A Cavanaugh Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Sure. The shot he got off never hit me,” she answered, her eyes still trained on the bleeding threesome, all of whom were on the ground, growing more vocal about their pain, as well as anger over being stopped.

  “No, but I did,” Tom said. He realized belatedly that in trying to save her, he could have caused her to sustain a concussion. “Sorry I came down so hard on you. I didn’t bruise you, did I?”

  “Why don’t you check her over to make sure?” the man farthest from the front called out and then leered. “Give us something to look at while we’re waitin’ on that ambulance.”

  Tom was behind the thug in less than a heartbeat. He grasped the loudmouthed thief by the back of his dark, near-shoulder-length hair and jerked his head back. The thief yelped and then snarled. Tom pulled harder.

  “One more word out of you and you’re going to have to learn a whole new way to eat your food, because you’re not going to have any teeth left.” For good measure, he touched just the tip of his gun muzzle to the man’s lower jaw. “Do I make myself clear?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Yeah,” the thief snarled, then stifled a whimper as his hair was drawn back farther. “Perfectly,” he uttered between clenched teeth.

  “Good.” Tom continued to hold on to the man’s hair as he ordered, “Now apologize to the lady.”

  The suggestion was met with rage. “I ain’t— Okay, okay,” the thug cried as pain shot through his scalp because Tom had pulled harder on the strand of hair he had wound around his fingers. “Sorry,” the thief spat out, his small, brown eyes shifting toward Kait. “Didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Kait merely nodded dismissively. She didn’t care to hear any insincere apologies. The man was less than dirt to her, anyway. What he said couldn’t bother her, couldn’t touch her. She’d learned a long time ago how to shut things out, how to compartmentalize.

  And, when that failed, how to shut down entirely. There were times when this skill saved her. It kept her from being conquered by the life she’d never asked for and didn’t deserve.

  The sound of approaching sirens pierced the air, and a squad car arrived just a step ahead of the ambulance that was coming from a different direction.

  Tom backed up to let the paramedics and police officers get closer to the prisoners.

  “You have some kind of knight-in-shining-armor complex?” Kait asked him.

  He assumed she was referring to the interaction with the foulmouthed, would-be thief.

  “No complex. I just wanted to teach that lowlife a lesson.” When she kept watching him, he elaborated. “That he can’t get away with making lewd comments about women in general and especially not about women in the department.”

  “Technically, I’m not in the department,” she pointed out.

  His shrug was casual—and oddly sensual, she thought before shutting the thought away. “Minor point,” Tom answered.

  “That was pretty good shooting,” she commented as she attempted to change the subject. He examined her closely, as if he actually was checking her over for those bruises he’d asked about. She didn’t want him looking at her like that. It didn’t make her feel uncomfortable so much as it made her feel…restless. “You get out on the firing range much?”

  “Enough.” Actually, he went out often. And he was good. So good that his name was in the small, select pool the department referred to whenever it needed to put a S.W.A.T. team together. Luckily, that wasn’t very often.

  But he saw no point in telling her that. Despite the very real seriousness of the situation, the feel of her body beneath his had registered quite acutely. And now that he knew he hadn’t injured her, the memory came back for him to dwell on. And savor. It reminded him that it had been quite a while since he’d been out with a woman.

  “Cavelli—Cavanaugh,” she corrected herself, then stopped. “What do I call you?” she asked. This uncertainty was annoying.

  “Tom works,” he told her. “Or ‘Detective’ if you prefer. That hasn’t changed any.”

  Now what was that supposed to mean? What had changed? She hated to admit it, but the man had aroused her curiosity, something that was usually dormant as far as she was concerned. For the most part, the only answers she’d ever required were those that directly affected the cases she worked. That had roots in the fact that her distant past was one big, empty space, and because it was, she’d accepted not knowing the answers to a lot of other things. She just wasn’t interested in knowing other people’s business.

  But she had to admit that this mystery surrounding the detective’s last name did have her somewhat curious. Why was there a different nameplate on Tom’s desk when the chief called him one of his own and referred to him directly by the last name of Cavanaugh?

  “Okay,” she allowed with a slight inclination of her head. “Tom.”

  Was she just repeating his name, or drawing his closer attention? He gazed at the woman whose soft contours had momentarily broken through his powers of focus and concentration.

  “Yeah?

  Kait paused for a moment, looking for words. Expressing gratitude had never been easy for her. She had learned how to shut down early on, and that was her natural state. Warm words were not part of it. Still, the detective had acted quickly and selflessly. She wasn’t the kind to let things like that slide without acknowledgment. “Thanks.”

  He smiled then, a wide, affable smile, and Kait felt something strange and unsettling going on in her stomach. And warm. Very warm.

  She was driving herself too hard and was probably coming down with something.

  “Glad I was there,” Tom told her before heading out to the front of the building.

  So was she, she thought as she followed him.

  All three thugs had their wounds—none life-threatening—attended to and bandaged. They were then questioned separately over a number of hours by both Tom and Kait, acting in tandem and individually. But after several hours, it became apparent that this was just a random act. There was no connection between the theft-gone-bad and the investigation that had brought her to Aurora in the first place.

  The three men weren’t kidnappers; they had just seen an opportunity to steal a vehicle that was a cut above the rest in the lot. It was just their misfortune that the car belonged to one of Aurora’s finest—and that their clumsy attempt had been viewed on camera by another law-enforcement agent.

  She was back to square one, Kait thought as she walked out of the room. An officer was taking the three down to be booked for attempted auto theft.

  Walking back into the squad room, Kait did her best to keep her disappointment from showing, but she wasn’t as successful as she’d thought.

  “Cheer up,” Tom coaxed. “Maybe we’ll have better luck with that photo we got off the phony license.”

  Kait took the photo out of her pocket and unfolded it. The quality of the copy she held was grainy and she didn’t hold out too much hope, but right now, it was all she had to go on.

  The clerk at the rental agency, once he’d calmed down, had been instructed to call them, night or day, the moment the van was returned to the lot. But there, again, she thought that the chances that they would find anything were slim if the van was even returned, which she thought was pretty doubtful. For all she knew, Megan and the van could be halfway across the country by now.

  The very thought made her stomach sink. She shut the thought out and looked back down at the paper copy in her hand.

  “Who do I see about having this run through facial-recognition software?” she asked.

  It was after eight. “There’s no one there now, but I’ll bring it down to the CSI lab for you,” he offered. “They’ll get to it first thing in the morning,” he promised. The woman looked beat, he noted. Beautiful, but beat. “Want to get something to eat?” he asked.

  The thought of eating hadn’t even crossed her mind. She shrugged indifferently. “I’ll get some takeout on my way out.”

  “We can get it together,” he t
old her, then explained his offer. “I’m guessing you don’t know your way around yet—not that you won’t,” he interjected quickly before she resurrected the chip to her shoulder. “It’s just quicker right now if I take you.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to turn down his offer, but if she did she’d be acting too ornery. Even though she wasn’t actually hungry, she needed to eat in order to keep going.

  “You have a point,” she allowed.

  “Thanks. I try,” he said with a quick, easy smile that, due to her weakened state, she judged, she was finding more and more attractive. “Any kind of takeout in particular you were interested in getting?”

  Kait shrugged. Unlike some people who lived to eat, she ate to live. “Food’s food,” she answered indifferently.

  Tom laughed. Andrew Cavanaugh would definitely love to get his hands on her, he couldn’t help thinking. The former chief of police who had opted for early retirement to raise his then-motherless five children—and to conduct a long, patient search for the wife he never believed had died when her car went into the lake—had wound up funneling his energy into creative cooking. He made it a point to have everyone in his family—and that included his extended family, otherwise known as the police department—know that his door was always open and that they could always find a hot meal at his table.

  Wouldn’t he be surprised if one of the members of his newly “uncovered” branch of the family turned up at his table, with a guest no less, Tom mused.

  But he wasn’t the type to just show up, open invitation or no open invitation. Otherwise, he would have been tempted to bring Kaitlyn to Andrew’s house and introduce her to what actual excellent cooking was all about. Him, he couldn’t successfully boil water, but that didn’t stop him from knowing the difference between a decent meal and one that was just short of heavenly.

  Besides, he thought, tired or not she looked as if she would have his head if he tried to bring her over to Andrew’s house.

  “Okay.” He locked the middle drawer of his desk and stuck the key back into his pocket. It was time to call it a day. “Since you don’t really care, if you like pizza I know a place that makes the second-best pizza in Northern California.”

  She fell into step beside him. “Second best?” she echoed. That was certainly an odd way to put it. “Who makes the first?”

  “Andrew Cavanaugh.” The man had served up several incredible themes and variations of classic pizza at the last “meeting” that had been called gathering the entire family together.

  The man certainly seemed to revel in all that closeness, Tom thought. Up until that point, he’d thought he had a large family when it was just the seven of them and Dad. Now that almost seemed small and cozy in comparison.

  “Andrew Cavanaugh,” Kait repeated. “Is he any relation to the chief of detectives?”

  Tom nodded as he pressed for the elevator. “Andrew’s his older brother. He used to be the chief of police,” Tom went on, “before he took an early retirement. But that’s a long story.”

  “Another long story,” she noted, then asked, “Do all the Cavanaughs have long stories?” She remembered what he’d said earlier about there being a long story behind the discrepancy about his name.

  The elevator arrived just as he shrugged. He waited for her to get in, then got in himself. Tom pressed for the first floor. “I don’t know. There’s a lot of them to ask.”

  “How many of them are there?” she asked, her curiosity piqued despite her best efforts not to care. “Cavanaughs, not stories,” she clarified.

  She probably thought he was just carelessly tossing terms around, he thought. Was she in for a surprise. “At last count?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  He paused for a moment, doing a mental head count. He remembered being really overwhelmed when he’d first walked into Andrew’s house for the initial introduction, and he wasn’t a man who was rattled easily.

  Tom suspected that his siblings had all felt more or less the same way. The Cavanaughs en masse were a mighty force to be reckoned with.

  “Strictly speaking, if you don’t count spouses or children, there are twenty-eight of them—if you include my side of the family.”

  Kaitlyn stared at him. He had to be pulling her leg. “You’re not serious.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She laughed shortly, shaking her head. “Where I come from, there’re towns with less people than that.”

  He could well believe it. The Southwest had more than its share of small towns. “Yeah, well, fortunately, the Cavanaughs use their powers for good and not evil,” he quipped.

  Chapter 5

  After an initial, mercifully brief discussion as to whether or not they were going to be using two vehicles or just one and if one, which, Tom was a little surprised that he managed to convince Kait that since he actually knew where the restaurant was and she didn’t, he should be the one to drive them there.

  “I expected you to put up more of an argument,” he admitted as he approached his destination several minutes later.

  “Didn’t really seem worth the effort,” Kaitlyn told him.

  She had to be tired. But for someone who was obviously dead on her feet, she still looked damn good from where he was sitting.

  The restaurant, Naples, had been in the neighborhood for the past thirty-five years. Some said longer. In that time it slowly expanded from a small, two-table storefront eatery to what it was today, a large, sprawling restaurant that took up a third of the block it was on and was generally filled with customers. Tonight was no exception.

  Its patrons didn’t seem to mind or really notice that the restaurant’s decor amounted to just the bare minimum. The tables all had the classic checkered red-and-white tablecloths, some which were even frayed around the edges. The floor was covered with sawdust that was swept out every night. The prices were more than fair, and what money was left over after the staff was paid went right back into the business. Only the best ingredients were used, and the ovens were top quality. No one had ever been known to go away dissatisfied.

  Sitting at the table, waiting for their order to be brought over once it emerged out of the oven, Kait slowly took in her surroundings. She could relate to the bare-bones appearance and rather liked it.

  “So, I guess you’re not trying to dazzle me,” she observed wryly.

  “What I’m trying to do is feed you,” he reminded Kaitlyn.

  From where he was sitting, Tom could easily see the area directly behind the counter where the ovens were situated. The pizza they had ordered—a classic pepperoni with sausage, heavy on the mozzarella—had just been gingerly taken out of the oven. The man who’d prepared it now deftly cut the aromatic pie into equal parts, then loaded his work of art into a large box.

  The box in turn was handed over to the waiter who quickly delivered it to their table.

  Tom could literally feel his taste buds surfacing and salivating in anticipation of what was ahead. Until he’d tasted Andrew’s rendition of pizza, he’d been confident that this place had no match.

  It was still an extremely close second.

  Throwing open the top of the box, he deposited a slice onto the empty plate in front of Kait, then quickly took one for himself. He savored the first bite like a penitent who’d finally been allowed to enter heaven after an abnormally long wait.

  He hadn’t had pizza in a week.

  “So,” he said as he began to feel human again, “where are you staying?”

  Busy eating, Kait glanced up at him. She had to admit he was right. Never one who had cared very much for pizza, this could turn her into a true believer.

  “Why?” she asked. “Are you planning on standing beneath my balcony and serenading me?”

  He supposed, if they worked together long enough, he’d get used to her particular brand of sarcasm. He might even view it as entertaining. Right now, he saw it for what it was. A defense mechanism. He recognized it because he had used the same M.O.
on more than one occasion.

  “No,” he replied easily as he took a second slice out of the box and brought it over to his plate. He noted with satisfaction that Kait was almost finished with her first slice, as well. At least she wasn’t pretending not to like it. “I’m just curious if you picked a safe part of the city.”

  “I come equipped with a gun,” she pointed out matter-of-factly. “I’m pretty much safe anywhere.” She paused as she took a bite out of a second slice. “But, since you asked—and you are springing for the pizza—right now I’m not staying anywhere.” She could see by his expression that her answer aroused a second wave of curiosity, so she indulged him and explained. “I came directly to the precinct when I hit Aurora. I didn’t want to waste any time.”

  She was driven. It didn’t take a genius to see that. And it was beginning to have an effect on her. It didn’t take a genius to see that, either.

  “Just how long has it been since you last slept?” he wanted to know.

  About to eat another bite of her slice, Kait lowered it instead and fixed him with a penetrating, reproving look. “What’s with all these personal questions, Detective?” she asked.

  “Hey, I saved your life,” he calmly reminded her. “I figure that entitles me to at least ask a couple of questions about the person I saved.”

  Kait sighed. She supposed he had a point. Sort of. And she didn’t want to come across as completely ungrateful.

  “I don’t know when I last slept,” she admitted grudgingly. “Day before yesterday, I think.” Before he could make a comment, she was waving it away. “Don’t worry about me. I can get by on very little.”

  The woman probably thought she was indestructible. But no one was, and since he was, in a manner of speaking, responsible for Kait while she was here, he wanted to make sure she didn’t turn into a liability. At the same time, he had a gut feeling that it would be a futile effort to tell her she needed to get some sleep, so he approached the subject in a roundabout way.

  “If you haven’t gotten a room yet, I’ve got an extra bedroom if you’re interested.”