Cavanaugh Pride

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Obviously not.” Sighing, she pushed the glass away from her. Locking the barn door after the horses had run away, she thought, upbraiding herself. “I should have told him to bring me a ginger ale.” And then, because there was a need to blame someone, she eyed him accusingly. “Did you tell him to switch drinks?”

  He didn’t take offense. “You were sitting here the entire time. Unless you think I have some kind of secret powers and can communicate with people through telepathy, I think you know the answer to that.” And then, because he couldn’t help himself, he smiled warmly at her. Regulations dictated that he ignore her confession and pretend that nothing had said about the electricity humming between them. But he was too intrigued, too taken with her to just let her words pass without some sort of acknowledgement. “You’re attracted to me?”

  She could feel herself reddening and gave him a look that bordered on murderous, deliberately daring him to make a comment about her changing complexion. “It’s the wine talking.”

  His gut told him that this wasn’t the case here. “Sometimes alcohol loosens tongues.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And sometimes it turns people into useless drunks.”

  She said it with such feeling, Frank was certain that someone close to her had to be the focus of that statement. A lover? An ex-husband? He’d seen her file and there was next to nothing personal in it. Other than her having grown up on a reservation and the fact that both her parents were deceased, nothing in it gave him a clue about her childhood. He was filling in the blanks as he went.

  He leaned forward, lowering his voice. Sounding kind. “Who did it turn into a useless drunk, Julianne?”

  There he went again, using her name and making it personal. She wished he’d stop that. She raised her chin defiantly.

  “That has no bearing on anything.”

  “Doesn’t it?” he challenged. “We’re all made up of a million different little pieces that are fit together. Some of which go back to our childhood,” he added tactfully. He saw resistance enter her eyes.

  Maybe, if he was lucky, it would be a matter of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” It was worth a try. But that meant that he had to go first.

  More than most, Frank understood her reluctance about talking about her personal life. He didn’t exactly like talking about parts of his past, either. But if his talking about his past would free her up to talk about hers, then it was worth it.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if no one knew. That was the problem. Too many people knew. It was something he and his brother and sisters, not to mention his mother, had had to live down.

  So, when she said nothing, he took the plunge. “I’ve spent the last few years fighting the specter of my father. Rumor had it that he was a dirty cop, that he was trying to rip off the very people he was supposed to be busting.” Talking about it brought back the anger. It surged through him. He wondered if he was ever going to be able to revisit this time without feeling betrayed and defensive. “The worst of it was when they started whispering things about my mother, saying that she was in on his plan, or that she knew where the money that had disappeared was buried. It got me pretty crazy for a while,” he admitted.

  “How did you handle it?” she asked.

  “Instead of getting into fights, defending her, defending his name, I learned how to just ignore what was being said.” His expression turned grim as he remembered the events of the previous year. Of how his mother had tried in vain to protect them all from the fall out. “But then my father came back from the dead and everything that had been said about him turned out to be true.”

  “Wait, wait.” Julianne grabbed his hand, as if that would stop him from going any further. Suddenly realizing what she was doing, that her hand was covering his, she pulled it back. “What do you mean, he ‘came back from the dead’?”

  He was so used to the people around him being aware of the details, he forgot that she wouldn’t be. “We all thought he was dead. There’d been a gun battle and my father’s mutilated body wound up washing up on the shore. At least, we thought it was his body. We held a closed-casket funeral service for him and buried him in the family plot.” The ironic smile on his lips had no humor in it. “Turns out it wasn’t him. It was his drug contact who was killed in the shoot-out. My father was probably the one who pulled the trigger,” he added grimly. “He dressed the other man in his clothes, then bashed his face in. We made a natural mistake.”

  She knew what it felt like wanting to be proud of your father and knowing that you couldn’t be. That he was nothing more than a huge disappointment, a weak man who thought only of himself.

  Her sympathy aroused, she looked at him for a long moment. “How did you stand it?”

  Frank shrugged. He hadn’t intended for his “confession” to go this far. He’d brought her here to find out more about her, not talk about his own past. “You get through it. And it helps to have someone like Brian Cavanaugh on your side,” he told her. “Not to mention siblings to turn to.”

  She thought of the people Riley had introduced her to the other night. She vaguely recalled that a couple of them, a man and a woman, had been named McIntyre. That made him far better off than her.

  “Yeah, well, things are different when there’s nobody to turn to.”

  Nobody. That had to be one of the loneliest words he’d ever heard. “Nobody?”

  She shook her head. From what she’d heard, her mother, already convinced that she’d made a huge mistake marrying her father, hadn’t wanted any children. After she was born, her parents stopped sleeping in the same bed.

  “I’m—I was,” she amended with a great deal of difficulty, “five years older than Mary. When the bottle finally did my father in, I was a couple of weeks shy of turning eighteen. My uncle volunteered to take me in.” Her mouth hardened. “According to him, it was my father’s dying wish that I move in with him and my cousin. It didn’t sound like my father, but I just wanted to be part of something so much, I believed him. Turned out that it was my uncle’s wish, not my father’s.”

  It wasn’t hard to pick up on her tone. “What did your uncle do to you?”

  “Nothing,” she answered firmly, and then she relented, adding, “Not for lack of trying. Every time I walked by, he tried to pull me onto his lap, grab me…” Julianne shrugged, letting the momentary silence take the place of any further explanations. “I lasted exactly eight days, then packed up and left in the middle of the night.” If she’d tried in the daytime, she knew her uncle would have tried to physically stop her, and he was twice as big as she was. “I got a job and put myself through school,” she continued without any fanfare, then sighed heavily. “It never occurred to me that he would try to do the same thing to his own daughter.” Just saying it made her feel ill all over again.

  He’d seen it time and again. People who blamed themselves for things they had absolutely no control over. “That’s because you don’t think like a sick child predator.”

  “I should have. I should have known,” she murmured more to herself than to him. “Now, because of me, Mary’s dead.” And she was never going to forgive herself for that.

  “What happened to your cousin is not your fault,” Frank insisted firmly. What was it going to take for her to believe him?

  “Yes, it is,” she answered quietly. There was no way that she couldn’t take responsibility for this. “I failed her when she needed me.”

  Stopping abruptly, Julianne looked at him. Most likely it was the wine talking. But maybe McIntyre was right. Maybe it just loosened tongues instead of fabricated stories.

  Julianne leaned in closer and said, “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

  Her breath was warm on his face and he could feel his pulse accelerating. But even though he felt himself responding to her and to what she was saying in myriad ways, he knew nothing would come of it. Because he wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t believe in taking advantage of vulnerable women no matter how attracted to them he w
as. There were rules, rules of his own making, that he followed.

  “I’ll take you to your hotel room,” he told her. “Tomorrow, Riley will come by and bring you to your car,” he continued, answering Julianne’s question before she could ask.

  Signaling for the check, Frank paid the amount in cash, leaving a healthy tip. He slipped his wallet back into his pocket and placed his hand under her arm. “Let’s go, Julianne.”

  “White Bear,” she corrected, rising to her feet. “Call me White Bear.”

  It seemed like an odd request. Usually, a woman who wanted to sleep with you wanted things to be more intimate, not less. “Why?”

  Julianne took a breath, trying to keep things from slipping into a haze. “Because when you say my name, it feels too personal.” They walked outside and the cool evening air made her feel a little better. “This isn’t going to be personal,” she informed him.

  This was absurd, she thought, annoyed with herself. Why was her head buzzing like this? It was just one stupid glass of wine. Okay, maybe two, she amended, remembering that the waiter had come by to refill her glass. The problem was, she suddenly remembered, that she’d consumed the wine on essentially an empty stomach. And because she blamed it for her parents’ breakup, she had never built up any sort of tolerance for alcohol.

  A little tolerance would have been wonderful right about now.

  They’d reached his vehicle and she realized that he was looking at her. “It’s not going to be personal, huh?” It was a rhetorical question.

  She began to shake her head, then thought better of it. Her head was throbbing as it was. “Nope.”

  “Then I take it we’re going to be using puppets?” he asked mildly, unlocking her door.

  “We’re going to be having sex,” she retorted, getting into his car. Sinking into the seat, she took a moment undertaking the ordeal of buckling up. “That doesn’t have to be personal.”

  Getting in on the driver’s side, Frank laughed shortly. There was a lot that had to be straightened out about this woman.

  “Sorry, whenever I make love with a woman, it’s always personal.” He spared her a look before backing out of the parking space. “Otherwise, why bother?”

  Confusion wove in and out of her brain as Julianne tried to think. “To release energy, tension,” she finally answered.

  Wow. He shook his head in disbelief. “You’ve just reduced a beautiful thing to a science theorem. Bet you have to beat men off with a stick.”

  She took his last sentence literally. And remembered. “A knife,” she corrected.

  They were on the road. Rather than pass through the amber light, he slowed down and watched the traffic signal turn red. This wasn’t the kind of conversation to be had while staring through the front windshield. “You used a knife?”

  She shut her eyes and found that wasn’t such a good idea. Things began to swim. She opened her eyes again. “Just once.”

  To defend herself? To exact revenge? With her, it could have gone either way. He didn’t know her well enough to make the actual call, but his gut told him it was probably self-defense. “Want to talk about it?”

  The light turned green. He wasn’t moving. “No.”

  The driver behind him tapped his horn. Frank put his foot on the accelerator. His hands tightened ever so slightly on the steering wheel. “He deserve it?”

  The laugh gave him his answer before she did. “In spades.”

  There was silence for the rest of the trip, which wasn’t long. Within ten minutes, he was guiding his vehicle into the parking lot. Frank found a spot close to the entrance.

  Pulling up the hand brake, he turned the engine off and then looked in her direction. Ordinarily, he would have just waited for her to get out but his gut told him that, despite her pride, Julianne might need a little help navigating. Without saying as much, he got out on his side and rounded the trunk of his car, getting to her door before she had a chance to pull the handle.

  Opening the door for her, he extended his hand and then helped her out. Her left heel got caught in the gravel and she sank slightly when her shoe refused to move with her.

  Frank’s hold on her tightened automatically and he pulled her to him.

  Big mistake.

  His brain instantly telegraphed the observation to him as electricity shot through his body.

  Before he knew exactly what was happening, he found himself kissing her.

  Under penalty of death, he wouldn’t have been able to say if he was the one who made the first move, kissing her or if she had set the ball in motion, kissing him. Either way, the next moment, their lips were pressed against each other and someone had set off an entire giant string of Fourth of July fireworks approximately three months too early.

  Her mouth tasted exactly the way he’d thought it would.

  Impossibly sweet, impossibly enticing.

  Without meaning to, Frank deepened the kiss, wanting to savor her lips before he did the right thing and stepped back, away from her and what was clearly the line of fire. However, since his intentions were good and his plan laid neatly out before him, he thought that he could be forgiven, just this once, if he extended the time limit by a few precious seconds. He needed to absorb the sensations that were—even now—shooting wildly through him, setting off sparks and, inadvertently, a hunger that he hadn’t been aware of harboring.

  While it was true that he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been attracted to women and acted on that attraction, for some unknown reason, this felt different.

  Was different.

  To begin with, it was going against rules, both his own and, to a lesser degree, the department’s. Julianne was someone from his own department—at least she was for the time being—and that meant that there was supposed to be a hands-off policy in force.

  A policy he couldn’t seem to make stick.

  But he would. In a minute. Maybe just a tad bit longer.

  She’d never been drunk before, had sworn to herself, at a very young age as she tended to her father, that she never would be.

  Because being drunk made you stupid.

  Except that she didn’t feel stupid. She felt, in a word, glorious. Superhuman. Right at this moment, she felt as if she could leap a tall building in a single bound and do all sorts of wonderful, incredible things.

  All because he was kissing her.

  No, it wasn’t a kiss. The man was setting fire to her. And she didn’t have enough brains to try to get away. To run for cover.

  Julianne could swear that she could actually feel her blood rushing through her veins. Could feel her head begin to spin wildly as an unprecedented hunger began to consume her.

  Was that the alcohol at work?

  Or him?

  Wrapping her arms around Frank’s neck, leaning her body into his, she stood up on her toes and deepened the kiss.

  As she did, her tongue briefly flirted with his, sending shockwaves through her body to the point that she couldn’t understand how she was keeping from trembling all over.

  She was a responsible woman. This had to stop.

  In a minute.

  In just another minute.

  A sigh escaped her lips as, rather than stop, she kissed him harder. Kissed him with all the feeling that was running rampant through her.

  This was just sex, nothing more than sex, Julianne silently insisted, even as something inside of her really craved for it to be more.

  But even in her unfocused state, she knew that wasn’t possible.

  More was for people who won more than they lost. For people who hadn’t found themselves abandoned at every turn by people they loved.

  By people who were supposed to have loved her.

  For her, just sex and nothing more, would have to do.

  But even as she resigned herself to that, the ache inside of her grew.

  Chapter 9

  The heat continued to build up within her. Julianne could sense it all but consuming her. Burning the edge
s of her fingers and toes.

  And then, suddenly, she felt hands closing down on her shoulders. Firm hands that exerted just enough force to gently push her back.

  Julianne blinked, disoriented. There was space between them where, only a moment earlier, there’d been none.

  Frank looked down into her face, a squadron of emotions flooding him. “Good night, Julianne.”

  Those were probably the hardest words he’d said in a long time. Somewhere, a medal of honor waited for him.

  “You’re not coming in?”

  For two cents…Struggling, he shook his head. “No.”

  Julianne stared at him, dazed. “But I just threw myself at you.”

  And he would have liked nothing more than to catch her. But he knew he couldn’t. Not if he wanted a clear conscience.

  “Yes, you did.”

  And then it suddenly all became clear. “Oh.” Julianne felt naked and vulnerable and every inch an idiot. This had never happened to her before. The opposite had always been true. She’d have to fight men off. “You don’t want me.”

  Frank laughed then and shook his head. God, was she ever off base.

  “Lady, you are definitely not as good at reading people as you think you are.” Because they were standing outside her hotel and not inside her room, he allowed himself a second more to drink her presence—and all that could have been—in. “I don’t think the word want even begins to cover what I’m feeling right now.”

  He wasn’t making any sense. “Then why…?” Her voice trailed off as she regarded him, mystified. Was he afraid that she was trying to trap him? “I’m not expecting anything.”

  He laughed shortly. “Always flattering to be told that.”

  She waved an impatient hand at him. “You know what I mean. I’m not expecting our spending the night together to mean anything to you—to us,” she corrected herself quickly, not wanting him to think that her attraction was reaching critical mass. “Isn’t that what every man wants, sex with no strings?”