A Cavanaugh Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  “So you plan on kissing me.” It wasn’t so much a question as an establishment of fact.

  “As long as you don’t have any objections,” Tom told her. “If you don’t, I plan to kiss you until both of us are returned to our ancient liquid states.”

  They each got out of the car and walked up to the front door. Tom did the honors, temporarily disarming the security system so that he could open the door for them. All the while, he continued to look at her.

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a plan,” she told him loftily as she walked in. “Actually, it sounds like the waste of an evening.”

  Shutting the door behind them, Tom caught her lightly by the arm. When she looked up at him, he smiled into her eyes. “The plan doesn’t end there.”

  “Oh?” Damn, she had to keep her heart from kicking into high gear like that. She would wind up giving herself away—if she hadn’t already. “Go on.”

  “I have an idea,” he proposed, slipping her jacket off her shoulders and down her arms. He tossed the jacket in the general direction of the easy chair. “Instead of telling you, why don’t I show you?” His smile widened. “I tend to be a hands-on kind of guy.”

  “Sounds interesting,” she agreed.

  The next moment, he surprised her by pushing her back. She felt her back meeting the wall in the living room. In the next breath, the front of her body was securely lodged against his. So much so that their complementing body parts meshed in a whispered promise of things to come.

  If she had any illusions about remaining aloof or projecting an aura of disinterest, they all went up in smoke the first few seconds into the seduction. Her pulse raced in tandem with her heart rate and all she could think of was Tom. The way he made her feel, the way she wanted to make him feel.

  They went as fast, if not faster, as they had the very first time they’d made love last night. There was an urgency, fueled by a fear that something would happen to terminate all this, and she desperately wanted to experience that light show in the sky that Tom could create within her just as they reached the ultimate climax together.

  She wasn’t disappointed.

  When it happened, when the stars seemed to shower down all around them, Kait could feel his heart slamming against hers even as he continued to balance the weight of his body on his elbows, keeping it from crushing her.

  As the euphoria began to recede, she heard Tom laugh very softly to himself. Her insecurity instantly perceived it to reflect something she had done that he found laughable.

  Stiffening, she challenged, “What?”

  He’d had every intention of going slow, but she’d tempted him into a faster and faster tempo. He didn’t like to admit it to himself, but she had wrested control away from him. He couldn’t remember that ever happening before.

  “We went at it like the end of the world was around the corner.”

  Was he going to say it hadn’t been any good that fast? Because he had rocked her world, just as he had yesterday. But maybe today he’d been removed enough to feel the need to criticize her.

  “So?” she asked defensively.

  “So this time,” he said, gently gliding the crook of his finger along her cheek, “I’d like to do it as if we had all the time in the world.”

  Her eyes widened as a pleased feeling spread all through her. “You want to do it again?”

  He mimicked her surprise. “You don’t?”

  She blew out a breath. “You talk too much,” she told him.

  “Maybe you don’t talk enou—”

  He didn’t get an opportunity to finish. Kait had taken matters into her own hands again, just as she had yesterday, and she pressed her mouth against his, terminating any further flow of words on his part and eliminating the need for answering questions on hers.

  An hour and a half later, after a third go-round had left them both spent and trying to steady their erratic breathing, Kait thrilled to the feel of Tom drawing his fingers along her hair with long, languid strokes. Shivers raced up and down her spine in response.

  Though she knew the danger of letting her guard down, of allowing herself to simply savor this moment, Kait did just that and could feel contentment slipping in.

  “About that question I asked earlier…” Tom began, whispering the words into her hair.

  Her mind was a total blank right now. “What question?”

  “About your last name.”

  Oh, right. That question. She shifted slightly so that she could look at him. “So you don’t believe in maintaining an aura of mystery?”

  “I believe in learning things about you,” he told her, playing with a strand of her hair. “Lots of things. Significant things. Insignificant things…”

  She made a small, hopefully disparaging sound. “You certainly have a lot of prerequisites for a casual-sex partner.”

  Her words hit him square in his chest. Tom rose up on his elbow and looked at her, his expression deadly serious. “What about this felt casual to you?” he asked.

  That was just the problem. It hadn’t. Not to her. To her what had just happened had been not just intense but very, very personal. And profound.

  In her heart she knew that she was setting herself up for a fall.

  Kait took a breath as she looked at the man beside her for a long moment.

  Maybe the question he’d asked wasn’t all that personal. After all, she wasn’t ashamed of being adopted. It had marked the beginning of her life, really.

  What would it hurt, telling Tom?

  Telling him wouldn’t actually be letting out some secret. He could look up the records, find out for himself if he pulled a few strings. Something that would be easy enough for him to do if he wanted to. So either he was just teasing her, being lazy—or he wanted her to tell him herself for whatever reason.

  She knew what sort of a reason he was thinking of: that she trusted him enough to be personal with him. Because even more personal than sharing her body would be sharing her thoughts, her past.

  This would take a giant leap on her part.

  Kait took a deep breath—and leaped.

  “Ronald Two Feathers had initially been part of a sting operation. My grandmother was given custody of me right after my mother gave birth. Seems someone, much to my mother’s relief, thought prison wasn’t the best place to raise a baby. That same line of thinking seemed to dictate that a grandmother would be the right person to raise a baby.”

  She stared at the ceiling. Truth be told, she had very faint memories of a tall, skinny, sharp-tongued woman who smelled of stale cigarette smoke and sweat.

  “Except that the powers that be who decided my fate didn’t know my grandmother.” Kait laughed shortly. “She was a resourceful woman and found uses for me from the very start.”

  Tom wasn’t sure he understood what she meant. “Uses?”

  Kait nodded. This, too, she vaguely remembered, mainly in bits and pieces. “If you’re shoplifting food to feed your baby granddaughter, most store owners won’t press charges and they’re most likely to take pity on you and let you walk away with even more than you initially shoplifted.

  “But after a while, my grandmother and her boyfriend found they needed drugs more than they needed food, so she tried to sell me.”

  “Sell you?” Tom echoed, horrified and incensed at the same time. She hadn’t mentioned this part when she’d told him how she’d gotten her last name. Granted, he knew things like selling children went on, but he’d never had any personal contact with that sort of a case.

  He was beginning to see why she had taken Megan’s abduction so personally. Because she put herself in the little girl’s place.

  “My grandmother never had much luck. The first guy she tried to sell me to not only turned her down but he called the police. Ronald and his partner posed as a couple who desperately wanted a baby girl.”

  She vividly remembered the first time she saw Ronald Two Feathers. He looked impossibly tall, impossibly strong. He’d had shining blue-
black hair and she thought he was a guardian angel, sent down to rescue her. Her four-year-old heart had fallen in love with him that very moment.

  “My grandmother was more than happy to offer me to them—for fifty thousand dollars. The second the exchange was made, my grandmother and her boyfriend were taken into custody. They turned on each other in record time and were both sent to prison. I never saw my grandmother again.

  “I was a scared, dirty, hungry little girl. Ronald bought me clothes, took me home.” The corners of her mouth curved as she remembered. “Had his partner clean me up. And then he cooked me the first decent meal I’d had since I couldn’t remember when—my grandmother thought my looking like a thin waif was more marketable,” she explained.

  “When social services came to take me away the next day, I cried and screamed and hung on to his leg. I didn’t want to leave him. He promised he’d come visit me every chance he could—and, amazingly, he kept his word. He was always there, looking out for me, taking me to amusement parks, promising me that someday, he would give me a real home. Then one day he brought around this woman, told me he was getting married. I was twelve at the time and thought that would be the end of it. That he’d forget about me and I’d be on my own again.” She closed her eyes and struggled to keep the hurtful memories at arm’s length. “Some of the foster homes were pretty terrible.

  “But Ronald Two Feathers was a man of his word. The first thing he and his new wife, Winona, did when they got back from their honeymoon was sign up to be foster parents and request that I be put in their care. I couldn’t believe it.” She closed her eyes again, willing herself not to cry. “I felt safe for the first time in years. Ronald and Winona adopted me before the year was out.”

  And that qualified as the happiest day of her life. But it took her a long time to get over the fear that her new life was just temporary. That her grandmother would come back and take her away. Or that one of the foster parents she’d had over the years would materialize to steal her back and put her through hell again.

  When she finally allowed herself to feel secure, fate came and stole it all away from her.

  Tom heard the tears in her voice even though she maintained a stoic expression as she related her story for him. “And so you became Kaitlyn Two Feathers,” he said, silently urging her to continue.

  She smiled at that. “And so I became Kaitlyn Two Feathers.”

  “What was your last name before then?” he asked, curious.

  She turned her head toward him. “I really can’t remember.” It was true, she really couldn’t. She had absolutely no sense of curiosity when it came to that. She didn’t want to know. “And as far as I’m concerned, I didn’t exist before I was twelve and Ronald gave me a life.”

  He made a natural assumption. “Is he the reason you became a cop?” She nodded in response. “He must have been very proud of you.”

  He knew how his father had felt about his being part of the force. How he felt about all of them joining up. While Sean had had a father’s natural fears, he was exceedingly proud of all of them.

  “He was.” Kait paused for a moment. It was always hard for her to say this. Still hard for her to come to terms with what her reality was. “Like I told you the other day, my father died four years ago. Cancer.”

  “And Winona?”

  “She was in a terrible car accident less than a year after that. A sports car jumped the divider, plowed right into her.” She pressed her lips together and stared at the ceiling again without seeing it at all. She blew out a shaky breath, trying to steady herself enough to continue. “She never woke up from that. Doctors told me she was brain-dead. I was the only next of kin she had, which meant that I had to be the one who told the doctors to pull the plug and terminate her life support. I struggled with that for a whole week, then realized I was just being selfish, trying to keep her alive for me, not because I honestly thought she could recover.

  “I knew in my heart that she wouldn’t have wanted to continue like that, a shell of the woman she’d been. So I said goodbye and told the doctor to turn off the machine.” The sigh that escaped her lips was ragged. “She lived a whole twenty-three minutes after the machines stopped. And then she died.”

  Tom thought he’d never heard a voice as sad as Kait’s as she said that.

  And then she tried to brighten a little, pushing all the emotions away into a small, invisible container where she kept them locked up. “I’m sure Ronald was waiting for her on the other side. She’d really been only half alive after he died.”

  Tom leaned over her and brushed away the tears that zigzagged down the side of her face, staining her cheek and the pillow beneath her. “I am very, very sorry you had to go through that, Kait.”

  She took another deep breath. It really didn’t help all that much.

  “Yeah, so am I.” She found she had to take a second breath before she could continue speaking. Her throat felt tight and she had to push the words out. She looked at him, trying desperately to regain her equilibrium. “Are you satisfied now?” she added. “Is that a good enough explanation for you about my last name?”

  She was in pain, Tom thought, and more than anything, he wanted to absorb that pain, take it away from her. But all he could do was slip his arm around her and draw her closer to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated quietly. “I didn’t mean for you to bring up all this pain,” he confessed, then whispered, “Thank you for letting me in,” and he pressed a kiss to her temple.

  She curled into him even as she balked at his undoing her. “Don’t be nice to me, Tom. When you’re nice to me, you make me want to cry. And I hate to cry.”

  He knew even that admission had been extremely personal for her. “I could kick you if that made you feel better,” he offered.

  “Well, what I’d really rather—”

  The phone on his nightstand rang, cutting into her thoughts. She turned her head toward it as he reached to answer it.

  “What I’d really like,” she concluded, switching directions, “is to pull that damn thing right out of the wall.”

  Tom held his hand up, the gesture asking for her silence, as he tried to make out the voice on the other end of the line.

  Halfway into the first shaky sentence, he recognized it. It was the clerk from the car-rental agency. Every nerve ending Tom had went on the alert.

  “I called like you told me to, Detective. That white van you were asking about? Well, I just saw it. It’s back on the lot.”

  Chapter 13

  The expression on Tom’s face told Kait something was definitely up. If the call had been inconsequential, he would have hung up by now.

  Was that Andrew requesting a return audience tomorrow or in the near future? When they’d been there, she’d heard the man talking about throwing another party for Christmas Eve, which was only a few days away.

  Kait could hear the clock in her head ticking away the minutes. She’d promised Amanda that she’d have Megan back to her by then.

  Or maybe the caller was his Uncle Brian. Maybe the chief of detectives had found out that she was operating on her own out here, without the blessings of Lt. Blackwell. In order for him to have found that out, he had either decided to call her lieutenant to check her out or—

  “We’ll be right there. Don’t go anywhere,” Tom ordered sharply.

  Kait braced herself, just in case. “We’ll be right where?” she asked, watching his face carefully.

  Tom dropped the receiver into the cradle and got to his feet. It was obvious that he’d meant what he said about getting to the unknown destination as quickly as possible.

  Picking up his jeans from the floor, he told her, “That was the clerk from the car-rental agency.”

  If he hadn’t had her attention before, he did now. Kait scrambled out of bed, taking her cue from him. Her clothes were lying in the doorway.

  “At this hour?” she questioned. “Why would he be opened now?” It didn’t make sense. “Who ren
ts a car at close to midnight?”

  Tom looked around for the blue pullover he’d worn earlier, before clothing had no longer been an option. Spotting a blue cuff peeking out from under the bed, he pulled the shirt out.

  He shook off the dust, pushed his arms through the sleeves and pulled the shirt on. “According to him, he lives near the place and he was out walking his dog when he decided to look in on the lot to make sure nobody had broken in to steal any of the cars.” Dressed, he began to hunt for his shoes. “Not only had no one stolen any of the vehicles, but according to him, the van was back. My guess is that it must have been returned after he closed down tonight.”

  Kait was hurrying into her own clothes as she listened. Questions multiplied in her head. Trust was something she usually held in abeyance. “Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd? Bringing the van back when no one was around?”

  He knew what she was thinking. That maybe the rental clerk was in on the abduction after all and had just played dumb. But if that were the case, why the improbable story about the van’s sudden return? Why not just have the van returned on someone else’s watch, when he wasn’t on duty?

  After turning the thought over in his head, Tom had another explanation.

  “Not if you think about it,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to pull on the worn pair of boots he’d tugged off earlier. “The guy who took Megan is probably afraid that it’s only a matter of time before someone sees the van and connects him to the abduction. Afraid he’s going to run out of luck, he brings the vehicle back. One less thing to worry about.”

  She supposed that made sense. In a way. “Until we get the fingerprints off the inside of the vehicle.”

  “We already got those, remember?” he reminded her, thinking of the application form that had been dusted. “The guy’s squeaky-clean.”

  The hell he was. “Yeah, a squeaky-clean predator,” she said bitterly. “I’ve been thinking about the case and it seems to me that this has to be a two-man job. Someone to drive the van and someone to grab the girl.” She saw that he was about to voice his doubts and she talked right over him, convinced that she was right.