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  “Like a truck ran over me, but I’ll live,” she answered.

  The detective grinned and nodded his approval. “Good.” Then he got back to what he wanted to say to Ethan. “We caught him,” he announced triumphantly. “Dispatch just called to say that Bonner was picked up at the Amtrak station, trying to buy a ticket to Sedona. Seems that the machine rejected his credit card.” He was looking directly at Ethan when he said the last part.

  By the look on Ethan’s face, Kansas knew he had to have something to do with the credit card being rejected. “Just how long was I out?”

  Ortiz withdrew and Ethan turned his attention back to her. “Long enough for me to get really worried.”

  “You were worried about me?” She couldn’t remember the last time anyone cared enough to be worried about her. It was a good feeling.

  This was going to take some time, he thought. But that was all right. He had time. Plenty of time. As long as he could spend it with her. “I tend to worry about the people I love.”

  She struggled to sit up, leaning on her elbows. “Wait, say that again.”

  “Which part?” he asked innocently. “‘I tend’?”

  “No, the other part.”

  “‘…to worry about’?”

  She had enough leverage available to be able to hit his arm. “The last part.”

  “Oh, you mean ‘love’?” he asked, watching her face.

  “The people I love,” she repeated, her teeth gritted together.

  “Oh?” He looked at her as if this were all new to him. “And who are these people that you love?”

  Why was he toying with her? “Not me. You!” she cried, exasperated.

  “You love me?” Ethan asked, looking at her in surprise and amazement.

  “Of course I love you—I mean—” And then it hit her. “Wait, you tricked me.”

  He saw no point in carrying on the little performance any longer. His grin went from ear to ear. “Whatever it takes to get the job done.”

  She was feeling better. Much better. “Oh, just shut up and kiss me.”

  This he could do. Easily. Taking hold of her shoulders to steady her, he said, “Your wish is my command.”

  And it was.

  Epilogue

  A ndrew Cavanaugh’s house was teeming with family members. All his family members. The former chief of police hadn’t merely extended an invitation this time, as was his habit—he had instructed everyone to come, telling them to do whatever they had to in order to change their schedule and make themselves available for a family gathering.

  When his oldest son had pressed him why it was so important to have everyone there, Andrew had said that he would understand when the time came.

  “Anyone know what this is about?” Patrick Cavanaugh asked, scanning the faces of his cousins, or as many as he could see from his position in his uncle’s expanded family room. There seemed to be family as far as the eye could see, spilling into the kitchen and parts beyond.

  Callie, standing closest to her cousin, shook her head. “Not a clue.”

  Rayne moved closer to her oldest sister, not an easy feat these days given her condition. Rayne was carrying twins whom she referred to as miniature gypsies, given their continuous restless state.

  “Maybe he’s decided, since there’re so many of us, that we’re forming our own country and seceding from the union,” she quipped. Rayne laced her fingers through her husband’s as she added, “You never know with Dad.”

  Kansas looked at Ethan and briefly entertained the idea—knowing that the Cavanaugh patriarch celebrated each family occasion with a party—that this might be because she and Ethan were engaged. So far, it was a secret. Or was it?

  “You didn’t tell him, did you?” she whispered to Ethan.

  Ethan shook his head, but the same thought had crossed his mind, as well. If not for the way the “invitation” had been worded, he wouldn’t have ruled out the possibility.

  “From what I hear,” he whispered back, “there’s never a need to tell the man anything. He always just seems to know things.”

  They heard Brian laugh and realized that the chief of detectives had somehow gotten directly behind them. “Despite the rumors, my older brother’s not a psychic,” Brian told them, highly amused.

  This was the first opportunity Kansas had had to see the man since Bonner’s capture. In all the ensuing action, she hadn’t had a chance to tell him how grateful she was that he had come to her aid. Rescuing obviously ran in the family, she mused.

  Turning around to face Brian, Kansas said, “I really want to thank you, Chief, for putting in a good word for me with the Crime Scene Investigation Unit.”

  “All I was doing was rubber-stamping a very good idea,” he told her, brushing off her thanks.

  Brian had been instrumental in bringing up her name to the head of the unit. He’d done it to save her the discomfort of going back to the firehouse and trying to work with people who regarded her with hostility because she’d turned in one of their own.

  Seeing her smile of relief was payment enough for him. “Thank you for agreeing to join the CSI unit. They’re damn lucky to have you,” he told her with feeling. “Hopefully, you’ll decide to stay with the department after Captain Lawrence comes to his senses and asks you to reconsider your resignation.”

  Kansas shook her head. She sincerely doubted that Captain Lawrence would ever want her back. He all but came out and said so, commenting that he felt she would be “happier someplace else.” And he was right. She felt she’d finally found a home. In more ways than one.

  “You have nothing to worry about there.” Things had gotten very uncomfortable for her within the firehouse after Bonner was caught and arraigned. Everyone agreed that Bonner should be held accountable for what he’d done, but the bad taste the whole case had generated wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. And it was primarily focused on her.

  Transferring to another fire station wouldn’t help. Her “reputation” would only follow her. She would always be the outsider, the investigator who turned on her own. She’d had no choice but to resign. The moment she had, like an answer to a prayer, Brian Cavanaugh had come to her with an offer from the Crime Scene Investigation unit. The division welcomed her with open arms.

  “Good. I know I speak for all the divisions when I say that we look forward to working with you on a regular basis.”

  About to add something further, Brian fell silent as he saw his older brother walk into the center of the room. He, along with Lila and Rose, were the only other people who knew what was going on—if he didn’t count the eight people waiting to walk into the room.

  This, Brian thought, was going to knock everyone’s proverbial socks off.

  “Everybody, if I could have your attention,” Andrew requested, raising his deep baritone voice so that he could be heard above the din of other conversations.

  Silence swiftly ensued as all eyes turned toward him.

  “What’s with the melodrama, Dad?” Rayne, his youngest and a card-carrying rebel until very recently, wanted to know, putting the question to him that was on everyone else’s mind.

  “No melodrama,” Andrew assured her. “I just wanted all of you to hear this at the same time so I wouldn’t wind up having to repeat myself several dozen times. And so no one could complain that they were the last to know.” He was looking directly at Rayne as he said it.

  “Repeat what several dozen times?” Zack called out from the far end of the room.

  Andrew paused for a moment, then, taking a breath, began. “First of all, I think you should all know that your grandparents had four sons, not three.”

  “Four?” Teri, Andrew’s middle daughter, echoed, stunned. “Where’s the fourth one?”

  “Let him talk,” Janelle counseled.

  “Good question,” Andrew allowed. “The son your grandparents had after Mike and before Brian only lived for nine months. Your grandmother woke up one morning to find that he had died in hi
s sleep. What you also don’t know,” he continued, raising his voice again as snatches of disbelief were voiced throughout the room, “was that, for weeks after she first came home from the hospital, your grandmother kept insisting that they had switched babies on her. That Sean—that was the baby’s name—wasn’t her Sean. Nobody really paid attention to her, thinking she was just imagining things.” He paused again to let his words sink in before he came to the most incredible portion. At times, he still didn’t feel as if it was real.

  “Recently, people—like your uncle Brian—have been coming up to me, asking me why I was ignoring them when they encountered me on the street. Other than thinking maybe I had an early onset of dementia—”

  “Never happen,” Rose told him fiercely, threading her arm around her husband’s waist.

  Andrew grinned down at the wife he’d gone to hell and back to find, bringing her home after everyone had assumed she was dead. “Anyway,” he told the others after planting a kiss on his wife’s forehead, “I started my own investigation into this so-called doppelgänger people were seeing. Long story short—”

  “Too late,” Brian deadpanned.

  Andrew ignored his brother. “It turns out that your grandmother was right, which will teach the male segment of this family never to doubt their women’s instincts. I won’t bore you with details—”

  “Also too late,” Brian commented loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Andrew slanted his brother a patient, tolerant glance. “Right now, I would like to introduce you to the end result of my investigation. Everyone, I’d like for you to meet your uncle Sean—oddly enough that’s what the people who raised him called him, too—and his seven kids…your cousins.”

  The silence within the family room was deafening as eight more people walked into the room. Each and every one of them blended in perfectly with the people who were already there.

  It would have been difficult to tell them apart.

  “We really could start our own country,” Ethan murmured, remembering what Rayne had said earlier.

  “I don’t know about our own country,” Kansas whispered in his ear, deciding that the time was right to tell him, “but we have gotten started on a family.”

  He looked at her sharply. “Are you—?”

  She grinned broadly at him. “I am.”

  He couldn’t begin to describe the joy he was experiencing. “Now will you marry me?”

  Her eyes sparkled. “You bet I will.”

  If she was going to say anything else, it would have to wait. Because Ethan scooped her into his arms and kissed her. And he intended to go on kissing her for a very long time to come.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-6614-2

  CAVANAUGH REUNION

  Copyright © 2010 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  For questions and comments about the quality of this book please contact us at [email protected].

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  Visit Silhouette Books at www.eHarlequin.com

  **The Sons of Lily Moreau

  †††Matchmaking Mamas

  ‡The Doctors Pulaski

  ‡The Doctors Pulaski

  ‡‡The Wilder Family

  ‡The Doctors Pulaski

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  ‡The Doctors Pulaski

  ‡The Doctors Pulaski

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  **The Sons of Lily Moreau

  **The Sons of Lily Moreau

  ‡‡The Wilder Family

  †Kate’s Boys

  †Kate’s Boys

  †Kate’s Boys

  ††The Fortunes of Texas: Return to Red Rock

  †Kate’s Boys

  †Kate’s Boys

  ‡‡‡The Baby Chase

  †††Matchmaking Mamas

  †††Matchmaking Mamas

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 H e smelled it before he saw it. His mind elsewhere, Detective Ethan O’Brien’s attention was immediately captured by the distinct, soul-disturbing smell that swept in, riding the evening breeze. Without warning, it maliciously announced that someone’s dreams were being dashed even as they were being burnt to cinders. Or, at the very least, they were damaged enough to generate a feeling of overwhelming sorrow and hopelessness. Summers in California meant fires, they always had. Natives and transplants would joke that fires, earthquakes and mudslides were the dues they paid for having the best, most temperate overall weather in the country. But they only joked when nothing was burning, shaking or sliding away. Because during these catastrophic events, life proved to be all too tenuous, and there was no time for humor, only action. Humor was a salve at best, before and after the fact. Action was a way to hopefully curtail the amount of damage, if at all humanly possible. But it

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2 “G ive me your location,” Dax Cavanaugh instructed. Then, before Ethan had a chance to give him the street coordinates, he offered, “I’ll round up the rest of the team. You just do what you have to do until we get there.” The chief had appointed Dax to head up the team. Calling them was an assignment he could have easily passed on if he’d been filled with his own importance. But Ethan had come to learn that none of the Cavanaughs ever pulled rank, even when they could. Ethan paused for a moment as he tried to recall the name of the intersection. When he did, he recited the street names, acutely aware that the woman to his right was staring at him as if she were expecting to witness some kind of a rare magic trick. Either that or she was afraid that he was going to run off with her cell phone. “You want to call the chief, or should I?” Dax was asking, giving him the option. Ethan thought it just a wee bit strange that Dax was referring to his own father by his official title,

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3 I n all, twelve children and nineteen adults were saved. Because the firefighters had responded so quickly to Kansas’s call—and despite the fact that several women and children wound up being taken to the hospital for treatment—not a single life was lost. Tired, seriously bordering on being punchy, Ethan nonetheless remained at the scene with the other detectives, interviewing anyone who’d been in the building just before the fire broke out. It was a long shot, but he kept hoping that someone might have witnessed even the slightest thing that seemed out of the ordinary at the time. Because she wanted to spare the victims any more unnecessary trauma, and since the nature of the questions that the police were asking were along the lines of what she wanted to ask, Kansas decided it was best to temporarily join forces with the Neanderthal who had slung her over his shoulder. The women and children who’d been in the fire had her complete sympathy. She knew the horror they’d gone t

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 E than wasn’t a morning person, not by any stretch of the imagination. He never had been. Not even under the best of circumstances, coming off an actual full night’s sleep, something that elude
d him these days. Having less than four hours in which to recharge had left him feeling surly, less than communicative and only half-human. So when he heard the doorbell to his garden apartment ring, Ethan’s first impulse was to just ignore it. No one he knew had said anything about coming by at a little after six that morning. and it was either someone trying to save his soul—a religious sect had been making the rounds lately, scattering pamphlets about a better life to come in their wake—or the neighbor in the apartment catty-corner to his who had been pestering him with everything from a clogged drain to a key stuck in the ignition of her car, all of which he finally realized were just flimsy pretexts to see him. The woman, a very chatty brunette who wore too much makeup and too litt

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5 S till completely in the dark, Brian and Rose exchanged quizzical glances. Brian was the first to speak. “Mom wasn’t wrong about what?” Andrew looked up as if he’d suddenly become aware that he wasn’t alone and talking to himself. “That the hospital had given her the wrong baby.” He doled out the words slowly, thoughtfully, as he continued sorting things out in his mind. “The wrong baby?” Brian echoed, staring at Andrew as if his brother had just sprouted another head. This was making less sense now, not more. “Which one of us is supposed to have been this ‘wrong baby’? Mike or me?” Andrew took a deep breath before answering. It had been a very long time since the name he was about to say had been uttered. An entire lifetime had gone by. It had become a family secret, known to only his late parents and him. Maybe it was time to air out the closet. “Sean.” “Sean?” Brian repeated, more mystified than ever. “Andrew, maybe you’ve been standing in the kitchen too long and the heat