Chapter Text
The first thing he notices isn’t even really an awareness, like sight or sound or smell. It’s more like a shift in the air. Something’s not right. Or, there’s something present that’s been affected by something that’s not right.
Really that’s not fair either, because probably his horse notices it before he does, and probably he’s reacting more to her awareness than anything. He’s been a bit distracted, to be honest. The new horse is a big pain in Steve’s ass. Literally as well as figuratively. (He’s never been thrown so much in his life.) If Hal’s owners weren’t so set on having him rideable again, if it didn’t mean so much to them (and okay, if they weren’t willing to pay so much money), Steve would have given up long ago and just let him run wild. It seems like that’s where he belongs anyway.
Point being, Darla is Steve’s best trail horse, and he’s been letting her do all the work while he sulks and feels sorry for himself and tries to pretend he’s thinking of what methods he hasn’t tried yet on the problem stallion.
So it’s a good thing Darla is as astute and paying attention as she is, because Steve thinks otherwise he might have trod on the girl before he’d seen her lying there in the grass.
He leaps out of the saddle and is at her side before he can even call out. She’s hit her head, and blacked out, but he doesn’t think it’s too bad. Maybe she’s broken something, it’s hard to tell through her padded riding gear—which is at odds with the lack of riding helmet, which would have prevented the decent sized gash on the side of her head. He tears off a strip from the hem of his tee and presses it into the wound, but the bleeding is mostly stopped anyway. Which, considering head wounds can bleed an inordinate amount, is a lucky thing indeed.
He hates to move her more before further assessing the damage, but first he looks around for signs of which way she’d come, though unless she’s been following one of his clearly blazed trails, he doesn’t have much chance of following hers back to wherever she’s come from. (It’s been a dry summer, there’s just not much growth and no moisture to leave readable marks.) He gives up after not very long because he doesn’t want to go too far away from her, so he calls up his best triage skills, and, mindful he’s manhandling a young woman, he gently ascertains she’s not too injured to move. She stirs slightly as he lifts her, but passes out again before she fully wakes.
Fortunately, Darla will follow him for miles with only the barest suggestion he’s got an apple in his pocket, so he turns towards the shorter path back home and walks as smoothly as he can, trying not to jostle her. They've not gone far when she wakes enough he decides he’d better stop and set her down before she startles and injures herself worse in her fright.
“Hey, hey... it’s okay. You’re safe. You fell off your horse, but I don’t think you broke anything, though you really should have been wearing a helmet.”
“Where’s Ginger?” Her voice is groggy but insistent.
“Your horse? I didn’t see any sign of her, but I can go look once I’ve got you safe. Won’t she follow your trail home?”
“No, she doesn’t know the area at all. We’d never come this way before. Oh god, Danno is gonna kill me.”
“No one is killing anyone over a bolted horse. I’ll find her. Can you ride? Darla here’s real gentle and I promise she won’t throw you.”
She looks up at the dusty blue roan, who’s been nuzzling at Steve’s side like she’s looking for evidence the promised apple exists. At the sound of her name she snorts, and nods her head like she’s agreeing. The girl smiles, then winces.
“Easy there. I’ll lift you. Okay?”
Once she’s seated, Steve takes a moment to appreciate the guts it takes to get right back in the saddle after being thrown, and he realizes it’s not just horse’s names they should exchange.
“I’m Steve, by the way. Steve McGarrett. I run the ranch out this way.”
Her eyes light up. “The one for problem horses,” she says, brightly. “I know about your place. I think it’s so great you give traumatized horses a second chance, where most people just give up on them. I’m Grace Williams,” she says, offering her hand, which Steve takes with a grin and recognition of his own.
“Danny Williams’ daughter,” he says, piecing things together. “I heard he was out this way for the summer. Painting our sunsets and mountains. Didn’t know he’d brought you along. Didn’t think that was his usual MO.” He pauses, hesitating slightly. “Or yours.”
“It’s not.” She sighs, unfazed by the accusation, or the insinuation. “I didn’t want to come,” she admits. “I wanted to take Ginger to England for training like we usually do. But Mom went off to Switzerland for some stupid beauty spa thing, and she said I could come with her and ‘be civilized like a grown up’ or go with dad and ‘play cowboys.’” She mocks her mother’s native accent, possibly unintentionally.
Steve tries to hide his smirk, but he likes her choice, he won’t deny it.
They talk easily as they make their way back to Steve’s ranch. Despite her injuries and missing horse, she’s more interested in Steve and his work than in her own situation, and it takes some effort on his part to steer her towards facing what’s happened, gently, without upsetting her. He says she can use the landline there to phone her dad—some places out this way still don’t have reliable cell service, and his ranch is one of them. As is, according to Grace, the log cabin they’re staying at while her famous artist father paints the great scenic sunsets he’s known, at least in this part of the world, for. (Evidently his fame does not reach the shores of the UK, and isn’t enough to bolster the opinion of Grace’s mother’s family, much to her chagrin.)
By the time they make it to the house, the sun is getting low. It’ll be sunset soon, and Steve doesn’t know if Williams actually paints by the sunset or merely captures it for inspiration, but he guesses either way he will be missing his daughter by now—or very shortly. So he gets Grace to one of the Adirondacks on the porch, ties Darla at the post, and starts to go inside to get the first aid kit and the phone.
Grace stops him. “He’ll be out painting. He won’t know that I’ve not come back. He... I’ll leave him a voicemail, so he knows when he gets back to the cabin, but can I stay here for now?”
“We really should get your head looked to,” Steve hesitates.
“I’m fine. I know what a bad head injury feels like. This isn’t that.”
“If you know head injuries, then you know that you can’t always trust yourself about them.”
“Then watch me, to be sure. I promise I’ll rest. If I don’t feel well by the time he gets here, Danno can take me to urgent care. But if I’m okay....”
“Had your full of hospitals?” Steve guesses, being somewhat familiar with that feeling himself.
She huffs out a bitter laugh and gives him a crooked smile. “You could say that.” She rolls up one sleeve and points to a scar. “Compound fracture. That was my most dramatic one. But not my worst.”
It turns out she’s not kidding, as she gives Steve the tour of her riding-related mishaps while he cleans her wound and dresses it as best he can. He’s used to patching himself up when his patients throw him from the saddle (or worse, kick him), so he sympathizes. Still, Grace’s career as an equestrian has not gone smoothly. Steve wonders how her dad stands it. How he copes knowing she’s putting her body on the line like that.
When he finishes taping her wound and says as much, Grace gives him a steely glare, and he gets a sense of what the guy has to contend with. “He doesn’t have a choice,” she says plainly. “It’s what I love. He won’t keep me from riding. Though if I’ve lost Ginger, he won’t have to.”
Her worry is starting to bleed through her brave front, and it stirs his protective instincts. “It’s too dangerous to be out in the dark, or I’d go look for her now. But if she’s smart, and since she’s yours I’m guessing she is, I’ll bet she finds her way home. Even if you did go a different route and she hadn’t seen it before.”
Grace takes a deep breath, almost like she’s counting her inhalations to calm her nerves. Maybe she is. “I hope you’re right. She’s pretty spoiled. And not exactly a trail horse. I probably should have left her back home in Jersey, but I couldn't go the whole summer without riding.”
And Steve doesn’t want to agree, he won’t fault Grace for having brought her presumably expensive and well-bred eventing horse to such a rustic area for what essentially amounts to trail riding, but it does seem an unusual choice. “Couldn’t you have stayed with someone back home? Kept up with your training? I got the sense your dad usually spends summers out west painting, alone.”
Something flashes in her eyes, a recognition, or something Steve can’t identify. “I didn’t want to leave him alone. Not this summer.” She lowers her voice, confiding. “Mom's divorcing him.”
“Ah,” Steve says, wondering why she’s watching him so closely for his response. English socialite drama and gossip isn’t exactly a hot commodity on an American Wild West ranch. “Well, if you’re sure he won’t worry, we might as well go inside and get some supper. You hungry?”
She grins delightedly. “Starving.”
And it’s not like Steve’s a great chef, but he has to wonder what her dad feeds her if she’s so easily excited to eat what a remote-ranch-living bachelor might feed her. Still, he gets her set up in the cozy nook corner of his kitchen, then leaves her with the phone and goes to put Darla away and check on the others, and by the time he’s back, she’s got the pantry open and she looks so at home, it makes him think of him and Mary cooking for each other after their mom died, and their dad was working too many shifts to look after them. Steve gets the sense Grace is used to fending for herself. Or maybe she’s accustomed to making herself at home wherever she finds herself. Steve, who lacked a stable home for much of his childhood, recognizes the signs.
“Do you eat anything besides eggs and chili?” She asks, eyeing him critically.
He laughs, amused by her directness. “Not really.”
“Alright then,” she says. “Eggs it is.”
“Not a fan of chili?” He asks, but then steers her back towards her cushioned seat. “Or are you feeling nauseated? You better sit down.”
“God, you’re worse than my dad,” she grouses, but she sits. “No, my stomach is fine, I’m just not a fan of spicy food. Dad says it’s my English blood. Used to bland foods. Like, genetically or something.”
Steve’s happy to make a frittata, his one fancy dish, and it’s not like he’s showing off or anything, but Danny Williams is a pretty popular name out here in Big Sunset country, and he’s not unaware that Grace herself is considered an up and comer in the elite equestrian world that Steve, by necessity of his work, sometimes navigates. Not that he doesn’t have something of a reputation himself. But it’s not exactly for cooking.
“That smells really good,” Grace says, as he plates them up at the kitchen table, her on the built-in bench, soft with pillows, him sliding up a stool on the other side. “Danno usually burns the eggs when he makes them.”
Steve can’t help but chuckle at the image of the handsome artist, covered in paint splatters and forgetting the eggs til they brown.
“Easy for you to laugh, you don’t have to eat them.”
They talk about food and cooking, and he’s careful, because he knows equestrians often struggle with weight and food issues, but she’s small for her age, so he guesses it’s less an issue for her than for most, and the thing is, he’s not exactly used to kids. So if you’d told him he’d be spending the evening with a teenager and enjoying it, he’d have laughed in your face—or assumed you meant a horse. But she’s sharp, and she’s sassy, and yet there’s a sweetness underneath, and he realizes as he thinks all that, it sounds familiar. Sounds like the way he’s heard people talk about her dad.
Danny Williams is something of a local legend. In a very regional, small-town kind of way. He’s a total city boy. Jersey through and through. Except that he spends his summers holed up in tiny western towns like theirs. Painting the mountains and sunsets and tree lines and snow capped peaks. And he swaggers into town, paintbrushes in hand, and he keeps his distance, keeps mostly to himself. But there’s always a handful of locals who get to know him. The waitress at his favorite cafe who learns his breakfast order (which he usually orders well after noon), the bartender in the local watering hole who learns his standard drink (which he orders not long after). The gallery owner who shows and sells his work. The mayor who capitalizes on the clout of having a well-known artist pick his town above all others that summer. There’s the odd rumor about a passionate affair here and there. (Steve doesn’t put much stock in rumors. But they persist.) Overall, the tales tell of an outward brashness, of sass and snark, but also of a hint of softness underneath. Which of course people always love to poke at.
It reminds Steve of his horses. The wounded soul that bristles to keep you at a distance, but underneath just wants a carrot and a good brushing down. It’s easy to convince himself that’s why he’s compelled by the stories of the enigmatic artist. And not because of the looks he gives to the camera when his picture is taken for publicity—at once shaded and distant, yet daring the viewer to draw close.
So, okay. It’s possible Steve’s thought about the guy a little too much, but in his defense, Williams’ paintings are pretty much everywhere these days. Taken up by the old timers and the painfully cool hipsters equally. Used in logos and ad campaigns, on coffee cups and those decorative lampshades that for some reason are popular as souvenirs. Hell, there’s even one on the wall of Steve’s office. Given him by a grateful racehorse owner, when Steve had managed to re-tame a star stallion enough to put him to stud, and his first crop of foals had earned more than his entire career purse.
Grace asks for a tour of the stables after they eat. And Steve isn’t sure it’s wise, but Grace Williams isn’t the kind of person it’s easy to sway when she’s got something in her sights. So he agrees to show her around the barn if she’ll let him know as soon as she feels faint. Her grin as she promises is too sweet by half and he’s reminded again of his younger sister, and her lifelong habit of making promises with her fingers crossed behind her back.
They stroll slowly through the yard, and she’s surprisingly interested in the structures themselves, the construction of the pens, the materials the paddock is made from. Granted the aesthetic is rough and sturdy. It’s an old ranch. Built from whole ponderosa logs in many places, thinner trunks of birch or aspen in others. But most all the surfaces are rubbed smooth—either from use, or out of necessity. It wouldn’t do to have the million dollar animals he often gets sent gash themselves on his fence posts before he can win over their wounded hearts.
“You understand them, don’t you,” she asks, softly, as they stand, looking out over the paddock where Darla and several other horses are grazing. And there’s a question in her tone, but it’s not the one she’s asked. He sees it in her eyes when he looks.
“I know what it’s like, if that’s what you mean. To be wounded. Damaged. And to struggle to find your way back to being whole. You need someone to show you the way. But you gotta get there on your own.”
She nods thoughtfully. Processing. “Who showed you the way?” She asks, and when Steve hesitates, she backs off. “Sorry. Too personal.”
He smiles, shaking his head. “No, it’s a valid question.” He rests a boot on the cross bar of the paddock, leans against it. She turns sideways and lets her weight be held by the sturdy fencing. “Mostly my commanding officer in the Navy, the guy who trained me. He was like a father to me when mine wasn’t around. He taught me everything I know.” It sounds trite, he knows. He doesn’t often admit it, because it’s true, but it sounds so much like just words. There’s an assessing look in her eyes that tells him she doesn’t think he’s being anything other than honest.
“Sounds like a good man,” she says, that way people do when they hear about someone they wish they could have known. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Steve startles a little, that she’s gone there. Noticed the past tense, and been bold enough to say so. He smiles as he sees it, because he knows in that moment, Joe would have liked this kid. Maybe seen a little of Steve in her. Steve sure does.
“He’d have liked you,” he says. And then because his emotions are getting the better of him after this unusual day: “Let’s go meet Hal.”
Hal is in a pen all his own, at the far end of the barn. He’s got an enclosed area, but also the run of a decent sized paddock out the other side, separate from the main one. Steve grabs two apples from a mini fridge under the counter where the grooming supplies are kept, and hands one to Grace.
“He doesn’t have nice manners, so mind your fingers.”
She lights up when she sees him, and Steve gets that. The flash of recognition. The understanding between man and beast.
“Ohhh, he’s beautiful.”
“He knows it, too,” Steve whispers in a conspiratorial undertone.
Hal’s dark ears twitch as they near. He’s in the sheltered part, under cover, resting near the gate, weight shifting between his feet. He tends to linger there, when no one’s near. As though he might escape if only he could work the latch. Steve wouldn’t be shocked if one day he did, and there must be enough a part of him that genuinely wants to let the horse go free, because he hasn’t bothered to improve the lock.
Grace eases towards the thoroughbred, Steve hovering over her shoulder but letting her advance before him. It hasn’t gone un-thought of by Steve that the stallion might respond better to a female than he does to himself. The way he’s sniffing at the air makes Steve think he’s been right to contemplate it. As Grace gets closer, Hal’s interest is definitely piqued.
She flattens her hand with the apple, and holds it out. His lips curl, his teeth gnash, but he doesn’t move to take the treat. Keeping her hand where it is, she steps closer, bending her arm as she does. He sniffs again, whinnies softly, lifting his head enough his mane falls back, showing off the tiny white star right between his haunted-looking eyes, then he steps closer as well, shuffling his feet a little in restrained excitement. Grace reaches a hand up to his forelock, drawn to the white star there, the only spot of light on him. His eyes flicker shut as he finally takes the apple from her hand, far more gently than Steve’s ever seen him do it. As he eats, he pushes his head against her other hand, shakes his mane again, and Steve swears he purrs.
She turns to look at Steve, face bright with delight, but unfortunately, it breaks the spell. As Hal recognizes Steve’s presence, he steps away from Grace sharply, not leaving, but turning his back.
“That was... amazing,” Steve says, as she returns to his side, wiping her hand on her jacket.
“I think he smelled Ginger.” Her tone is somewhere between awed and guilty.
“We’ll find her,” Steve insists. “First thing in the morning, I’ll head out. You can ride Darla, if you want to come with me.”
She swallows, nods, and looks up at him gratefully. “Thank you.”
They head back towards the house, just as the moon is starting to rise, and Grace breathes deeply. “God I love it here,” she says, that awed tone again flooding her voice. “The air just feels so different from home. It’s like you can tell it’s more pure. Less city.”
Steve chuckles. “Dirt and grass and trees, mostly,” he says. “No chemicals or fertilizers. Just the rocks and the sun and the rain and snow.”
“You like it too,” she says, accusingly.
“It’s a long way from the sea....” He knows that’s not an answer. He’s unsure why he’s thought it. Just, the sea always had been home.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
He shrugs. “It just is.”
She smiles. “Yeah.”
Over her shoulder, Steve sees the bouncing lights move across the horizon. “Looks like your dad got your message,” he says, and even he hears the tense anticipation in his tone.
Her head turns, then quickly looks back at him, but it’s too dark for him to read her expression. “Oh boy. Um, so, Danno likes to yell. We better get inside so he doesn’t frighten the horses.” There’s fondness in her words, not fear, so Steve nods and follows her back to the house, and how is he already deferring to this child as though she’s suddenly in charge of his life?
Steve goes to put the kettle on, because offering a cup of coffee is an expected local courtesy, and he won’t be caught out not providing it. Grace snuggles back in her nook in the corner of the kitchen like she’s claimed it, like she feels safe there, and Steve finds he likes that she’s done that. He’s left the front door open, and the screen is ajar as it always is—another something he should no doubt fix, but it doesn’t slam this way, and he hates very few things, but a slamming door is something he doesn’t need to have to deal with.
“Gracie!” Williams is yelling before the car’s even come to a full stop, Steve’s sure of it. He barges right in, the door swinging silently behind him, and Steve guesses that readily making oneself at home must be a family trait. Williams skips right over the niceties any normal person might abide by and swoops into the kitchen, lifting Grace’s chin gently, checking her pupil dilation, and prodding her ribs expertly.
Clearly he’s done this before.
“No concussion. No broken bones. You were damn lucky.”
“I wasn’t. Ginger bolted.”
“Damn horse. Should have listened to your mother and left the horse at home and sent you to Switzerland.”
“Don’t say that.” It’s the most upset Steve’s heard her, and it kicks his protective instincts into high gear.
“I’ll find the horse,” he says, sternly. “I’ll go out in the morning, I know the area she went missing. So does my horse. We’ll find her.”
Williams looks sharply up, icy eyes flashing with fire, and he starts to reply, but Grace interrupts him.
“I’m going, too, Danno. Steve said I could. We will find Ginger.”
Her dad looks at her like he’s about to argue, but then deflates. Steve almost laughs at the sudden shift, but he stifles it, and he’s pretty sure he’s glad he did when Williams turns back to look at him, assessing more slowly this time. Something dark passes across his eyes, just for a moment, but it chills Steve’s skin and heats his blood at the same time. Right. It’s just his stupid fascination with the celebrity messing with his head. Yeah, that must be it.
“Come on, monkey. Let’s get you to bed.”
Grace stands, no hint of stiffness or a limp, and Steve’s pretty sure that’s entirely on purpose and at no small cost. He recognizes the look in her eyes. She’s in pain, but she won’t let it show. She lays a small, warm hand on his arm.
“I’ll see you in the morning. Thank you for everything.” And she stands on her tiptoes and kisses him on the cheek. He’s sure he blushes.
Her dad sends one last fiery glare his way, and they’re out the door just as the kettle starts to whistle.
Well. Danny Williams certainly lives up to his reputation, Steve thinks, as he turns off the stove and heads up for a lot longer shower than he ordinarily allows himself.