expedition. "Do I need different clothes for this?"

Pierce snatched the letter off the desk, gripped my arm, and steered me toward the door.
 

"Guess not," I said, making a grab for my handbag as he marched me out of the room.
 

He’d called for a rental car while my fingernails were drying, and by the time we reached the front door of the Ma Kai, the valet had it parked by the entrance.

He’d rented a Porsche. A dark blue Boxster with the top down. I took one look at it and reached for both a scrunchie and a clip. The valet barely had me settled in the passenger side before Pierce peeled out of the
porte cochere
.
 

"Hey," I snapped. "It’s
my
grandmother. How about you chill?"
 

He shot me a look. "The price on her head doesn’t give us a lot of time."
 

Five

A chill slapped the base
of my neck and catapulted down my spine. "Did you say the price on her head?"
 

He nodded, his jaw set.
 

"That’s not possible." Fear hit my chest, hard and sharp. I curled around the pain, and rubbed the diamond nestled in my navel. There was nothing wrong with hoping for a bit of Irish luck.
 

Pierce reached over the console and squeezed my hand. "Your grandmother is a valuable commodity."
 

I shook my head. "No. I read the papers. I get that the government thinks she has…had, access to my…" I stopped, needing a minute to wrap my mind around the possibility that my mother was involved in potential criminal activity.

Pierce focused on me, his gaze intense.

"You’re driving." I pointed to the road. "I’d like to live long enough to meet my grandmother and get to know her. Maybe take her to lunch and try to make up for the years she's spent in hiding. Oh, damn. She might not know her daughter was killed."
 

 
An uncomfortable foreboding lingered in the back of my thoughts. What if I had to be the one to tell her?
 

Pierce tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. What had I been saying? Oh, yeah. "I know the government thinks my grandmother has Mom’s—" I dragged in a breath— "has Loyria Gray’s notes and formulas, may even be protecting her in some way. But it’s been years. Someone would have found her by now, would have done whatever it took to get that information, so she must not know anything."
 

Cold crept deep into my bones. I had to remember that Loyria Gray was more than my mother, and that I needed to distance myself from our relationship until I had some answers. Less emotion would help to keep my brain sharp.

Pierce turned his attention back to the road. "Your grandmother has been well-hidden."
 

My stomach landed somewhere around my feet. "Until I started to look for her, you mean?"
 

He nodded. "Yeah. That opened a secondary investigation."
 

"You’re saying I put her in danger." It took a minute to process the words hanging between us. Guilt and shock swept through me.

 
"Stop the car," I yelled, reaching for the door handle.
 

A distinct
fuck
colored the air as the latch released under my fingers. Pierce skidded to a stop on the side of the road, slammed the car into park, and grabbed my shoulders. "You were a child when Loyria Gray set this in motion, and you can’t stop it." He gave me a hard shake.
 

I wrenched free of his hold, fighting the nausea churning in my gut. "I can go back to North Carolina."
 

"No. You can’t."
 

"Yes—" I nodded my head vigorously— "of course I can. This whole mess can disappear. Go back to the way it was. To the way my mother left it."
 

Pierce ducked his head. "It was too late for that the minute you booked your flight." Calm, monotone—his voice was a direct contrast to the horror washing through me.
 

 
I was responsible for putting my grandmother in danger. My only living relative, and her life was at risk because of me. It was too much. I couldn’t squeeze a breath into my lungs.
 

Pierce dragged me across the console, hauling me onto his lap. No mean feat in a Boxster. He crushed me against his chest and held on until I stopped struggling.
 

By the time I was able to inhale a full breath, I realized he was right. There would be no turning back. I had to take responsibility for what I’d done and focus on not making any more unknowing mistakes. Not with my grandmother’s life. I needed to protect her no matter what the cost.

I pushed away from Pierce, the steering wheel jabbing into my back. "You’re telling me I triggered more than our government’s interest. Terrorists? Are we talking terrorists here?"
 

He nodded. Once.

"No, can't be," I said emphatically, crawling back into the passenger seat. "It’s hard to believe our government watched me that closely, much less other governments. It’s simply not possible. This sort of thing happens in action movies, or maybe computer games, not in real life."

Pierce cleared his throat with a frustrated growl.

"I’m nobody. Totally not important enough to snag anyone’s radar." I desperately needed him to agree with me, preferably with encouraging words rather than a garbled snarl.
 

Silence hung heavy. He slid his sunglasses down his nose and focused on me. "They don’t send me out unless there’s a good reason."
 

 
"Go," I said, waving my hand at the road ahead of us. It was up to me to prove this was all a mistake. I
would
protect my grandmother. Somehow.
 

It took us over an hour to find her neighborhood—and that was with GPS. Turned out that Hawaiian country roads were sporadically marked and definitely weren’t kept up by the highway department. Probably had something to do with the rapid growth of vegetation in the tropics.
 

I grabbed for the dash as bounced over a deep rut in the dirt road. "You should have gotten a Jeep."
 

He shot me a look. "Right, and exactly what I asked for."

"So how come—?"
 

"Unrequested upgrade." He snapped the words out. "I’ll fix it when we get back."
 

I pointed to a hand-painted post stuck in the ground next to a narrow path. "There. The address on that sign is only a few numbers off from my grandmother’s. Where exactly are we, anyway?"
 

"North Shore. Big waves. Surfer’s paradise." Pierce slowed, and we both scanned potential driveways, all marked with faded, hand-painted signs. The air was heavy with afternoon humidity, and the tension rolling off Pierce was strong enough to push me toward the passenger door.

"What’s wrong?" I asked, pulling the scrunchie out of my hair so I could redo the straggling curls into a tight knot at the base of my neck. I turned to look behind us. Nothing. No cars. No people.
 

His eyes darted from side to side as he scanned the area around us. "Her house isn’t here."

 
I nodded toward a cutoff up ahead, and slightly to the right of us. "Looks like there's a side road between those bushes, and the house numbers are wonky here, so it could be up there.

The neighborhood was a mish-mash of pristine, elegant homes nestled alongside places in such disrepair I couldn’t imagine anyone living in them.

Pierce turned onto the road I’d indicated and followed it, bumping through potholes and over small mounds of dirt for a couple of miles before pulling to a stop in front of a dilapidated wooden structure.

"You think this was a house?" I tried to rebuild it in my mind, to get a feel for how it must have looked when it was new.