The Strong Silent Type (12 page)

Not with a woman as glib as her. Not with anyone, he reminded himself. “No.” The word tasted harsh, unpalatable. Lies always did.

“Good, because neither do I.” Even as she said it, she could feel the words hurting her.

That’s because they were a lie. Weren’t they? Confusion took up residence in her brain. She’d known what she was getting into even as she stood on his doorstep, waiting for him to open the door. Knew in her heart this was what she wanted. One night with
him, just one night. To satisfy her curiosity. She’d hoped that one red-hot, sizzling go-round with Hawk would answer all the questions she had, would get him out of her system.

All it managed to do was get him more entrenched into it.

The old saying about best-laid plans of mice and men, she thought disparagingly, obviously also applied to women. Dressed, she looked around to see if she’d forgotten anything.

Yes, you forgot to stay out.

She took a deep breath and went to the door. “So I’ll see you tomorrow?”

Hawk rose, completely unmindful of the fact that he was magnificently naked. He crossed the small room and walked over to her.

“Today,” he corrected. “You’ll see me today.”

She could feel herself reacting again, could feel the tips of her fingers itching to touch him. To begin the process all over again. What was going on here?

Struggling to be as disinterested, as detached as he seemed, she glanced at her wristwatch.

“That’s right, it’s today, isn’t it?” Her throat felt raspy, dry. She warned herself not to swallow like some shaky teenager. She’d seen male bodies before, seen his just moments earlier. So why was she feeling so weak-kneed again? “I didn’t realize it was so late.”

It was late, all right. Later than he thought. He
should have stopped what was happening before it had gotten out of hand.

He had to stop it now, before it took him over. “Give me a minute to get dressed and I’ll walk you to your car.”

“You don’t have to.” She raised her chin. “Just because we made love doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly turned helpless.”

It wasn’t up for debate. And he didn’t want her winning every encounter they had, even one as small as this one.

“I said I’ll walk you to your car.” He fairly growled out the words.

She felt her temper slipping. Maybe it was because she needed to exercise some kind of control, even over something as tiny as this. She felt as if he’d completely overwhelmed her, body and soul. “You always this cheerful after you make love?”

His eyes slitted. “We didn’t make love, Cavanaugh. We had sex.”

He was right and she should have gone with it, should have agreed, but her stubborn nature came to the fore, fueled by something akin to hurt. Even if she referred to it as that herself, she didn’t want him denigrating what just happened.

“You had what you had and I had what I had,” she told him coldly. “I’m not asking for a commitment, Hawk, but I am asking you to be civil.”

“I
am
being civil.”

She went toe-to-toe with him, desperately trying to
ignore the fact that he wasn’t wearing anything and that it was really taking its toll on her. “Then why are you shouting at me?”

“Because I don’t want you to leave,” he shouted even more loudly.

That completely threw her. She scrambled to recover. “And shouting at me is going to make me stay?”

“No,” he snapped. “It’ll make you leave before I can make you stay.”

She tried not to think about what that meant, only that she needed him to understand something. Everything else hung on this one truth.

“Let’s get something straight, partner. You can’t ‘make’ me do anything. What happens here, what happens anywhere, is my doing, as well. Hence the word
partner
instead of
flunky
or
slave.
Got that?”

He said nothing, only took hold of her shoulders, bringing her closer to him. She could feel her heart starting up all over again, could feel her body priming. “I guess I should have let you walk me to the car when I had a chance.”

His eyes were fierce as Hawk felt the trap snapping shut around him again. “What makes you think you had a chance?”

She knew she was supposed to argue against his assumption, but she didn’t want to. What she wanted was what he had to offer.

Her purse slipped from her fingers as she stood up
on her toes and wrapped her arms around his neck. “No fair. You’re already dressed for the occasion.”

He smoothed her hair away from her face, wanting just to look at her. “That can be remedied.”

And it was. Quickly.

T
aking a break, Teri looked at Hawk over the rim of her coffee mug. For most of the morning, she and he had been cross-referencing information, searching for a connection, a name, something to hang their newest theory on.

A headache formed over the bridge of her nose and she paused to massage it, her eyes never leaving the top of Hawk’s head. He was busy poring over something. Intent. Focused.

Unlike her. Her mind bounced back and forth like a ball at zero gravity, going from their case to the night they’d spent together.

She didn’t want to feel this way, this happy-glad-Fourth-of-July-sparkler sort of way every time she
thought of him. What she wanted, or felt she wanted, didn’t seem to enter into it.

The sparkler continued to burn.

For the first time in her life, she had feelings, potentially deep feelings for someone—if she allowed herself to admit it—and it worried her. More than that, it frightened her. She’d seen what really loving someone could do. She only had to look to her father if the memory began to fade a little. She’d watched what he endured when he’d lost her mother. Her disappearance created a hole in his life, a hole that nothing could really fill. Despite all the love that abounded in their house, in their family, at bottom Andrew Cavanaugh was still lonely for his wife.

She didn’t want that happening to her, didn’t want to love someone so much that it hurt to breathe, that it cast a shadow on everything else.

And yet she knew she was on that kind of a path if she didn’t somehow manage to stop herself. For all her optimism, she knew that Jack Hawkins wasn’t the kind of man who allowed himself to be tied down. Home and hearth were not his kind of thing.

If she fell in love with him, she was only setting herself up for her father’s kind of heartache.

It wasn’t going to happen, she promised herself. It wasn’t.

With effort, Teri forced herself to get back to the stack of files on her desk. She wasn’t getting paid to pine, she was getting paid to solve a crime.

It felt different.

The air, the day, the office, his skin—they all felt different this morning. As if he’d just turned onto a new page, a new chapter. A new book.

Shuffling through files he wasn’t completely focused on, Hawk frowned to himself.

What the hell was going on? He wasn’t the type to think this way, to feel this way. To feel at all. Feelings were for people who had a prayer of leading regular lives. From the first moment he’d opened his eyes, a heroin-addicted baby born to two people who had no business procreating, his life had been anything but regular. There’d been times, when he was very young, when he’d dreamed of that life. Of actually being normal with normal parents.

But that dream had faded a very long time ago. There was no reason for it to be raising its head now, peering into his existence and whispering ever so seductively in his ear.

He didn’t believe in things like that. In feelings. In people like Teri Cavanaugh who seemed to have no hidden agendas. It made him almost angry to be placed in this kind of a position, to be sitting here and wrestling with emotions he was uncomfortable with—not to mention totally unfamiliar with.

She’d opened a door inside of him, a door to a place he hadn’t even suspected existed. It hadn’t happened just with the sex, because it hadn’t been just about sex, no matter how much each one of them denied this. It had been more.

He didn’t have an explanation. He only knew that
he didn’t feel like himself. Shades of gray seeped into his black-and-white world. Not just gray, but a soft sheen of colors, as well. Colors that came along with waves of confusion that washed over him. Most confusing was that she asked nothing of him, wanted nothing.

It made him want to give her everything.

Except that he knew he had nothing to give. His parents had seen to that.

He was a walking, breathing empty shell, masquerading as a person.

It had been two days since they’d been together in his apartment. Two days, two nights and a great deal of endless time in between. Time that had been filled with work, with following up leads and with trying to find the name of someone who had at one time or other worked in all or most of the valet services that seemed to be implicated. Time in which his mind was only half on the job.

And half on her.

He scrubbed his hands over his face, wishing he’d never left Homicide. Edmunds had never lingered on his mind this way.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Hawk raised his eyes. She was watching him. He had the feeling she’d been doing it for quite a while now. Was she feeling restless, too? He couldn’t tell.

“You’re awfully quiet—for you,” Hawk tacked on. “What’s up?”

“This is a first, isn’t it? You wanting to know if something was bothering me.”

Belatedly, she’d remembered that it wasn’t, that he’d tried to get at the root of what was bothering her the day they’d wound up making love. Her brain was so addled, she’d forgotten. She had to get a grip before she fell completely apart.

“It’s been a week for firsts,” he commented. Then, thinking that he might have given too much away, redirected her thoughts to the case. “You don’t normally chew on things and keep them to yourself.” He nodded toward her desk. “Find anything?”

“A hell of a lot more than I bargained for,” she muttered under her breath. By the look on his face, Teri realized that the comment had slipped out when she’d meant it to be internalized. Damn, she was going to have to watch that.

“Would you like to share that with the class?”

The question came from behind her. Teri swung her chair around to find herself looking up at a worn-down-at-the-heels-looking Mulrooney. Even the doughnut in his hand looked droopy. The dead ends in the case were taking their toll.

Glancing to her left, Teri’s eyes met Hawk’s. Her mind scrambled for something plausible to say. “Just that beyond the common thread of all the victims having used valet services sometime before the burglaries or home invasions occurred, there doesn’t seem to be anything that links up.” She looked at the list of valet services, some of which had gone out of business.
“The services aren’t owned by a single parent company and there hasn’t been anyone who’s worked at most, much less all of them.”

“Maybe there doesn’t have to be,” Hawk ventured. Getting up, he came around to her desk. Teri suddenly felt hemmed in. “Maybe it’s a group effort. Four or five friends all coordinating from their various valet services.”

Teri thought of the two dead bodies in the alley. “Some friends.”

“Oh, great,” Mulrooney groaned, polishing off his snack. He crumpled the napkin and tossed it into her trash basket. “So what, we stake out—” he paused to count the names on Teri’s list “—twelve different services?” He offered them a beefy frown. “The chief’s never going to give us the manpower to do that.”

“No,” Hawk agreed, his mind racing ahead. “But we can get a court order to let us get access to the forms all the employees filled out when they were applying for the job. Maybe there’s a common name given as a reference. He might be our key player.” Mulrooney groaned again, louder this time. Hawk shot him a dark look. “It’s worth a shot. We’ve got nothing else.”

Teri raised her eyes innocently to his face. “Do we really want to wait for a court order?”

Hawk ignored the strange feeling stirring in his gut when she looked up at him like that. “You got a better idea?”

Teri glanced toward the captain’s glass office. It was at the end of the squad room. Right now, the captain looked busy with his work, but she was taking no chances. “I do if you watch my back.”

Mulrooney caught on and grinned widely at Hawk. “She’s going to do her thing again, isn’t she? She’s going to hack into their systems.”

The former chief’s daughter or not, hacking wasn’t something that was smiled upon. Hawk looked at the other man sharply. “Why don’t you try standing on the roof and making that announcement?”

Mulrooney was slow to anger, but there was definite simmering going on. “Hey, what crawled up your butt and died?”

Looking to avert any escalation, Teri came to his rescue. “He’s just edgy because we haven’t solved it yet. Right, Hawk?”

“Yeah, right,” he bit off.

“Hey, we all want this thing wrapped up,” Mulrooney said good-naturedly. He glanced down at Teri. “Need me to do anything?”

“Your desk is closer to the captain’s office than Hawk’s is. Find a way to give me a warning if you see him coming my way.” Pausing for a moment, she glanced over her shoulder at the big man. “This is going to take some time.”

“Gotcha.” With a smart salute, Mulrooney went back to his desk.

For a second, nothing was heard in the immediate area except for the sound of keys being tapped. Hawk
glanced around. Most of the squad room was empty. The teams were all working on other cases. But there was still the network system that could easily be accessed to see what every computer in the precinct was doing. She was doing something risky and, depending on who caught her, it could carry stiff penalties and consequences.

“You know,” Hawk observed, trying to sound disinterested, “for someone whose whole family is in law enforcement, you don’t exactly tread the straight and narrow path.”

She didn’t answer him right away. Instead, afraid she might lose the thread, she waited until she completed typing in a sequence. And then she murmured, “Patience isn’t.”

“Patience isn’t what?”

Teri looked up and smiled at him. “My cousin Patience,” she clarified. “She isn’t in law enforcement. She’s a vet.”

Damn it. The woman’s smile was going straight to his gut. That wasn’t normal and he didn’t like it. “I’ll try to remember that the next time I need a rabies shot,” he grumbled. And then he replayed her comment to him. It didn’t make sense. “Why do you feel you had to share that with me?”

Mentally she counted off another sequence before typing it in. “So you’ll know when you come over for breakfast tomorrow.”

“Come over for breakfast tomorrow?” It made no more sense to him when he said it that when she did.
“What are you talking about? I didn’t agree to anything. I haven’t lost that bet yet,” he reminded her.

Teri didn’t even look up. Her fingers continued to fly across the keyboard. He was surprised that she could even think of anything else beyond the codes she typed. The woman gave new meaning to
multi-tasking.
“No, but you will. There’s a connection here between all the robberies and we both know it. Besides, it’s time you met the rest of my family.”

His eyebrows drew together. He didn’t like the sound of that. Hawk bent over so that he was close to her ear. He didn’t want to take a chance of anyone else overhearing. “Hey, we only slept together once. That doesn’t mean I’m about to meet with your father and exchange a dozen war ponies for your hand.”

God, he was jumpy, wasn’t he? And because he was, she felt an inner calm rising up out of nowhere. “No ponies, no hand, Hawk, just a lot of food and conversation. You’re my partner,” she pointed out. “Partners get brought to breakfast, or lunch, or dinner if you prefer, although breakfast is the most common time. It also has a built-in time limit you might like because we all have to dash off to work. Well, all except Dad, of course, but then—”

He had to stop her before she got a second wind. There was no way he was going to go and meet her family under any pretext. “I don’t do breakfast.”

Stopping in midword, she looked up and pinned him with a look that would have made a lesser man squirm. “You do coffee. You can sit and sip.”

He snorted at the idea. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Because you do.” She couldn’t begin to explain it any better than that. It was the way things were done, had always been done. Anyone who figured prominently into any of their lives was brought around for viewing. Time changed nothing. Her father still wanted to know the people in her life, in all his children’s lives. Hawk, she could see, still waited for more. She added only two words. “Trust me.”

He trusted her to watch his back, but there was no way he was going to allow her access to any other part of him. That night in his apartment had already created havoc inside of him.

If he were honest with himself, the groundwork for that havoc went back further than two nights ago. Still, the word
no
didn’t come when called. Instead, he heard himself muttering, “We’ll see.”

Teri grinned at him. “Don’t forget. I know where you live.”

“So you’ll come and get me?”

She still looked at him even though her fingers flew along the keyboard. “Either that, or bring everyone to you.”

Hawk laughed shortly, shaking his head. “They wouldn’t fit.”

“My family is surprisingly resourceful. Seven-thirty would be good,” she told him, lowering her eyes to the screen again.

She heard Hawk sigh and smiled to herself.

He wasn’t going to show. There was no earthly reason for him to turn up at her house, he thought. He’d go into the precinct the way he’d done every other morning.

Except that he knew in his gut that if he didn’t show up for breakfast, Cavanaugh wouldn’t give him any peace, and if there was one thing that woman knew how to do, it was to mercilessly nudge at a man until he literally and figuratively screamed “uncle.”

Like a tropical storm pounding a beach, the woman was relentless. He’d seen her in action. It would be easier just to show up.

Resigned, Hawk drove to the Cavanaugh house. With myriad cars parked in front of it and around it, the house was hard to miss. It looked more like the scene of a party than breakfast.

He fought the temptation to turn around and driving out of the development. Finally, he parked down the block and walked up to the front door.

She answered on his first ring. He wasn’t even sure if he made complete contact with the doorbell before the door swung open.

“You came.”

The house gave off an aura of warmth. Somewhere inside of him, where a tiny part of the small boy he’d once been still lived, came the thought that he would have liked growing up here. He envied her. And then he buried the thought.