Cavanaugh Reunion

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

Copyright

About the Author

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author MARIE FERRARELLA has written two hundred books, some under the name of Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website at www.marieferrarella.com.

Dear Reader,

So here we are with another Cavanaugh story. By all rights, this is also the last one. And if you believe that, you don’t know me. I have a great deal of trouble letting go, except for a truly awful experience. In essence, I am an emotional pack rat.

Case in point: when I was a teenager in New York City, every year we had a real Christmas tree. I would plead for our tree to stay well into January and once actually into February (Valentine bush, anyone?). As with everything else, it had been a source of joy once and I didn’t want to let it go. So how could I possibly say goodbye to a family I have come to love?

Sidebar: this is my two hundredth book. Not bad for a person who thought she had only one, possibly two books in her when she started out. I have loved every nail-biting minute and hope to write another two hundred! As ever, thank you for reading my books, and from the bottom of my heart I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

Marie Ferrarella

To the wonderful Intrigue family, and especially Patience Smith, who more than lives up to her name. I thank you all for making my dreams come true. Also, to Pat Teal, who started it all by asking, “Would you like to write a romance?” Thank God I said, “Yes.” And last, but by no means least, to you, beloved readers, thank you! I wouldn’t be here without you.

Chapter 1

He smelled it before he saw it.

His mind elsewhere, Detective Ethan O’Brien’s attention was immediately captured by the distinct, soul-disturbing smell that swept in, riding the evening breeze. Without warning, it maliciously announced that someone’s dreams were being dashed even as they were being burnt to cinders.

Or, at the very least, they were damaged enough to generate a feeling of overwhelming sorrow and hopelessness.

Summers in California meant fires, they always had. Natives and transplants would joke that fires, earthquakes and mudslides were the dues they paid for having the best, most temperate overall weather in the country. But they only joked when nothing was burning, shaking or sliding away. Because during these catastrophic events, life proved to be all too tenuous, and there was no time for humor, only action. Humor was a salve at best, before and after the fact. Action was a way to hopefully curtail the amount of damage, if at all humanly possible.

But it wasn’t summer. It was spring, and ordinarily, devastating fires should have still been many headlines away from becoming a very real threat.

Except that they were a real threat.

There were fires blazing all over the southern section of Aurora. Not the spontaneous fires that arose from spurts of bone-melting heat, or because a capricious wind had seized a not-quite-dead ember and turned it into something lethal by carrying it off and depositing it into the brush. These fires, ten so far and counting in the last two months, were man-made, the work of some bedeviled soul for reasons that Ethan had yet to understand.

But he swore to himself that he would.

He’d been assigned to his very first task force by Brian Cavanaugh, the Aurora Police Department’s chief of detectives, and, as he’d come to learn in the last nine months, also his paternal uncle.

Knowledge of the latter tie had jolted him, Kyle and Greer the way nothing ever had before. He could state that for a fact, seeing as how, since they were triplets, there were times when he could swear that they functioned as one, single-minded unit.

The three of them received the news at the same time. It had come from their mother in the form of a deathbed confession so that she could meet her maker with a clear conscience. She’d died within hours of telling them, having absolutely no idea what kind of turmoil her revelation had caused for him and his siblings.

Initially, finding out that he, Kyle and Greer were actually part of the sprawling Cavanaugh family had shaken the very foundations of their world. But in the end, once they’d gotten used to it and accepted the truth, the information had proven not to be life-shattering after all.

He had to admit, at least for him, that it was nice to be part of something larger than a breadbox. Back when his mother’s death was still imminent, he’d anticipated life being pared down to it being just the three of them once she was gone. Three united against the world, so to speak.

Instead, the three of them were suddenly part of a network, part of something that at times seemed even greater than the sum of its parts.

Just like that, they were Cavanaughs.

There were some on the police force who were quick to cry “Nepotism!” when he, Kyle and Greer advanced, rising above the legions of patrol officers to become detectives in the department. But as he was quick to point out when confronted, it was merit that brought them to where they were, not favoritism.

Merit riding on the shoulders of abilities and quick thinking.

Like now.

On his way home after an extraordinarily long day that had wound up slipping its way into the even longer evening, Ethan had rolled his windows down in an attempt to just clear his head.

Instead, it had done just the opposite.

It felt as if smoke were leeching its way into his lungs and body through every available pore. The starless sky had rendered the black smoke all but invisible until he was practically on top of it.

But nothing could cover up the acrid smell.

In the time that it took for the presence of smoke from the fire to register, Ethan was able to make out where the telltale smell was emanating from. The building to his right on the next block was on fire. Big-time.

Ethan brought his lovingly restored 1964 Thunderbird sports car to a stop, parking it a block away so he didn’t block whatever fire trucks were coming in. And truth be told, it was also to safeguard against anything happening to it. After his siblings, he loved the car, which he’d secretly named Annette, the most.

“I’ll be right back, Annette,” he promised the vehicle as he shut down the engine and leaped out. Despite the urgency of the situation, Ethan made sure that he locked the car before leaving it.

Where was everyone?

There were no fire trucks, not even a department car. People from the neighborhood were gathering around, drawn by the drama, but there was no indication of any firefighters on the scene.

But there was screaming. The sound of women and children screaming.

And then he saw why.

The building that was on fire was a shelter, specifically a shelter for battered women and their children.

Protocol, since there was no sign of a responding firehouse, would have him calling 911 before he did anything else. But protocol didn’t have a child’s screams ringing in its ears, and calling in the fire would be stealing precious seconds away from finding that child, seconds that could very well amount to the difference between life and death.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ethan saw several people gathering closer, tightening the perimeter of the so-called spectacle.

Voyeurs.

Disasters attracted audiences. This one time he used that to his advantage. Or rather the shelter’s advantage.

“Call 911,” he yelled to the man closest to him. “Tell them that the Katella Street Shelter’s on fire.” He had to shout the end of his sentence, as he was already running toward the building.

Turning his head to see if the man had complied, Ethan saw that he was just staring openmouthed at the building. Disgusted, Ethan reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

The fire couldn’t be called an inferno yet, but he knew how little it took to achieve the transformation. It could literally happen in a heartbeat.

Raising the windbreaker he was wearing up over his head as a meager protective barrier against the flames, Ethan ran into the building even as he pressed 911.

The next moment, he stumbled backward, losing his footing as someone came charging out of the building. Springing up to his feet, Ethan saw that he’d just been knocked down by a woman. A small one at that. The blonde was holding an infant tucked against her chest with one arm while she held a toddler on her hip on the other side. A third child, just slightly older than the toddler, was desperately trying to keep up with her gait. He was holding tightly on to the bottom of her shirt and screaming in fear.

Trying to catch his breath, Ethan was torn between asking the woman if she was all right and his initial intent of making sure that everyone was out of the building.

The once run-down building was spewing smoke and women in almost equal proportions. In the background, Ethan heard the sound of approaching sirens. It was too soon for a response to the call he’d made. It was obvious to him that someone else must have already called this fire in. There were two firehouses in Aurora, one to take care of the fires in the southern portion, the other to handle the ones in the northern section. Even given the close proximity of the southern-section fire station, the trucks had to have already been on their way when he’d first spotted the fire.

The woman who had all but run over him now passed him going in the opposite direction. To his amazement, she seemed to be running back into the burning building.

Was she crazy?

He lost no time heading her off. “Hey, wait, what about your kids?” he called out. She didn’t turn around to acknowledge that she’d heard him. Ethan sped up and got in front of her, blocking her path. “Have you got another one in there?” Ethan grabbed the woman’s arm, pulling her away from the entrance as two more women, propping each other up, emerged. “Stay with your children,” he ordered. “I’ll find your other kid,” he promised. “Just tell me where.”

“I don’t know where,” she snapped as she pulled her arm free.

The next moment, holding her arm up against her nose and mouth in a futile attempt to keep at least some of the smoke at bay, the woman darted around him and ran back into the burning building.

Ethan bit off a curse. He had a choice of either remaining outside and letting the approaching firefighters go in after her or doing it himself. Seeing as how they had yet to pull up in front of the building, by the time they could get into the building, it might be too late. His conscience dictated his course for him. He had no choice but to run after her.

Ethan fully intended to drag the woman out once he caught up to her. If she was trying to find another one of her children, he had the sinking feeling that it was too late. In his opinion, no one could survive this, and she had three children huddled together on the sidewalk to think about.

Mentally cursing the fate that had him embroiled in all this, Ethan ran in. He made his way through the jaws of the fire, its flames flaring like sharp yellow teeth threatening to take a chunk out of his flesh. Miraculously, Ethan saw the woman just up ahead of him.

“Hey!” he shouted angrily. “Stop!”

But the woman kept moving. Ethan could see her frantically looking around. He could also see what she couldn’t, that a beam just above her head was about to give way. Dashing over, his lungs beginning to feel as if they were bursting, Ethan pulled the woman back just as the beam came crashing down. It missed hitting her by a matter of inches.

Still she resisted, trying to pull free of his grasp again. “There might be more,” she shouted above the fire’s loud moan. She turned away but got nowhere. Frustrated fury was in her reddened eyes as she demanded, “Hey! Hey, what are you doing?”

“Saving your kids’ mother,” Ethan snapped back. He threw the obstinate woman over his shoulder, appropriately enough emulating fireman style.

She was saying something, no doubt protesting or cursing him, but he couldn’t hear her voice above the sounds of the fire. As far as he was concerned, it was better that way.

His eyes burned and his lungs felt as if they were coming apart. The way out of the building felt as if it were twice as far as the way in had been.

Finally making it across the threshold, he stumbled out, passing several firefighters as they raced into the building.

One of the firefighters stopped long enough to address him and point out the paramedic truck that was just pulling up.

“You can get medical attention for her over there,” were the words that the man tossed in his direction as he hurried off.

“Let go of me!” the woman yelled angrily. When he didn’t respond fast enough, she began to pound on his back with her fists.

For a woman supposedly almost overcome with smoke, Ethan thought, she packed quite a wallop. He was having trouble hanging on to her. When he finally set her down near the ambulance, Ethan instinctively stepped back to avoid contact with her swinging fists.

She all but fell over from the momentum of the last missed swing. Her eyes blazed as she demanded, “What the hell do you think you were doing?”

He hadn’t expected a profusion of gratitude, but neither had he expected a display of anger. “Off the top of my head, I’d have to say saving your life.”

“Saving my life?” she echoed incredulously, staring at him as if he’d just declared that he thought she were a zebra.

“You’re welcome,” Ethan fired back. He gestured toward the curb where two of the three children were sitting. The third was in another woman’s arms. The woman was crying. “Now go see to your kids.”

She stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. What the hell was he babbling about? “What kids?” she cried, her temper flaring.

“Your kids.” Annoyed when she continued staring at him, Ethan pointed to the three children she’d had hanging off her as if she were some mother possum. “Those.”

She glanced in the direction he was pointing. “You think—” Stunned and fighting off a cough that threatened to completely overwhelm her, Kansas Beckett found that she just couldn’t finish her thought for a moment. “Those aren’t my kids,” she finally managed to tell him.

“They’re not?” They’d certainly seemed as if they were hers when she’d ushered them out. He looked back at the children. They were crying again, this time clinging to a woman who was equally as teary. “Whose are they?”

Kansas shrugged. “I don’t know. Hers, I imagine.” She nodded toward the woman holding the baby and gathering the other two to her as best she could. “I was just driving by when I smelled the smoke and heard the screams.” Why was she even bothering to explain her actions to this take-charge Neanderthal? “I called it in and then tried to do what I could.”

Kansas felt gritty and dirty, not to mention that she was probably going to have to throw out what had been, until tonight, her favorite suit because she sincerely doubted that even the world’s best dry cleaner could get the smell of smoke out of it.

Ethan gaped at what amounted to a little bit of a woman. “You just ran in.”

She looked at him as if she didn’t understand what his problem was. “Yeah.”

Didn’t this woman have a working brain? “What are you, crazy?” he demanded.

“No, are you?” Kansas shot back in the same tone. She gestured toward the building that was now a hive of activity with firemen fighting to gain the upper hand over the blazing enemy. “From the looks of it, you did the same thing.”

Was she trying to put them on the same footing? He was a trained professional and she was a woman with streaks of soot across her face and clothes. Albeit a beautiful woman, but beauty in this case had nothing to do with what mattered.

“It’s different,” he retorted.

Kansas fisted her hands on her hips, going toe-to-toe with her so-called rescuer. She absolutely hated chauvinists, and this man was shaping up to be a card-carrying member of the club.

“Why?” she wanted to know. “Were you planning on using a secret weapon to put the fire out? Maybe huff and puff until you blew it all out? Or did you have something else in mind?” she asked, her eyes dipping down so that they took in the lower half of his frame. Her meaning was clear.

He didn’t have time for this, Ethan thought in exasperation. He didn’t have time to argue with a bull-headed woman who was obviously braver than she was smart. His guess was that she probably had a firefighter in the family. Maybe her father or a brother she was attempting to emulate for some unknown reason.

Ethan frowned. Why was it always the pretty ones who were insane? he wondered. Maybe it was just nature’s way of leveling the playing field.

In any case, he needed to start asking questions, to start interviewing the survivors to find out if they’d seen or heard anything suspicious just before the fire broke out.

And he needed, he thought, to have the rest of his team out here. While his captain applauded initiative, he frowned on lone-ranger behavior.

Moving away from the woman who was giving him the evil eye, Ethan reached into his pocket to take out his cell phone—only to find that his pocket was empty.

“Damn,” he muttered under his breath.

He remembered shoving the phone into his pocket and feeling it against his thigh as he started to run into the burning shelter. He slanted a look back at the woman. He must have dropped it when she knocked him down at the building’s entrance.

Kansas frowned. “What?”

Ethan saw that she’d bitten off the word as if it had been yanked out of her throat against her will. For a second, he thought about just ignoring her, but he needed to get his team out here, which meant that he needed a cell phone.

“I lost my cell phone,” he told her, then added, “I think I must have lost it when you ran into me and knocked me down.”

Ethan looked over in the general direction of the entrance, but the area was now covered with firefighters running hoses, weaving in and out of the building, conferring with other firemen. Two were trying to get the swelling crowd to stay behind the designated lines that had been put up to control the area. If his phone had been lost there, it was most likely long gone, another casualty of the flames.

“You ran into me,” she corrected him tersely.

Was it his imagination, or was the woman looking at him suspiciously?

“Why do you want your cell phone?” Kansas asked him. “Do you want to take pictures of the fire?”

He stared at her. Why the hell would he want to do that? The woman really was a nut job. “What would anyone want their phone for?” he responded in annoyance. “I want to make a call.”

Her frown deepened. She made a small, disparaging noise, then began to dig through her pockets. Finding her own phone, she grudgingly held it out to him.

“Here, you can borrow mine,” she offered. “Just don’t forget to give it back.”

“Oh damn, there go my plans for selling it on eBay,” he retorted. “Thanks,” he said as he took the cell phone from her.

Ethan started to press a single key, then stopped himself. He was operating on automatic pilot and had just gone for the key that would have immediately hooked him up to the precinct. He vaguely wondered what pressing the number three on the woman’s phone would connect him to. Probably her anger-management coach, he thought darkly. Too bad the classes weren’t taking.

It took Ethan a few seconds to remember the number to his department. It had been at least six months since he’d had to dial the number directly.

He let it ring four times, then, when it was about to go to voice mail, he terminated the call and tried another number. All the while he was aware that this woman—with soot streaked across her face like war paint—was standing only a few feet away, watching him intently.

Why wasn’t she getting herself checked out? he wondered. And why was she scrutinizing him so closely? Did she expect him to do something strange? Or was she afraid he was going to make off with her phone?

No one was picking up. Sighing, he ended the second call. Punching in yet another number, he began to mentally count off the number of rings.

The woman moved a little closer to him. “Nobody home?” she asked.

“Doesn’t look that way.”

But just as he said it, Ethan heard the phone on the other end being picked up. He held his hand up because she’d begun to say something. He hoped she’d pick up on his silent way of telling her to keep quiet while he was trying to hear.

“Cavanaugh,” a deep voice on the other end of the line announced.

Great, like that was supposed to narrow things down. There were currently seventeen Cavanaughs on the police force—if he, Greer and Kyle were included in the count.

He thought for a moment, trying to remember the first name of the Cavanaugh who had been appointed head of this task force. Dax, that was it. Dax.

Ethan launched into the crux of his message. “Dax, this is Ethan O’Brien. I’m calling because there’s just been another fire.”

The terse statement immediately got the attention of the man he was calling—as well as the interest of the woman whose phone he was using.

Chapter 2

“Give me your location,” Dax Cavanaugh instructed. Then, before Ethan had a chance to give him the street coordinates, he offered, “I’ll round up the rest of the team. You just do what you have to do until we get there.”

The chief had appointed Dax to head up the team. Calling them was an assignment he could have easily passed on if he’d been filled with his own importance. But Ethan had come to learn that none of the Cavanaughs ever pulled rank, even when they could.

Ethan paused for a moment as he tried to recall the name of the intersection. When he did, he recited the street names, acutely aware that the woman to his right was staring at him as if she were expecting to witness some kind of a rare magic trick. Either that or she was afraid that he was going to run off with her cell phone.

“You want to call the chief, or should I?” Dax was asking, giving him the option.

Ethan thought it just a wee bit strange that Dax was referring to his own father by his official title, but he supposed that just verified the stories that the Cavanaughs went out of their way not to seem as if they were showing any favoritism toward one of their own.

“You can do it,” Ethan told him. “The chief’s most likely home by now, and you have his private number.”

Ethan shifted to get out of the way. The area was getting more and more crowded with survivors from the shelter and the firemen were still fighting the good fight, trying to contain the blaze and save at least part of the building.

“And you don’t?” Dax asked in surprise.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ethan saw the woman moving in closer to him. Apparently, she had no space issues. “No, why should I?”

“Because you’re family,” Dax said, as if Ethan should have known that. “My father lets everyone in the family have his home number.” To back up his claim, Dax asked, “Do you want it?”

Dax began to rattle off the numbers, but Ethan stopped him before he was even halfway through. “That’s okay, I’m going to have my hands full here until the rest of the team comes. You can do the honors and call him.”

The truth of it was, Ethan didn’t want to presume, no matter what Dax said to the contrary, that he was part of the Cavanaugh inner circle. Granted, he had Cavanaugh blood running through his veins, but the way he came to have it could easily be seen as a source of embarrassment, even in this day and age. Until he felt completely comfortable about it, he didn’t want to assume too much. Right now, he was still feeling his way around this whole new scenario he found himself in and wanted to make sure he didn’t antagonize either Andrew or Brian Cavanaugh.

Not that he would mind becoming a real part of the family. He wasn’t like Kyle, who initially had viewed every interaction with their newfound family with suspicion, anticipating hostile rejection around every corner. He and his sister, Greer, secretly welcomed being part of a large, respected family after all the years they’d spent on the other side of the spectrum, poor and isolated—and usually two steps in front of the bill collector.

But he wanted to force nothing, take nothing for granted. If Brian Cavanaugh wanted him to have his private number, then it was going to have to come from Brian Cavanaugh, not his son.

“Will do,” Dax was saying, and then he broke the connection.

The moment Ethan ended the call and handed the phone back to her, the blonde was openly studying him. “You a reporter?” she asked.

Damn, she was nosey. Just what was it that she was angling for? “No.”

The quick, terse answer didn’t seem to satisfy her curiosity. She came in from another angle. “Why all this interest in the fires?”

He answered her question with a question of his own. “Why the interest in my interest in the fires?” he countered.

Kansas lifted her chin. She was not about to allow herself to get sidetracked. “I asked first.”

Instead of answering, Ethan reached out toward her hair. Annoyed, she began to jerk her head back, but he stopped her with, “You’ve got black flakes in your hair. I was just going to remove them. Unless you want them there,” he speculated, raising a quizzical eyebrow and waiting for a response.

Something had just happened. Something completely uncalled-for. She’d felt a very definite wave of heat as his fingers made contact with her hair and scalp. Her imagination?

Kansas took a step back and did the honors herself, carelessly brushing her fingers through her long blond hair to get rid of any kind of soot or burnt debris she might have picked up while she was hustling the children out of the building. She supposed she should count herself lucky that it hadn’t caught fire while she was getting the children out.

“There,” she declared, her throat feeling tight for reasons that were completely beyond her. She tossed her head as a final sign of defiance. And then her eyes narrowed as she looked at him. “Now, why are you so interested in the fires, and who did you just call?”

She was no longer being just nosey, he thought. There was something else at work here. But what? Maybe she was a reporter and that was why she seemed to resent his being one, as per her last guess.

If that was what she was, then she was out of luck. Nothing he disliked more than reporters. “Lady, just because I borrowed your phone doesn’t entitle you to my life story.”

She squared her shoulders as if she were about to go into battle. He braced himself. “I don’t want your life story. I just want an answer to my question, and it’s Kansas, not ‘lady.’”

Ethan’s eyebrows lifted in confusion. What the hell was she talking about? “What’s Kansas?”

Was she dealing with a village idiot, or was he just slow? “My name,” she emphasized.

Ethan cocked his head, trying to absorb this meandering conversation. “Your last name’s Kansas?”

She sighed. She was fairly certain he was doing this on purpose just to annoy her. “No, my first name is Kansas, and no matter how long you attempt to engage in this verbal shell game of yours, I’m not going to get sidetracked. Now, who did you call, and why are you so taken with this fire?” Before he could say anything, she asked him another question. “And what did you mean by ‘there’s been another one’?”

“The phrase ‘another one’ means that there’s been more than one.” He was deliberately goading her now. And enjoying it.

She said something under her breath that he couldn’t quite make out, but he gathered it wasn’t very favorable toward him.

“I know what the phrase means,” she retorted through gritted teeth. “I’ll ask you one more time—why are you so interested in the fires?”

“What happens after one more time?” Ethan wanted to know, amused by the woman despite himself. Irritating women usually annoyed the hell out of him—but there was something different about this one.

She drew herself up to her full height. “After one more time, I have you arrested.”

That surprised him. “You’re a cop?” He thought he knew most of the people on the force, by sight if not by name. He’d never seen her before.

“No. I’m a fire investigator,” she informed him archly. “But I can still have you arrested. Clapped in irons would be my choice,” Kansas added, savoring the image.

“Kinky,” he commented. Damn, they were making fire investigators a hell of a lot prettier these days. If she was telling the truth. “Mind if I ask to see some identification?”

“And just so I know, who’s asking?” she pressed, still trying to get a handle on his part in all this.

It was a known fact that pyromaniacs liked to stick around and watch their handiwork until the object of their interest burnt down to the ground and there was nothing left to watch. Since she’d begun her investigations and discovered that the fires had been set, Kansas had entertained several theories as to who or what was behind all these infernos. She was still sorting through them, looking for something that would rule out the others.

“Ethan O’Brien,” he told her. She was still looking at him skeptically. He inclined his head. “I guess since you showed me yours, I’ll show you mine.” He took out his ID and his badge. “Detective Ethan O’Brien,” he elaborated.

Like his siblings, he was still debating whether he was going to change his last name the way Brian and his brother Andrew, the former chief of police and reigning family patriarch, had told them they were welcome to do.

He knew that Greer was leaning toward it, as were Brian’s four stepchildren who’d become part of the family when he married his widowed former partner. Kyle was the last holdout if he, Ethan, decided to go with the others. But he, Greer and Kyle had agreed that it would be an all-or-nothing decision for the three of them.

As for himself, he was giving the matter careful consideration.

“You’re a cop,” she concluded, quickly scanning the ID he held up.

“That I am,” Ethan confirmed, slipping his wallet back into his pocket. “I’m on the task force investigating the recent crop of fires that have broken out in Aurora.”

“They didn’t just ‘break out,’” she corrected him. “Those fires were all orchestrated, all set ahead of time.”

“Yes, I know,” Ethan allowed. He regarded her for a moment, wondering how much she might have by way of information. “How long have you been investigating this?”

There was only one way to answer that. “Longer than you,” she promised.

She seemed awfully cocky. He found himself itching to take her down a peg. Take her down a peg and at the same time clean the soot off her bottom lip with his own.

Careful, O’Brien, he warned himself. If anything, this is a professional relationship. Don’t get personally involved, not even for a minute.

“And you would know this how?” he challenged her. How would she know what was going on in his squad room?

“Simple. The fire department investigates every fire to make sure that it wasn’t deliberately set,” she answered him without missing a beat. “That would be something you should know heading into your investigation.”

He’d never been one of those guys who felt superior to the softer of the species simply because he was a man. In his opinion, especially after growing up with Greer, women were every bit as capable and intelligent as men. More so sometimes. But he’d never had any use for people—male or female—who felt themselves to be above the law. Especially when they came across as haughty.

“Tell me,” he said, lowering his voice as if he were about to share a secret thought. “How do you manage to stand up with that huge chip on your shoulder?”

Her eyes hardened, but to his surprise, no choice names were attached to his personage. Instead, using the same tone as he just had, she informed him, “I manage just fine, thanks.”

“Kansas!” The fire chief, at least a decade older than his men and the young woman he called out to, hurried over to join them. Concern was etched into his features. “Are you all right?”

She flashed the older man a wide smile. “I’m fine, Chief,” she assured him.

The expression on the older man’s face said that he wasn’t all that sure. “Someone said you ran into the burning building.” He gestured toward the blazing building even as he leaned over to get a closer look at her face. “They weren’t kidding, were they?”

She shrugged, not wanting to call any more undue attention to herself or her actions. “I heard kids screaming—”

Chief John Lawrence cut her off as he shook his head more in concern than disapproval. “You’re not a firefighter anymore, Kansas,” he pointed out. “And you should know better than to run into a burning building with no protective gear on.”

She smiled and Ethan noted that it transformed her, softening her features and in general lighting up the immediate area around her. She was one of those people, he realized, who could light up a room with her smile. And frost it over with her frown.

It was never a good idea to argue with the fire chief. “Yes, I do, and I promise to do better next time,” she told him, raising her hand as if she were taking an oath. “Hopefully, there won’t be a next time.”

“Amen to that,” the chief agreed wholeheartedly. He had to get back to his men. The fire wasn’t fully contained yet. “You stay put here until things are cool enough for you to conduct your initial investigation,” he instructed.

The smile had turned into a grin and she rendered a mock salute in response to the man’s attempt at admonishing her. “Yes, sir.”

“Father?” Ethan asked the moment the chief had returned to his truck and his men.

Kansas turned toward him. He’d clearly lost her. “What?”

“Is the chief your father?” The older man certainly acted as if she were his daughter, Ethan thought.

Kansas laughed as she shook her head. “Don’t let his wife hear you say that. No, Captain Lawrence is just a very good friend,” she answered. “He helped train me, and when I wanted to get into investigative work, he backed me all the way. He’s not my dad, but I wouldn’t have minded it if he were.”

At least, Kansas thought, that way she would have known who her father was.

His curiosity aroused, Ethan tried to read between the lines. Was there more to this “friend” thing than met the eye? Lawrence was certainly old enough to be her father, but that didn’t stop some men. Or some women, especially if they wanted to get ahead.

“Friend,” Ethan echoed. “As in boyfriend?” He raised an eyebrow, waiting to see how she’d react.

She lifted her chin. “Unless you’re writing my biography, you don’t have the right to ask that kind of question,” she snapped.

Ethan’s smile never wavered. He had a hunch that this woman’s biography did not make for boring reading. “I’m not writing your biography,” he clarified. “But there are some things I need to know—just for the record.”

She bet he could talk the skin off a snake. “All right. For the ‘record’ I was the first one on the scene when the shelter began to burn—”

He’d already figured that part out. “Which is why I want to question you—at length,” he added before she could brush the request aside. “I need to know if you saw anyone or anything that might have aroused your suspicions.”

“Yes,” she deadpanned, “I saw the flames—and I instantly knew it was a fire.”

He had nothing against an occasional joke, but he resented like hell having his chain yanked. “Hey, ‘Kansas,’ in case it’s escaped you, we’re both on the same team. It seems to me that means we should be sharing information.”

She was sure that he was more than eager for her to “share” and doubted very much that it would be a two-way street as far as he was concerned. Until he brought something to the table other than words, she was not about to share anything with him.

“Sorry.” With that, she pushed past him.

“I bet the box that said ‘works and plays well with others’ always had ‘needs improvement’ checked on it,” he said, raising his voice as she walked away.

She looked at him over her shoulder. “But the box labeled ‘pummels annoying cop senseless’ was also checked every time.”

Ethan shook his head. Working together was just going to have to wait a couple of days. He had a definite hunch that she’d be coming around by then.

“Your loss,” he called after her and turned just as he saw Dax Cavanaugh coming toward him.

Right behind him were Richard Ortiz and Alan Youngman, two other veteran detectives on the force who now found themselves part of the arson task force. Remarkably, none of the men seemed to resent his presence despite the fact that they were all veterans with several years to their credit, while this was his very first assignment as a detective.

There were times he could have sworn that his shield was still warm in his wallet.

“What have you got?” Ortiz asked him, looking more than a little disgruntled. “And it better be worth it because I was just about to get lucky with this hot little number.”

“He doesn’t want to hear about your rubber doll collection,” Youngman deadpanned to his partner.

Ortiz looked insulted. “Hey, just because you’re in a rut doesn’t mean that I am,” the younger man protested.

“Guys,” Dax admonished in a low voice. “Playtime is over.”

Youngman frowned as he shook his head. “You’re no fun since they put you in charge.”

“We’ll have fun after we catch this arsonist and confiscate his matches,” Dax replied.

Overhearing, Kansas couldn’t help crossing back to the men and correcting this new detective. “He’s not an arsonist.”

Dax turned to her. His eyes, Ethan noticed, swept over the woman as if he were taking inventory. What was conspicuously missing was any indication of attraction. Brenda must be one hell of a woman, Ethan couldn’t help thinking about the man’s wife.

“And you would know this how?” Dax asked the self-proclaimed fire investigator.

“An angel whispered in her ear,” Ethan quipped. “Dax, this is Kansas Beckett. She says she’s the fire department’s investigator. Kansas, this is Dax Cavanaugh, Alan Youngman and Richard Ortiz.” Three heads bobbed in order of the introductions.

It was more information than she wanted, but she nodded at each man, then looked at the man conducting the introductions. “I didn’t say I was the fire investigator. I am the fire investigator. And how did you know my last name?” she wanted to know. “I didn’t give it to you.”

“But remarkably, I can read,” Ethan answered with an enigmatic smile. “And it was in on the ID you showed me”

“How do you know it’s not an arsonist?” Dax persisted, more emphatically this time.

She patiently recited the standard differentiation. “Arsonists do it for profit,” she told him, moving out of the way of several firefighters as they raced by, heading straight for the building’s perimeter. “Their own or someone else’s. The buildings that were torched, as far as we can ascertain, have no common thread drawing them together. For instance, there’s no one who stands to profit from getting rid of a battered-women’s shelter.”

Ethan turned the thought over in his head. “Maybe there’s a developer in the wings, looking to buy up land cheap in order to build a residential community or a king-sized mall or some vast hotel, something along those lines.”

But she shook her head. “Too spread apart, too farfetched,” she pointed out. “It would have to be the biggest such undertaking in the country,” she emphasized. “And I don’t really think that’s what’s going on here.”

Dax was open to any kind of a guess at this point. “So who or what do you think is behind these fires?” he asked her.

She was silent for a moment. Almost against her will, she glanced in Ethan’s direction before answering. “My guess is that it’s either a pyromaniac who’s doing it for the sheer thrill of it, or we’re up against someone with a vendetta who’s trying to hide his crime in plain sight with a lot of camouflage activity.”

“In which case, we have to find which is the intentional fire and which were set for show,” Ethan theorized.

Kansas looked at him. “I’m impressed. Chalk one up for the pretty boy.”

He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or actually giving him his due. With Kansas, he had a hunch that it was a little bit of both.

Chapter 3

In all, twelve children and nineteen adults were saved. Because the firefighters had responded so quickly to Kansas’s call—and despite the fact that several women and children wound up being taken to the hospital for treatment—not a single life was lost.

Tired, seriously bordering on being punchy, Ethan nonetheless remained at the scene with the other detectives, interviewing anyone who’d been in the building just before the fire broke out. It was a long shot, but he kept hoping that someone might have witnessed even the slightest thing that seemed out of the ordinary at the time.

Because she wanted to spare the victims any more unnecessary trauma, and since the nature of the questions that the police were asking were along the lines of what she wanted to ask, Kansas decided it was best to temporarily join forces with the Neanderthal who had slung her over his shoulder.

The women and children who’d been in the fire had her complete sympathy. She knew the horror they’d gone through. Knew, firsthand, how vulnerable and helpless they’d all felt. And how they’d all thought, at one point or another, that they were going to die.

Because she’d been trapped in just such a fire herself once.

When she was twelve years old, she’d been caught in a burning building. It occurred in the group home where she’d always managed to return. She came to regard it as a holding zone, a place to stay in between being placed in various foster homes. But in that case, there’d been no mystery as to how the fire had gotten started. Eric Johnson had disobeyed the woman who was in charge and not only played with matches but deliberately had set the draperies in the common room on fire.

Seeing what he’d done, Kansas had run toward the draperies and tried to put the fire out using a blanket that someone had left behind. All that had done was spread the flames. Eric had been sent to juvenile hall right after that.

Kansas couldn’t help wondering what had happened to Eric after all these years. Was he out there somewhere, perpetuating his love affair with fire?

She made a mental note to see if she could find out where he was these days.

Kansas glanced at O’Brien. He looked tired, she noted, but he continued pushing on. For the most part, he was asking all the right questions. And for a good-looking man, he seemed to display a vein of sensitivity, as well. In her experience, most good-looking men didn’t. They were usually one-dimensional and shallow, too enamored with the image in their mirror to even think about anyone else.

More than an hour of questioning yielded the consensus that the fire had “just come out nowhere.” Most of the women questioned seemed to think it had started in the recreation room, although no one had actually seen it being started or even knew how it had started. When questioned further, they all more or less said the same thing. That they were just suddenly aware of the fire being there.

Panic had ensued as mothers frantically began searching for their children. The ones who hadn’t been separated from their children to begin with herded them out into the moonless night amid screaming and accelerated pandemonium.

The chaos slowly abated as mother after mother was reunited with her children. But there was still one woman left searching. Looking bedraggled and utterly shell-shocked, the woman went from one person to another, asking if anyone had seen her daughter. No one had.

Unable to stand it any longer, Kansas caught O’Brien by the arm and pulled him around. She pointed to the hysterical woman. “She shouldn’t have to look for her daughter on her own.”

Busy comparing his findings with Dax and all but running on empty, Ethan nodded. “Fine, why don’t you go help her.” More than any of them, this impetuous, pushy woman seemed to have a relationship with the women at the shelter. At the very least, she seemed to be able to relate to them. Maybe she could pick up on something that he and the others on the task force couldn’t—and more important, she could bring to the table what he felt was a woman’s natural tendency to empathize. That would probably go a long way in giving the other woman some measure of comfort until they were able to hopefully locate her missing daughter.

Kansas pressed her lips together, biting back a stinging retort. She couldn’t help thinking she’d just been brushed off.

Not damn likely, Detective.

Detective Ethan O’Brien, she silently promised herself, was about to discover that she didn’t brush aside easily.

The moment she approached the distraught woman, the latter grabbed her by the arm. “Have you seen her? Can you help me find my Jennifer?”

“We’re going to do everything we can to find her,” Kansas told the woman as she gently escorted her over to one of the firemen. “Conway, I need your help.”

“Anytime, Kansas. I’m all yours,” the blond-haired fireman told her as he flashed a quick, toothy grin.

“This woman can’t find her daughter. She might have been one of the kids taken to the hospital. See what you can do to reunite them,” Kansas requested.

The fireman looked disappointed for a moment, then with a resigned shrug did as he was asked and took charge of the woman. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he said in a soothing, baritone voice.

Kansas flashed a smile at Conway before returning to O’Brien to listen in on his latest interview.

“Buck passing?” Ethan asked when she made her way back to his circle. Curious to see what she did with the woman, he’d been watching her out of the corner of his eye.

“No,” she answered tersely. “Choosing the most efficient path to get things done. Conway was part of the first team that made it inside. If there was anyone left to save, he would have found them.” She crossed her arms. “He’s also got a photographic memory and was there, helping to put the injured kids into the ambulances. If anyone can help find this woman’s daughter, he can.”

Ethan nodded, taking the information in. “You seem to know a lot about this Conway guy. You worked with him before?”

“For five years.”

He was tempted to ask if she’d done more than just work with the man. The fact that the question even occurred to him caught him off guard. The woman was a barracuda. A gorgeous barracuda, but still a barracuda, and he knew better than to swim in the water near one. So it shouldn’t matter whether their relationship went any deeper than just work.

But it did.

“How does someone get into that line of work?” he wanted to know.

He was prejudiced. It figured. “You mean how does a woman get into that line of work?”

Ethan knew what the sexy force of nature was doing, and he refused to get embroiled in a discussion that revolved around stereotypes. He had a more basic question than that. “How do you make yourself rush into burning buildings when everyone else is running in the opposite direction?”

It was something she’d never thought twice about. She’d just done it. It was the right thing to do. “Because you want to help, to save people. You did the very same thing,” she pointed out, “and no one’s even paying you to do it. It’s not your job.” She looked back toward Conway and the woman she’d entrusted to him. He was on the phone, most likely calling the hospital to find out if her daughter was there. Mentally, Kansas crossed her fingers for the woman.

“It’s all part of ‘protect and serve,’” she heard O’Brien telling her.

Kansas turned her attention back to the irritating detective with the sexy mouth. “If you understand that, then you have your answer.”

Greer blustered through life, but Ethan’s mother had been meek. He’d always thought that more women were like his mother than his sister. “Aren’t you afraid of getting hurt? Of getting permanently scarred?”

Those thoughts had crossed her mind, but only fleetingly. She shook her head. “I’m more afraid of spending night after night with a nagging conscience that won’t let me forget that I didn’t do all I could to save someone. That because I hesitated or wasn’t there to save them, someone died. There are enough things to feel guilty about in this world without adding to the sum total.”

She didn’t want to continue focusing on herself or her reaction to things. There was a more important topic to pursue. “So, did you find out anything useful?” she pressed.

What did she think she missed? “You were only gone a few minutes,” he reminded her. The rest of the time, she’d been with him every step of the way—not that he really minded it. Even with soot on her face, the woman was extremely easy on the eyes.

“Crucial things can be said in less than a minute,” she observed. Was he deliberately being evasive? Had he learned something?

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Ethan said. “But nothing noteworthy was ascertained.” He looked back at the building. The firemen had contained the blaze and only a section of the building had been destroyed. But it was still going to have to be evacuated for a good chunk of time while reconstruction was undertaken. “We’ll know more when the ashes cool off and we can conduct a thorough search.”

“That’s my department,” Kansas reminded him, taking pleasure in the fact that—as a fire investigator—her work took priority over his.

“Not tonight.” He saw her eyes narrow, like someone getting ready for a fight. “Look, I don’t want to have to go over your head,” he warned her. He and the task force had dibs and that was that.

“And I don’t want to have to take yours off,” she fired back with feeling. “So back off. This is my investigation, O’Brien. Someone is burning down buildings in Aurora.”

“And running the risk of killing people while he’s doing it,” Ethan concluded. “Dead people fall under my jurisdiction.” And that, he felt, terminated the argument.

“And investigating man-made fires comes under mine,” she insisted.

She didn’t give an inch. Why didn’t that surprise him?

“So you work together.”

They turned in unison to see who had made the simple declaration. It had come from Brian Cavanaugh, the chief of police. When Dax had called him, Brian had lost no time getting to the site of the latest unexplained fire.

Brian looked from his new nephew to the woman Ethan was having a difference of opinion with. He saw not just a clash of temperaments as they fought over jurisdiction, but something more.

Something that, of late, he’d found himself privy to more than a few times. There had to be something in the air lately.

These two mixed like oil and water, he thought. And they’d be together for quite a while, he was willing to bet a month’s salary on it.

His intense blue eyes, eyes that were identical in hue to those of the young man his late brother had sired, swept over Ethan and the investigator whose name he’d been told was Kansas. He perceived resistance to his instruction in both of them.

“Have I made myself clear?” Brian asked evenly.

“Perfectly,” Ethan responded, coming to attention and standing soldier-straight.

Rather than mumble an agreement the way he’d expected her to, the young woman looked at him skeptically. “Did you clear this with the chief and my captain?”

“It was cleared the minute I suggested it,” Brian said with no conceit attached to his words. “The bottom line is that we all want to find whoever’s responsible for all this.”

The expression was kind, the tone firm. This was a man, she sensed, people didn’t argue with. And neither would she.

Unless it was for a good cause.

Kansas stayed long after the police task force had recorded and photographed their data, folded their tents and disappeared into what was left of the night. She liked conducting her investigation without having to trip over people, well intentioned or not. Gregarious and outgoing, Kansas still felt there was a time for silence and she processed things much better when there as a minimum of noise to distract her.

She’d found that obnoxious Detective O’Brien and his annoying smile most distracting of all.

Contrary to the fledgling opinion that had been formed—most likely to soothe the nerves of the shelter’s residents—the fire hadn’t been an accident. It had been started intentionally. She’d discovered an incendiary device hidden right off the kitchen, set for a time when the area was presumably empty. So whoever had done this hadn’t wanted to isolate anyone or cut them off from making an escape. A fire in the kitchen when there was no one in the kitchen meant that the goal was destruction of property, not lives.

Too bad things didn’t always go according to plan, she silently mourned. One of the shelter volunteers had gotten cut off from the others and hadn’t made it out of the building. She’d been found on the floor, unconscious. The paramedics worked over the young woman for close to half an hour before she finally came around. She was one of the lucky.

Frowning, Kansas rocked back on her heels and shook her head.

This psychopath needed to be found and brought to justice quickly, before he did any more damage.

And she needed to get some sleep before she fell on her face.

She wondered where the displaced residents of the shelter would be sleeping tonight. She took comfort in the knowledge that they’d be returning in a few weeks even if the construction wasn’t yet completed.

With a weary sigh, Kansas stood up and headed for the front entrance.

Just before she crossed the charred threshold, she kicked something. Curious, thinking it might just possibly have something to do with the identity of whoever started the fire, she stooped down to pick it up.

It turned out to be a cell phone—in pretty awful condition, from what she could tell. Flipping it open, she found that the battery was still active. She could just barely make out the wallpaper. It was a picture of three people. Squinting, she realized that the obnoxious detective who thought she needed to be carried out of the building fireman-style was in the photo.

There were two more people with him, both of whom looked identical to him. Now there was a curse, she mused, closing the phone again. Three Detective O’Briens. Kansas shivered at the thought.

“Tough night, huh?” the captain said, coming up to her. It wasn’t really a question.

“That it was. On the heels of a tough day,” she added. She hated not being able to come up with an answer, to have unsolved cases pile up on top of one another like some kind of uneven pyramid.

Captain John Lawrence looked at her with compassion. “Why don’t you go home, Kansas?”

“I’m almost done,” she told him.

His eyes swept over her and he shook his head. “Looks to me like you’re almost done in.” Lawrence nodded toward the building they’d just walked out of. “This’ll all still be here tomorrow morning, Kansas. And you’ll be a lot fresher. Maybe it’ll make more sense to you then.”

Kansas paused to look back at the building and sighed. “Burning buildings will never make any sense to me,” she contradicted. “But maybe you’re right about needing to look at this with fresh eyes.”

“I’m always right,” Lawrence told her with a chuckle. “That’s why they made me the captain.”

Kansas grinned. “That, and don’t forget your overwhelming modesty.”

“You’ve been paying attention.” His eyes crinkled, all but disappearing when he smiled.

“Right from the beginning, Captain Lawrence,” she assured him.

Captain Lawrence had been more than fair to her, and she appreciated that. She’d heard horror stories about other houses and how life became so intolerable that female firefighters wound up quitting. Not that she ever would. It wasn’t in her nature to quit. But she appreciated not having to make that choice.

Looking down, she realized that she was even more covered with dust and soot than before. She attempted to dust herself off, but it seemed like an almost impossible task.

“I’ll have a preliminary report on your desk in the morning,” she promised.

Lawrence tapped her on the shoulder, and when she looked at him quizzically, he pointed up toward the sky. “It already is morning.”

“Then I’d better go home and start typing,” she quipped.

“Type later,” Lawrence ordered. “Sleep now.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re a nag, Captain Lawrence?”

“My wife,” he answered without skipping a beat. “But then, what does she know? Besides, compared to Martha, I’m a novice. You ever want to hear a pro, just stop by the house. I’ll drop some socks on the floor and have her go at it for you.” He looked at her. “I don’t want to see you until at least midday.”

“‘O, Captain! my Captain!’” Throwing her wrist against her forehead in a melodramatic fashion, Kansas quoted a line out of a classic poem by Walt Whitman that seemed to fit here. “You’ve hurt my feelings.”

He gave her a knowing look. “Can’t hurt what you don’t have.”

“Right,” she murmured.

She’d deliberately gone out of her way to come across like a militant fire investigator, more macho than the men she worked with. There was a reason for that. She didn’t want to allow anything to tap into her feelings. By her reckoning, there had to be an entire reservoir of tears and emotions she had never allowed herself to access because she was sincerely afraid that if she ever did, she wouldn’t be able to shut off the valve. It was far better never to access it in the first place.

Heading to her car, she put her hand into her pocket for the key…and touched the cell phone she’d discovered instead. She took it out and glanced down at it. She supposed that she could just drop it off at O’Brien’s precinct. But he had looked concerned about losing the phone, and if she hadn’t plowed into him like that, he wouldn’t have lost the device.

Kansas frowned. She supposed she owed O’Brien for that.

She looked around and saw that there was still one person with the police department on the premises. Not pausing to debate the wisdom of her actions, she hurried over to the man. She was fairly certain that the chief of detectives would know where she could find the incorrigible Detective O’Brien.

“I could drop it off for you,” Brian Cavanaugh volunteered after the pretty fire investigator had approached him to say that she’d found Ethan’s cell phone.

She looked down at the smoke-streaked device and gave the chief’s suggestion some thought. She was bone-tired, and she knew that the chief would get the phone to O’Brien.

Still, she had to admit that personally handing the cell phone to O’Brien would bring about some small sense of closure for her. And closure was a very rare thing in her life.

“No, that’s all right. I’ll do it,” she told him. “If you could just tell me where to find him, I’d appreciate it.” “Of course, no problem. I have the address right here,” he told her.

Brian suppressed a smile as he reached into his inside pocket for a pen and a piece of paper. Finding both, he took them out and began writing the address in large, block letters.

Not for a second had he doubted that that was going to be her answer.

“Here you go,” he said, handing her the paper.

This, he thought, was going to be the start of something lasting.

Chapter 4

Ethan wasn’t a morning person, not by any stretch of the imagination. He never had been. Not even under the best of circumstances, coming off an actual full night’s sleep, something that eluded him these days. Having less than four hours in which to recharge had left him feeling surly, less than communicative and only half-human.

So when he heard the doorbell to his garden apartment ring, Ethan’s first impulse was to just ignore it. No one he knew had said anything about coming by at a little after six that morning. and it was either someone trying to save his soul—a religious sect had been making the rounds lately, scattering pamphlets about a better life to come in their wake—or the neighbor in the apartment catty-corner to his who had been pestering him with everything from a clogged drain to a key stuck in the ignition of her car, all of which he finally realized were just flimsy pretexts to see him. The woman, a very chatty brunette who wore too much makeup and too little clothing, had invited him over more than a dozen times, and each time he’d politely but firmly turned her down. By the time the woman had turned up on his doorstep a fifth time, his inner radar had screamed, “Run!” Two invitations were hospitable. Five, a bit pushy. More than a dozen was downright creepy.

When he didn’t answer the first two rings, whoever was on his doorstep started knocking.

Pounding was actually a more accurate description of what was happening on the other side of his door.

Okay, he thought, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Whoever was banging on his door was going to get more than just a piece of his mind. He wasn’t in the mood for this.

Swinging the door open, Ethan snapped, “What the hell do you want?” before he saw that it wasn’t someone looking to guide him to the Promised Land, nor was it the pushy neighbor who wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was the woman he’d met at the fire. The one, he’d thought, whose parents had a warped sense of humor and named her after a state best known for a little girl who’d gone traveling with her house and a dog named Toto.

“To give you back your cell phone,” Kansas snapped back in the same tone he’d just used. “Here.” She thrust the near-fried object at him.

As he took it, Kansas turned on her heel and started to walk away. March away was actually more of an accurate description.

It took Ethan a second to come to. “Wait, I’m sorry,” he called out, hurrying after her to stop her from leaving. “I’m not my best in the morning,” he apologized.

Now there was a news flash. “No kidding,” she quipped, whirling around to face him. “I’ve seen friendlier grizzlies terrorizing a campsite on the Discovery Channel.”

With a sigh, he dragged his hand through his unruly hair. “I thought you were someone else.”

She laughed shortly. “My condolences to ‘someone else.’” Obviously, it was true: no good deed really did go unpunished, Kansas thought.

But as she started to leave again, her short mission of reuniting O’Brien with his missing cell phone completed, the detective moved swiftly to get in front of her.

“You want to come in?” he asked, gesturing toward his apartment behind him.

Kansas glanced at it, and then at him. She was bone-weary and in no mood for a verbal sparring match. “Not really. I just wanted to deliver that in person, since, according to you, I was the reason you lost it in the first place.”

Ethan winced slightly. Looking down at the charred device, he asked, “Where did you find it?”

“It was lying on the floor just inside the building.” Because he seemed to want specifics, she took a guess how it had gotten there. “Someone must have accidentally kicked it in.” She looked down at the phone. It did look pretty damaged. “I don’t think it can be saved, but maybe the information that’s stored on it can be transferred to another phone or something.” She punctuated her statement with a shrug.

She’d done all she could on her end. The rest was up to him. In any case, all she wanted to do was get home, not stand here talking to a man wearing pajama bottoms precariously perched on a set of pretty damn terrific-looking hips. Their initial encounter last night had given her no idea that he had abs that would make the average woman weak in the knees.

The average woman, but not her, of course. She wasn’t that shallow. Just very, very observant.

With effort, she raised her eyes to his face.

Ethan frowned at the bit of charred phone in his hand. They had a tech at the precinct who was very close to a magician when it came to electronic devices. If anyone could extract something from his fried phone, it was Albert.

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” he told her.

“That’s me, thoughtful,” Kansas retorted. It was too early for him to process sarcasm, so he just let her response pass. “Well, I’ll see you—”

Ethan suddenly came to life. Shifting again so that he was once more blocking her path, he asked, “Have you had breakfast yet?”

Kansas blinked. “Breakfast?” she echoed. “I haven’t had dinner yet.” She’d been at the site of the women’s shelter fire this entire time. And then she replayed his question in her head—and looked at him, stunned. “Are you offering to cook for me, Detective O’Brien?”

“Me?” he asked incredulously. “Hell, no.” Ethan shook his head with feeling. “That wouldn’t exactly be paying you back for being nice enough to bring this over to me. No, I was just thinking of taking someone up on a standing invitation.”

And just what did that have to do with her? Kansas wondered. The man really wasn’t kidding about mornings not being his best time. His thought process seemed to be leapfrogging all over the place.

“Well, you go ahead and take somebody up on that standing invitation,” she told him, patting his shoulder. “And I’ll—”

He cut her off, realizing he hadn’t been clear. “The invitation isn’t just for me. It applies to anyone I want to bring with me.”

She looked at him. Suspicion crept in and got a toehold. Ethan O’Brien was more than mildly good-looking. Tall, dark, with movie-star-chiseled features and electric-blue eyes, he was the type of man who made otherwise reasonable, intelligent women become monosyllabic, slack-jawed idiots when he entered a room. But she’d had her shots against those kinds of men. She’d been married to one and swiftly divorced from him, as well. The upshot of that experience was that she only made a mistake once, and then she learned enough not to repeat it.

Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

“It’s easier to show you. Wait here,” Ethan told her, backing into the apartment. “I’ve just got to get dressed and get my gun.”

“Now there’s a line that any woman would find irresistible,” she murmured to herself, then raised her voice as she called after him, “If it’s all the same to you, Detective—” not that she cared if it was or not “—I’ll just be on my way.”

Ethan turned from his doorway, still very much underdressed. It was getting harder and harder for her to focus only on his face. “The invitation’s for breakfast at my uncle’s house,” he told her. “Dozens of chairs, no waiting.” The quote belonged to Andrew.

She had to admit that O’Brien had made her mildly curious. “What’s he run, a diner?”

He had a feeling Andrew would have gotten a kick out of the question. “Very nearly. I’ve only been a couple of times,” he confessed. “But the man’s legend doesn’t do him justice.”

“I’m sure,” she murmured. Ethan had the distinct feeling he was being brushed off. Her next words confirmed it. “But all I want to do right now is crawl into bed. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just take a rain check.”

Where this tinge of disappointment had come from was a complete mystery to him. He was only trying to thank her for reuniting him with his phone, nothing more. Ethan chalked it up to having his morning shaken up. “If I tell him that, he’ll hold you to it. He’ll expect you to come for breakfast sometime soon,” Ethan added when she made no comment.

Like she believed that.

Kansas knew she should just let the matter drop, but it annoyed her that this walking stud of a detective thought she was naive enough to believe him. She deliberately pointed out the obvious.

“Your uncle has no idea who I am.” And it was mutual, since she had no idea who this “Uncle Andrew” and his so-called legend were.

“Uncle Andrew’s the former chief of police,” O’Brien informed her. “He makes a point of knowing who everyone is when it comes to the police and fire departments.”

This was something she was going to look into, if for no other reason than to be prepared in case she ever bumped into Detective Stud again.

“I consider myself duly warned,” she replied. “Now, unless you want me falling asleep on your doorstep, I’m going to have to go.”

Maybe not the doorstep, Ethan thought, but he certainly wouldn’t mind finding her—awake or asleep—in his bed. He had a hunch, though, that she wouldn’t exactly appreciate him vocalizing that right now.

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