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  She’d given him the opening he wanted and he seized it. “Right. Once,” he emphasized, interrupting her. “When you were engaged to Jason. But newsflash, Cavanaugh,” he said, deliberately using her last name, reminding her of how things did change in life, “I’m not Jason. I don’t have a hero complex with unrealistic expectations for myself. And I don’t have any unrealistic expectations for you, either.”

  “Nice to know.” There was a tinge of sarcasm surrounding her words.

  Matt continued as if he hadn’t heard her or picked up on her tone. What he had to tell her was too important to get sidetracked by minor details and wounded pride.

  “Hell, you’ve already exceeded any expectations I might have had beyond my wildest dreams,” he said with finality. “All I have to do is look at you and I find myself wanting you more than I even want to breathe.”

  “Really nice to know,” she said, amending her original response and definitely eliminating the sarcastic tone that had come with it.

  “My point was,” Matt went on, “that I don’t know where this is going, but I want to give it every chance to get to the right destination.” They were at a red light and he looked at her intently. “I want to go the distance with you.”

  “I thought we already were.”

  She was being flippant. It was, he’d come to understand, one of her defense mechanisms.

  “Not that distance,” he laughed, and then he grew serious again. “The big distance—the kind of distance that your mother and father went. The kind,” he said with feeling, “that your father is proposing to go with my mother.”

  Her mouth was now drier than dry. She was surprised she wasn’t croaking as she asked, “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  “Not yet,” he told her honestly. “But there is a distinct possibility that we will be having that conversation in the not-too-distant future.” Then, before she could protest, he assured her, “I know what you went through and I don’t want to rush you. And I know how I felt about the thought of marriage—until I started dealing with you. Things change, and they don’t always have to change for the worse.” He waited for her to stay something. When she didn’t, he prodded, “Well?”

  “Drive faster,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Drive faster,” Kendra repeated firmly. “I want to carry on this conversation at my place, preferably without so many clothes in the way,” she said, ending her statement with a wicked wink that had his stomach tightening, then flipping over.

  “Kendra, I’m serious.”

  Yes, he was, Kendra thought. It was the first time she’d heard him say her name. “I know,” she told him, her tone utterly subdued as she looked at him. Her smile was warm—and full of promise. “So am I.”

  Matt stepped on the gas and sped up.

  Epilogue

  The moment Kendra slammed shut the front door of her apartment, the blizzard of clothing began, falling on the floor, marking their path.

  By the time Matt and she had gone the short distance from her door to her bed, there no longer remained anything between them except the very intense desire to share all the heated pleasures they had come to discover in each other’s arms.

  In the relatively short time they had been together, Kendra had learned an infinite number of ways to make love, to give, sustain and get the maximum thrill from intimate rituals and she was incredibly eager to revisit each and every method, each and every movement.

  Her heart was pounding wildly as she found herself on the receiving end even as she made plans to reverse the tables on him.

  The first spectacular climax occurred within less than five minutes of her unlocking her front door. More followed, but by then she could no longer gauge time and space, only heat and exhilarating bursts of pulsating pleasure.

  Exhaustion never felt so wonderful.

  “No fair, no fair,” she gasped in protest, “you’re ahead.”

  “I’ll let you catch up,” Matt promised, murmuring the words against the sensitive skin along her throat. “I just wanted to prove to you that I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” she breathed.

  A salvo of energy infused her. In a moment she was switching positions with him and climbing on top, doing her best to at least partially drive him as crazy as he had already driven her.

  And then, into this mutually acceptable madness, a jarring noise began to invade. It continued, taking on shape until she recognized it for what it was.

  Ringing.

  “Dammit, it’s my cell phone,” she cried in frustrated annoyance, not wanting to surrender a moment of what was happening. “I should have dropped it in a glass of water when we came in.”

  “You’d better take it,” Matt recommended. His words would have had more conviction had he not been pressing his lips and other parts of his body against receptive parts of hers.

  Delicious waves of heat and passion were licking at her as Kendra struggled to clear her head and reached for the phone she’d flung somewhere on the nightstand.

  “Cavanaugh,” she declared into the phone. It took more than a little effort and she struggled to try to keep that shred of her brain that was still functioning receptive. And then her eyes flew open. “Say again?” The next moment, she sighed. Resigned. “Damn. Okay, keep me posted if there’s any more news. Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  Closing her phone, she let it slip from her fingers, already forgotten.

  But she’d piqued Matt’s curiosity. “What was that about?” he asked, even as he trailed his lips along her naked shoulder.

  Another, more heartfelt sigh preceded her answer. “The actor escaped.”

  He raised his head to look at her. “What?”

  She filled him in as best she could, given that her body was once again tingling in high anticipation of the magic she knew was to come.

  “Wong just called. Somehow, Blake got his hands on a guard’s uniform and walked right out of jail. Nobody knows where he is.”

  He asked because he knew procedure, not because he wanted to. “They want us to go after him?”

  There they had lucked out. For now. “Wong and Ruiz already said they were on it, but they don’t hold out much hope.” She had to admit, though, if only to herself, that there was a part of her that felt they had not heard the last of Tyler Blake.

  But, right now, none of that mattered. The only thing that did matter was the way that Matt made her feel: incredibly alive and hopeful.

  “Then we can go back to what we were doing,” he concluded, never really having stopped.

  Every part of her smiled in response. “Absolutely.”

  “Good,” he said, both to the situation and recalling the nickname he’d teasingly given her the first day they’d met.

  In either case, it was the last thing either one of them said for the rest of a very long, inspired and delicious evening.

  * * * * *

  Cavanaugh Reunion

  To the wonderful Harlequin family,

  and especially Patience Bloom,

  who more than lives up to her name.

  I thank you all for making my dreams come true.

  And, to Pat Teal,

  who started it all by asking,

  “Would you like to write a romance?”

  Thank God I said “Yes.”

  And last, but by no means least,

  to you, beloved readers,

  thank you!

  I wouldn’t be here without you.

  Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  Excerpt

  Chapter 1

  He 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 wasn’t summer. It was spring, and ordinarily, devastating fires should have still been many headlines away from becoming a very real threat.

  Except that they were a real threat.

  There were fires blazing all over the southern section of Aurora. Not the spontaneous fires that arose from spurts of bone-melting heat, or because a capricious wind had seized a not-quite-dead ember and turned it into something lethal by carrying it off and depositing it into the brush. These fires, ten so far and counting in the last two months, were man-made, the work of some bedeviled soul for reasons that Ethan had yet to understand.

  But he swore to himself that he would.

  He’d been assigned to his very first task force by Brian Cavanaugh, the Aurora police department’s chief of detectives, and, as he’d come to learn in the last nine months, also his paternal uncle.

  Knowledge of the latter tie had jolted him, Kyle and Greer the way nothing ever had before. He could state that for a fact, seeing as how, since they were triplets, there were times when he could swear that they functioned as one single-minded unit.

  The three of them received the news at the same time. It had come from their mother in the form of a deathbed confession so that she could meet her maker with a clear conscience. She’d died within hours of telling them, having absolutely no idea what kind of turmoil her revelation had caused for him and his siblings.

  Initially, finding out that he, Kyle and Greer were actually part of the sprawling Cavanaugh family had shaken the very foundations of their world. But in the end, once they’d gotten used to it and accepted the truth, the information had proven not to be life-shattering after all.

  He had to admit, at least for him, that it was nice to be part of something larger than a breadbox. Back when his mother’s death was still imminent, he’d anticipated life being pared down to it being just the three of them once she was gone. Three united against the world, so to speak.

  Instead, the three of them were suddenly part of a network, part of something that at times seemed even greater than the sum of its parts.

  Just like that, they were Cavanaughs.

  There were some on the police force who were quick to cry “Nepotism!” when he, Kyle and Greer advanced, rising above the legions of patrol officers to become detectives in the department. But as he was quick to point out when confronted, it was merit that brought them to where they were, not favoritism.

  Merit riding on the shoulders of abilities and quick thinking.

  Like now.

  On his way home after an extraordinarily long day that had wound up slipping its way into the even longer evening, Ethan had rolled his windows down in an attempt to just clear his head.

  Instead, it had done just the opposite.

  It felt as if smoke was leeching its way into his lungs and body through every available pore. The starless sky had rendered the black smoke all but invisible until he was practically on top of it.

  But nothing could cover up the acrid smell.

  In the time that it took for the presence of smoke from the fire to register, Ethan was able to make out where the telltale smell was emanating from. The building to his right on the next block was on fire. Big-time.

  Ethan brought his lovingly restored 1964 Thunderbird sports car to a stop, parking it a block away so he didn’t block whatever fire trucks were coming in. And truth be told, it was also to safeguard against anything happening to it. After his siblings, he loved the car, which he’d secretly named Annette, the most.

  “I’ll be right back, Annette,” he promised the vehicle as he shut down the engine and leaped out. Despite the urgency of the situation, Ethan made sure that he locked the car before leaving it.

  Where was everyone?

  There were no fire trucks, not even a department car. People from the neighborhood were gathering around, drawn by the drama, but there was no indication of any firefighters on the scene.

  But there was screaming. The sound of women and children screaming.

  And then he saw why.

  The building that was on fire was a shelter, specifically a shelter for battered women and their children.

  Protocol, since there was no sign of a responding firehouse, would have him calling 911 before he did anything else. But protocol didn’t have a child’s screams ringing in its ears, and calling in the fire would be stealing precious seconds away from finding that child, seconds that could very well amount to the difference between life and death.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Ethan saw several people gathering closer, tightening the perimeter of the so-called spectacle.

  Voyeurs.

  Disasters attracted audiences. This one time he used that to his advantage. Or rather the shelter’s advantage.

  “Call 911,” he yelled to the man closest to him. “Tell them that the Katella Street Shelter’s on fire.” He had to shout the end of his sentence, as he was already running toward the building.

  Turning his head to see if the man had complied, Ethan saw that he was just staring openmouthed at the building. Disgusted, Ethan reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

  The fire couldn’t be called an inferno yet, but he knew how little it took to achieve the transformation. It could literally happen in a heartbeat.

  Raising the windbreaker he was wearing up over his head as a meager protective barrier against the flames, Ethan ran into the building even as he pressed 911.

  The next moment, he stumbled backward, losing his footing as someone came charging out of the building. Springing up to his feet, Ethan saw that he’d just been knocked down by a woman. A small one at that. The blonde was holding an infant tucked against her chest with one arm while she held a toddler on her hip on the other side. A third child, just slightly older than the toddler, was desperately trying to keep up with her gait. He was holding tightly on to the bottom of her shirt and screaming in fear.

  Trying to catch his breath, Ethan was torn between asking the woman if she was all right and his initial intent of making sure that everyone was out of the building.

  The once run-down building was spewing smoke and women in almost equal proportions. In the background, Ethan heard the sound of approaching sirens. It was too soon for a response to the call he’d made. It was obvious to him that someone else must have already called this fire in. There were two firehouses in Aurora, one to take care of the fires in the southern portion, the other to handle the ones in the northern section. Even given the close proximity of the southern-section fire station, the trucks had to have already been on their way when he’d first spotted the fire.

  The woman who had all but run over him now passed him going in the opposite direction. To his amazement, she seemed to be running back into the burning building.

  Was she crazy?

  He lost no time heading her off. “Hey, wait, what about your kids?” he called out. She didn’t turn around to acknowledge that she’d heard him. Ethan sped up and got in front of her, blocking her path. “Have you got another one in there?” Ethan grabbed the woman’s arm, pulli
ng her away from the entrance as two more women, propping each other up, emerged. “Stay with your children,” he ordered. “I’ll find your other kid,” he promised. “Just tell me where.”

  “I don’t know where,” she snapped as she pulled her arm free.

  The next moment, holding her arm up against her nose and mouth in a futile attempt to keep at least some of the smoke at bay, the woman darted around him and ran back into the burning building.

  Ethan bit off a curse. He had a choice of either remaining outside and letting the approaching firefighters go in after her or doing it himself. Seeing as how they had yet to pull up in front of the building, by the time they could get into the building, it might be too late. His conscience dictated his course for him. He had no choice but to run after her.

  Ethan fully intended to drag the woman out once he caught up to her. If she was trying to find another one of her children, he had the sinking feeling that it was too late. In his opinion, no one could survive this, and she had three children huddled together on the sidewalk to think about.

  Mentally cursing the fate that had him embroiled in all this, Ethan ran in. He made his way through the jaws of the fire, its flames flaring like sharp yellow teeth threatening to take a chunk out of his flesh. Miraculously, Ethan saw the woman just up ahead of him.

  “Hey!” he shouted angrily. “Stop!”

  But the woman kept moving. Ethan could see her frantically looking around. He could also see what she couldn’t, that a beam just above her head was about to give way. Dashing over, his lungs beginning to feel as if they were bursting, Ethan pulled the woman back just as the beam came crashing down. It missed hitting her by a matter of inches.

  Still she resisted, trying to pull free of his grasp again. “There might be more,” she shouted above the fire’s loud moan. She turned away but got nowhere. Frustrated fury was in her reddened eyes as she demanded, “Hey! Hey, what are you doing?”

  “Saving your kids’ mother,” Ethan snapped back. He threw the obstinate woman over his shoulder, appropriately enough emulating fireman style.