The diner was busy. It could have been one of a number of New York City diners the siblings had been to before. The location chosen by Sean based on an appointment he had to keep.
Cormac, who generally didn’t bother himself with answers that were none of his business, didn’t need to know more than that.
What he needed most desperately to know, the ADA wasn’t sharing.
He was the last to arrive and shrugged out of his overcoat as he approached the square table in the back corner of the brightly lit, crowded room. Throwing the coat over the same rack that held ones he recognized as his siblings’, he ordered hot chocolate and sat.
Eva, in uniform on his left, was saying something to Liam on her other side, giving Cormac the chance to lean over to Sean on his right and ask if Eugene Maxwell had made any moves, calls or visits since he’d left the interview room.
“Not that I’ve heard, but the guy’s wife left him while he was in prison and is married to someone else in the neighborhood, which has got to be stirring up bad emotions every minute he’s home, so I’m liking him for our guy,” Sean answered. As he and Cormac glanced at the table and saw their two siblings watching them, Sean filled the other two in on the details of Emily’s case as well.
They all knew her. As the ADA.
None of them knew Cormac had slept with the woman for one glorious week. Or even that they’d ever had a friendly meal together.
His time with Emily...it hadn’t been for sharing, most particularly not with family. It hadn’t been going anywhere that would involve family. Ever.
Just imagining the ribbing he’d have taken, him doing a woman eleven years older than him...
Except that...a baby?
They were going to be aunt and uncles...
Shivering from a boatload of trussed up emotion, blowing it off as a chill coming in with him from outside, he opened his menu, wondering how he was going to explain having no appetite at all.
But he didn’t have to worry about that small problem as Sean started talking and all four of the siblings chose not to order meals. Cormac knew the others well enough to know that the subject of Humphrey’s continued absence stripped all of them of any desire for food.
Sean, still in the tan pants and white shirt he’d had on earlier at Cormac’s place, started right in. “I know we all have places to be, so I’m going to be brief. We still haven’t had a single sighting of Humphrey reported, not even on the tip line, and there’s been no word from a kidnapper, no ransom demand.”
“I hate to say it, but it’s time to start preparing ourselves for the worst,” Liam added. “Humphrey wouldn’t have just left of his own accord, no way he’s walking out on us, let alone his new young wife, and his patients. And with no ransom demand, it means he’s probably already been...dealt with. Depending on who got to him, we might never find the body.”
Trying to kick his twin under the table, Cormac felt Eva’s tension even before their little sister’s eyes filled with tears. When the table fell instantly silent, with all three brothers assessing the damage, Eva jumped up and made a beeline for the bathroom.
“Way to go, bro,” Cormac said with a downward smirk of his mouth. Yeah, Eva was a cop now, but at six years his and Liam’s junior, she’d always be their baby sister first. “The kid was eight when Dad died. Humphrey is pretty much the only parent she knows...”
“He’s right,” Sean butted in between them before Liam could get hot. Or not. With his green gaze claiming them both, Sean put on his stern face, the short-haired look he was going with these days adding to his air of authority over them. “Or rather, you’re both right. Liam’s right first. We do need to be prepared. And we’re all going to have to look after Eva...”
Cormac would have given his older brother a lighter, warning kick if he’d had a chance.
“No one has to look out for me,” Eva said as she calmly reclaimed her seat, her pinned back long red hair giving her an air of composure. “If I’m going to make it as an NYPD cop, and I am going to make it, I’m going to have to get tougher.”
Cormac got it. All of it. Her need to be a cop. Her need for toughness. “But not too tough, okay?” he asked hesitantly, with a tad of softness in the tone reserved only for her.
Before she could respond, Sean took over again with, “Like he’s one to talk. No one’s more jaded than Cormac.”
With a shrug and a grimace, Cormac took the assessment on the chin, knowing that his brother was right. He let the emotional moment die, as Sean had meant it to do.
He could have defended himself with justifications, but his siblings already knew about the very personal betrayal that had hit him the hardest. And with the violence on the streets, he spent his days in way more of the daily grit than Sean or Liam did. A lot of what he dealt with never even made it to a detective’s desk. Yeah, that made a guy jaded.
Not at all daddy material...
The thought crept through, but Cormac was able to push it aside almost instantly as Liam told them, “I managed to get a list of every one of Humphrey’s clients,” and then added, “Don’t ask me how,” before anyone, mostly Eva, who was a huge stickler for protocol, could question him. Leaning in, Liam turned his potent blue-eyed gaze on each of them individually, one at a time, and said, “The list is more dangerous than we ever suspected. There are Wall Street sharks who’ve done prison time for fraud and insider trading. On top of that he had more than a few clients who are criminally insane, and there are some real doozies in between, too.” Pulling pages from his notebook, he handed them each one. “I figured we’d split up the list.”
“Good idea,” Sean said, his expression clearly concerned as he glanced over his list. “Let’s investigate everyone on our lists, looking for possible motives, for any way they’d benefit by Humphrey being permanently gone.”
“Or benefit from holding Humphrey captive for a length of time,” Cormac added, the fact that his little sister was sitting next to him, driving him to remind them all of that other very real possibility.
“I think that’s what we’re all hanging on to at the moment,” Sean agreed. The four of them exchanged glances, and just like that, they were as one.
As they’d always been and always would be.
The only family unit Cormac had ever expected, or wanted, to have.
With her doctor appointment on the books, Emily did what she always did. She worked. Specifically, going over evidence in the Brinkley murder.
And by the time she heard Cormac’s key in the lock, she’d already made a call to set up an appointment within the next forty-eight hours with a witness who’d recanted a statement she’d given at the beginning of the investigation. Just that one statement could break the case wide-open. In the truth’s—and the state’s—favor.
In the middle of a nervous conversation with herself regarding whether or not to tell Cormac she was arranging the meeting, at least until it was actually on the calendar, she was interrupted by the ringing of her phone.
A receptionist from work. Someone who did occasional casework for Emily.
“Yeah, Sarah, what’s up?” She took the call as Cormac closed the door, shutting them alone together in his apartment.
Sarah knew she was always welcome to call. But she only did so when it was important.
“I’m sorry to bother you...” she heard the usual fatigue in the much younger woman’s words, and instead of feeling the usual compassion, horror plummeted Emily’s stomach contents. Twins. Sarah was the single mother of four-year-old twins. A woman who loved her job, who was good at it, but whose exhaustion showed more days than not.
Cormac was a twin.
Were there two babies growing inside Emily? Fathoming just one was...
“It’s just that, you didn’t come back today, and these roses were left for you. I just thought you’d want to know...”
“Roses?” What roses?
Cormac, who’d seemed to be passing through to the kitchen, stopped and looked at her.
Giving him a shrug, Emily put the phone on speaker.
“They’re really pretty, and expensive looking, and if they don’t get in some water, they’re going to die. I can take them home with me if you’d like...”
With a raised eyebrow, Cormac continued to stand there, making her uncomfortable for totally unprofessional reasons. Whether he thought so or not, she was not in the habit of getting roses at work.
The occasion was another first in a day filled with bad ones.
“Who are they from?” she asked, expecting to hear that a family to whom she’d brought justice had just happened to choose that day to express over and above gratitude. Even when fate was raining on you, it could bring sunshine, too.
One baby, please, instead of two?
“I...um, thought you’d know...” Sarah’s tone sounded uncomfortable. “I couldn’t help but read the card, it was just there...”
With a completely different kind of knot filling her stomach, made worse by the sharpening of Cormac’s gaze, Emily responded with, “Read it to me.”
“Okay, but...it says, ‘Sweet scent for my sweet. Beauty for a beauty. I loved the feel of your body against mine, dearest Emily. I’ll be counting the hours until next time.’”
Her gaze locked with Cormac’s as her trembling fingers forced her to set the phone down. “Who’s it from?” He barked the question.
“Excuse me? Who’s this?” There was no weariness evident in Sarah’s sharpened tone.
“It’s Cormac Colton, Sarah. After the situation outside the courthouse today, I’ve hired him for protection.”
“I heard about the attempted abduction, Emily, and I’ve been thinking about you all day. When you didn’t come back, I was worried...”
“I’m fine. Just working remotely while the police try to pin down the whys of what happened. Out of an abundance of caution,” she added the overused phrase.
“Who signed the card?” Colton asked again, kindlier.
“No one.” Sarah’s words carried new worry. “You don’t... I thought it was a date...”
She hadn’t had a date in months. Two of them to be exact.
And the one prior to Cormac Colton had been that many years in the past. At least.
It was a testimony to her state of mind that she admitted as much aloud. With enough wherewithal to leave out Cormac’s identity when she referred to the short liaison they’d shared as one outing.
Looking back, it had seemed that way. A dinner that had turned into spending together every waking moment that neither of them were working. With as much as both of them worked, they’d either had to spend their off hours together or not see each other.
She was seeing plenty of him right then. He wore a tight-lipped expression as he tempered a tone she could see rising to a yell as he asked, “Did you see who delivered the flowers?”
“Yes, of course. I was right here,” Sarah answered him. “A woman, in her thirties. Said she was here to get a marriage license. She told me that a guy handed them to her outside, and he said that if Emily saw him, it would ruin the surprise. Plus, he didn’t want to embarrass her at work.”
“Did she say what he looked like?” Cormac was standing over the phone.
“No, but I didn’t ask. I just thought...” Sarah’s voice trailed off, leaving all three of them to know what she’d thought.
“What time was this?” Cormac’s next question kicked Emily into gear, too. They could access the surveillance camera outside the building.
“Around one,” Sarah replied without hesitation. “I was just getting back from lunch.”
“Good, can you do me a favor?” While Emily was still trying to catch up to her professional self, reeling from the note on the card and the obvious conclusion, Cormac’s questions just kept coming.
“I’ll do whatever I can.” Sarah was right there, ready to do his bidding. As were any of the other women she’d ever seen the man having dealings with.
“Can you check and see who applied for a marriage license today at one?”
“I’d need a warrant to pass on that information.”
“I’ll have one to you within the half hour.”
Without another word, Cormac turned from the table, leaving the dining room as he dialed his phone.
And for the first time that day Emily was one hundred percent glad that he was sharing her space.
The fiend had been taunting her with those flowers. Spinning his foiled abduction, his body pressed against hers, as a win for him, something that gave him pleasure. A step forward rather than a step back. He’d made it personal, and as violating as possible. Instead of losing confidence due to failure, the man had rallied and attacked from afar, just a couple of hours later.
And had been bold enough to show himself with a bouquet of flowers in front of her office building.
Cormac made his calls, tracking down one source while he waited for callbacks from others, but as soon as he’d received his answers, he got right back out to the living room, needing to keep Emily in his sight.
With the patrol outside, he knew she was safe. The knowledge didn’t stop the drive to protect her that was pulsing through him at such a pace he couldn’t sit still. She was not only a woman he admired greatly, she was going to be the mother of his child.
A fact he couldn’t process any more than the idea that if he hadn’t happened to be heading to her office at the exact time he had that morning, she could already be dead.
Or at least missing.
The vagaries of fate, of life, didn’t sit well with him.
Nor did the way Emily Hernandez was shutting him out. She hadn’t even glanced up from her computer when he’d walked back into the room.
“Sean got warrants,” he said, plopping his butt in the chair at the end of the dining table, perpendicular to her. Facing the side of her cheek.
Staring because he couldn’t just walk away and leave her alone. As much as she seemed to want that. He couldn’t pretend that the baby didn’t exist. Or that they didn’t have a mutual critical life change happening between them. There were things to discuss. The baby wasn’t just hers.
And while he wouldn’t be physically housing the kid, he still had to do all he could to assist her in doing so. Whatever that meant.
Grocery shopping maybe. Providing healthy meals. There had to be takeout for pregnant women. He could arrange daily...
She turned her head. Was finally looking at him.
And he realized he’d mentioned the warrants and nothing else.
“The guy stayed out of view of surveillance cameras positioned outside your office.”
“How could that be? There are enough of them to take in pretty much the whole area.”
He’d had a similar response when he’d first heard the news. “There are a couple of missed areas. But you’d have to know exactly where they are to avoid being seen. Which leads us to believe this guy is someone who frequents the DA’s office on a regular basis. For all we know, he might not be someone case related, but rather, someone you see every day. Maybe even someone you work with.”
His gut didn’t buy it. Still, the possibility was there, so it had to be managed.
The brown in Emily’s eyes intensified when she was flooding with emotion. Passion, or fear apparently. “I can’t think of anyone who’s shown any interest,” she told him.
“No one’s asked you out? Or maybe even offered to do a favor or something at work that you’ve turned down?”
Shaking her head slowly, she glanced at her computer and then back, her suited shoulders suddenly seeming fragile to him covered in the long dark waves that had wisped along his body on more than one occasion. “Seriously, I’m always so swamped that anytime anyone offers any help, I gladly accept.”
“And dinner invitations? Do you get them, too?”
The question was necessary. His tension as he awaited her response had nothing at all to do with the case.
“Not in years,” she said. “I meant it when I told you that I don’t date anyone involved in any way with my work.”
She had told him that. The first time he’d asked her to have a drink with him. But her gaze, it had already been smoldering, and he’d been certain that the fire pulsing through him had been lit by one alight in her.
He hadn’t asked a second time.
She had. The day he’d finished his investigation into a woman set to testify for her. She’d called half an hour after he’d turned in his final report.
“I can see where that might be hard for you to believe.” The words came out now with a thickness not normally present. As though her throat was dry. “That I don’t date anyone related to my work.”
And her gaze was pinned on him again. Almost as though she was finding it as impossible as he was to stay away.
As though the two months they’d put between them hadn’t quashed even a tiny bit of the weird bond they’d shared.
He’d smothered the inferno and it was still raging?
“I swear to you, I’ve made my position clear for so long, no one ever even asks me to have a drink in a group after a case.”
Now, that just sounded...lonely.
“But you go out for drinks...” He’d seen her once, in a bar by the courthouse, a couple of weeks after he’d ditched her. And had turned around and left before she saw him.
He’d come back to his apartment and gotten drunk.
It hadn’t helped.
“With the same group of girlfriends, yes. Other attorneys, mostly.”
“Have you told any of them about the pregnancy?” The question wasn’t planned, just spilled out naturally, broaching the subject he most needed to discuss with her.
As long as her life was in danger, his baby’s was, too, and she had to understand that. Not go on thinking that he was some kind of freak out to control her, or cage her, or in any way impinge on her independence.
“Of course not. There’d be questions and since I don’t even have answers for myself, I can hardly be prepared to stave off others’.”
He got that. Really got it. Nodded.
“Another theory...from...uh...the flowers...is that the guy knew nothing about camera placement, but got lucky enough to be behind someone taller than him, or was hidden from view by a large group of what looked like law students entering the building.”
“And there are the couple of pillars that block views,” she said quickly, with a little too much force. Like her words were tumbling over themselves to get past the ones they weren’t letting out.
“We did get a description of him from the woman who delivered the flowers.” Leaning in, resting his forearms on the table, Cormac folded his hands. “It was pretty much what we had from this morning. Average height, maybe six feet, winter coat—but it wasn’t leather. Hood and scarf, like this morning. She said the scarf was brown, not black.”
“Witnesses confuse things like that all the time.” She stated the obvious, her tone...nervous. Fidgeting. Just like the fingers that were rubbing back and forth along the edge of her laptop. “But all of this...it fits Eugene Maxwell.”
Exactly.
“Having been at the DA’s office frequently when he’d been testifying in the trial for his cousin’s killer he’d be familiar with the building’s security. When he’d been charged with murder himself, there was earlier surveillance camera footage on the news, showing him heading into the building,” she said. “I’d been coming up the steps of our building with morning coffee, and he’d been coming in for deposition. He approached me. His attorney later tried to say that his own trial was tainted, to get me off the case, because of that outside encounter, but after he’d viewed the tape he’d seen that the surveillance footage not only didn’t show him, it showed that I never even looked at anyone, let alone talked to them.”
While Cormac might have found it hard to believe that anyone could hear someone call out to them and not glance over, he could believe it of Emily. When she was focused on a case, it was like nothing else existed.
He’d seen her switch from lover to prosecutor with the ring of a phone.
Had admired the hell out of her for it.
Because it meant that she was like him.
It meant that he didn’t ever have to worry about “them” becoming more than burning hot sex with some admiration and friendliness thrown in.
And he hadn’t known that about the surveillance tape. Hadn’t known that Maxwell would have been privy to the placement of cameras when he’d figured him for delivering the flowers.
What resonated for him was Maxwell’s divorce. “The man lost his wife because of his own guilty verdict,” he said. “Now, not only does he not get any loving of his own, after having been locked up with men for years, but he also has to live down the street from his ex-wife living with another man.”
“It makes sense that he’d make sexually charged threats against the woman he holds responsible for ruining his marriage,” she finished. “What do you think?”
He thought that he had to find something to prove that Maxwell needed to be back in prison before the man had another chance to get close to Emily.
“I think we need to talk about you being pregnant with my kid.”