Cavanaugh in Plain Sight Read online

  One of her stories may get her killed...

  But a detective’s on the case

  Journalist Krys Kowalski doesn’t shy away from uncovering scandal…even if it means putting her life in danger. When her latest investigation endangers her life, Krys enlists Detective Morgan Cavanaugh as a 24/7 bodyguard. But she won’t give up, even as the attraction between her and Morgan simmers...even if the job costs her her life!

  USA TODAY Bestselling Author

  “All right, my boss signed off on it.”

  Krys stared at Morgan, wondering if she’d missed something. “Signed off on what?”

  “From now on, you have my undivided attention.”

  She had an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means that I know all the signs of terminal stubbornness.”

  Well, that said nothing. “English?” she prompted.

  “I realize that if I tell you that you need to stay home until we can find this mysterious would-be killer who’s already tried to get rid of you twice, you won’t listen.”

  At least he was perceptive, she thought. “And...?” Krys knew there had to be more to this than just this declaration of knowledge on his part.

  “And given the urgency of this matter, I’ve asked my lieutenant to let me be assigned to this case exclusively.”

  Krys could feel the uneasiness continue to build in her stomach. “And what does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means that where you go, I go. More simply put, you, Kowalski, have just acquired a shadow.”

  * * *

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

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

  * * *

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  think of Harlequin Romantic Suspense!

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  Dearest Reader,

  Welcome back to the world of the Cavanaughs, where the men are breathtakingly handsome, the women are feisty and beautiful, and justice always has a way of prevailing. This time around we get to meet Krystyna Kowalski, the twin sister of the heroine in Cavanaugh Stakeout. Krys is an investigative journalist whose spot-on articles have managed to rattle a few cages and have garnered her the angry displeasure of someone out there who seems to have marked her for retribution and death.

  She brings the matter to major crimes detective Morgan Cavanaugh. At first Morgan doesn’t believe her and thinks she is only exaggerating the situation until someone tries to hit her with a car while Morgan is in a parking lot with her. From there on in, Morgan appoints himself her bodyguard. Krys might have welcomed that except for the fact that the hunky detective insists on getting in the way of her pursuing her latest exclusive story. In fact, Krys’s determination might be her undoing—permanently.

  As always, I thank you for reading one of my books. I hope you enjoy it. And from the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

  All the best,

  Marie Ferrarella

  CAVANAUGH IN

  PLAIN SIGHT

  Marie Ferrarella

  USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–winning author Marie Ferrarella has written more than two hundred and 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

  The Coltons of Kansas

  Exposing Colton Secrets

  The Coltons of Mustang Valley

  Colton Baby Conspiracy

  Cavanaugh Justice

  A Widow’s Guilty Secret

  Cavanaugh’s Surrender

  Cavanaugh Rules

  Cavanaugh’s Bodyguard

  Cavanaugh Fortune

  How to Seduce a Cavanaugh

  Cavanaugh or Death

  Cavanaugh Cold Case

  Cavanaugh in the Rough

  Cavanaugh on Call

  Cavanaugh Encounter

  Cavanaugh Vanguard

  Cavanaugh Cowboy

  Cavanaugh’s Missing Person

  Cavanaugh Stakeout

  Cavanaugh in Plain Sight

  Visit the Author Profile page at

  Harlequin.com for more titles.

  To

  Korinna Rena Props-Berry,

  Whose Very Kind Comment About My

  Cavanaugh Justice Series

  Totally Made My Day

  Hope You Like This One

  As Well,

  With Thanks,

  Marie

  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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Her P.I. Protector by Jennifer Morey

  Prologue

  She felt tired as she walked out of the office building and into the large, deserted parking lot. It felt as if she hadn’t gotten any sleep since the funeral.

  Maybe that was the reason Krystyna Kowalski was having trouble shaking the feeling that someone was watching her. She hadn’t actually seen anyone following her when she’d turned around, but it was a feeling gnawing away at the pit of her stomach.

  Krys sighed, aware just how paranoid that would have sounded if she had said it aloud. She supposed that, examined in the light of day, it probably was.

  The darkness made it more real, given the nature of the work she did. As a freelance investigative reporter, she delved into dark, hidden secrets while traveling down streets where most other people wouldn’t even dream of venturing.

  But her work required her to burrow into and expose secrets that were thought to be completely buried. It was her job to cast light on paths that the key figures of her investigations thought were safely out of sight.

  During the course of her investigations, Krys had heard herself being cursed, threatened with bodily harm and told more than once that she would be made to pay for what she had so brazenly and callously done. That kind of thing had become part of her job. She accepted it as her due and even thought of it as her badge of courage. But her safety wasn’t anything she haphazardly took for granted. Krys always made sure that she took the necessary precautions. As for the rest of it, she just shrugged it off and went on her way.

  But this eerie feeling had haunted her nights for the last six weeks. That was definitely something new in her life.

  Even as she had sat beside her mentor’s hospital bedside, holding Ian Marshall’s hand as he lay dying, that uneasy feeling that she was being watched kept eating away at her. So much so that each time someone entered Ian’s room—usually a hospital staff member as well as an old friend coming by to pay their last respects—something inside of Krys would tighten and instantly go on the alert. She had to mentally talk herself down each time because a great many old acquaintances came by in those few weeks to see Ian—while he was still there to be seen.

  But now Ian was no longer alive to distract her. He had passed away clutching her hand. She had no regrets about being there even though she had wound up missing her only sister’s wedding. She refused to leave Ian’s bedside, refused to take a chance that the man with no family would wind up dying alone while she was busy celebrating Nikola’s big day.

  Nik had understood why she couldn’t come to her wedding. They were twins, and twins intuited things about one another that no one else could begin to comprehend.

  But now Ian was gone and Nik was on her honeymoon with Finn Cavanaugh. Not wanting to think about how much Ian’s passing affected her, not to mention how she felt about missing Nik’s wedding, Krys threw herself back into her work with a vengeance.

  In the last nine months, after doggedly following a trail that led from the middle of the country to the West Coast, she had written an intensely conclusive exposé about Alan Parker, a charming, dark-haired, rakishly handsome man who, for the purposes of her article—and the nature of his crimes—she had dubbed “Bluebeard.” The man with soulfully seductive blue eyes and a smile that Cary Grant would have envied made it his business to romance wealthy, lonely women and marry them.

  According to the research she had done, there had been at least six of these women over the course of the last few years, although she had a hunch that there were more who hadn’t come to light yet. Parker separated them from their money and eventually, he separated them from the world of the living as well.

  Krys had doggedly put together all the evidence until there was enough for the police to issue a warrant and arrest the man. Everything fell into place and the man the police thought of as “Bluebeard” faced certain conviction as well as prison.

  But somehow, thanks to his connections, Parker managed to escape before he could be put on trial for the murders he committed.

  Right now, he was out there, free to continue his spree unimpeded.

  She remembered the way Parker had looked at her when he was being arrested and taken away. For one split second, the silver-tongued smooth-talker shot her a look of sheer hatred. In that moment, her blood had run absolutely cold.

  By then, she was hot on the trail of her newest investigation. Weatherly Pharmaceuticals had sunk a great deal of their money into the research, development and test trials for a new wonder drug whose properties were believed to keep cancer from metastasizing and spreading to other organs. The researchers hoped to contain the disease if not drive it totally into remission.

  Fifteen years in development, the drug was highly anticipated and promised to make Weatherly’s investors richer beyond their wildest dreams. The drug was, in essence, too good to be true.

  For Krys, that sent up bright red flags.

  Unlike her twin sister, to Krys, if something was too good to be true, she believed that it usually wasn’t—and it was her job to prove that. She was currently interviewing everyone associated with this new wonder drug, both the developers and the people who had been the drug’s test subjects. She was determined to get to the truth of the matter. If her hunch turned out to be true, there would be an awful lot of unhappy people at Weatherly Pharmaceuticals. People who she felt would go a long way to make sure they weren’t unhappy.

  For her part, Krys would have never become involved in investigating something of such major proportions if she didn’t feel she was able to prove that the emperor had no clothes.

  Possibly that was why she was letting her imagination run away with her, why she felt there were threats to her safety lurking around almost every corner.

  Maybe she just needed to take a break, wind down, be a person again instead of strictly a driven investigative reporter with tunnel vision who was focused on only one thing.

  Making her way to her car in the almost completely deserted parking lot, Krys shifted the pages and copious notes that she had accumulated and brought with her to this latest meeting. As she opened the driver’s side door, several of the pages slipped out of the pile and unceremoniously fluttered down to her feet.

  “Damn,” Krys muttered, ducking her head and bending down to retrieve the errant pages.

  A jolting noise just above her head, sounding like a car backfiring, screamed through the night air and effectively pierced the silence. Krys had spent enough time at gun ranges to know what that sound actually was.

  And even if she hadn’t recognized it, the shattered glass raining down from just above her head onto the pavement would have cleared up the mystery for her.

  Her mouth went dry.

  Someone had just taken a shot at her.

  Chapter 1

  Detective Jay Fredericks was the embodiment of a man on the cusp of middle age. Balding since the age of twenty-three and paunchy, Fredericks had the unfortunate habit of shuffling his feet when he walked, and he had long given up his battle with maintaining some sort of relatively decent posture. Consequently, walking or sitting, he gave the impression of being the personification of a perpetual parenthesis. Because of this, Detective Morgan Cavanaugh had given up trying to read his partner’s body language as a way of gauging whether or not the news that the man was about to deliver was good, bad or of no consequence whatsoever.

  “Hey, Cavanaugh,” Fredericks called out as he walked into the Major Crimes squad room and crossed over to Morgan’s desk.

  Looking up from his computer monitor, Morgan waited for his partner to say something further.

  There was a pregnant pause on Fredericks’s part, either for effect or because he couldn’t find the right words to explain what was on his mind. Since Morgan was currently catching up on his paperwork, something he viewed as just a shade better than having a root canal, he had no patience for whatever Fredericks was attempting to communicate.

  “Are you just trying out my name because you’ve forgotten how it sounds, or do you actually want to say something?” Morgan asked.

  By now Fredericks had reached the two desks that butted up against one another in the squad room. Fredericks eyed his desk, obviously tempted to take a load off, but there was apparently something stopping him.

  “Umm, didn’t you tell me that one of your cousins just got married?” he asked, stumbling his way into the reason he had come looking for Morgan in the first place.

  The latest Cavanaugh wedding had just recently taken place. The entire police department had been invited and most of them had attended. Fredericks was one of the few who had not because his wife had insisted on picking that exact week for their annual vacation.

  “You know I did,” Morgan told his partner, doing his best to hold on to his patience. “Finn and Nikki. I showed you their wedding pictures,” he reminded Fredericks. “Why? Where are you going with this?”

  Fredericks bit his almost nonexistent lower lip. “I’m not sure,” he confessed.

  Morgan temporarily abandoned his paperwork and pinned the man hovering over his desk with an impatient look, waiting. Sometimes Fredericks could become exceedingly tongue-tied. That was a direct result of his wife of eighteen years never allowing him to get in a word edgewise.

  “C’mon, Fredericks. Spit it out. What is it you’re trying to say?” Morgan pressed.

  “Would you happen to know if the newlyweds were due back early from their honeymoon?” Fredericks asked awkwardly.

  “They weren’t,” Morgan answered without any hesitation. “Why? And for heavens’ sakes, sit down and stop hovering like a seagull that’s circling a garbage heap, looking for lunch,” he said, exasperated.

  Shifting and obviously undecided, Fredericks remained on his feet. “You think I could see that picture again?” he asked. When Morgan looked at him quizzically, his partner elaborated. “You know, the one from their wedding?”

  Morgan had brought the photograph in to show one of the people he worked with who wasn’t able to attend the ceremony. After he did, he shoved the photograph into a drawer and then promptly forgot about it. That was the only reason the photograph was still in the squad room rather than back at his place.

  Morgan thought Fredericks’s request was rather odd, but he shrugged. “All right.” Opening the wrong drawer at first, he located the photograph and took it out. He passed the photograph to his partner. “Okay, again I ask, what is this all about? Or do you just have a thing for wedding pictures?”

  Fredericks frowned as he studied the photograph Morgan had handed to him. “Yup, it’s her all right,” he murmured under his breath.

  “‘Her?’” Morgan questioned uncertainly. Just what was Fredericks getting at? His partner was known to be quirky on occasion, but this was downright weird.

  “Your cousin’s wife,” Frederick answered, handing the photograph back to Morgan. “You’d better brace yourself,” he warned. “I think something’s wrong.”

  Definitely weird, Morgan decided. “You know, for a detective with the Aurora Police Force, sometimes you can be as clear as mud. What the hell are you talking about, Fredericks?” he demanded.

  Fredericks pressed his lips together, making them almost disappear altogether. “She just came in asking for you.”

  “Who came in asking for me?” He was barely able to keep from shouting the question.

  And then, before Fredericks could make another attempt to explain himself, Morgan suddenly had his answer. Finn’s wife had just come walking into the squad room and now appeared to be heading straight for him.

  He had only met Nik a handful of times, one of which was at the actual wedding. He had no idea why she would be back from her honeymoon so soon but by the expression on her face, something was definitely wrong. Not only that, but out of all the Cavanaughs who were available in this building, why would she be coming to see him? If there was some sort of a problem going on, he would have thought that Uncle Andrew, the former police chief of Aurora and the real family patriarch, would be the one the newlywed would be more inclined to turn to, especially since she had been instrumental in helping to bring Andrew’s father, Seamus, around after a mugging had thrown the older man into a depressed tailspin.