Cavanaugh Judgment

by Marie Ferrarella

  What was that supposed to mean?

  For that matter, Blake suspected he was having his leg pulled. The story didn’t ring true. “Just what does a slip of a woman do to scare off two coyotes?” he wanted to know. The stories he’d heard made a point of the fact that of late, driven by hunger, coyotes were getting pretty brazen in the early morning light.

  “Something’ll get lost in the translation if I explain. You should ask her to show you sometime.”

  Not likely. Blake made a disparaging noise under his breath. He was in no need for an installment of show-and-tell. “I’ll be going to my chambers to have lunch,” he informed this newest Detective O’Brien he had to deal with.

  Ethan nodded amiably, gesturing for him to go first. “Lead the way, Your Honor.”

  Blake remained where he was. Security had been doubled. A rat with a hip replacement couldn’t sneak by the metal detector, much less a gun-wielding drug dealer. Just what did this O’Brien think was going to happen if he went to his chambers for some much-needed solitude?

  “I’d prefer to have it alone,” he informed the detective.

  “I’m sure you would,” Ethan responded cheerfully. “And I feel for you, Judge, I really do. But the chief’ll have my head if I don’t hang around you—and so would Greer.” He inclined his head toward the other man just a little. “And to tell you the truth, she scares me a lot more than the chief does. Greer doesn’t pull her punches,” he confided.

  There was just no winning, Blake thought with exasperation. Turning on his heel, he motioned for the other man to follow him to his chambers.

  Greer didn’t stop to catch her breath until she was in her car again, on her way back to the courtroom. She’d spent the past hour practically running from place to place, trying to get everything done in as short amount of time as possible.

  There was a duffel bag in the trunk, stuffed with everything she’d need for a week’s stay just in case this little detail she was shackled to dragged on and she didn’t get a chance to get back to her place. She’d arranged for her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Rosenbloom, to pick up her mail. She knew the retired junior high school English teacher would like nothing better than to have an actual excuse to go through her mail.

  The sprinklers were programmed on a timer set to go off every other day so that she wouldn’t return to a dead lawn. Most important, she’d made arrangements for Hussy to stay with Patience. Her half sister was only one of two within the Cavanaugh clan who wasn’t directly in law enforcement. Janelle was the other. The latter had thrown her lot in with the court system while Patience, bless her, was a veterinarian. More than that, she was a vet with just the right kind of touch.

  Hussy, poor baby, tended to be a huge chicken when it came to being handled by anyone but her. Some in-depth investigative work on her part had uncovered that Hussy’s former owner had abused her, using the small mongrel dog as a training tool for the pit bulls he was breeding. That was why the poor thing was missing part of her ear.

  Skittish around people she didn’t know, Hussy had nonetheless taken to Patience right from the start. Which was why she’d decided to leave Hussy with the woman instead of asking one of her brothers to swing by her house once a night to feed the dog and let her out in the yard.

  Patience had been more than happy to look after the dog. And she wasn’t housing Hussy in one of the runs at the animal hospital where other dogs whose masters were away were boarded. Instead, Patience told her that she was going to take the dog home with her.

  Greer could have sworn that Hussy had smiled when she’d handed the leash over to Patience.

  With her mind at ease, Greer felt she could give the proper amount of undivided attention to her assignment: making sure that Judge Blake Kincannon remained unharmed.

  Her mouth curved slightly. She was sure that was going to just thrill the man. Not that she could really blame him. Being independent herself, she could certainly understand Kincannon’s resistance to the situation. He was caught between a rock and a hard place. Refusing left him unprotected. No one liked feeling vulnerable, as if they had a target painted on their forehead. But men like Kincannon didn’t like being forced to obey rules that were not of their own making, didn’t like feeling hemmed in and trapped. Didn’t like their every move being watched and shadowed.

  The judge gave her the impression that he’d always shouldered his way through life. He was a protector, if she didn’t miss her guess, not a protectee.

  She felt for him. That didn’t mean that she was going to let him have his way. She was here for however long the chief felt she should be.

  Sorry, Judge. Sometimes we just have to play the hand we’re dealt, she thought as she pulled into the courthouse parking lot. It was only half full, which meant that people were still out to lunch.

  Her own lunch was sitting in a bag next to her on the passenger seat. Three different kinds of meat mated with two different cheeses and then drizzled with oil and vinegar before being stuffed into twelve inches of crusty French bread.

  At the rate she ate, she figured it would be her lunch and possibly her dinner, as well. Dinner for Kincannon and his father was going to be something she’d put together once she brought the judge home. During her nonstop marathon hour she’d made a point of picking up some groceries. She’d deposited them at the judge’s house just after she’d brought Hussy to stay with Patience.

  For a few seconds, she debated eating her lunch in the car, then decided that she’d been gone long enough. Ethan was doing her a favor; she didn’t want to abuse it. If she did, she knew she wouldn’t hear the end of it for a very long time. Ethan had the kind of memory that elephants envied.

  Besides, all things being equal, she’d rather be up in Kincannon’s chambers than sitting in a hot car.

  At the thought of the judge, Greer became aware of a strange feeling rifling through the pit of her stomach, unsettling it. Under different circumstances, she would have called what she felt butterflies, but there was no reason to have butterflies. This was just an assignment, no different from any other.

  Okay, maybe a little different, but that didn’t change the basics. She was a detective acting as a bodyguard. She was definitely not invested in this situation as a woman, only as an agent of the law. There was absolutely no reason for her to feel anything at all except responsible for keeping the man alive.

  But there was a part of her that did wish Kincannon wasn’t so damn sexy. It made things harder on her.

  Doesn’t matter if the man looks like Johnny Depp in one of his better roles, she upbraided herself. Blake Kincannon is just an assignment, not a man.

  Right. And she was a turnip, Greer thought as she entered the courthouse lobby.

  In order for her to get to any of the courtrooms—or even the bathroom for that matter—security required that she had to pass through a metal detector and then walk by the scrutinizing eye of a dour-faced policeman. The man made her think of a troll sitting beneath a bridge.

  “What’s in the bag?” the policeman fairly growled the question as he watched her place both of her weapons and her cell phone on the conveyer belt. He looked completely unimpressed when she flashed her shield at him. He was programmed to do a job and nothing was going to get in his way.

  “A sandwich,” she responded cheerfully. To prove it, she crossed to him and opened the bag so that he could verify the contents for himself.

  The policeman, Officer DeVry, muttered something under his breath and waved her on. As she picked her weapons and cell phone up on the other side of the screening apparatus, Greer heard what sounded like his stomach rumbling audibly.

  Greer raised her eyebrows as she looked in the officer’s direction. “Hungry?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he grumbled.

  She’d always been good at small talk. It was a tool to get people to relax around her. “When’s your lunch break?”

  “Not for a while,” he complained. “They’re short-handed because of the shoo
ting and I can’t go get anything for another ninety minutes.”

  Greer thought for a moment. Most likely, she was going to be dealing with this man for at least the next week if not longer. Having him view her in a friendly frame of mind might come in handy.

  Taking the sandwich out of the bag, she separated the two halves. They’d already been cut by the boy behind the counter who’d built the sandwich for her.

  Dropping one half back into the bag, Greer held the other half out to the officer like a peace offering. “Here.”

  DeVry eyed the offering suspiciously, making no move to take it from her.

  “Here what?” he wanted to know.

  The officer was sitting in a chair that had an arm extension on it. She placed the half she’d offered him on the extension.

  “I’d take it as a personal favor if you had this half. I hate wasting food and there’s just too much here for me to finish. Take it off my hands, Officer DeVry?”

  With that, Greer turned on her heel and hurried over to the escalator before the bewildered officer could say anything.

  She heard wrapping paper being quickly disposed of as the escalator took her up to the next floor. Greer smiled to herself.

  Judge Kincannon’s courtroom was empty when she walked in. It looked as if court was still in recess, she thought.

  Crossing the length of the room, Greer circumvented the judge’s desk and went through the door on the left that led to the hall and to Kincannon’s chambers. That door was closed, as well. She knocked on it once.

  Not waiting for a response, Greer turned the doorknob and walked in.

  Kincannon was at his desk, reviewing something that had him frowning to himself.

  Nothing new there, she thought.

  Her brother was on the leather sofa, reading a paperback book that he’d stuffed into his pocket earlier when she’d asked him to stay with the judge for an hour. Most likely he was reading a play, she guessed. Ethan had a weakness for theater productions. Being in them, not seeing them. Ethan was the family ham.

  “Hi, I’m back,” she announced just as Kincannon looked up. Tongue in cheek, she asked, “Did you miss me?”

  “What I realized,” Kincannon answered, “was that I’d missed the silence. In the past twenty-four hours, I haven’t had any.”

  Rather than rise to the bait, she glossed right over it. “Ethan’s not that much of a talker,” she agreed, setting down the bag that now only contained half a sandwich.

  Both Blake and Ethan laughed shortly, the sound merging. Just like when both her brothers used to gang up on her when they were growing up. She liked to point out that it took two of them to equal one of her.

  “Compared to you, an auctioneer isn’t much of a talker, either,” Blake told her.

  He wasn’t fooling her, she thought. Her eyes crinkled as she drew her conclusion. The man had missed her. The fact that he would probably go to his grave rather than admit it didn’t matter.

  “Thanks for filling in,” she told her brother. “You can go back to your homicide now.”

  Kincannon looked mildly interested. “She always boss everyone around?” he asked Ethan.

  “For as long as I can remember, Judge. Good luck,” he addressed the remark to Kincannon, not Greer. “And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

  “He means he would if he had one,” Greer corrected.

  Blake said nothing. He was too caught up in remembering. Scottie and he used to engage in the same kind of banter. It reminded him how much he missed his younger brother.

  “See you later, Greer.” And then Ethan nodded at him. “Goodbye, Judge, nice meeting you.”

  “Goodbye,” Blake murmured, already turning his attention back to what he was doing. And trying very hard not to notice that the woman had the crisp, fresh smell of the wind about her.

  It seemed rather appropriate, he couldn’t help thinking, seeing as how Detective Greer O’Brien had all but blown into his life.

  Chapter 10

  “So, what are we having tonight?” Alexander asked, seeming to materialize at the door the moment that Greer opened it.

  Tired, Greer still grinned as she dropped her shoulder bag on the hall table and removed her weapon, still in its holster. She placed it next to her purse. Her secondary weapon she only removed when she was going to bed.

  It was a little more than three weeks into her assignment and she and the senior Kincannon had hit a comfortable stride.

  After what seemed like several initial false starts, she sensed that the former gunnery sergeant had begun to view her as the daughter he’d never had. His own wife had died years ago and, from what he’d told her, he’d never really gotten to know his late daughter-in-law. He, Margaret and his son would get together around the holidays, but only if he was stationed in the area, which wasn’t very often.

  Alexander now called her by her first name rather than by her last and things were now comfortable between them. Greer wished she could say the same for her and the judge. Though he didn’t say it in so many words, Kincannon still looked as if he would rather she wasn’t around, which made her job more difficult.

  “In the interest of time,” she said in answer to Alexander’s question about dinner, “I was thinking of making shrimp alfredo.”

  Greer knew that she, like all the other Cavanaughs, had a standing invitation to drop by Andrew’s anytime for a meal. She’d done it the first night because she needed something to break the ice, but left to her own devices, she liked cooking and there was something very intimate and bonding about cooking for these two bachelors.

  Widowers, she silently corrected herself. Both men had loved and lost in the cruelest way nature could devise, long outliving the women they had vowed to love, honor and cherish to the end of their days.

  At least they’d loved someone, she thought wistfully, which was more than she could say. Of course, it was hard to fall in love when you kept a tight rein on your heart the way she did. But she was determined not to be hurt the way her mother had been and the only way to prevent it was not to fall in love in the first place.

  “Sounds good to me,” the older Kincannon enthused. “I’m partial to seafood,” he said, telling her something she’d already found out for herself. “Need any help?”

  The offer, out of the blue, surprised her. Her eyes crinkled as she told the man, “I could use some company. You up for that, Gunny?”

  “Sounds like something I can handle,” Alexander told her amiably as he slid onto a stool by the counter. He watched her gather the ingredients that another detective had dropped off earlier. “You know, this isn’t so bad, having a woman around.”

  She knew that as far as former gunnery sergeant Alexander Kincannon was concerned, he’d just given her a very high compliment. When she’d first arrived, Greer was well aware that the older man resented her intrusion into the home he shared with his son almost as much as his son did. Added to that was the fact that he didn’t feel that women belonged in law enforcement doing anything other than sitting behind a desk. With all of that stacked up against her, things could have become a little dicey.

  But they didn’t.

  “Wish your son felt that way,” Greer said offhandedly as she separated the already cooked shrimp from their tails. She threw the shrimp, one by one, into a bowl and the shells surrounding their tails onto a paper towel.

  “He minds less than he lets on,” Alexander assured her. “Blake just has trouble letting his feelings show. He’s used to keeping everything all bottled up.”

  She raised her eyes to the man sitting opposite her, barely able to suppress her smile. “Gee, I wonder where he got that from.”

  Alexander shook his head. “Beats me.”

  What really amused Greer was that Blake’s father was being serious. He didn’t see the connection of his passing on his behavior to his son.

  A noise behind him had Alexander swiveling his seat to the right to get a better look. Blake had just walked into the
kitchen.

  “Speak of the devil,” Alexander marveled, chuckling under his breath. “Hey, Blake, we were just talking about you.”

  Blake stopped short of the refrigerator and the cold drink that had been his goal. Suspicion flittered across his features as he looked from his father to the woman who, unbeknownst to her, was increasingly getting under his skin. “Why?”

  Greer decided to answer before his father said anything to get her in trouble. There was no telling how the older man would deliver the truth.

  “Your father seems comfortable having me around. I just commented that I wish you felt the same way.”

  Opening the refrigerator and taking out a can of soda, Blake popped the top. He took a drink, nudging the refrigerator door closed with his elbow. His eyes shifted toward her before he said anything.

  “Hard to feel comfortable with someone shadowing my every step.” He took another long sip and then laughed shortly. “I guess I should count myself lucky you let me use the bathroom by myself, without requiring me to share the experience.”

  Alexander’s laugh was far less subdued or guarded. “Might prove interesting,” he commented more to himself than to either one of them.

  Blake sighed. He knew better than to take his father to task for making the comment. The odds were fifty percent against him that Gunny might say something even worse the next go-round.

  So instead, Blake nodded at the pot that was growing crowded with shelled shrimp. “That dinner?”

  “It will be,” she answered.

  Kincannon didn’t usually come out of his office until dinner was ready. She’d learned in the first few days that the judge was a man of routines. That was good for her when it came to keeping tabs on him, but not so good when it came to the matter of the lowlife who was after him. A routine was something they could easily use to their advantage.

  That’s what you’re here for, remember? she reminded herself. It was up to her—and the patrolmen who periodically drove by Kincannon’s house—to keep the judge safe even within his routine.