Cavanaugh on Duty

chapter 13



He was absorbed the moment he and Kari stepped over the threshold into the house already teeming with earlier arrivals.

There was no other way to describe what happened to him, except for that word.

Absorbed.

He wasn’t prepared for it.

Esteban had spent so many years literally being on the outside while pretending to be someone he wasn’t. The trouble was, he’d been that other “person” for so long and had done such a good, believable job of it—until someone had ratted him out—that now he wasn’t sure how to be himself or even who that actually was.

Consequently, he entered the home of Andrew Cavanaugh without an identity intact.

And they accepted him anyway.

For the past couple of weeks or so, Esteban had worked among them—it was hard going anywhere in the station without tripping over a Cavanaugh—not to mention that the beguiling partner that had been thrust on him was one of them. But even so, coming to this wedding, he’d thought that he would be on the outside looking in. Just as usual.

Instead, he was immediately considered to be “in.” Immediately accepted and welcomed.

Just like that.

Andrew Cavanaugh, the host of this major family event, had opened the door for them himself. After hugging Kari, the man unexpectedly clasped his hand and shook it heartily, his booming voice filling the foyer as he greeted him.

“So you’re the new guy I’ve been hearing so much about.” Then the former chief of police laughed, still holding Esteban’s hand as he drew him into the house. “Don’t look so worried, Detective. It’s all good,” Andrew assured the younger man.

“If you don’t mind my asking, sir, who have you been hearing all this from?” Esteban asked.

Finally breaking the physical connection, Andrew merely smiled and said, “Reliable sources. That’s all you need to know. Either of you,” he added, his penetrating look sweeping over both his niece and her new partner.

“Go,” he urged. “Get yourselves something to eat, something to drink, and mingle. The ceremony’s going to start soon.” He looked at Kari. “Your uncle’s about ready to officiate. He’s getting set up in the back.” And then Andrew paused for a moment, looking pointedly at Esteban. “He might still need help with the altar,” he speculated. His inference was clear: he wanted Esteban to pitch in and get involved.

“Altar?” Esteban asked, not quite sure he’d heard correctly.

Andrew nodded. “It’s actually something some of the boys rigged up. Mostly it looks like a wooden arch with flowers woven through it,” he told them. He gestured toward the back. “It’s that way. I’ll see you both out back for the ceremony,” he said in parting.

Kari flashed her uncle a smile, then turned back to Esteban. “Guess we’d better go out back,” she said before leading the way through the crowd.

The backyard, like the living room they had just threaded their way through, was a hive of activity in absolutely every direction. It was enough, Esteban thought, to make a man’s head spin.

“One of your uncles is performing the wedding?” he asked her, somewhat surprised.

She nodded even as she scanned the area for the man in question. “My uncle Adam is a priest.”

“A priest?” Esteban echoed, puzzled. “I thought that all the Cavanaughs were involved in some area of law enforcement.”

“You thought right,” she confirmed. “They are, one way or another. My uncle Adam is a Cavelli,” she told him, then went on to explain further. “That’s the last name of the family my dad thought he belonged to. The family he grew up with. He thought he had four brothers and sisters—before he discovered he was a Cavanaugh. Now there are a lot more relatives.”

The last sentence, in his opinion, was unnecessary. What was necessary was a way of identifying everyone. “How the hell do you tell who’s who without some kind of a playbook or name-tag system?” he wanted to know, mystified as he looked around at all the different clusters of people scattered throughout the immediate area.

She laughed at the completely overwhelmed expression on Esteban’s face. She had a feeling that there wasn’t all that much that threw him for a loop, but her family obviously did.

“It does take a little time,” she admitted. “But it’s well worth the effort. I could see how it might be a little overwhelming for someone, though.” She decided to give him an example to work with. “Think of it as the first day of college. You don’t know anybody and it’s intimidating. But after a couple of weeks, you start making friends and it begins to all fall into place. Pretty soon, you’re in a comfortable niche.”

“I’m not interested in a comfortable niche or in making any friends,” he informed her in a clipped voice. “I’m just interested in doing my job.”

Kari abruptly stopped walking through the yard and looked at him as if she was certain she hadn’t heard him correctly.

“Why wouldn’t you want to make friends? It’s very lonely without friends,” she said. Then, picking up on the signs, she said quietly to him, “But I think you already know that.”

“Hey, Steve—right?” Thomas, her oldest brother called out, waving at her partner to get his attention.

“Esteban,” Esteban corrected him. His name hadn’t been that important to him when he was younger. But it was now. Having lost everything else—his mother, his brother and, in part, his stepfather, since the man was now in prison serving twenty to life—his heritage was all that he had left, and Esteban was determined to hang on to it.

“Sorry. Esteban,” Thomas acknowledged with a cheerful nod. “Need an opinion here,” he told Kari’s partner. “Tell me if I’ve finally got this damn thing level, will you?” he asked.

With a shrug, Esteban did as he was asked and with that one single, small action, he wound up shedding the last residual traces of being an outsider. He was part of them now, part of the brotherhood that made up the family of cops, as tightly connected a family as any in the annals of history.

If, during the course of the rest of the day and the evening to follow, Esteban began to entertain ideas about pulling back, those notions were promptly smashed by one person or another.

Esteban found himself pulled into one conversation after another almost seamlessly. Each time he thought he was separating himself from one group, another group would snare him.

And, throughout it all, there was Kari. Kari, beside him at the wedding, quietly shedding tears of joy and getting his handkerchief damp. Kari, urging him to sample yet another dish of something he didn’t recognize and bringing him a gin and tonic rather than a glass of champagne—which he loathed—so he could properly toast the new bride and groom.

And Kari, who wound up coaxing him onto the dance floor.

It seemed as if it had been an eternity since he’d had an occasion to dance—or the desire to.

The first time she threaded her hand through his and began pulling him toward the temporary dance floor that two of her cousins had constructed less than twenty-four hours before the wedding, he had dragged his feet, resisting.

“I’ll step all over your feet,” he’d protested, falling back on the age-old excuse.

“I really doubt that,” she’d told him. Knowing she couldn’t say she had seen him on the dance floor back in high school—he’d already denied that he was that Steve Fernandez—she fell back on a small white lie. “You look like rhythm would come naturally to you.”

He’d laughed shortly at that. “I think you have entirely too much faith in this overblown image you’ve conjured up of me.”

Taking his left hand, Kari positioned it on her hip, then took his right hand in hers and drew him in closer to her.

A lot closer.

The air seemed to shift, bringing with it a wave of warmth that transcended anything the air-conditioning could negate—if there had been any out there, which there wasn’t.

“I think, Esteban,” she said, emphasizing his name, “you’re completely up to anything I come up with—and more.” Her eyes held his to make her point. “And you’re right, I do have great faith in you...but I believe that faith’s justified.”

“Based on what?” he wanted to know.

As far as he knew, he hadn’t done anything to prove himself to be an asset to her. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t even want to. But of late there had started to be this small, nagging desire inside him. He wasn’t even sure just what sort of desire was involved, just that it was there.

And it was growing.

“Gut instinct,” she told him cheerfully. “Something you’re born with if you’re a Cavanaugh.”

He pinned her with a look as their hips all but locked in syncopated rhythm. “But you were born a Cavelli,” he reminded her.

“That was a technicality that has since been smoothed out,” she told him, unfazed. “And, for the record, I was right.”

He felt as if they were in two different conversations—and he had lost track of hers. “Right about what?”

The tempo was slow. Her movements, slower. And sensual as hell. He was really doing his best not to notice, but it was like trying not to notice that he needed to breathe. It was damn impossible.

“About what I said when I dragged you out onto the dance floor earlier. I said you could dance and that’s exactly what you’re doing, you know. You’re dancing. Dancing so well, other couples are stopping just to watch,” she told him proudly.

That wasn’t the only thing he was doing, Esteban thought.

In addition to dancing, he was feeling. Without any conscious consent on his part, he could feel parts of him that had been placed in frozen suspended animation suddenly thawing out.

That wasn’t supposed to be happening.

He worked better the other way, when there was nothing distracting him, nothing to be aware of but the job and survival. Focusing on anything but bringing down the enemy just complicated things and got in the way of his functioning properly.

Got in the way of his being an asset to both the department and his partner.

He couldn’t allow this to continue. Or worse, to grow. It had been a great day, one to someday look back on fondly, but it was time to end it, while he could still find his way back to the barren land he’d occupied for almost the past four years.

“I don’t think this was such a good idea,” he told her, his comment encompassing not just his dancing with her but the entire outing, as well.

But Kari wasn’t ready to throw in the towel, wasn’t ready to allow her common sense to take over and dictate her actions. Because, like a good detective, she knew she was traversing through dangerous terrain. But right now she was enjoying herself more than she was worried about the consequences of her actions. More than she was worried about the Pandora’s box she’d just opened.

“I do,” she told him, her voice barely above a whisper as her words and her breath seemed to seep in through his shirt and echo against his skin.

He found himself fighting it again, fighting the urge to kiss her the way he had that first night in his apartment, when she’d come over bearing a bottle of bourbon and pulled out all the stops to sway him into becoming her partner.

He’d kissed her then, he’d told himself, to scare her off. But it had backfired on him, not only failing to frighten her off, but also succeeding in introducing fear back into his own life. Fear that he was, despite all his best efforts to the contrary, vulnerable beneath all those hard layers of his.

And she had made him that way.

Kari could literally feel it, feel the tug-of-war he was going through, feel it because it was the very same tug-of-war that she was going through, as well.

She knew, without being subjected to a lecture, that getting involved with your partner in anything but a professional way was not exactly the smartest move a detective could make. Having romantic feelings clouded judgment and took the edge off reaction time, made you slower, caused you to hesitate a microsecond—just long enough to get you killed.

She’d heard stories to that effect time and again and knew it was true.

Knew too that right now she just didn’t care. Because what was going on inside her had taken center stage and would continue to build steam until she experienced some form of release—and soon. And since she wasn’t planning on bungee jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge anytime within the next couple of days, that really left her only one viable way out.

She wanted to be with him.

Wanted to be with this man who pretended not to know her, pretended not to remember her for whatever reason that suited him.

But denying the past didn’t change it, didn’t mean it had never happened, no matter how much he wished it to the contrary.

But if it helped him get through his day and go on with his life, who was she to upset the balance he’d struck?

If he wanted her to know that he’d lied about who he was...that he was in fact the wildly popular high school jock who had inhabited the dreams of half the girls attending Aurora High all those years ago, then he would tell her in his own time. And she could wait, at least for that.

But as for waiting for him to make that first move, to lead her where she found herself so desperately wanting to go, well, that was another story. One that she might have to take upon herself to orchestrate if she wanted it to happen.

Even now she could feel every bone in her body growing tense and impatient.

She was going to have to do something about that, Kari thought—and taking an extralong, extracold shower tonight really didn’t seem as though it would be the answer to her problem.

But for now she did her best to put a lid on it. After all, she reasoned, she couldn’t very well jump him here, right in the middle of her father’s wedding reception.

At the very least, she was going to have to wait until they were alone, and that wasn’t going to happen until they left the party.

Laying her head against Esteban’s shoulder, she went on dancing and just enjoyed his company as well as his close proximity.

For now that had to be enough.

As she was reining herself in, Esteban went on telling himself that his incredibly sexy partner wasn’t distracting him, and that he wasn’t experiencing any sort of longings, beyond wishing that the band would take a long break right about now so that he could cool off.

He was getting rather good at lying.

* * *

“Are they all like that?” Esteban asked her.

They had said their goodbyes and were almost at his apartment complex when he finally broached the question. It was several hours later, and even though the whole event had lasted more than twelve hours, he and Kari were hardly the last ones to leave when they’d finally decided it was time to go.

He’d been so quiet, she’d become convinced that Esteban wasn’t going to talk at all. That maybe this was his way of handling the potent attraction that she’d felt growing between them. Because there was definitely something going on, and she was convinced that she wasn’t the only one who felt it.

But she had also begun to think that Esteban’s way of dealing with it was to slip into denial, and for him that seemed to mean silence.

It took her a second to run his question through her head, and even then she couldn’t make much sense of it.

“Huh? What are you talking about?” she asked him, confused.

“The Cavanaugh weddings.” He reasoned that this couldn’t have been the first one she’d attended, which meant that she had something to go by to make a judgment. “Are they all these marathon affairs?”

Now she understood his question. Looking at the situation from his point of view, she could see why he’d ask. He’d been a loner for too long and had no family to relate to anymore.

“Andrew Cavanaugh’s shindigs, be they wedding ceremonies, birthday parties, Christmas celebrations or just spur-of-the-moment things he throws together, go on for at least half a day, if not more.” Her mouth curved as she recalled one particular example. “When my branch of the family came to light, the party he threw began on a Friday afternoon and lasted until Sunday night. That’s a family that likes each other’s company,” she told him with fondness in her voice. “The food, fabulous though it is, is secondary to the company—just don’t tell Uncle Andrew I said so. He takes a great deal of pride in his cooking.”

He lifted a brow. “And when would I get a chance to tell him that?”

She didn’t even have to pause to think before she answered. “At the next party.”

They were already planning another one? So soon? “I wasn’t invited,” he pointed out.

She realized that she needed to explain the rules to him. “Once you attend one party, the invitation is a standing one and understood. The only way to get out of the perpetual invitations is to die,” she deadpanned. She saw his expression grow somber. “I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?”

Her question surprised him, catching him off guard. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, for one thing, you look like you’re a million miles away.” For another, she added silently, you look sad.

“No, I’m just remembering something.” They had reached their destination and she parked in the last spot in guest parking. He blew out a breath as he got out of her vehicle. “I’m remembering a better time—in my life,” he clarified, “not in comparison to tonight. I had a good time,” he admitted as they came to his door.

She pretended to be impressed. “Wow, and I didn’t even have to pull any teeth to get that out of you this time.”

He shook his head. The woman never stopped, he thought. “You’re relentless, aren’t you?”

She took no offense at his assessment. Actually, she took it as a compliment, though she had a feeling he hadn’t intended it that way. “I’m one of seven and the runt of the litter. I have to be.”

Runt. Now there was a term he would have never applied to her. “You’re not like any runt I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank you—I think,” Kari added with a soft laugh.

He didn’t even crack a smile. It was far too hard to smile when his gut felt as if it was twisted into a knot. Breathing was a challenge. And all because she was standing so close to him, the moonlight in her hair and the scent of her perfume encircling him like a golden lasso.

“Don’t thank me for the truth.”

He’d lived the past three years in the shadows, doing his best not to be noticed, remaining off the grid and unappreciated. He needed to know that what he thought mattered, she realized. That his whole life didn’t just amount to footprints in the sand.

“Someone has to,” she told him softly.

Drawing a breath was no longer important to him. But, as he stood there before his door, he knew that kissing her was important to him at this very moment in time, even if it wound up being his last, dying act.

So, the next moment, he went with his instincts and did what he’d been longing to do for hours now.

He kissed her.