He woke up disoriented to the sound of a ringing phone.
His phone.
Kane groped around on his nightstand for his phone while trying to keep his eyes closed for a couple of seconds longer.
The sun, shining into his bedroom, pried them open, just as his cell phone pried open his brain.
His first thought was that they had caught another case.
He put his phone to his ear.
“Durant,” Kane announced, trying to remember what day of the week it was. His brain function was lagging behind.
The second he heard her voice the rest of his system came online. His brain was no longer fuzzy. It just felt as if it was under siege.
“Are you ready?”
Kane scrubbed his hand over his face. Bits and pieces of his life were pulling themselves together into a recognizable whole. “For you?” He laughed harshly. “Never.”
Rather than take offense, Kelly said breezily, “Your chariot awaits, Cinderella.”
Okay, maybe he was still asleep and having a nightmare, Kane thought. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m here to take you to brunch—just like we talked about,” Kelly cheerfully, albeit patiently, reminded her partner.
That wasn’t the way he recalled it. “You talked. I said no.”
“No. You didn’t,” she contradicted maddeningly. “You wisely surrendered because you knew I was right about this. You also knew I wasn’t going to give up, so you held out for the best bargain, which is my doing your reports for a month. Ringing a bell yet?” she prodded.
Kane stuck to his guns. “Nope. None of this sounds even vaguely familiar,” he replied.
Her tone shifted, telling him she wasn’t going to continue playing games. “It doesn’t have to sound familiar, you just have to comply. Now open your damn door.”
Propping his phone up with his shoulder and the side of his head, he had his hands free. He grabbed his jeans and slid them on. He felt better prepared to handle things—and her—with clothes on.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I’m standing right outside it waiting to take you to Andrew’s for brunch,” she told him patiently.
“And if I refuse to go?” he challenged.
“Don’t make me use force,” she threatened.
Wearing only his jeans and a bemused expression, Kane pulled opened the front door. Kelly was standing less than an inch away. Had she been leaning against the door, she would have fallen in at his feet.
For just half a second, he indulged himself with that fantasy: having her fall at his feet, necessitating his having to put his arms around her to pick her up...
The next moment, he shook himself free of the seductive thought and came back to reality and his apartment.
“Damn, you weren’t kidding,” he marveled. The woman really didn’t give up easily.
“Nope, I wasn’t. I’d give you fair warning if I was just pulling your leg.” Her eyes swept over him. It was impossible to remain neutral to a man whose physique was the closest to perfect she had ever seen. “You might want to put something on before we go.”
His amusement was definitely growing. “And if I don’t?”
She shrugged. His bare chest was not a deal breaker. She knew of several cousins who would have judged it a real plus as far as livening up the gathering. “As long as you’re comfortable, I guess it’ll be okay. But one way or another you’re coming with me, Durant, so stop fighting it.”
Kane sighed. He had a feeling his partner was not above dumping his body into a wheelbarrow and running with him all the way to her uncle’s house if it came down to that.
For a second he considered resisting just to see if he was right. But when he came right down to it, he had to admit that part of him—a very small part—was curious about these so-called famous gatherings that the former chief of police held.
“Give me a minute,” he said in a less-than-cheerful voice. There was no point in letting her think she had won him over easily.
“I’m feeling generous. I’ll give you two,” she told him magnanimously.
Kane shot her a dark look and warned, “Don’t push it.”
She offered him a Cheshire-cat grin and said, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
As if he believed her, Kane thought with a touch of cynicism.
* * *
Less than ten minutes later Kane was ready to go. Since it was Saturday, he was dressed even more casual than usual.
“Let’s get this over with,” he told her.
On some level he was looking forward to this, Kelly thought. If he wasn’t, if he really didn’t want to go, no power on earth—certainly not her—could get him to attend.
However, since he was obviously giving more than an inch, she could afford to do the same and play along. “Cheer up. You’re going to enjoy this,” she promised.
The look Kane gave her all but shouted, “We’ll see about that.”
“Still don’t understand why my coming to brunch seems to be so important to you.”
“I realize that,” she acknowledged as she waited for him to lock up. “But you will. Eventually,” she added, not wanting him to think that she expected some sort of an epiphany to transform him. It was that, just for a second the other day, she had glimpsed the little boy who had witnessed his entire family as well as his own innocence and trust being wiped out. She wanted, in some small way, to give a little of that back to him. Wanted him to be part of an actual family atmosphere for the space of a few hours.
She was firmly convinced that there was a healing power in the kind of closeness her family enjoyed—and it wasn’t exclusive to family members.
* * *
For the most part Kane was quiet as she drove to Andrew’s development. For once she didn’t try to fill the silence with an outpouring of words. She let him have his solitude.
It didn’t take long to get there. Kelly parked her vehicle as close to Andrew’s house as she could. Kane got out first and waited for her to join him. Once she had, they began walking up the block.
“I’ve only got to do this once, right?” he questioned.
Kelly didn’t hesitate, even though mentally she crossed her fingers. “Right.”
He studied her as he asked, “And then you’ll leave me alone.”
“Absolutely,” she promised, perhaps a tad too quickly.
“Why don’t I believe you?” he questioned.
In his opinion her shrug was just a little too innocent.
“Because you’re not a very trusting man,” she speculated as they arrived at Andrew’s front door.
The sound of raised, cheerful voices could be heard through the heavy wooden door. It was a noisy crowd, he caught himself thinking.
“That must be it,” he quipped sarcastically.
At that moment the wide front door swung open. The noise and sounds of laughter increased twofold.
“So, you’re Kelly’s new partner,” Andrew Cavanaugh said, taking Kane’s hand and shaking it. “Been looking forward to meeting you,” the former chief of police told him.
Kane hadn’t expected to meet the man face-to-face so soon, nor was he sure exactly what he was supposed to say. So he just shook the older man’s hand and murmured, “Nice to meet you, sir.”
“How’s your uncle doing?” Andrew asked, ushering them in. “Has retirement made him stir-crazy yet?” Andrew chuckled softly under his breath.
His interest seemed genuine, Kane found himself thinking.
“No, not yet,” Kane answered, surprised that the former chief of police even knew who his uncle was. But the next words out of the clan patriarch’s mouth convinced him that he did. “Tell Keith that if he ever decides he’s had enough of the ideal life I’ve got a proposition for him.”
“A proposition?” Kane repeated. “What sort of a proposition?”
“My dad and I run a security firm,” Andrew told him. His father was still full of surprises, Andrew thought. Several years ago Seamus Cavanaugh had ‘‘unretired’’ himself and decided to start a small security business on the side. So far, knock on wood, it had been growing and progressing at a very healthy rate.
“Nothing fancy,” Andrew continued. “But it keeps the day interesting for a few retired cops. Thought maybe Keith might enjoy rubbing elbows with some of the guys he knew back in the day. Tell him to come by if he’s interested,” Andrew urged.
“I will,” Kane promised. That could be just the thing to get his uncle out of his malaise. Keith didn’t do well without a purpose. And ever since retiring from the force, his uncle had had no structure, no direction. Only more time on his hands than he knew what to do with.
Kelly stood by silently listening to the exchange and noting the way her partner seemed suddenly to perk up. It was obvious that the way to the man’s good side was by doing something for his uncle.
She could relate to that, Kelly thought. However, in her case it was her father she was always concerned about. When retirement came for him, she felt confident that Murdoch Cavanaugh was going to need to do something useful with himself. That was just the way the man was built.
Maybe he could look into joining this security firm, as well.
When Andrew had moved on to another one of his guests, she prodded, “So, this is turning out not to be so bad, right?”
Kane shrugged. “The jury’s still out on that,” he answered.
“On the contrary,” she pointed out with more than a little confidence. “The jury’s already voted on that and everyone’s happy with the outcome.”
“So, she did it,” a male voice belonging to someone standing behind Kane declared in surprise. “I didn’t think she could nag you into coming.”
Kane turned around to look at the man who was talking to him. The face, with its rugged features, high cheekbones and vivid green eyes, was vaguely familiar, and then, at the same time, it wasn’t. But obviously the man knew Kelly.
“As the old saying goes, my partner can talk the ears off a brass monkey,” Kane said in reply.
The man laughed heartily. “You’re preaching to the choir, Detective. She damn near made mine fall off in self-defense.”
“And you are?” Kane asked.
The young man extended his hand. “One of her long-suffering brothers. Bryce,” he added, as if realizing that introductions—since this was a newcomer—were necessary. “At your service.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Kelly told her partner. “Bryce’s actually one of the few men who are even grumpier than you are—at least at times.”
Kane’s eyes shifted toward the man he had just met. “Is she always this bluntly direct?”
Bryce laughed, obviously getting a kick out of the assessment.
“She’s a straight shooter, our Kelly,” Bryce assured him. “Sometimes a bit too straight a shooter. She hasn’t learned how to sugarcoat things yet. Maybe you can teach her a thing or two,” Bryce suggested.
Kane allowed himself a moment to study the woman under discussion. “I don’t think that anyone can teach your sister anything.”
The remark really seemed to tickle Bryce. He grinned as he looked at his sister. “I guess your partner really does know you, doesn’t he, Kel?”
Kelly turned up her nose at her brother, pretending to ignore him.
“Maybe you’d like to meet someone else,” she suggested to Kane.
She hooked her arm through his and physically pulled him over to another cluster of people. People, she hoped, who wouldn’t hand Kane any more material to use against her than he already had. Although, she knew what Bryce had said was all part of a calculated maneuver. Because she was still trying to figure Kane out, she couldn’t be certain that any of her siblings would accidentally say or do something that would put her partner off and thus cause him to withdraw again.
All she could do at this point was hope for the best.
* * *
Kane would have preferred to stand and just observe, but he found that was not nearly as easy as it might have sounded. Apparently Cavanaughs didn’t know the meaning of the word solitude or solitary. From what he could see, they were all about crowds of people mingling. If they saw a loner, he—or she—stirred a sudden need within a Cavanaugh to incorporate that loner into the whole.
“Resistance is futile,” a phrase once popular in a science fiction show cult favorite, was very obviously a credo for getting on with the Cavanaughs as well, Kane couldn’t help thinking.
* * *
“I can’t find two solitary minutes to rub together,” Kane complained when his path crossed Kelly’s again a little while later. “Everyone keeps jumping in, talking to me, wanting to ask something, share something, or just plain talk at length on topics I never brought up. Are they always like this?”
“Like what?” she asked innocently.
Could she actually not know what he was referring to? Kane had his doubts, although if this was the way things had always been in her family, he could see how someone might be oblivious to it.
“Like someone wound them up and just let them run loose.”
Her smile wasn’t apologetic or sheepish. What it was, in the absolute sense, was proud. He could understand that. Every family member just wanted to be proud of their association with the other members of the clan. For the most part, he’d spent his youngest years deprived of that. And while his uncle was far from the warmest man ever created, Kane had become a law enforcement agent to cull his favor and gain his approval.
“Pretty much,” Kelly had to acknowledge. “They watch out for one another.” Because what she’d just said sounded wrong to her ear, or rather it sounded incomplete, Kelly corrected herself and said, “We watch out for one another.” She peered at his face a bit more closely, doing her best not to be distracted by features that would have made a nun entertain thoughts of leaving her order. Instead, she focused on what she saw beneath all that. “You want to leave, don’t you?”
He had, but that had been when they’d first arrived and he’d felt like an outsider. The people around him—his partner’s people—had quickly erased that feeling for him. “Oddly enough, no. At least not yet.” He stopped talking, searching for the right words, and then decided there really weren’t any, at least none that would correctly express what he was feeling. “This isn’t what I expected,” he confessed.
“And what is it that you expected?” Kelly asked, all the while taking small bites of what she felt was an amazing piece of French toast.
“To be nauseated in under sixty seconds. Five minutes, tops.” He shook his head when she offered him a piece of the French toast. She chose to override him and managed to get a forkful between his lips. She had to admit that caused a small, warm, delicious little shiver to go racing up her spine. From the one unguarded look she’d seen on his face, sampling the small piece she’d gotten into his mouth had been an entirely pleasurable event for Kane.
She struggled to hide her smile. “Are you disappointed that you’re not nauseous?”
He was definitely not disappointed. It seemed that nothing that had to do with the Cavanaughs was simple or cut-and-dried.
“Stunned is more like it.”
She nodded. “Stunned’s a good word. I’ll take that,” she told him. He didn’t look stunned, she thought. If she was to judge by his appearance, he seemed pleased. They were getting to him, getting through that armor he kept around himself.
Just as she had hoped.
And then she decided to pry just a little. “I heard Andrew asking about your uncle. Did he retire recently?”
“Not recently,” he told her “It’s been a few years.” And he was clearly surprised that the family patriarch, with an ever-expanding family of Cavanaughs to keep track of, still knew that he was related to Keith and had actually kept up on the man’s life. Surprised and maybe just a little bit glad, as well.
Kane had caught himself looking at his partner in unguarded moments, having his imagination wander off with him. He found himself wondering if by some wild chance things would heat up between them, and, if they did, what repercussions that sort of thing might have on them, on him and on his career.
He had no idea why that thought had suddenly turned up in his head. Nor why he couldn’t immediately terminate it instead of exploring it from all sides.
As if reactions could all be neatly labeled, cataloged and annotated for future generations.
They couldn’t, and he of all people knew that.
Still, Kane decided that perhaps hanging around a little while longer in this hub of socializing Cavanaughs wouldn’t be all that bad an idea. He could think of it as doing reconnaissance.
It never hurt to know his enemy—and if it turned out that Kelly Cavanaugh wasn’t his enemy, look at all the intel gathering that had been accomplished. If nothing else, it was good practice. Not to mention that it allowed him to gain insight into a branch of the Cavanaughs that his partner interacted with closely. Getting to know them would be invaluable in giving him a clue as to what exactly made this partner of his tick.
All in all, Kane stayed a great deal longer than he had initially intended. And he learned things. Learned that despite his tendency to keep to himself, he actually liked these people, who didn’t allow natural boundaries to force them to remain on the outside, looking in. They very boldly abandoned the outside for the inside, politely but firmly infiltrating the world of anyone who had the unique fortune of being around them.
His natural instinct was to close up, but he found that, astonishingly enough, he didn’t want to. Not in this case. These people were fellow cops who very obviously—or, in a few cases, not so obviously—cared about the people they brought into their lives. Ordinarily, he didn’t like anyone prying into his life. Cavanaughs pried all the time. And the damn thing about it was that it didn’t faze him.
That alone should have had him heading for the hills. But it didn’t. He told himself he had time for that later, that he could always shut down and walk away at a moment’s notice.
A moment of his own choosing.
But for now it suited him to stick around and observe them.
Observe her.
Because his partner was getting to him more and more—something that should have put him on his guard—he told himself that he could put emotional distance between the two of them anytime he wanted to.
He just didn’t want to at this present time.
Not until he was ready.