Cavanaugh or Death Read online

  Those law-enforcing Cavanaughs are back in USA TODAY bestselling author Marie Ferrarella’s sizzling series!

  After losing two partners in the line of duty, major crimes detective Davis Gilroy isn’t about to get close to his new one. Especially when that partner is an optimistic blonde beauty with killer curves. Davis will do his job, keep a close eye on detective Moira Cavanaugh and not let her get under his skin. But when someone starts disturbing old graves in local cemeteries, he and Moira work long nights to solve the macabre mystery. Suddenly Davis finds himself caring too much about the strong, sexy woman who always has his back…and is gaining on his heart.

  Davis wasn’t sure just what had possessed him at that moment. Most likely it was frustration.

  Or maybe he just wanted her to back off once and for all, and the only way he felt he could do that was to frighten her off. He reasoned he could do that by kissing her.

  Which was why he’d turned toward Moira and, operating on what amounted to automatic pilot, he suddenly and without a word pulled her to him despite her seat belt. He didn’t even remember leaning against the rather awkward transmission shift that was between them, dividing them from one another like an old-fashioned bundling board. All that he did remember was that he kissed her.

  Kissed her hard.

  Kissed her until neither one of them could breathe anymore and the only sound within the sedan was the one created by two pounding hearts.

  * * *

  Be sure to check out the next books in this exciting miniseries:

  Cavanaugh Justice—Where Aurora’s finest are always in action.

  * * *

  If you’re on Twitter, tell us what you think of Harlequin Romantic Suspense! #harlequinromsuspense

  Dear Reader,

  Growing up, I was the only kid I knew who didn’t like horror movies. I never saw the upside in being scared by vampires, or werewolves, or things that went bump in the night. To that end, I deliberately avoided reading or watching anything that even remotely dealt with ghosts or the undead.

  So having a mystery take place in a cemetery—two cemeteries, actually—was rather an odd choice for me. But I think it all worked out in the end. Moira Cavanaugh and loner Davis Gilroy first meet when she is all but mowed down by two shadowy figures who are dressed all in black and fleeing from a cemetery. They have good reason to flee, because they are being chased by the aforementioned Davis, a detective in the major crimes division. He stops only long enough to offer Moira a hand up.

  The whole thing is enough to arouse her curiosity, so she goes into the precinct where she works in the robbery division and requests permission to investigate what all the commotion had been about. It isn’t long before she’s partnered with the very reluctant Davis, and what they wind up discovering nearly blows them both away.

  If I’ve aroused your curiosity, please come read and decide if this is better than reading a scary ghost story. I sincerely hope you think so.

  As always, I thank you for taking the time to read my work, and from the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

  All the best,

  Marie

  CAVANAUGH

  OR DEATH

  Marie Ferrarella

  USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–winning author Marie Ferrarella has written more than two hundred fifty books for Harlequin, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, marieferrarella.com.

  Books by Marie Ferrarella

  Harlequin Romantic Suspense

  Cavanaugh Justice

  Mission: Cavanaugh Baby

  Cavanaugh on Duty

  A Widow’s Guilty Secret

  Cavanaugh’s Surrender

  Cavanaugh Rules

  Cavanaugh’s Bodyguard

  Cavanaugh Fortune

  How to Seduce a Cavanaugh

  Cavanaugh or Death

  Coltons of Texas

  Colton Copycat Killer

  Coltons of Oklahoma

  Second Chance Colton

  Visit Marie’s Author Profile page at

  Harlequin.com for more titles.

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  To

  Kristin Costello,

  With deep appreciation

  For being more

  Than a nurse

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from A Father's Desperate Rescue by Amelia Autin

  Prologue

  Dawn was beginning to touch the edges of the darkness, hinting that first light was not far away.

  Davis Gilroy was only vaguely aware of the time, having glanced at his wristwatch just before entering St. Joseph’s Cemetery, the larger of the two cemeteries in the city of Aurora, California, where he had lived all of his life.

  Davis assumed that there was a groundskeeper in the area somewhere, possibly grabbing a catnap in one of the three mausoleums on the far end of the property. Or maybe the man was sleeping on the creased brown leather sofa back at the office right off the cemetery’s chapel. But other than the groundskeeper, Davis was fairly certain he was the only one in the area.

  That was the way he liked it. He liked being alone.

  Although he was a detective in the police department’s major crime division, Davis wasn’t much of a people person. Especially since losing his last two partners, Detective Mike Chan and Detective Ed Ramirez, both of whom now permanently resided at this same cemetery.

  But he wasn’t here to pay his respects to the two men he had worked beside for a total of less than three years. They were each decent men and good detectives in their own right, though he hadn’t socialized with either of them in life and saw no reason to visit them now that the conversation would only be one-sided.

  The only people he had one-sided conversations with these days were his parents: James and Martha Gilroy. It was their mutual grave he’d come to visit, as he did at least once a month, more often if he got the chance. For the most part his life consisted of work and sleep—and work kept him pretty busy. Coming here was his only deviation from that narrow path.

  Davis stood in front of the double headstone. It was a wide, expensive marble piece that had taken him months to save up for—putting aside every cent he could out of his paychecks—until the tombstone was finally paid off and in place over his parents’ grave instead of the meager one his uncle had put there.

  They were together in death just as they had been in life. His father had taken pride in the fact that it had been love at first sight for both of them. As he’d gotten older, Davis had pretended not to listen, though he’d never tired of hearing the details.

  He’d been almost thirteen the day they died. They had been
together in the car that Sunday, but only he had survived.

  That still haunted him.

  Davis was kneeling over their grave, the bouquet of fresh white roses—his mother’s favorite—placed just beneath the headstone. Spring had been part of the terrain for a good month. His mother had always loved spring.

  He felt the sting of tears smart at the corners of his eyes and was glad no one was around to see him.

  Here, alone with his parents, away from other inquisitive eyes, he was free to be himself the way he wasn’t in his daily life. Six-foot-two, thirty-four-year-old men didn’t get emotional or shed tears about events that had happened more than two decades ago.

  But there was no one here to judge him.

  “Sorry I haven’t been around lately—had a case that wasn’t easy to solve. But I’m here now and that’s what counts, right, Dad?”

  His father had never bothered berating him for time that had been lost; he’d only pointed out that there was time ahead to be used—until there wasn’t any time ahead left.

  “Can you believe it?” Davis asked, addressing the two people beneath the tombstone. “It’s been almost twenty-one years now. Twenty-one years since you and Mom relocated here.”

  That was as specific as he allowed himself to get, even when “talking” with the two people who had been ripped out of his life by that fatal car accident. An accident that had taken them from him and subsequently thrust him in with his father’s older brother, John. Being the only family member he had left, John had begrudgingly taken him in.

  The reluctance had faded when John—Davis could never bring himself to call him Uncle John because that was far too warm a title for a man who never smiled, never asked him how he was doing—had discovered that there was a substantial insurance policy to be held in trust for his nephew until his eighteenth birthday. His father had named John the executor of the trust.

  John had turned out to be a rather resourceful man when it came to finding ways to siphon off some of that trust fund money to pay for the “expenses” involved in raising an orphan from the age of thirteen to eighteen. It eventually came to light that John had taken advantage of every loophole he could find or fabricate.

  There was a coldness in John’s house that never abated; a coldness that seemed to set the tone for the rest of his own young life. Davis never felt any resentment toward his father’s older brother. He never felt anything at all. All he had wanted from the moment he had entered the man’s house was the freedom to leave it. That freedom came on his eighteenth birthday.

  He’d taken whatever money was left in the insurance policy—precious little—and put it toward his education, becoming what his father had been before him: a cop. But first his father had wanted him to get his college degree. It was the only stipulation his father had ever placed on him.

  “I miss you guys, but then, you already know that, don’t you?” Davis murmured. He sighed. “Well, I just wanted to come by, make sure that they’re keeping the weeds off your plot and—”

  Davis stopped abruptly, certain that he’d heard a noise out of place in the eerie quiet that enshrouded the cemetery at this hour.

  Cocking his head in the direction of the sound, he listened closely.

  Intently.

  Davis could have sworn it was the sound of a shovel accidentally hitting stone.

  At this hour? Nobody buried anyone before the sun came up.

  Either his imagination had gotten the better of him, or—

  “Later,” he promised the pair who remained eternally young, eternally smiling, in his mind. “Something sounds off. You know what I mean, Dad.”

  And with that Detective First Class Davis Gilroy silently hurried in the direction he could have sworn he’d heard something out of keeping with the sleepy rhythm of the cemetery.

  When it came to hunches, Davis was hardly ever wrong.

  The next moment, as he turned a corner, he thought he saw something moving in the shadows.

  Two somethings moving in the shadows.

  As he gained ground, zigzagging and sprinting around headstones, Davis realized that the shadows were actually people. Two people, dressed entirely in black. Black pullovers, black slacks, black boots and black ski masks pulled down over their faces.

  They looked like second-story cat burglars—except that they were here in a cemetery, hovering around one of the tombstones.

  “Hey, you!” Davis called out. “Stop!”

  The two dark figures did the exact opposite.

  They bolted.

  Chapter 1

  Every morning, halfway through her run, Moira Cavanaugh asked herself the same question: Why am I doing this?

  The answer she’d arrived at some time ago, and that still held as of this morning, was that if she didn’t put her running shoes on, throw on a sweatshirt and shorts, then pound on the pavement for a good hour, she would be moving around at half speed for the rest of the day. Not to mention that she’d spend the rest of the day feeling guilty for slacking off. Because of what she did for a living, she needed to be at the top of her game all day, every day.

  So here she was, a police detective like most of the rest of her vast, sprawling clan, sweating and breathing progressively harder in the predawn light, counting off the seconds until she was nearing the end of this self-inflicted torture. And fervently wishing that she was more like her older brother, Malloy, who rolled out of bed, hit the ground running, was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by the time he drove into the Aurora Police Department parking lot.

  But she wasn’t like Malloy. To be in peak condition, she needed to jump-start her day, and running seemed to be the only thing that accomplished that for her. Varying her route caused her to remain wide-awake instead of merely going through the motions.

  By choosing a different route each morning—one of ten or so she’d marked down for herself—she had to stay alert to take the right path home. She only had twenty minutes once her run was over to get ready and be in the car, on her way to work.

  The only thing Moira hated more than being sluggish was being late.

  Jogging first thing in the morning before she was even fully awake kept both from happening—even though it felt like hell while she was doing it.

  This morning’s route was the creepy route—especially since the street lamp in front of the cemetery had picked today to go out and there was only a half-moon up in the sky to guide her past the tall, imposing, black wrought-iron gates.

  Cemeteries didn’t bother her in the light of day, but there was almost a sinister vibe about them before the sun came up.

  However, this was the route she’d drawn out of the candy dish where she kept all the routes she’d picked to run. Being guided by the luck of the draw was another way she had of combating monotony.

  “Just a little farther, Moy, just a little farther,” she mumbled, egging herself on. “You can do this. You’ve done it before, you’ll do it again. Pay no attention to the eerie place on your left. It’s just your imagination, you know that.”

  Her imagination and the ghost stories Malloy had loved telling her every night when their ages were both still in the single digits.

  “Just keep on running. There’re no such things as ghosts or creatures that go bump in the night, just Malloy, doing his best to scare you. Think about something else.”

  His best, back then, had always been more than good enough and it had laid the foundation for the uneasy wariness she experienced whenever she passed a cemetery after twilight.

  Logically, the fear had no foundation. Emotionally, though, was another story entirely.

  Emotionally, it was—

  Moira’s breath caught in her throat.

  There were two shadowy figures racing out of the cemetery—and they looked as if they were running right tow
ard her.

  Moira jumped out of the way, just in case they actually were running toward her, but the evasive maneuver only managed to complicate matters.

  One of the shadowy figures slammed right into her, knocking the air out of her.

  Her imagination going full blast, Moira had half expected the shadowy figure to go right through her, but it hadn’t.

  And now that she thought about it, the figure had felt very solid for a ghost.

  She watched, stunned, as the “ghost” scrambled to its feet and then proceeded to run off despite the limp it seemed to have acquired from the collision.

  The shadowy figures just kept on going as if she hadn’t been there.

  Maybe to them she wasn’t.

  “Hey!” she cried, rattled and stunned as well as beginning to lose her temper. The notion that the duo were ghosts had quickly disappeared. Nothing that hit so hard upon collision was made of vapor and air. She had definitely been hit by a flesh-and-blood human being. It frustrated her that she was unable to specify anything beyond that vague description.

  Because of the fact that both running figures had been covered in black from head to foot, she couldn’t have even identified the gender of either.

  The next second she saw the reason that the duo had come flying out of the cemetery. They were being chased by someone.

  Him she could make out.

  He was a tall, dark-blond haired man who ran with both the grace and speed of a professional athlete. He’d appeared to be gaining on the slower of the two shadowy figures until he’d seen her sprawled out on the pavement.

  The thought that she’d had more graceful moments flashed through Moira’s mind.

  Stopping for a second, the dour-looking stranger put his hand out to her. Her ego bruised, Moira accepted his help. There was a time for pride and a time for practicality. This was one of those latter times.

  “You okay?” he asked in a resonant voice as he pulled her to her feet.

  “Yes.”

  She was about to add a coda that it actually depended on his definition of “okay” since her unexpected sudden meeting with the pavement had jarred her to the roots of her teeth, but Moira never got the opportunity.

 
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