How to Seduce a Cavanaugh Page 13

  She was firmly convinced that there was a healing power in the kind of closeness her family enjoyed—and it wasn’t exclusive to family members.

  * * *

  For the most part Kane was quiet as she drove to Andrew’s development. For once she didn’t try to fill the silence with an outpouring of words. She let him have his solitude.

  It didn’t take long to get there. Kelly parked her vehicle as close to Andrew’s house as she could. Kane got out first and waited for her to join him. Once she had, they began walking up the block.

  “I’ve only got to do this once, right?” he questioned.

  Kelly didn’t hesitate, even though mentally she crossed her fingers. “Right.”

  He studied her as he asked, “And then you’ll leave me alone.”

  “Absolutely,” she promised, perhaps a tad too quickly.

  “Why don’t I believe you?” he questioned.

  In his opinion her shrug was just a little too innocent.

  “Because you’re not a very trusting man,” she speculated as they arrived at Andrew’s front door.

  The sound of raised, cheerful voices could be heard through the heavy wooden door. It was a noisy crowd, he caught himself thinking.

  “That must be it,” he quipped sarcastically.

  At that moment the wide front door swung open. The noise and sounds of laughter increased twofold.

  “So, you’re Kelly’s new partner,” Andrew Cavanaugh said, taking Kane’s hand and shaking it. “Been looking forward to meeting you,” the former chief of police told him.

  Kane hadn’t expected to meet the man face-to-face so soon, nor was he sure exactly what he was supposed to say. So he just shook the older man’s hand and murmured, “Nice to meet you, sir.”

  “How’s your uncle doing?” Andrew asked, ushering them in. “Has retirement made him stir-crazy yet?” Andrew chuckled softly under his breath.

  His interest seemed genuine, Kane found himself thinking.

  “No, not yet,” Kane answered, surprised that the former chief of police even knew who his uncle was. But the next words out of the clan patriarch’s mouth convinced him that he did. “Tell Keith that if he ever decides he’s had enough of the ideal life I’ve got a proposition for him.”

  “A proposition?” Kane repeated. “What sort of a proposition?”

  “My dad and I run a security firm,” Andrew told him. His father was still full of surprises, Andrew thought. Several years ago Seamus Cavanaugh had ‘‘unretired’’ himself and decided to start a small security business on the side. So far, knock on wood, it had been growing and progressing at a very healthy rate.

  “Nothing fancy,” Andrew continued. “But it keeps the day interesting for a few retired cops. Thought maybe Keith might enjoy rubbing elbows with some of the guys he knew back in the day. Tell him to come by if he’s interested,” Andrew urged.

  “I will,” Kane promised. That could be just the thing to get his uncle out of his malaise. Keith didn’t do well without a purpose. And ever since retiring from the force, his uncle had had no structure, no direction. Only more time on his hands than he knew what to do with.

  Kelly stood by silently listening to the exchange and noting the way her partner seemed suddenly to perk up. It was obvious that the way to the man’s good side was by doing something for his uncle.

  She could relate to that, Kelly thought. However, in her case it was her father she was always concerned about. When retirement came for him, she felt confident that Murdoch Cavanaugh was going to need to do something useful with himself. That was just the way the man was built.

  Maybe he could look into joining this security firm, as well.

  When Andrew had moved on to another one of his guests, she prodded, “So, this is turning out not to be so bad, right?”

  Kane shrugged. “The jury’s still out on that,” he answered.

  “On the contrary,” she pointed out with more than a little confidence. “The jury’s already voted on that and everyone’s happy with the outcome.”

  “So, she did it,” a male voice belonging to someone standing behind Kane declared in surprise. “I didn’t think she could nag you into coming.”

  Kane turned around to look at the man who was talking to him. The face, with its rugged features, high cheekbones and vivid green eyes, was vaguely familiar, and then, at the same time, it wasn’t. But obviously the man knew Kelly.

  “As the old saying goes, my partner can talk the ears off a brass monkey,” Kane said in reply.

  The man laughed heartily. “You’re preaching to the choir, Detective. She damn near made mine fall off in self-defense.”

  “And you are?” Kane asked.

  The young man extended his hand. “One of her long-suffering brothers. Bryce,” he added, as if realizing that introductions—since this was a newcomer—were necessary. “At your service.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Kelly told her partner. “Bryce’s actually one of the few men who are even grumpier than you are—at least at times.”

  Kane’s eyes shifted toward the man he had just met. “Is she always this bluntly direct?”

  Bryce laughed, obviously getting a kick out of the assessment.

  “She’s a straight shooter, our Kelly,” Bryce assured him. “Sometimes a bit too straight a shooter. She hasn’t learned how to sugarcoat things yet. Maybe you can teach her a thing or two,” Bryce suggested.

  Kane allowed himself a moment to study the woman under discussion. “I don’t think that anyone can teach your sister anything.”

  The remark really seemed to tickle Bryce. He grinned as he looked at his sister. “I guess your partner really does know you, doesn’t he, Kel?”

  Kelly turned up her nose at her brother, pretending to ignore him.

  “Maybe you’d like to meet someone else,” she suggested to Kane.

  She hooked her arm through his and physically pulled him over to another cluster of people. People, she hoped, who wouldn’t hand Kane any more material to use against her than he already had. Although, she knew what Bryce had said was all part of a calculated maneuver. Because she was still trying to figure Kane out, she couldn’t be certain that any of her siblings would accidentally say or do something that would put her partner off and thus cause him to withdraw again.

  All she could do at this point was hope for the best.

  * * *

  Kane would have preferred to stand and just observe, but he found that was not nearly as easy as it might have sounded. Apparently Cavanaughs didn’t know the meaning of the word solitude or solitary. From what he could see, they were all about crowds of people mingling. If they saw a loner, he—or she—stirred a sudden need within a Cavanaugh to incorporate that loner into the whole.

  “Resistance is futile,” a phrase once popular in a science fiction show cult favorite, was very obviously a credo for getting on with the Cavanaughs as well, Kane couldn’t help thinking.

  * * *

  “I can’t find two solitary minutes to rub together,” Kane complained when his path crossed Kelly’s again a little while later. “Everyone keeps jumping in, talking to me, wanting to ask something, share something, or just plain talk at length on topics I never brought up. Are they always like this?”

  “Like what?” she asked innocently.

  Could she actually not know what he was referring to? Kane had his doubts, although if this was the way things had always been in her family, he could see how someone might be oblivious to it.

  “Like someone wound them up and just let them run loose.”

  Her smile wasn’t apologetic or sheepish. What it was, in the absolute sense, was proud. He could understand that. Every family member just wanted to be proud of their association with the other members of the clan. For the m
ost part, he’d spent his youngest years deprived of that. And while his uncle was far from the warmest man ever created, Kane had become a law enforcement agent to cull his favor and gain his approval.

  “Pretty much,” Kelly had to acknowledge. “They watch out for one another.” Because what she’d just said sounded wrong to her ear, or rather it sounded incomplete, Kelly corrected herself and said, “We watch out for one another.” She peered at his face a bit more closely, doing her best not to be distracted by features that would have made a nun entertain thoughts of leaving her order. Instead, she focused on what she saw beneath all that. “You want to leave, don’t you?”

  He had, but that had been when they’d first arrived and he’d felt like an outsider. The people around him—his partner’s people—had quickly erased that feeling for him. “Oddly enough, no. At least not yet.” He stopped talking, searching for the right words, and then decided there really weren’t any, at least none that would correctly express what he was feeling. “This isn’t what I expected,” he confessed.

  “And what is it that you expected?” Kelly asked, all the while taking small bites of what she felt was an amazing piece of French toast.

  “To be nauseated in under sixty seconds. Five minutes, tops.” He shook his head when she offered him a piece of the French toast. She chose to override him and managed to get a forkful between his lips. She had to admit that caused a small, warm, delicious little shiver to go racing up her spine. From the one unguarded look she’d seen on his face, sampling the small piece she’d gotten into his mouth had been an entirely pleasurable event for Kane.

  She struggled to hide her smile. “Are you disappointed that you’re not nauseous?”

  He was definitely not disappointed. It seemed that nothing that had to do with the Cavanaughs was simple or cut-and-dried.

  “Stunned is more like it.”

  She nodded. “Stunned’s a good word. I’ll take that,” she told him. He didn’t look stunned, she thought. If she was to judge by his appearance, he seemed pleased. They were getting to him, getting through that armor he kept around himself.

  Just as she had hoped.

  And then she decided to pry just a little. “I heard Andrew asking about your uncle. Did he retire recently?”

  “Not recently,” he told her “It’s been a few years.” And he was clearly surprised that the family patriarch, with an ever-expanding family of Cavanaughs to keep track of, still knew that he was related to Keith and had actually kept up on the man’s life. Surprised and maybe just a little bit glad, as well.

  Kane had caught himself looking at his partner in unguarded moments, having his imagination wander off with him. He found himself wondering if by some wild chance things would heat up between them, and, if they did, what repercussions that sort of thing might have on them, on him and on his career.

  He had no idea why that thought had suddenly turned up in his head. Nor why he couldn’t immediately terminate it instead of exploring it from all sides.

  As if reactions could all be neatly labeled, cataloged and annotated for future generations.

  They couldn’t, and he of all people knew that.

  Still, Kane decided that perhaps hanging around a little while longer in this hub of socializing Cavanaughs wouldn’t be all that bad an idea. He could think of it as doing reconnaissance.

  It never hurt to know his enemy—and if it turned out that Kelly Cavanaugh wasn’t his enemy, look at all the intel gathering that had been accomplished. If nothing else, it was good practice. Not to mention that it allowed him to gain insight into a branch of the Cavanaughs that his partner interacted with closely. Getting to know them would be invaluable in giving him a clue as to what exactly made this partner of his tick.

  All in all, Kane stayed a great deal longer than he had initially intended. And he learned things. Learned that despite his tendency to keep to himself, he actually liked these people, who didn’t allow natural boundaries to force them to remain on the outside, looking in. They very boldly abandoned the outside for the inside, politely but firmly infiltrating the world of anyone who had the unique fortune of being around them.

  His natural instinct was to close up, but he found that, astonishingly enough, he didn’t want to. Not in this case. These people were fellow cops who very obviously—or, in a few cases, not so obviously—cared about the people they brought into their lives. Ordinarily, he didn’t like anyone prying into his life. Cavanaughs pried all the time. And the damn thing about it was that it didn’t faze him.

  That alone should have had him heading for the hills. But it didn’t. He told himself he had time for that later, that he could always shut down and walk away at a moment’s notice.

  A moment of his own choosing.

  But for now it suited him to stick around and observe them.

  Observe her.

  Because his partner was getting to him more and more—something that should have put him on his guard—he told himself that he could put emotional distance between the two of them anytime he wanted to.

  He just didn’t want to at this present time.

  Not until he was ready.

  Chapter 13

  “Uncle Andrew wants to know when you’re coming back.”

  It was a couple of weeks after he had shared brunch with his partner, the former chief of police and a good number of Cavanaughs, and they were traveling to the scene of yet another home invasion in the upscale section of Aurora. The count was now up to seven—including this latest one—and they were still no closer to closing in on a viable suspect than they had been a month earlier.

  Kane was driving and, in her opinion, he took his sweet time answering her question. He took so long she thought he was going to ignore it, so she was about to pointedly ask him again when he finally spoke.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of busy here with these home invasions.”

  “We’re kind of busy,” Kelly corrected. “And yes, I noticed. I also noticed something else.” She paused, waiting for Kane to jump in with the logical question following her statement. When he didn’t, she took it upon herself to pretend that she was Kane and answered for him. “‘What else did you notice, Kelly?’ Glad you asked, Kane. What I noticed is that we still have to eat, which is where the matter of stopping by the chief’s place comes in. The meal’ll be already made. We stop, eat and run. Oddly enough, the chief has no problem with that. The only thing he has a problem with is if someone deliberately doesn’t show up even though the invitation is out there on the table for him.”

  Kelly paused again, waiting for her partner to make some sort of a comment. When he still didn’t, she prodded, “Well? Say something.”

  He spared her a pointed look. “I don’t call you by your first name.”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “In that little miniplay you just performed, when you were putting words into my mouth, you had me referring to you by your first name. I don’t do that,” he told her, his voice devoid of emotion.

  He’d hooked on to something minor and inconsequential, all in an effort not to talk about the real issue. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

  Kane sighed, frustrated. “I wasn’t aware that there was a problem—other than our not being able to hone in on a suspect committing these home invasions,” he added.

  “The problem,” she emphasized, “is that you’re desperately trying to keep those damn walls up, keeping everyone out. My family put a decent-size crack in those walls and that worries you, I know it does.” Which was why he was staying away, she thought.

  “And why is that?” Kane asked sarcastically.

  He wanted her to spell it out for him. Well, she was happy to oblige. “You’re worried that if you let those walls come down, if you allow yourself to get close to someone and let them get close to yo
u, you’ll be setting yourself up to be really disappointed and hurt somewhere down the line.” She paused for a second before adding, “Like you were as a kid.”

  Kane shot her a look she couldn’t quite read. “Ready to hang up your shingle, Dr. Freud?”

  It was all or nothing. He needed to know that she knew. They had to get that out of the way before she could get him to open up and allow her in. It would be easier just to back away, but being there for someone wasn’t about easy, it was about commitment.

  “I know, Kane,” she said quietly.

  “Know?” he repeated as if she’d used a foreign word he’d never heard before. “What is it that you know, Cavanaugh?”

  Kelly took a breath and then let out everything she’d been holding back. Mentally, she crossed her fingers that she wasn’t making a really bad mistake.

  “I know that your father killed your mother and thought he’d killed you just before he killed himself. You survived something that no one, especially a kid, should have to go through, but you did survive,” she emphasized. “There had to be a reason.”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “The old man didn’t hit anything vital and I lived.”

  “You lived for a reason,” Kelly insisted. “You went on to make something of your life, to make a difference. But that scared boy inside, that little boy who saw his immediate world go up in flames, he’s still in there trying single-handedly to hold down the fort while keeping the entire world at bay.”

  “You finished?” Kane demanded in a monotone voice.

  “Almost. I’m here for you, Kane,” she stressed. “Anytime you want to talk, to unload, to rant, I’m here. And so’s my family. We’re all very good at listening, and we’re not going to disappoint you,” she added before saying, “Now I’m finished.”

  “Just in time,” he commented.

  When she looked at him quizzically, he pointed to the house that had a patrol car parked in front of it as well as a couple of officers taking down a woman’s statement.

  “We’re here,” he said.