Cavanaugh's Surrender

by Marie Ferrarella

  “It was more the way you said it,” he amended. Logan shook his head. “It came out much too docile for you.”

  “What are you, an expert on me now?” Destiny stared at him, completely mystified. “You’ve only known me for, what, a day?”

  “Almost two,” he corrected, as if that explained it all. “And sometimes, you just know things.” He smiled at her with an air of satisfaction that immediately got under her skin. “I would have done the same in your shoes.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she tried to understand. Was he drawing parallels between them? Or was he just trying to get her to drop her guard?

  Don’t hold your breath, Cavanaugh.

  “So exactly what are you saying? That I’m just like you?”

  “Oh, God, I hope not.” He said it with such feeling that just for a split second, she believed him. “What fun would that be?”

  Was that how he viewed his job? This investigation? As fun? Was he that irreverent?

  “I wasn’t aware that we were supposed to be having fun,” she said cynically.

  “You create little pockets of it along the way,” he told her, and she had the feeling that despite the easygoing smile on his lips, Logan was absolutely serious. “Otherwise, this job’ll eat you alive.”

  For now, she let that go. “How did you get here ahead of me?” she asked. “I drove away with you still standing in the parking lot, watching me leave.”

  “I took a shortcut,” he told her. “Besides, I have the car with the pretty little dancing lights and the siren I can turn on whenever I’m stuck in traffic.”

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t come here?” she challenged.

  “Oh, but you did, and I figured it was a pretty safe bet from where I was standing. So,” he said, getting down to business, “what is it that we’re going to be looking for?”

  For a second, the private part, the part that had always been protective of Paula and their mother before that, wanted to defiantly dig in. But what was the point? Protecting Paula no longer really mattered. What mattered was not letting whoever had done this to her sister get away with it. And if that person was the serial killer the way she believed him to be, well, then finding him and making him pay for all this as well as keeping him from killing anyone else would at least in some minor way give some sort of meaning to Paula’s death.

  She shrugged her shoulders in answer to his question. “Something. Anything.”

  “Well, that’s really pinning it down.” He laughed shortly. “In other words, we’ll ‘know’ it when we see it.”

  “Yes.” And then, as he began to head toward Paula’s bedroom to conduct a second, more thorough search through her closet and bureau drawers, Destiny recalled something. She addressed his back. “When we were kids, Paula used to keep a diary. I don’t know if she still does—still did,” Destiny corrected herself, still struggling with the fact that she had to use the past tense. “But it’s worth looking for.”

  The first wave of crime scene investigators had taken the laptop they’d found—presumably Paula’s—back to the precinct. The technician who had gone over it—Brenda Cavanaugh—the chief of D’s daughter-in-law—was exceptionally thorough.

  “They didn’t find anything besides her daily schedule on her computer,” Logan told her.

  That was no surprise. “They wouldn’t have,” Destiny told him, beginning her search in the kitchen. “In some ways, Paula was kind of old-fashioned. She liked the thought of writing personal things down using a pen and paper.” Her mouth curved just a little as she remembered her sister’s words. “Paula said she thought it was more ‘romantic’ that way.”

  Logan paused and glanced in her direction. “Sounds like she was a really unique person.”

  Destiny suppressed the heartfelt sigh that rose in her throat.

  God, but she was going to miss Paula. Even though they hadn’t gotten together all that much and Paula had her own set of friends, friends that she gathered she, Destiny, didn’t have all that much in common with, she would miss the idea of Paula, the comforting feeling that Paula was somewhere in the world with her. Now she had to accept the cold, hard fact that she would never see Paula again no matter how much she wanted it or how hard she wished for it.

  Her baby sister was gone, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

  But the next best thing would be finding Paula’s killer and making him pay for this. It was all she had to cling to.

  “Yeah, she was,” Destiny agreed in a small, strained voice.

  With that, she turned back to the kitchen and began opening all the drawers, checking all the shelves, including the refrigerator and the freezer. Paula wouldn’t have put it somewhere obvious, not since Destiny had accidentally stumbled across it under her sister’s mattress when she was changing the sheets years ago. Because Paula had become secretive and uncommunicative, she’d read a couple of pages—just enough to discover that David Chesnee had been Paula’s first and that Paula had been disappointed because there were no shooting stars, no wild feelings of fulfillment.

  That was as far as she’d gotten before Paula walked in and caught her. Absolutely livid, Paula didn’t talk to her for a month.

  With all her heart, she wished that Paula wasn’t talking to her now. That it was just anger and not death that separated them.

  Pressing her lips together, she blinked several times to keep back the tears. She had no time for tears.

  Destiny moved about the kitchen methodically, carefully going through one section at a time. But the result was still the same. She was coming up empty. The diary—if it existed—wasn’t wrapped in a plastic bag and tucked in the recesses of the refrigerator. It wasn’t in a plastic case on the bottom of the freezer. And it definitely wasn’t in any of the cabinets or the small pantry.

  Stumped, Destiny was on the verge of admitting that her sister no longer kept something as old-fashioned as a diary when her foot hit the bottom of the refrigerator. The long, rectangular plastic section just beneath the refrigerator door came loose.

  She looked down at it and frowned. She had the same problem with the one in her apartment. Having removed it to clean the coils in the front, she’d found that reattaching the section was far trickier than she had anticipated. It kept coming loose, bedeviling her. In Paula’s case, Destiny doubted that she’d taken it off to clean the coils. Cleaning had never exactly been high on her sister’s priority list. Most likely she—

  Destiny stopped and stared at the loose section as if seeing it for the first time.

  The next moment, she dropped to her knees in front of the refrigerator. Pushing the rectangular section out of the way, Destiny reached beneath the refrigerator as far as she could. Fingers outstretched, she felt around.

  Which was just the way Logan found her, hunkered down, flat on the floor with her arm underneath the refrigerator. Not knowing what to think, only that she was lying on the floor, he rushed over to her. Logan quickly got down on the floor beside her.

  “Richardson, you okay?” he asked, concerned.

  She could have sworn that her fingertips had just barely brushed against something. Positive it had to be the diary, she focused on coaxing it out and was oblivious to whatever Cavanaugh was saying.

  The next moment, a pair of strong hands pulled her back, away from the refrigerator. And then, just as if she was some weightless rag doll, she was off the floor and in his arms. How she’d gotten turned around, she wasn’t sure. Just as she wasn’t sure how he’d managed to get her up without tearing off the arm that had been snaked under the refrigerator. The only thing she did know was that there were less than two inches between them and she found herself looking into those magnetic green eyes of his.

  Her stomach tightened into a knot. He was much too close.

  There was concern written all over his face. “What happened?” he asked. Then, before she had a chance to utter a single word, Logan urgently demanded, “Are you all right?”

  For just a
split second, as her breath struggled to move back into her lungs, Destiny was utterly at a loss for words. Her mind had gone numb. But not her body. Her body felt as if a blanket of heat was wrapped all around her.

  And then, with a determined surge of strength, she pulled herself together. The heat receded and her senses returned. Her mind was functioning again.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, except that I think my right arm is longer than my left one now.” The sarcastic tone faded as she told him, “I think I felt something.” Turning, she pointed to the refrigerator. “It’s under there. I’m sure of it.”

  “It’s probably just dust—or the dead carcass of a rodent,” he guessed.

  She blocked the latter image from her mind. She’d seen more than her share of dead bodies—Paula’s included—but a dead rat made her squeamish.

  “No,” she insisted, “this felt like something straight and flat—like the edge of one of those black-and-white copybooks. You know the kind I’m talking about.” She looked at him expectantly, as if, for this one moment, he could access her thoughts.

  A black-and-white copybook could have easily been turned into a diary, he thought. At any rate, since she seemed so positive, it was worth a look.

  “Stand back,” he told her. “If it’s there, I’ll get it out.”

  Destiny shook her head. “Your arm’s too big to angle under the refrigerator,” she told him. “You’ll only get stuck.”

  He was way ahead of her there. “Wasn’t planning to go under it,” he said.

  And then, very slowly, grasping the side of the refrigerator closest to him, he moved it as far as he could. Positioning himself on the other side of the appliance, he repeated the process. Logan went back and forth several times until he’d finally succeeded in “walking” the refrigerator away from the wall and out into the kitchen proper.

  It was all the encouragement Destiny needed. Hopping onto the counter, Destiny slid her bottom along the slick tile. Perched on the edge, she looked down into the space he’d created.

  She could see a corner of a black-and-white book. Triumph surged through her. “I was right. It’s a copybook.”

  He looked around the refrigerator he’d just taken for a dance. “She really had trust issues, didn’t she?” he marveled.

  Now, there was an ironic observation, given that they were about to read her sister’s most intimate, personal thoughts.

  “Obviously justified,” Destiny retorted defensively for the sister who could no longer defend herself.

  Scrambling over to one side, Destiny lowered herself into the small space. There wasn’t really much room between the appliance and the wall. She had just enough space to bend her knees. Sinking down as far as she could go, Destiny once more felt around.

  Tapping into her patience—it was more difficult than she’d anticipated—Destiny finally managed to secure the book using just the edge of her fingertips. She moved it closer and closer to her until she could finally wrap her fingers around one corner.

  She didn’t like what she was feeling.

  The book was wet, as if the refrigerator had just recently leaked on it—or it had been dropped into something wet before someone slipped it back beneath the refrigerator.

  But if that was the case, why go through all that trouble if she was dead?

  Unless she hadn’t been dead at the time.

  But then, if there was something in the diary someone else didn’t want coming to light, why not just take the diary and destroy it?

  It didn’t make sense.

  Still, there might be some clue they could get off one of the pages. With a less than triumphant sigh, she placed the rippled copybook on the counter next to her point of entry.

  Seeing what he assumed was the diary, Logan marveled, “Son of a gun, you’re right.”

  Trying to vault out of the enclosure, to her dismay Destiny discovered that her upper-body strength was not as good as she would have liked. Two more attempts to propel herself out of the small space failed before she finally turned her eyes toward Logan.

  Logan appeared to be entertained by her unsuccessful attempts to get out of the small, enclosed area. His smile was annoying and far sexier than she would have been willing to admit.

  “Can I get you something?” he offered. “A ladder maybe?” The suggestion was followed by the sound of his laughter.

  Ordinarily, Destiny might have enjoyed the deep, somewhat sensual rumbling sound. But right now, she just felt exasperated.

  “Okay, a little help here.” It was just short of a demand.

  “Sure thing,” he said obligingly. “All you had to do was just ask.”

  “Otherwise you’d just stand there for the rest of the night?” she asked.

  He looked at her as if she’d gone simpleminded. “And get my head bitten off? Nope. I find that with women, to stay on the safe side, you have to wait until they make a request. Then you can come riding to the rescue.”

  “Let’s get this clear. This is not riding to my rescue,” she informed him.

  “It’s not?” Logan said innocently. “Then what is it?”

  “This is just giving me a helping hand,” she fired back through gritted teeth.

  He gave the impression of weighing her words. Finally, Logan lifted his shoulders in a careless shrug and said, “Whatever you say.”

  He was still laughing at her, even though there wasn’t a sound. Losing patience, she said, “Get me out of here, Cavanaugh!”

  “Your wish is my command,” he assured her.

  The next moment, he put his hands on each side of her rib cage. With what seemed to be a minimum of effort, Logan easily lifted her out of the narrow space behind the refrigerator.

  Bringing her up and over the counter, his hands slipped a fraction of an inch and he wound up holding her along the sides of her breasts.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, somehow, as he brought her over the top, she’d wound up being much too close to Logan. For all intents and purposes, she was almost intimately close.

  In response, her heart had begun hammering again and then that damn breath of hers had all but disappeared for a second time. But this time, exertion had nothing to do with it.

  Proximity did.

  When Logan set her down, the counter was against her back and he was pretty much against her front—or so it felt to her.

  The world seemed to suddenly freeze in time for a moment—except that there was no ice, just heat. Lots and lots of heat, and it flashed back and forth between them with an intensity that would have taken her breath away—had she had any to take.

  What the hell was going on with her? The question came on the heels of her reaction. Her atypical reaction. For a second—for just the briefest of seconds—she felt a very real, very strong temptation—to kiss Logan.

  His lips were less than the breadth of an eyelash away from hers. All she had to do was rise up on her toes, tilt her face up to his and there they were.

  The temptation was enormous.

  Especially when she felt Logan’s breath along her face. The ache inside of her, hot and strong, came out of nowhere.

  Destiny tried to tell herself that it came out of the emptiness she was experiencing because of Paula’s death, but that still didn’t make it go away or even lessen its intensity by so much as a fraction.

  The longing grew.

  Her pulse began to race as the urge multiplied, growing by leaps and bounds until it all but threatened to swallow her up.

  What would be the harm? her conscience whispered, turning on her. What would be the harm, just this once, to give in?

  Chapter 9

  Damn, but he was tempted. Really, really tempted.

  If they weren’t working together, if they weren’t focused on trying to find who had killed her sister and possibly several other women, Logan would have felt freer to indulge his curiosity.

  But he was walking a tightrope here.

  It was up to him to make perfectly sure there were no miss
teps with this investigation so that if they actually found a viable suspect, the case wouldn’t be tossed out of court on some irritating-as-hell technicality.

  Like tainted evidence.

  Would kissing a fellow investigator in an unplanned moment of extreme attraction and overwhelming weakness be considered the basis for undermining such an investigation? Logan would have been the first to admit that he wasn’t really clear on the concept, but all the same, he didn’t think so.

  Or was it that he didn’t want it to be so?

  Oh, the hell with it, he thought with a surge of impatience as he symbolically threw up his hands in frustration.

  The next moment those hands framed her face—odd how delicate she actually felt, considering that she came on like some indestructible gangbuster.

  And then, anticipation coursing through his veins, Logan lowered his head and contact was made.

  Extremely pleasant contact.

  No, on second thought, Logan amended, the word pleasant had no place here. Mainly because the kiss wasn’t pleasant. It was overwhelming, breath stealing, earthmoving and a whole host of other descriptions meant to convey something incredible, something leagues out of the ordinary. Pleasant was a word meant to describe an old-fashioned drawing room comedy or a semicold beer—rather than a preferable completely cold one. Pleasant was a joke that made you smile, not laugh out loud.

  This kiss made him want to shout.

  Logan could almost feel his blood rushing through his veins and definitely could feel his adrenaline increasing in tempo. As for his heart, it was hammering so hard, he was surprised it hadn’t broken through his rib cage and fallen at her feet.

  Without fully meaning to, he deepened the kiss, and lost himself in the revelry.

  Oh, no, no, no!

  What was she doing? Destiny silently demanded. Why was she kissing him back? She should be the one calling a halt to this, the one setting an example, not melting in his arms.

  But the plain truth of it was, despite the fact that she knew all the reasons she shouldn’t be doing this, she knew of only one reason why she should.

  Because she wanted it to continue.