“It’s okay. I’m okay,” she protested, trying to catch her breath. When she finally did, her eyes still somewhat watery, she looked at O’Brien. “Where did that come from?”
He slid back into his seat. “From what you said earlier.”
Her mind a blank, she shook her head. “I don’t recall.”
He had a feeling that she remembered but was dismissing the subject outright. “When I made that crack about your mother teaching you not to talk to strangers and you answered that you were sure she would have if you’d had one.”
Kansas placed what was left of the wrap down on the paper it had come in and looked at him. “Where is this going?”
There was a dangerous note in her voice that warned him to tread lightly. Or better yet, back off. “I was just curious if your mother died when you were very young.”
Her expression was stony as she told him, “I have no idea if she’s dead or alive. Now could we drop this?” she asked in the coldest tone she’d ever summoned.
It wasn’t cold enough. “You didn’t know her.” It didn’t take much of a stretch for him to guess that.
The first reply that came to her lips was to tell him to damn well mind his own business, but she had a feeling that the retort would fall on deaf ears. He didn’t strike her as the type to back off unless he wanted to. The best way to be done with this was just to answer his question as directly and precisely as possible.
“No, I didn’t know her.” She addressed her answer to the windshield as she stared straight ahead. “All I know is that she left me on the steps of a hospital when I was a few days old.”
Sympathy and pity as well as a wave of empathy stirred within him. There’d been times, when he was much younger, when he’d felt the sting of missing a parent, but his mother had always been there for all of them. What must it have been like for her, not having either in her life?
“You’re an orphan?”
He saw her jawline harden. “That’s one of the terms for it. ‘Throwaway’ was another one someone once used,” she recalled, her voice distant, devoid of any feeling.
She wasn’t fooling him. Something like that came wrapped in pain that lasted a lifetime. “No one ever adopted you?”
She finally turned toward him. Her mouth quirked in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Hard to believe that no one wanted me, seeing as how I have this sweet personality and all?” One of the social workers had called her unadoptable after a third set of foster parents had brought her back.
He knew what she was doing, and he hadn’t meant to make her feel self-conscious or bring back any painful memories. “I’m sorry.”
Her back was up even as she carelessly shrugged away his apology. “Hey, things happen.”
“Do you ever wonder—”
She knew what he was going to ask. If she ever wondered about who her parents had been. Or maybe if she wondered what it would have been like if at least her mother had kept her. She had, in both cases, but she wasn’t about to talk to him about it. That was something she kept locked away.
“No,” she said sharply, cutting him off. “Never.” Balling up the remainder of her lunch, she tossed it and the wrapper into the bag. “Now, unless you’ve secretly been commissioned to write my biography, I’d appreciate it if you’d stop asking me questions that aren’t going to further this investigation.” She nodded at the burger he was still holding. “Finish your lunch.”
Not until he evened the playing field for her, he thought. He didn’t want her thinking he was trying to be superior or put her down in any manner. That was not the way he operated.
“I never knew my father.”
Oh no, they weren’t going to sit here, swapping deep-down secrets that he hoped would ultimately disarm her so that he could get into her bed. It wasn’t going to work that way. It had once, but she’d been very young and vulnerable then. And stupid. She’d grown up a lot since she’d made that awful mistake and married a man she’d thought could be her shelter from the cruelties of life. Grown up enough to know that there would never be anyone out there to love her the way she needed to be loved.
The way she so desperately wanted to be loved.
Like it or not, she’d made her peace with that and she wasn’t about to suddenly grow stupid because the guy sitting across from her with the chiseled profile and the soulfully beautiful blue eyes was doing his best to sound “nice.”
Kansas looked at him and said flatly, “I don’t want to know this.”
Ethan didn’t seem to hear her. Or, if he did, it didn’t deter him. He went on as if she hadn’t said anything.
“My mother told us he died on the battlefield, saving his friends. That he was a hero.” For a moment, a faraway look came into his eyes as bits and pieces of that time came back to him. “She told us a lot of things about our father, always emphasizing that we had a lot to be proud of.”
She had no idea why he was telling her this. Did he think that sharing this was going to somehow bring them closer? “Okay, so you had a legend for a father and I didn’t. How does this—”
She didn’t get to finish framing her question. His eyes met hers and he said very simply, without emotion, “She lied.”
That brought what she was about to say to a screeching halt. Kansas stared at him. “Excuse me?”
“She lied,” he repeated, and then, for emphasis, said again, “My mother lied.”
Despite her initial resolve, Kansas could feel herself being drawn in ever so slowly. It was the look in his eyes that did it. She supposed, since O’Brien seemed so bent on talking, that she might as well try to gain a measure of control over the conversation. “About his being a hero?”
If only, Ethan thought. If it had just been that, he could have easily made his peace with it. But it went far beyond a mere white lie. And it made him slow to trust anyone other than Kyle and Greer, the only two people in the world who had been as affected as him by this revelation.
“About all of it. Everything she’d told us was just a lie.”
Kansas felt for him. She would have been devastated in his place. If what he said was true. “How did you find out?”
“From her. On her deathbed.” God, that sounded so melodramatic, he thought. But it was the truth. Had his mother not been dying, he was certain that the lie would have continued indefinitely. “She knew she didn’t have much longer, and apparently she wanted to die with a clear conscience.”
Kansas took a guess as to what was behind the initial lie. “She didn’t know who your father was?”
“Oh, she knew, all right.” An edge entered Ethan’s voice. “He was the man who abandoned her when she told him she was pregnant. The man who bullied her into not telling anyone about the relationship they’d had. If she did, according to what she told us, he promised that he would make her life a living hell.”
Kansas didn’t know what to say. Going by her own feelings in this sort of a situation, she instinctively knew he wouldn’t want her pity. She shook her head, commiserating. “Sounds like a winner.”
“Yeah, well, not every Cavanaugh turned out to be sterling—although, so far, my ‘father’ seems to be the only one in the family who dropped the ball.”
The last name made her sit up and take notice. Her eyes widened. “Are you telling me that Brian Cavanaugh is your father?”
He realized that he hadn’t been specific. “No, it’s not Brian—”
“Andrew?” she interjected. She’d never met the man, but the detective had mentioned him and she knew the man by reputation. The very thought that Andrew Cavanaugh would have a love child he refused to publicly acknowledge sounded completely preposterous, especially since he was known for throwing open his doors to everyone.
But then, she thought, reconsidering, did anyone really ever know anyone else? When she’d gotten married, she would have sworn that Grant would never hurt her—and she’d been incredibly wrong about that.
“No, not Andrew, either.” He would have b
een proud to call either man his father, but life hardly ever arranged itself perfectly.
She frowned. Was he pulling her leg? “All the other Cavanaughs are too young,” she retorted. The oldest was possibly ten or twelve years older than O’Brien. Maybe less.
“It was Mike Cavanaugh,” he said flatly.
Mike. Michael. Kansas shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t know who that is.”
“Was,” he corrected her. “Mike Cavanaugh died in the line of duty a number of years ago. Patience and Patrick are his legitimate kids—”
She stopped him cold. He was treading on terrain that encompassed one of her pet peeves.
“Every kid is ‘legitimate,’ ” she said with feeling. “It’s the parents who aren’t always legitimate, not thinking beyond the moment or weighing any of the consequences of their actions. Allowing themselves to get careless and carried away without any regard for who they might wind up hurting—”
Ethan held up his hand to get her to stop. “I’m not trying to get into an argument with you,” he told her. “I’m trying to make you see that we have more in common than you think.”
Not really, she thought.
“At least you had a mother, a mother who tried to shield you from her mistake, however badly she might have done it. A mother who tried to give you something to believe in. Mine couldn’t be bothered to do anything except to literally pin a name on me that would always make me the butt of jokes.” She saw him looking at her quizzically and elaborated. “She pinned a piece of paper to my blanket that said, ‘Her name is Kansas. I can’t raise her.’ That’s it. Eight words. My entire legacy, eight words.”
“At least she did give you a chance to live,” he pointed out. “I’ve seen newborn babies thrown out in garbage cans, discarded by the wayside, like spoiled meat.” He recalled one specific case that had taken him months to get out of his head.
Kansas sat silent in the car, studying him for a long moment. Just as the silence began to seem as if it was going on too long, she said, “You’re a silver-lining kind of guy, aren’t you?”
Kyle had been the last one to accuse him of that, except that the terminology his brother had used wasn’t quite as squeaky-clean as what Kansas had just said.
“Once in a while,” he allowed. “It does help sometimes.”
Kansas didn’t agree. Optimists tended to be stomped on. She’d been down that route and learned her lesson early on.
“Being a realist helps,” she countered. “That way, you don’t wind up being disappointed.” Her mouth feeling exceptionally dry, she stopped to drain the last of her soft drink. “What do you say we get this show on the road and go talk to Mr. Silver, the owner of that discount store that burned down?” In case he’d forgotten, she prompted, “It was the fourth fire.”
He nodded, recalling the notes he’d written beneath the photos on the bulletin board. “That was the fire that led the chief of Ds to believe that there was just one person setting all of them.”
“Right.” Captain Lawrence had mentioned that to her in passing.
O’Brien turned the key in the ignition and started the car. Just as he was about to shift out of Park, she put her hand on top of his, stopping him. He could have sworn he felt something akin to electricity pass through him just then. Masking it, he looked at Kansas quizzically.
“This all stays here, right?” she questioned sharply. “What we just talked about, my background, it stays here, between us. It goes no further. Right?” This time it sounded more like an order than a question. Or, at the very least, like a sharply voiced request for a confirmation.
“Absolutely,” he assured her immediately. Pulling out of the spot and then merging onto the street, he slanted a glance in her direction. “But if you find you ever want to just talk about it—”
She cut him off before he could complete his offer. “I won’t.”
The lady doth protest too much, he thought. “Okay,” he allowed. “But should hell begin to freeze over and you find that you’ve changed your mind, you know where to find me.”
“Don’t worry,” Kansas assured him. “I won’t be looking.”
She bottled things up too much, he thought. He’d had one of his friends, a firefighter at another house, discreetly ask around about this woman. She didn’t go out of her way to socialize and definitely didn’t hang out with the firefighters after hours. She was, for all intents and purposes, a loner. Loners tended to be lonely people, and while he had no illusions or desires to change the course of her life, he did want to offer her his friendship, for whatever that was worth to her.
“Ever heard that poem about no man being an island?” he asked.
She could feel her back going up even as she tried to tell herself that O’Brien didn’t mean anything by this. That he wasn’t trying to demean her.
“Yeah,” she acknowledged with a dismissive tone. “It was about men. Women have a different set of rules.”
He doubted that she really believed that. She was just being defensive. She did that a lot, he realized. “Underneath it all, we’re just human beings.”
“Stop trying to get into my head, O’Brien,” she warned. “You’ll find it’s very inhospitable territory.”
He debated letting this drop and saying nothing. The debate was short. “You’re trying too hard, Kansas.”
God, she hated her name. It always sounded as if the person addressing her were being sarcastic. “Excuse me?”
“I said you’re trying too hard,” he repeated, knowing that she’d heard him the first time. “You don’t have to be so macho. This isn’t strictly a man’s field anymore. Trust me, just be yourself and you’ll have the men around here jumping through hoops every time you crook your little finger.”
Was he serious? Did he actually think she was going to fall for that? “I don’t know if that’s insulting me or you. Or both.”
“Wasn’t meant to do either,” he said easily, making a right turn to the next corner. He slowed down as he did so and gave her a quick glance. “You really are a beautiful woman, you know.”
She straightened, doing her best to look indignant even as a warmth insisted on spreading through her. “I’d rather be thought of as an intelligent, sharp woman, not a beautiful one.”
He saw no conflict in that. “You can be both,” he answered matter-of-factly, then added more softly, “You are both.”
Kansas frowned. Oh, he was a charmer, this temporary partner of hers. He was probably accustomed to women dropping like flies whenever he decided to lay it on. Well, he was in for a surprise. She wasn’t going to let herself believe a word coming out of his mouth, no matter how tempting that was or how guileless he sounded as he delivered those words. She’d had the infection and gotten the cure. She was never going to allow herself to be led astray again. Ever.
“Don’t you know that ingesting too much sugar can lead to diabetes?” she asked sarcastically.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he promised, not bothering to keep a straight face. “Were the cross streets for that discount house Culver and Bryan?”
“Culver and Trabuco,” she corrected.
As soon as she said it, he remembered. “That’s right.” He laughed shortly. “After a while, all the names and descriptions start running together.”
“Not to me,” she informed him crisply. “Each and every one of the buildings are different. Like people,” she added.
The way she said it, he knew she wasn’t trying to sound high-handed or find fault with him. She meant it. It was almost as if every fire had a separate meaning for her.
Ethan had a feeling that the fire inspector he’d initially felt that he’d been saddled with had more than one outstanding secret in her closet. He meant to find out how many and what they were, although, for the life of him, he couldn’t clearly state why he was so determined to do this. Why he wanted to unravel the mystery that was Kansas Beckett.
But he did.
Chapter 8
Th
ey were getting nowhere.
Five days of diligently combing through ashes, testimonies and the arrest records of felons who had a penchant for playing with fire hadn’t brought them to any new conclusions, other than to reinforce what they already knew: that there were some very strange sociopaths walking the earth.
Their lack of headway wasn’t for lack of tips. What they did lack, however, were tips that didn’t take them on elaborate wild-goose chases.
With a frustrated sigh, Ethan leaned back in his chair. He rocked slightly as he stared off into space. The lack of progress was getting to him. The latest “person of interest” he was looking into turned out to have been in jail when the fire spree initially started. Which brought them back to square one.
Again.
“I’m beginning to feel like a dog chasing his own tail,” he said out loud, not bothering to hide his disgust.
Kansas looked up from the computer screen she’d been reading. “I’d pay to see that,” she volunteered.
Closing her eyes, Kansas passed her hand over her forehead. There was a headache building there, and she felt as if she were going cross-eyed. She’d lost track of the number of hours she’d been sitting here, at the desk that had been temporarily assigned to her, going through databases that tracked recent fires throughout the western states in hopes of finding something that might lead to the firebug’s identity. Every single possibility had led to a dead end.
There had to be something they were missing, she thought in exasperation. Fires that could be traced to accelerants just didn’t start themselves. Who the hell was doing this, and when was he finally going to slip up?
Noting the way Kansas was rubbing her forehead, Ethan opened his bottom drawer and dug out the container with his supply of extra-strength aspirin in it. In the interest of efficiency, he always bought the economy size. He rounded his desk and placed the container on top of hers.
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