Cavanaugh Heat

However, the direction of the conversation was not and he got it back on track. “So, what’s your answer?”

Lila raised her eyes to his quizzically. Something quivered in his gut. “My answer?”

She did innocent well, Brian thought, amused. “I wasn’t distracted by the sidebar, Lila. Dinner? Tomorrow?”

Lila moved the mug aside. She’d had enough beer. Taking in a breath, she let it out slowly, as if by doing so it somehow signaled the beginning of a new journey. One that promised to be far more pleasant than the one she’d just been on.

“Dinner. Tomorrow,” she echoed, confirming the engagement.

Something like the burst of sunshine went off in his chest. He didn’t try to explore the reasons behind it. “Great. I’ll pick you up at your place. Seven o’clock all right?”

Now that she was living alone, dinner no longer had a set time. It was dictated by the contents of her refrigerator and her desire to nibble.

“Seven o’clock is fine,” she assured him. Warmth spread through her as she felt him looking at her. She wasn’t quite sure how to handle this, so she pushed it aside for the time being. Glancing at her watch, she realized that a lot more time had gone by than she’d thought. “I’d better get going.” She flashed him a grateful smile. “I’ve kept you long enough.”

He began to protest that it hadn’t been nearly long enough, then thought better of it. She was still skittish, even though that was difficult to reconcile with the Lila he knew. So instead, he rose from the booth, signaling that he was ready to go, too.

As Lila slid out, he leaned over to quietly tell her, “The tap will be put in place tomorrow morning. I’ll send Manny Lopez over.” The senior computer tech was both exceptionally competent and quiet. “What time do you leave for work?”

The precinct was only ten minutes away, but she liked getting in early. “Seven-thirty.”

“Manny will be there at seven.” It was before his shift, but he knew he could prevail on the man to come in early. “It shouldn’t take long.”

“Are you sure he won’t mind putting in the extra time?”

Manny, a widower, had a daughter who had been caught shoplifting last year. Brian had made the charges go away, keeping them off the police blotter in exchange for Rachel “volunteering” for community service and counseling.

Nodding, she preceded Brian as they made their way to the door.

“Come back soon,” Shawn called after them.

Brian glanced over his shoulder toward the bartender. “Count on it.”

“I’m talking to the cute blonde, not you, Cavanaugh,” Shawn responded.

Lila laughed and raised her hand above her head to wave goodbye.

“You have an admirer,” Brian told her as they walked out.

“Shawn was always a good guy.” She turned around at the entrance. The night air was chilly. The temperature had dropped drastically since they’d gone inside. Lila turned up her collar, wrapping her arms around herself. “So are you, Brian.”

Then why had she avoided him? But he knew better than to ask the question this early in their reconnection. If he did, she might find a reason to cancel tomorrow night. And he was really looking forward to tomorrow night.

“Hang on to that thought,” he told her as they walked back to the precinct parking lot.

He was whistling when he got home twenty minutes later. Even walking into the dark house didn’t bother him the way it usually did.

Ordinarily, the darkness and silence assaulted him the second he pushed open the front door. But not tonight. Tonight, this was the house where a lot of living had gone on, where four babies had grown up to be upstanding adults.

And where, tonight, he felt like a kid again.

Though Brian had never looked toward each birthday with increasing dread, he could feel his usual zest for life waning these last few months.

Maybe it was because everyone in his family had now paired off. That didn’t just include his own kids but Andrew’s and Mike’s, as well. Eleven members in all, every one of them married and in the family way—or getting there. Even Andrew, who had been on his own for so many years, was now reunited with the wife only he had actually believed was still alive.

Rose Cavanaugh had disappeared one morning after an argument with her husband. All the evidence had pointed to her death, not the least of which was the fact that her car was discovered in the river. Her body wasn’t found, but it could have easily been swept out to sea, and that was what everyone believed.

Everyone but Andrew.

He never gave up hope, and over the years, every spare moment he had found him poring over one dead end after another, until he finally found her. But even that hadn’t been a total success. Rose had been working at a diner upstate and was a victim of amnesia. She had no recollection of the husband and children she’d left behind.

Undaunted, Andrew displayed ultimate patience and somehow got her to come around, to remember.

So there they all were, paired up and happy while he pretended it didn’t matter to him that he was always stag at the endless family functions.

Well, tomorrow night he wasn’t going to go stag. Tomorrow he was going out with Lila.

“Don’t go getting ahead of yourself,” he murmured to himself. Methodically, he removed his jacket and then his holster with the service revolver. The former he slung across the back of a chair, but he placed the latter on the third shelf of his bookcase, the way he had been doing for the past twenty-some-odd years. “It’s just dinner, just catching up on old times.”

And maybe, finally, making a few new ones, he added silently.

“You talking to yourself now?”

Reaching for his gun, Brian swung around toward the sound of the voice, the weapon aimed and ready to fire. Andrew was standing in the doorway, looking more amused than angry or distressed.

“Easy, Quick Draw.” Andrew raised one hand in mock surrender.

Putting the safety back on, Brian returned the gun to its holster. “How did you get in here?”

“The front door was open.” Andrew nodded in the general direction of the door. “You forgot to lock it.” He crossed over toward Brian. “Not like you to be absentminded.” He considered his assessment for a second. “’Course, not like you to be talking to yourself, either. Hope you don’t do that down at the precinct. Wouldn’t want people to start talking, saying that my little brother is going crazy. Might not reflect well on the rest of the family. Or the police force for that matter, having a chief of d’s who talks to himself.”

He couldn’t care less what people at the station gossiped about. People always found something to talk about. All he cared about was what his family thought of him—and what he thought of himself. “Why don’t you let me worry about what people say about me?”

To his surprise, Andrew shook his head. “Can’t. I’m the patriarch of the family, remember? That’s what patriarchs do, they worry about the family’s reputation.”

Brian didn’t have any experience with so-called patriarchs, but he knew Andrew and what was important to his older brother. It wasn’t necessarily reputation, but seeing to it that everyone was fed. Well fed. “And cook.”

“If they’re exceptional,” Andrew deadpanned. “And speaking of food,” he continued, “that leads me to what I’m doing here.”

Brian crossed his arms before him, his affection for his brother more than slightly apparent. “I figured you’d get around to it, sooner or later.”

“I’ve come to take you to dinner.”

He’d wondered when Andrew would finally swoop down on him. It was very important to his older brother to have family members turn up at his table on at least a semi-regular basis and he’d been absent of late.

Still, he couldn’t resist giving Andrew a hard time. “I don’t remember you asking.”

Andrew looked at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “It’s a standing invitation. That means I don’t have to ask.”

Brian parried to Andrew’s thrust. “That also means if I don’t show up, no one’s nose is supposed to be bent out of joint.”

“Yours might be if you give me a hard time,” Andrew informed him. “Rose told me not to come home without you.”

Brian knew better. Although he and his sister-in-law got along very well, it was Andrew who insisted on meal attendance, Andrew who found any kind of an excuse to throw an immense family party. Andrew who insisted that the family that ate together, stayed together.

“Or what,” Brian asked, amused, “she’ll give you a time-out?”

Andrew ignored the question, getting down instead to the reason he’d come to fetch his brother. “You haven’t been around for a couple of weeks.”

He knew families who only saw one another over the holidays, if then. But to Andrew, that was unthinkable, and now that he reflected on it, Brian had to admit that he was grateful that he was a part of this family rather than the other kind.

But he did enjoy giving Andrew a hard time. “Maybe I’m on a diet.”

Andrew never missed a beat. “I’ve got carrots sticks. You can gnaw on a few while the rest of us eat.” Looking around the house, Andrew frowned. “You spend too much time alone.”

Amen to that. But he wasn’t about to make noises like a grieving woman after the last of her children had moved out. It just wasn’t manly. “Ever think I might want to be alone?”

Andrew shook his head. “No. You’re too much like me. Let’s face it, we’re family men, not lone wolves.”

The description struck a chord. “Like Mike?” Brian asked.

Their middle brother, killed on the job years ago, had been the different one, the one who had been out of step with the rest of them. A policeman, as well, he spent his life living in the shadow of both his older brother and his younger one, never finding a place for himself other than in a bottle. And never learning to appreciate the two young souls he’d help bring into the world. Andrew’d had more to do with raising Patience and Patrick even when Mike was alive than Mike did.

“Mike couldn’t help being what he was.”

There, they had a difference of opinion. Andrew was being too lax. “Everyone can help being what they are. You can’t help being tall, or right-handed, but you can do something about what you feel inside.”

“Fascinating,” Andrew declared with feeling as he slipped his arm around his brother’s shoulder. “Why don’t you elaborate on that, say, over dinner? Really,” he added seriously, “I hate thinking of you rattling around in this place night after night, standing over the sink or sitting in front of the TV, eating out of a can—”

“Take-out,” Brian corrected. “I eat take-out food.”

Andrew shuddered. “Even worse.” He played his ace card. “I’ve got a pot roast waiting. It’s got your name on it.”

Brian laughed. “You know, the sad thing is, I don’t doubt that. I can just see you carving my name into it.”

“Why would I bother to lie, especially since I outrank you?”

“You can’t outrank me. You’re the ‘former’ police chief, remember? You retired.”

Andrew hit the back of Brian’s head with the flat of his hand, as if to knock some sense into him. “I’m talking about in the family hierarchy.”

Brian rubbed the back of his head more for show than out of any sense of injury. “You always did have a way with words.”

“And pot roast.”

“And pot roast,” Andrew agreed, following his brother out the door.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.