Cavanaugh on Duty

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.

Esteban realized in frustration that the words needed to explain why it was imperative that she go now seemed to have escaped him. But then, he’d always been a man of action rather than words anyway.

Even back when his world had been incredibly sheltered in comparison to his life now, he was more prone to doing than talking.

So rather than search for words that wouldn’t come, and an explanation that refused to present itself, Esteban showed her why she needed to leave.

More roughly than he’d intended, he took hold of her cheek with one hand, keeping her in place as he brought down his mouth on hers.

This kiss was meant to scare her away.

Instead, what he actually managed to accomplish was to scare himself away—but not before he took the so-called “warning” he was issuing to its full conclusion, devouring her the way a starving man devoured his first meal in countless days. Except that for Esteban, it had been countless months, not days. Countless months that had stumbled their way into years without his complete recollection of that empty journey.

Pleasures of the flesh hadn’t been important to him at the time.

Now, though, something seemed to be stirring within him....

This uninvited woman he found himself saddled with tasted of all the good things that he had consciously left behind the day he’d found his brother Julio dead on the bedroom floor. She tasted of forbidden fruit, the fruit a man like him had knowingly sworn off in exchange for the life he’d dedicated himself to leading.

A life that, if conducted correctly, would allow him to get rid of at least a few scum of the earth before he himself was terminated. That the last part was inevitable, he was well aware of. But he didn’t care as long as he took as many of them with him when it happened—if not before.

* * *

Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.

This time she had gotten more than she had bargained for. Maybe even more than she could possibly handle, Kari realized.

It felt as if her very soul was being sucked into a heated vortex.

The smart thing, she knew, was to push this man away and run for her life. But that presupposed that her knees and legs were still working—which they weren’t. Both had turned to mush of varying consistencies.

Besides, she didn’t really feel all that compelled to do the smart thing anyway. Not when it involved pulling away from what was the surprisingly delicious feast of his mouth.

Yes, the man, even in his scruffy state, was sexy and attractive to a fault, but who knew this lay beneath it all?

Her reluctant partner’s kiss left her feeling a hell of a lot more intoxicated than the amber liquid she had brought with her. The latter did not hold a candle to what he could accomplish with that mouth of his.

So, just for a moment longer—or so she tried to convince herself—she allowed herself to linger.

And linger.

Kari closed her arms around the man’s neck, leaning her body into his and patiently waiting for the kick of that mule that had somehow managed to sneak into all this to subside.

It didn’t.

If anything, it increased.

And, to her utter surprise, she had no complaints.

* * *

He hadn’t survived these last three years by allowing his emotions, or the sensations that were at times generated by those emotions, to decide his path for him. He was the one who forged the path, the one who kept himself safe in the most unsafe situations.

He didn’t do it letting down his guard by so much as a sliver.

That took strength. Strength he knew he had to tap into now.

So it was with superhuman effort that Esteban put his hands on her shoulders and pushed Cavanaugh’s niece away from him. “Get out of here,” he growled, secretly afraid of where the next step might take him. He had no room in his life for more regrets.

Kari stood her ground. “No.”

Her defiance temporarily threw him for a loop. He stared at her, as if not comprehending her negative response to his order.

What the hell was wrong with her?

Did she think this was easy for him? Being noble wasn’t exactly his calling.

“Get the hell out of here,” he repeated, his voice more malevolent now than it had been before. “I don’t think either one of us is ready for the consequences if you stay.”

She didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay, to see what happened. To see exactly where this would go and what she would feel when it got there.

Kari wavered inside, more than ready to deal with any consequences if this wondrous condition could be persuaded to continue.

But she had a feeling that what she felt here wasn’t important. Esteban was the important one in this scheme of things. He was the one she’d been sent to convince to remain in the department any way she could. She wasn’t fool enough to believe that if what was happening between them at this moment was allowed to go on to its logical conclusion—if they wound up making love—then he would remain.

She knew damn well that the exact opposite would occur.

If they made love tonight—and the promise of that was something she ached for with her entire being—then Esteban would disappear by morning, most likely never to be heard from again. Kari could sense that in every bone in her body.

So she banked down all the unleashed emotions that were now madly unfurling within her. She was struggling to hold them in check, struggling to keep herself from throwing her arms around Esteban once again and pulling him back to that hotbed of sensual heat their coming together had generated.

“All right,” she said thickly, doing her best not to suck in air as she spoke, but to take it in slowly and calmly. “I’ll go,” she agreed, then flippantly added, “It looks like we’re out of alcohol anyway, so I guess the party’s over for tonight.”

He barely glanced in the direction of the bottles. “Looks like,” he muttered in agreement. Anything to get her to leave—before he gave in to temptation and refused to let her walk out.

Taking a deep breath, Kari did what she could to center herself.

“You don’t have to bother showing me to the door,” she told him sweetly. “I can see myself out.”

Esteban merely nodded. “Wasn’t planning on it,” he retorted.

At least he was honest to a fault, she thought, though she would have preferred to hear a token protest from him.

But then, since he was so honest, she would always know where she stood with him.

If he became her partner.

She nodded in response to his last words, turning to leave. She stopped for one more second, looking at him over her shoulder.

“And you’ll be there tomorrow morning? At the precinct?” she added when he’d made no response to her question.

When he still remained silent, she took a step back toward him, her hand on her hip as she waited for him to say something.

He didn’t want her walking back in. What had caused him to kiss her was still very much with him, and this time around, he was fairly certain that kissing would be the least of it. The stakes were definitely set to go higher, and he had no idea just where—and if—it would stop.

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” he told her curtly, ready to say, to promise, anything just to get her to leave. To get her out of harm’s way before he did something that both of them would live to regret. “Now, go!”

She ignored his last words, focusing only on the first part. “Good,” she pronounced. Her hand on the doorknob, she uttered one last parting shot. “Just remember, I know where you live.”

Then, to forestall any further exchange—or, more important, any further temptation—she closed the door and left.