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  “She confessed?” Brian asked.

  “In a manner of speaking. It was more bragging than confessing. She thought she was going to kill us both.” Her voice cracked and Charley paused for a moment. “It’ll all be in my report, sir,” she told him after a beat. Charley felt incredibly exhausted and nervously hopeful at the same time.

  “That’s one report I want to read personally,” Brian said. “How did Declan get hurt?”

  Charley pressed her lips together before beginning. Reliving the events was difficult for her. It was going to take time for the images she’d witnessed to stop haunting her.

  “She had a gun. It went off while he was trying to get it from her.”

  Brian looked at her knowingly. “Something tells me that there’s more to that than you’re saying.”

  There was, but she just wasn’t up to talking about it yet. “It’ll be in the report, sir,” she promised again.

  He nodded, accepting her excuse. “In the meantime,” he asked kindly, “is there anything any of us can get you?”

  “A miracle would be nice,” Charley said, thinking of Declan.

  Brian nodded as he slipped his arm around his wife, Lila, who’d silently come up to join them. The smile he gave Charley was one of encouragement. “It’s already on order,” he promised her. “By the way, Detective,” he said to Charley as she was about to return to her post by the swinging doors, “your brother would have been very proud of you.”

  “My brother?” she echoed as if she didn’t know who the chief was referring to.

  “Yes. Sergeant Holt. You did him proud.”

  “You knew?” she asked him, stunned that he’d allowed her to continue the investigation if he knew her connection.

  In response, Brian smiled at her. “I’m the chief of Ds, Charley. I know everything,” he cracked, tongue in cheek.

  “Well, almost everything, dear,” Lila told him, patting her husband’s chest in a lovingly tolerant manner.

  Charley didn’t know what to say. Fortunately, no one was waiting for her to respond. But she flashed the chief a grateful smile that was not lost on Brian.

  * * *

  It was, perhaps, the longest two hours Charley had ever been forced to endure in her life. Every minute seemed to lethargically drag itself by, limping into the past.

  Each time she saw the doors that led into the O.R. as well as several other restricted-access rooms swing open, her heart began to pound and her pulse spiked.

  But the hospital personnel who came and went through those doors had no news of Declan or how his surgery was progressing, and then her heart would plummet down to her toes.

  After two long, endless hours of this, Charley wasn’t sure just how much more she could handle.

  Concerned about how pale and haunted she looked, Sean walked up to her and took her hand. The iciness startled him.

  “Your hand’s ice-cold,” he said. Then he rubbed it a little to return circulation to it. He treated her the way he treated all his children, with thoughtful kindness. “He’ll be all right,” Sean assured her, then added with a kindly smile, “After all, his life’s finally coming together. Declan now has everything to live for. That’ll help pull him through.”

  She nodded in response, appreciating what Declan’s father was attempting to do, but knowing that sometimes positive thinking wasn’t enough. If it had been, then she would have been able to dig Matt out of that emotional abyss he’d allowed himself to sink into and who knew? Maybe that would have been enough to save her brother and he wouldn’t have provided that killer with a target.

  The second the surgeon walked through the swinging doors, his surgical mask hanging about his neck, Charley snapped to attention. She was the first one to reach him.

  “Doctor?”

  Charley couldn’t bring herself to say anything beyond that, just his title. Every fiber in her being was silently pleading with the man to tell her what she wanted to hear.

  When he did, she felt so giddy with relief, for a moment she was afraid that her knees were going to buckle. She grasped someone’s arm—Sean’s?—to keep from sinking to the floor.

  “He’s young, he’s strong and the surgery went well. The next twenty-four hours are crucial, but there’s every indication that he’ll pull through,” he told the sea of faces that were all focused on him, listening to his every word.

  A murmur went up around the surgeon that sounded very much like a cheer.

  The E.R. nurse who had attempted to herd them into waiting rooms when Andrew had arrived appeared again, asking them, “Now will you people disperse or at least clear my hallway?”

  They were far more accommodating now that there was hope.

  But as they drifted into several of the opened surgical waiting areas, Charley asked the nurse, “Which room will you be putting Declan Cavanaugh into?”

  The woman paused before the closest computer, typing something on the keyboard. The monitor left its sleep mode and became bright.

  “Room 320,” she said. “But he’s not going to be there for another hour. The patient’s in Recovery now.”

  “I’ll wait,” Charley replied.

  “Why don’t you go home and come back?” Brian suggested. She looked as if she’d been through hell and he didn’t doubt that she had. “I’ll have someone drive you.”

  But Charley shook her head. “Right now, this is home,” she told him just before she headed for the bank of elevators that were located a few feet to the left of the swinging doors.

  She allowed herself to cry in the elevator.

  Declan was going to be all right.

  * * *

  Declan struggled to open his eyes, somehow aware that there was a wall of pain shimmering just out of reach, waiting to begin closing in around him the moment he became fully conscious. His mind alternated between half-formed dreams he couldn’t quite make out and the scenario he remembered just before the world crashed into darkness around him while he was riding a red-hot flame comprised solely of pain.

  What he recalled, beyond the burning pain, was someone holding his hand tightly, telling him over and over again that he wasn’t allowed to die.

  Charley.

  Charley had been the one who had forbidden him to die, he realized. Charley’s voice had pulled him back from the brink of oblivion even as he was set to relinquish his own slender hold on life.

  Declan forced open his eyes and saw the slumped, sleeping figure sitting in the chair that was pulled up as closely as possible to his bed.

  Charley.

  She was still holding his hand, he realized, as if that was the last barrier between him and the jagged pain that was waiting to collapse in on him.

  “Charley?”

  The moment she heard the raspy whisper, her eyes flew open even as her heart began pounding wildly.

  “Declan?” She moved to the edge of her chair, taking his hand in both of hers.

  “What’s left of me,” he answered. “What are you doing here?”

  “Making sure you don’t skip out on me,” she quipped. Her face clouded over. “Don’t you ever, ever do that to me again,” she warned, doing her best to sound angry. She couldn’t quite pull it off.

  “Hey, are those tears?” Declan asked, trying to focus.

  “No, I just sprang a leak,” she snapped, brushing the tears away. But it was a useless endeavor. The tears, born of relief, just refused to abate.

  “You should do something about that,” Declan told her.

  “Yeah,” she mumbled, still holding on to his hand, adding flippantly, “First thing in the morning.”

  “Good,” he exhaled. Then, as events began to return to him, Declan asked, “How’s Andrew? The surgery, did it—”

  “The chief’s doing well. He came
through the surgery like a trooper. A full recovery is expected,” she summarized, her eyes all but devouring him.

  She’d gotten regular reports about the chief’s progress in the past eighteen hours from Declan’s family. Different members came and went from the room, checking on Declan—and her.

  “You’ve been here the whole time?” Declan asked her.

  She shrugged, trying to dismiss her part in any of this. All that mattered was Declan. “Seemed like the place to be. I’d better go and tell everyone you’re awake,” she said, beginning to rise.

  But this time it was Declan who was holding her hand, keeping her from moving. She looked at him quizzically.

  “Not just yet,” he told her. His throat felt so dry, it was hard getting the words to come out. “I want to tell you something.”

  She sank back down in the chair, a new nervousness undulating through her. She tried to brace herself—but couldn’t.

  “Okay,” Charley said slowly.

  She had no idea what he was about to say. Was he going to say something like it was her fault that he’d gotten shot? That if he hadn’t tried to pull that woman off her, the gun wouldn’t have discharged, nearly ending his life?

  “When I opened my eyes just now and saw you there, I realized something.”

  “What?” she whispered, afraid of hearing what he might have to say, that he felt she was getting too close to him, that now that the case was over, he was going to put in for another partner.

  Her breath stood still as she waited for him to speak.

  “I realized,” he said slowly, because uttering each word really hurt, but he wanted to get this out before he drifted off to sleep again, “that I wanted to go on doing that.”

  “Opening your eyes?” she guessed.

  “Yeah, that—and seeing you there when I did,” he said.

  “So you don’t want to get rid of me?” she asked, trying not to sound as happy as she really was. She failed.

  “Get rid of you?” he repeated, confused. Where would she get an idea like that? “I want to marry you.”

  Charley’s mouth dropped open. When she finally found her voice, she told Declan, “Okay, you’re still delirious.”

  “No,” he contradicted, “maybe for the first time, I’m clearheaded.”

  “Except for the anesthesia and the pain medication they’re pumping through your veins,” she cracked drolly.

  “That’s not it,” he argued. “I’m going to feel the same way tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. I had an epiphany just before I was shot.”

  “Did you, now?” she asked, humoring him. It was wonderful just to hear his voice, she couldn’t help thinking.

  “I realized, when that crazy woman had a gun to your head, that I didn’t want to lose you. That I loved you and I wanted a chance to prove it to you. I’m going to keep on asking you to marry me, Charley, until I wear you down and you say yes.”

  “This must be your lucky day because I’m pretty worn down already,” she said. And then she said one more word to make it official. “Yes.”

  Declan grinned. He would have cheered if he wasn’t so weak.

  “You’re going to have to lean over,” he told Charley, his voice beginning to fade as sleep began to slowly overtake him again, “so I can kiss you because I can’t sit up yet.”

  She smiled, feeling another wave of tears coming on. “I guess I can do that,” she whispered.

  And she could.

  Epilogue

  “Get that thing away from me, I’m not using a wheelchair,” Andrew declared, waving away the wheelchair that Brian brought into his hospital room.

  It was time to go home. He had signed all the papers, jumped through all the hoops and was more than ready to leave the hospital behind him as quickly as was humanly possible.

  But he was not going to do that leaving being pushed around in a wheelchair like some damn invalid, Andrew thought angrily.

  It was the principle of the thing more than the fact that he felt in tip-top shape. Because he didn’t. The former Chief of Police still felt rather weak, certainly weaker than he would have either wanted or liked.

  But he would be damned if he was going to let on or have anyone guess that at the moment, if he were challenged to a wrestling match by a two-month-old kitten, there was a fifty-fifty chance that the kitten might just win. As long as he took slow, steady steps and perhaps linked his arm cavalierly through Rose’s—as much for support as for emotional comfort—no one would suspect that he had seen far better days as far as his stamina and his strength went.

  “It’s hospital policy, dear,” Rose told him in a low-key, soothing voice.

  “I don’t care if it’s written on two tablets of stone, I’m leaving this place on my own power,” Andrew declared, glaring at the wheelchair.

  “There are rules, Andrew,” Brian told him calmly. “You don’t want to set a bad example for the next generation by breaking rules, now, do you? Declan’s being released, too. He’s already out in the hallway, waiting for you. He’s sitting out there in a wheelchair.”

  “Good for him,” Andrew grumbled, then threw up his hands. “Oh, okay,” he agreed, lowering himself into the hated chair in question. “Anything to get me out of here.”

  “Knew you’d come around sooner or later,” Brian said with satisfaction. “Especially if we told you that Declan was following hospital protocol and was sitting in a wheelchair.”

  “What do you mean ‘if’?” Andrew asked suspiciously.

  “Same thing worked on Declan,” Rose told him as Brian wheeled her husband out of the room. “You Cavanaugh boys are so predictable—no offense, Brian.”

  He laughed as he wheeled his brother out. “None taken.”

  * * *

  “What are all these cars doing out here?” Andrew asked as they approached his house.

  “Sitting from the looks of it,” Brian answered innocently, bringing the CRV to a stop in Andrew’s driveway.

  The poor joke didn’t fool or distract Andrew. There was only one reason why there would be so many cars parked along his street. Or why, he suddenly realized, whoever was driving Declan’s car had come here rather than gone on to Declan’s home.

  “Don’t tell me that you’re throwing me a welcome home party,” Andrew said, looking more stunned than happy. He turned toward his wife. “I love you more each day, but you and I both know you can’t cook for more than five people at a time.”

  “Which is why I had help,” Rose told him, unfazed by his display of doubt regarding her culinary abilities. “And just so you know, it takes five of us to replace one of you. Now let’s get you out of the car so you can say hi to your family.”

  “You don’t have a damn wheelchair hiding someplace to spring on me, do you?” Andrew asked suspiciously, his eyes sweeping up and down along the street.

  “Afraid not. Just my shoulder to lean on if you need to.” She got out and came around to his side of the vehicle.

  Andrew got out more slowly than he was happy about. Even so, he knew he was lucky to be alive. “I can do that,” he told her with a flirtatious smile.

  “Then let’s go. Oh, and by the way, that new branch of the family you tracked down for your dad just before you went and got shot, scaring the life out of me?”

  “What about them?” he asked.

  “They’re here. Sean drove over to the next town and invited them, too.”

  Andrew nodded his approval as he made his way up the walk with steps smaller than he was happy about. “Shows a lot of promise, Sean does.”

  * * *

  “You sure you’re up to this?” Declan asked Charley as she pulled up her car beside Andrew’s. One of Andrew’s sons had made sure that there were two spaces directly in front of the ho
use just for them so that neither man had to do very much walking. “We can turn around and go home.”

  “And miss the chance of witnessing the great unveiling?” she scoffed. “Not likely.”

  “Great unveiling?” he repeated, then asked, “What great unveiling?”

  She waited for him to get out on his own, knowing what his pride was like. “Of more Cavanaughs, that branch Andrew tracked down and talked to just before he was shot.”

  Declan laughed, shaking his head as he put his arm around her shoulders, silently accepting her help. “Just what the world needs. More Cavanaughs.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed as they began the journey to Andrew’s front door, “it does.”

  And very soon, she thought in delight, her grin widening, she was going to be part of them.

  Life felt really, really wonderful.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from ARMED AND FAMOUS by Jennifer Morey.

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  Chapter 1

  Soft clawing on the back patio door made Lincoln Ivy put the steaming pan of cheesy chicken casserole down. Turning from the stove, he saw Madeline’s paw lift for another series of attention-getting noises. Tap, tap, tap. Toy hamburger in mouth, tail wagging, nose smudging the glass and breath fogging the early-autumn air, her sweet brown eyes zeroed in on him with unabashed excitement. Chuckling, Lincoln walked to the door. She was a beautiful Labrador retriever. Show quality.