He didn’t need the police department’s blessings to do this, he mused, urging himself on. Fact of the matter was, he could accomplish this mission without them. He had a little money saved up and didn’t really require very much to live on.
The idea appealed to him.
He’d become an avenging angel.
“No,” he corrected himself out loud, “an avenging devil.” Because men like the one his stepfather had shot dead only understood a show of force. In this case, the show of force would be put on by a man whose soul was as black as theirs.
Maybe, in its own way, blacker.
“That’s it,” Esteban decided with a firm nod of his head, “I’ll be an avenging devil.”
He laughed, relishing the sound of that.
The next second, the laughter died in his throat as he froze. Immediately, his hand covered the hilt of the service revolver—his backup piece—that he’d tucked into his waistband before he and the bottle of whiskey had sat down together.
He’d heard something.
Someone was knocking on his door—the bell had long since given up the ghost and he’d had no reason to fix it. Visitors weren’t welcome.
Instantly alert, he stealthily made his way over to the front door in the dark. He saw no point in switching on any of the lights and giving whoever was on the other side of the door enough illumination to target him. The fact that his potential killer would announce himself by knocking on the door seemed completely plausible to him. Acting in a normal fashion was meant to throw him off, to quiet any of his suspicions that might arise.
At the door now, Esteban held his breath, anticipating whatever might happen next. He slowly drew his weapon out, holding it at the ready so that if his unexpected “caller” decided to break in, he’d be right here, waiting for him—
“Fernandez?”
His eyes narrowed as he stared at the door, as if that could somehow help him see whoever was on the other side.
The voice clearly belonged to a woman, but that could still be some sort of a trick, a way to get him to relax his guard—
“Fernandez? Are you inside there? It’s me. Cavelli-Cavanaugh, or just Cavelli...if that makes you more comfortable. Are you in there?” she asked again.
Kari had already circled the perimeter of the forty-year-old home once, and she had seen the car that she’d identified as the detective’s. It was parked over on the next block rather than in front of the house—by force of habit, no doubt.
But whether or not it was habit didn’t matter. What did matter was that the hood was still warm, but not hot. That meant that Esteban had driven it over sometime after he’d left the precinct.
That in turn meant that he was here.
“I come bearing gifts, Fernandez,” she informed him in a tone that was infinitely sweeter than the one she typically used day-to-day. “C’mon, open the door,” she coaxed, then added, “unless you want me to pick the lock, of course—because I do know how to do that.”
Of course she did, Esteban thought darkly. He’d intended to wait her out, but that course of action was quickly aborted when he saw the doorknob jiggling.
Muttering a curse under his breath, Esteban quickly released the locks and yanked open the door. His weapon was not only out, but ready, in case the woman the Chief of D’s was trying to push on him was here under duress.
But when he opened the door, he saw no one else but her. The shimmering moonlight, out in full force, had turned her skin almost a golden hue.
She belonged in someone’s dream, not on his doorstep, he thought in annoyance.
And it looked as though she was doing this of her own free will. It figured, he groused to himself. They weren’t even going to let him quit in peace.
Seeing a drawn weapon, Kari’s immediate reaction would normally have been to pull out her own service revolver, but she had no desire to exchange fire with the potently sexy man she’d come to coerce.
With effort, she managed to silently talk herself down and keep her own weapon holstered.
There was absolutely no light coming from inside the house. Had the streetlamp behind her been out and with a new moon in the sky, she wouldn’t have been able to see her unwilling partner at all.
“Are you raising bats or orchids in there?” she quipped, crossing the threshold. “Or did you just not pay your electric bill?”
From the surly look on his face, she could tell he wasn’t in the mood to exchange banter. He clearly wanted to be left alone.
“What are you doing here?” Esteban bit off, making no effort to hide his hostility. After all, the woman was invading his space, a space she wasn’t even supposed to know about.
Can’t trust anyone these days, the former undercover detective fumed.
“Not being welcomed for one,” she answered glibly.
His eyes narrowed. “Then go home. No one’s stopping you.”
“And turn my back on such a charming invitation?” she deadpanned. “No way.”
He had no idea what she was talking about. Somewhere, he was convinced, a village was searching for their idiot. Just his luck, she’d turned up here.
“What charming invitation?” he muttered.
Kari remained blissfully unfazed by the daggers his eyes were shooting at her.
“The one you silently extended to me back at the precinct. You know, indicating that you wanted me to share a drink with you,” she answered. As if to reinforce her point, she held up the bottle of expensive whiskey she’d thought to bring with her. “I even brought the bottle in case you didn’t have any—or started without me and ran out.”
That, she felt, was a pretty safe bet. Leaning slightly forward, she gave him her best, most innocent smile. “But I see that you did remember to pick up a bottle on your way home.”
He was not about to get sucked into this mindless babble. He just wanted to be left alone, to get drunk out of his mind, pass out and not think for a while. This highly annoying Pollyanna was interfering with his plans.
“Look,” he ground out, “I don’t have time for crazy women—”
“Good, neither do I,” she concurred. Feeling her way around the room, she found a light switch and turned it on. Illumination instantly flooded the room.
“Turn it off!” he ordered.
But she didn’t. Instead, she informed him blithely, “Just looking for another glass.” She opened one cabinet, then another. Both were empty. This man lived worse than a hermit. “You do have another one, right?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him. “Otherwise, one of us is going to have to drink out of the bottle.”
Esteban stared at the woman in his house, feeling like someone who had just been slammed by a runaway train that had come barreling out of nowhere. She still hadn’t answered his question.
“How the hell did you find out where I live?”
“I’m a very resourceful person,” Kari told him with a wide grin. “You’ll find that out when we start working together.”
“We’re not going to be working together,” Esteban snapped. This was like some bad dream that refused to fade. Did he have to bodily carry her out of his house to get rid of her?
“Of course we are,” Kari countered brightly. “Fighting the inevitable is just a waste of time and energy. You like being a cop, I like being a cop and right now, the Chief of Detectives wants us to be cops together.” She looked at him as if he should have known that he couldn’t win this battle. “He always gets what he wants.”
The look he gave her was darker than any look she’d ever seen on a perp’s face. “Not this time he won’t,” he growled.
Chapter 3
The woman who had brazenly invaded his much-needed solitude smiled at him as if his strongly voiced protest was destined to fall by the wayside.
/> Outraged by her impertinence, Esteban could feel his already-fanned flames of anger swiftly growing.
He was well aware that he was physically strong enough to simply toss this golden-haired irritant with the sexy mouth out of his house, but, even with more than half a bottle of bourbon in him, Esteban didn’t want to resort to the behavior of the very lowlifes he was attempting to get off the streets.
However, if he ever was inclined to give a woman the bum’s rush, it definitely would have been this vexing thorn in his side.
“Who sent you?” he demanded, his eyes darkening into a frown. “The Chief of Detectives?”
She wasn’t about to hide behind her uncle, or allow Esteban to think she was nothing more than a puppet, obediently doing what she was told. So, rather than say that Brian Cavanaugh had indirectly asked her to bring him into the fold, what she told Esteban instead was, “I came to find out why you don’t want to work with me.”
Which was in actuality part of the reason why she was here.
Esteban looked down contemptuously at the bottle of aged bourbon she’d brought with her. “So you thought, what? That you’d liquor me up and I’d tell you everything?”
She looked at the bottle she’d placed on the counter out of the way while she searched for another glass. “No, this is to fortify me so I can put up with you,” she told him bluntly. “But as I already offered, you’re certainly welcome to share it with me if you’d like.” She lifted her bright blue eyes to his. “I might have a lot of faults, but stinginess is not one of them.”
Esteban’s expression remained inscrutable. She caught herself holding her breath, waiting to see if she’d managed to burrow her way into his inner sanctum at least a little bit.
“Is that supposed to impress me?” he wanted to know. “Your bravado?”
If she blinked and backed off, Kari knew that she’d lose any chance of making the tiniest bit of headway with him. And as for gaining any ground, well that was just an unfulfilled fantasy at this point.
So, with nothing to lose, she decided to duke it out instead. “I don’t know, is it?”
Esteban uttered a sound that was a cross between an intolerant, short laugh and a contemptuously dismissive one. And then his eyes darkened again as they swept over her.
The same strange note of familiarity whispered through him with no more clarification than the last time. Except that this time the thought that she was damn attractive and too sexy for his own good insisted on taking root.
“You don’t want me working with you,” he warned.
There was absolutely no hesitation whatsoever on her part. “Sure I do.”
“No,” he repeated firmly, his voice almost ominous in timbre. “Trust me, you don’t.”
She had never accepted anything at face value or just because she was told to. She’d always needed proof, ever since she was very young.
It was no different now.
“Okay, I’ll bite. Why wouldn’t I want to work with you?”
As she spoke, Kari poured herself two fingers of bourbon, taking it neat, then offered the bottle to him.
Esteban poured twice as much for himself into his glass, then tossed it back quickly, making it disappear between his lips all at once. His eyes, watering ever so slightly, were the only indication that the alcohol intake had even affected his body at all.
“Because you come on like some prep-school educated Barbie doll, and I’m not going to pretend to be Ken,” he informed her.
Before he had a chance to take another swig from her bottle, Kari laid claim to it, her lips lightly touching the rim as she tilted it back.
“Good,” she pronounced once she’d swallowed. “Ken has fake hair,” she reminded him matter-of-factly, as if she was talking about an actual living, breathing being instead of an iconic doll. “I never really liked Barbie’s boyfriend.” She held the bottle out to him again. “Don’t worry. I won’t get in your way.”
“Especially if you’re not there,” Esteban agreed flatly.
Kari shook her head. What the hell had the Chief gotten her into? “You are a hard devil to get close to,” she commented.
Now she was finally getting it, he thought. It was about damn time. “Not hard,” Esteban corrected. “Impossible—and I like it that way.”
She laid it out for him, although she was certain that he’d already figured this out on his own. What did he hope to gain by playing this little charade out? Did he think this was going to “put her in her place”? Establish their hierarchy in relation to one another?
“Well, it’s either partner with me or hit the road, and I think you’ve invested too much time into the job to just walk away. At the very least, you’d have to start all over again somewhere else.”
He paused his ongoing communion with the bottle she’d brought. His own—the one he’d opened tonight—was now empty and he wasn’t finished drinking. He was still standing. “I really don’t care what you think, Ms. Cavanaugh.”
“It’s Detective Cavelli-Cavanaugh,” she corrected him, deliberately slurring just a bit for his benefit.
Her apparent inebriation was, for the most part, staged. The drinks she’d been taking from the bottle, now that they had both forgone the niceties of actual glasses, were deliberately exaggerated in appearance. In reality, it all amounted to very little alcohol going down. Kari had no intention of getting drunk—and it wasn’t because she was worried about the regretful events that might consequently follow once she reached that state. Rather, it was because she just knew that if she couldn’t appear to hold her liquor, he would have even less respect for her than he did now.
And the point of this entire confrontation was to get Esteban to have a decent amount of respect for her, not less.
“Hell of a mouthful,” he muttered, referring to her hyphenated last name.
Kari smiled at him, the kind of smile that hinted at secrets being held back. “Yes,” she told him, “Actually, I am.”
“Think a lot of yourself, Cavelli-Cavanaugh, don’t you?” he asked, mocking the extralong name.
“Not a lot,” she assured him, then added, “just my due. And you can pick one of my last names to use. Just be consistent.”
He stared at her in stunned silence for a moment. And this time, when the laughter came, it was heartier and not quite so full of animosity. He’d already had more than his fair number of shots before this beautiful, ornery woman had descended on him bearing a liquid peace offering. He’d lost count by now just how much he’d consumed.
The upshot of it all was that, while he wasn’t feeling any more receptive to her now than before, the hostility that he did have—not so much against her as against the fact that he was being barred from continuing the work that had been his sole reason for living these past few years—was morphing into something else.
Something equally as strong and, from his somewhat detached point of view, equally as useless.
Something that, he was fairly certain, had he not been on his way to total intoxication, he would have been unaware of.
Namely that he felt attracted to this annoyance with the sexy legs. Not mildly or conveniently attracted, but teeth-jarringly, mindlessly, intensely attracted.
For the past three years, he had conducted his one-man crusade to bring down the men behind his half brother’s drug overdose—and his stepfather’s subsequent prison sentence—to the exclusion of everything else. This exclusion included not tending to any of his other needs beyond occasionally eating and sleeping...and he only paid nominal attention to those two things so he’d have enough stamina to continue working. Everything else—searching for creature comforts, entertaining desires of the flesh or even, moderately, of the soul—had been so completely neglected that they were just shut out as if they didn’t exist.
But they did.
And now, for some unknown reason that utterly confounded him, he felt a flare of desire in this woman’s presence. A flare of desire that didn’t just evaporate the way he’d fully expected it to, but went on to spread like a wildfire through his veins.
To spread and feed on itself, and before he knew it, this raging desire threatened to take possession of him entirely.
Esteban was staring at her as if he hadn’t seen her before, she thought, as she tried to understand what was happening. Was that the alcohol at work, or was he just trying to intimidate her into leaving?
It’s not that simple, partner. You can’t get rid of me that easily.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he barked at her.
“You already said that. Have we run out of conversation so soon, throwing us into some kind of verbal reruns?” she asked wryly.
He had no idea what the hell she was talking about. He just wanted her out of here. Now.
“No, you really shouldn’t be here,” he told her. But even as he said it, he drew closer, like an imminent danger from which there was no escape.
He was so close now that when he uttered his warning, she could literally feel his words on her skin, words that were wrapped up in his warm breath.
The lethal combination made her heart quicken. Had she been completely sober, and not slightly tipsy as she was right now, a red flag would have shot up for her instantly.
As it was, the flag did go up, but it went up in what felt like slow motion—and once it was up, it seemed to wave in a rather happy, lackadaisical manner.
Truth be told, she was far more fixated on the sensations erupting between them in the wake of this moment of unexpected physical closeness. “And why shouldn’t I be here?” she asked him, raising her chin a bit to defiantly punctuate her question.
Or maybe, she silently reconsidered, she wasn’t being defiant. Perhaps she was merely flirting with him.
Or at least the bourbon was, she amended.
Cavanaugh on Duty Page 3
