The Strong Silent Type (4 page)

Cavanaugh wasn’t even attempting to put on her seat belt. Probably out of her head, Hawk decided. Reaching over her, he took hold of the seat belt and pulled it around her until he could fit the metal tongue into the groove and snap it in place.

“You feel that way because they pumped you full of Vicodin.” He snapped his own seat belt into place, then looked at her. A tinge of amusement came out of nowhere and almost made him smile. She looked as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “You don’t have much tolerance for medication, do you?”

“Nope,” she breathed, watching as the word floated away from her. She could almost see it. “But I can tolerate pain pretty well. And pain-in-the butts,” she tacked on, looking at him significantly. Her grin widened, then narrowed as she attempted to pull thoughts together. It was like trying to corral six-week-old puppies in an open yard. “You know, you’re a pretty nice guy when you let yourself.”

Hawk began to thread his way out of the small side parking lot. He wasn’t about to let her get sloppy on him. He was already having a hard enough time dealing with her and the strange undercurrent of feelings
bubbling within him, as well. “You didn’t leave me any choice.”

“Oh, c’mon, Jackie, we both know better.”

His spine stiffened at the sound of the name. He stepped a little too hard on the brake at the light. “Don’t call me that.”

His mother had called him Jackie when he was very, very young. Hearing the name set off chords he didn’t want touched.

Her head spinning and bursts of joy throbbing through her veins, Teri backed off. “Sorry. ‘Hawk’ just seems too harsh for someone who held my hand.”

“I didn’t hold your hand, you held mine,” he reminded her. It wasn’t strictly true. He’d held hers while the doctor had stitched her up. “And it’s Hawk. It always has been.”

She sighed, cotton beginning to spread itself all around her as she sank back in the seat. The scenery was whizzing by her at a rate that made it hard for her to fully absorb. She still had trouble putting the sequence of events in order. Everything seemed to be vying for the same exact place. Holding her head didn’t help. “My brain feels like mush.”

He laughed under his breath. “And this is different from normal—how?”

Even in her present state of confusion, she was aware that he was trying to regain ground, trying to come off like the fire-breathing prince of darkness he always was. Too late.

“Sorry, I’ve seen your underbelly. You can’t retrace your steps.”

She was babbling. It was probably the codeine the doctor had injected her with. But, God help him, she’d aroused his curiosity. “Retrace my steps? What are you talking about?”

“I’m on to you, Jack Hawkins. You come on like some Clint Eastwood knockoff, snapping out eight, nine words a day and keeping everyone at bay, but inside, you’re a decent guy.” She turned to look at him. “Just like your alter ego.”

“What alter ego?” Bullet wound or no bullet wound, he was quickly losing his patience with her. “Cavanaugh, what the hell are you babbling about?”

It was as clear as a bell to her. “Clint Eastwood’s a really nice guy when he’s not playing tough guys. I heard somewhere that he’s a real pussycat.”

There was traffic on the road at this hour, which meant that he was stuck in the car even longer than he could tolerate. Served him right, he thought darkly. No good deed ever went unpunished.

“Cavanaugh, get this through your addled brain. I am not interested in your font of useless knowledge or your Vicodin-laced attempt at psychoanalysis. Now why don’t you be a good little detective and just pass out the way the doctor said you would?”

“And make it easy for you?” she scoffed gleefully. “Nope. I want to enjoy this little breach.” The sound of her own voice egged her on. “Don’t get me wrong. I like tough guys. My cousin Patrick could spit
nails—until his fiancée came into his life.” And good luck to her, she thought. She adored her cousin, but living with him was going to be a tough thing. Patrick had his demons.

Not unlike the man next to her.

He had to stop her before she was off and running in another direction. He’d thought she was bad before, but that didn’t hold a candle to the way she could run off at the mouth with this painkiller in her.

“Look, I don’t know what gave you the idea that I’m interested in your family history, but I’m not, so save your breath.” He glanced at her as he came to a light. She was smiling broadly at him. “Now what?”

“It’s not working.”

He knew he should just keep quiet. After all, that was his way, wasn’t it? Allowing himself to enjoy silence? But something about the look on her face had him ask, “What’s not working?”

“Your tough-guy act. I’ve seen the light.”

He just bet she had. And it was probably all the shades of the rainbow. “That’s the pain medication. It distorts things.”

“Not enough to fool me.”

There was no point in arguing with her. He’d already learned that she could argue the ears off a stone statue.

“Look, Cavanaugh, just save your breath,” he repeated. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

He’d won that round. Hawk found that difficult to believe. She never retreated like that. It wasn’t like her. As he came to a stop before another light, wondering if she was all right, Hawk looked at her.

The next thing he knew, Teri was kissing him.

I
t just happened. She hadn’t planned it, or even thought it out.

To say she had never thought about kissing Hawk would have been a lie. She had. Several times. The man was tall, dark and handsome by absolutely anyone’s standards. But she wasn’t really attracted to him, she’d insisted. Brooding men weren’t her type. She liked outgoing, gregarious men. Men who knew how to have fun and didn’t mean anything by it once the good times were over.

Simple. That was the way she liked it.

Jack Hawkins, on the other hand, just breathed complexity. Every word he uttered—when he deigned to utter any—all but screamed the word.

No, she wasn’t attracted to him. Nope, not a whit.

If anything, Hawk was her pet project. She meant to drag her partner out among the living if it was the last thing she did on this earth. She had to get him to loosen up and smile more than once every nine, ten months or so. Nothing else, just that.

Kissing him hadn’t been a means to that goal.

What had brought her today to this junction of skin pressed against skin was extreme gratitude, or at least that was the excuse she fed herself. Hawk had remained by her side at the hospital when she knew every single inclination inside his body leaned toward walking away. That he didn’t meant a great deal to her.

So she was kissing him because she was filled with gratitude. Gratitude and a healthy dose of Vicodin, or whatever painkiller the nurse had injected into her.

And maybe it was the Vicodin spiking up through her system, but suddenly, the outside world faded away. The wound, the traffic, the car itself that Hawk was driving—all melted into oblivion as she became aware of this intense rise of heat all around her. Not like when she’d gotten shot and yet, somehow oddly similar.

Except without the pain.

No matter which way you sliced it, Teri felt she was definitely having an out-of-body experience and not really minding it one bit.

What the hell was going on here? Always aware
of his surroundings, Hawk had not seen this coming. Not in his wildest dreams. Not Cavanaugh.

It wasn’t even as if they had particularly easy access to one another and her lips had accidentally bumped against his. The car had bucket seats, for Pete’s sake.

One hand on the wheel, he grabbed Teri by the shoulder with his other for the purpose of removing her mouth from his. He was as surprised as anyone when he found himself holding on to her instead.

Surprise very quickly turned into something that involved not just his brain but his whole body. Desire moved through it like a sleeping snake uncoiling itself after an aeon of inactivity.

Worse still, Hawk could feel himself reacting to her in ways he didn’t welcome. Sure, the woman was attractive—anyone with eyes could readily see that. But she was also a walking mouth, someone who never knew when to cease and desist—which for him would have been before the very first word was uttered. As it was, Cavanaugh had more words in her arsenal than could be found within the pages of a congressional investigation.

So why the hell did he feel as if someone had just knocked him off his feet by swinging a wrecking ball into him?

The sound of horns blaring directly behind his vehicle pulled Hawk out of the center of the vortex he found himself in and pushed him quickly back out into the real world.

Finally wedging a space between them, he turned and quickly clamped both hands firmly on the steering wheel before he was tempted to repeat the offense.

Before he was tempted to initiate the next kiss himself.

The woman tasted sweeter than anything he’d ever had.

The moment his eyes were back in focus, Hawk took his foot off the brake and stepped down on the gas pedal.

Hard.

They flew through the intersection.

He realized that they’d come extremely close to having an accident. It would have taken very little for his foot to have slipped off the brake while his attention had been directed to other regions. Although there was no car in front of them, there
was
an intersection. They could have been smack in the middle of it with through traffic slamming into them before his brain would have registered the danger.

That had never happened to him before.

His pulse was racing harder than if he’d just done a 10K run.

Once they were on the other side of the intersection, he glared at her. She’d made him lose control and he didn’t like that. It didn’t go with the image he had of himself.

“What the hell was that?”

Teri took a deep breath. It didn’t help. Her heart was pounding harder than a drum soloist showing off
his expertise. She took another breath before slanting her eyes in his direction. “Boy, you
do
need to get out more. That’s commonly known as a kiss.”

If he clenched the steering wheel any harder, he had a feeling it would shatter. “I know what the hell it is, I want to know why it was coming from you.”

She’d come on to him, she realized. Oh, God, how had that happened? What was she acting on? Did she really feel that attracted to him? No, it was the medication—that’s what it was—taking away the restraints, the walls. Her judgment. Her mind fuzzy, she searched for something plausible to use as an excuse. “I kiss, Hawk. I kiss a lot. Don’t look so uneasy. A kiss isn’t always a prelude to sex—”

“I wasn’t uneasy,” he snapped. The next moment, he got himself under control. It was a lie. He was uneasy and he had no idea
why
he was uneasy, why his nerves felt as if they were being pulled apart, which just made the situation that much more irritating. “And before you and I have sex, hell will be selling overcoats.”

“Charmingly put,” she said. He probably had no idea that if she hadn’t had a healthy self-esteem, that would have gone a long way toward destroying it. “Have I told you how great you are for my ego?”

Hawk snorted. She was the last person who needed to be treated with verbal kid gloves. “You don’t need me for your ego. You’ve got other guys for that, hanging around like mindless flies.”

She shook her head, then regretted it. The inside
of the car spun a little. “Honey, pure honey on that tongue of yours.” And then she smiled. Well, well, well, he was aware of other men looking at her. Interesting. “So you do notice things sometimes.”

“I’m a detective. I’m supposed to notice things.”

“You don’t notice the women drooling after you.”

There she went, exaggerating again. “Nobody’s drooling,” he heard himself snap.

Damn it, Cavanaugh was doing it to him again, making him lose his cool, his control. How did she manage to do that when he usually could keep such tight rein on what was happening inside of him? And why did he have to be partnered with her in the first place?

He realized that she still hadn’t answered his question to his satisfaction. “Why did you kiss me?”

His profile was rigid. It was the kind of profile, she caught herself thinking, that could have easily been chiseled in rock. No soft edges, no curves, just planes and angles. A born tough guy. “Just the facts, ma’am,’ right?”

“What?”

“Joe Friday.
Dragnet,
” she said.

She could see that the names of the program and its chief character meant nothing to Hawk. The man needed color in his life. Broad strokes. She had a feeling his life was done in fine-point pencil.

He sure didn’t kiss that way, a small voice from the inside of her ebbed delirium whispered.

Teri made the only assumption she could. “I take
it you weren’t raised on police dramas the way I was.”

A great many of the programs had come via cable channels that featured old series from bygone eras. She could remember watching them, sitting on the floor in front of her father’s chair. Once in a while, when police work allowed, he was even in the chair, explaining things to her. Her desire to be a police detective had come just as much from those programs as it had from wanting to emulate her father, to give her something in common with him.

No, he thought, he wasn’t raised on watching police dramas, he
lived
police dramas. He’d lost count the number of times the police had come knocking on his parents’ door. A good many times they’d been arrested. He’d watched it all from the closet where his mother made him hide so that social services wouldn’t come to take him away. The way they had the day his parents were murdered.

He shook his mind free of the memories and shot Teri a look. “You’re changing the subject, Cavanaugh. Again.”

“No, I’m embellishing on the subject,” she corrected. “Otherwise, everyone talks like you.”

At least then, people would get to the point once in a while. “Not a bad thing.”

Now they were on a topic near and dear to her heart. With only two thirds of her mental firing pins in order, she warmed up to the subject. “It is for
communication. Nuances are what tell us things about people.”

“Maybe I don’t want people knowing anything about me.”

“Sorry, Hawk. This is the Internet age. If you can’t get information about someone one way, you can get it another. In the end, there is no mystery.” He had a very odd look on his face. “Except maybe for what you’re thinking about right now.”

Finally, they’d reached her housing development. He’d begun to feel as if it was an endless journey and he was stuck making it with her droning on in his ear. Hawk spared her a look as he drove through the entrance. “You’re better off not knowing what I’m thinking now.”

She was suddenly beginning to feel very, very tired. That, she assumed, was undoubtedly the effects of the medication she’d been injected with. She had to admit she liked the high she’d had just moments ago. Liked, too, the sensation that had permeated her body when she’d kissed him.

Liked it a lot.

Liked it better than matching wits with him.

Okay, it was time to stop yanking his chain. “I kissed you to say thank you. It really is as simple as that,” Teri told him.

Stirring him up was not a way to say thank you, he thought. “A handshake would have done.” And left him a great deal less unsettled, he added silently.

She smiled. It hit him right between the eyes. “Not this time.”

“Say thank you for what?”

He didn’t even realize what he’d done, did he? That was so typical of him. When it came to complexity, it only involved him. The rest of the world he seemed to view in terms of black and white. She wondered which side he placed her on.

“You stayed with me at the hospital, when I knew you would have rather hit the street again.” Because she’d asked him to, he had stayed even while the emergency room physician had removed the bullet fragment from her side and had stitched her up. She’d held his hand throughout the whole ordeal, and at times she could feel the probing scalpel, feel the needle despite the injections she’d been given to mute the pain. Hawk had never once given any indication that she’d channeled the pain and squeezed his hand far too hard.

Hawk dismissed her gratitude as unnecessary. “You had a vise lock on my hand. I figured if I made any sudden moves, you would have ripped out my shoulder.”

“Not hardly.”

Something inside of her wanted to kiss him again. Even as the last effects of the painkiller were fading. But because there was no medication to blame it on, she banked the urge down.

It took her a moment to realize that the car had stopped moving.

“We’re here,” Hawk told her when she made no move to unbuckle her belt and open the door. Why wasn’t she getting out? Was she weak? He knew she should have stayed in the hospital overnight for observation. The woman didn’t have the sense of a three-minute-old butterfly.

She took a breath, bracing herself, hoping she wouldn’t embarrass herself when she tried to get out. “Yeah, we are.”

He needed to get back. He was primary on this investigation and that meant not letting the lead fall into a subordinate’s hands.

But he never liked leaving anything half done. That included shepherding a wounded partner home. “You want me to come inside with you?”

She
was
embarrassing herself and she hadn’t even taken a step out of the car yet. She didn’t like appearing like a weakling. “No, I’ll be all right.” She looked at him significantly. “You’ve done enough penance for one day.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it penance,” he muttered, then allowed a slight smile to take possession of his mouth when she looked at him in abject surprise. “But close.”

He watched her begin to unbuckle her seat belt, then saw the way she winced. Her wound had to be hurting her like hell. The painkiller must be wearing off by now.

“That’s going to be tender for a while,” he told
her. Moving her hands out of the way, Hawk un-buckled her seat belt for her.

As his hands brushed against hers, her eyes met his. “What would you know about tender?”

It was a loaded question and she knew it, but maybe because, for a fleeting second, she’d come face-to-face with her own mortality, she was feeling a little more reckless today than was her norm.

“I’ve caught a couple of bullets,” he answered.

She knew about that, that he’d caught one to the shoulder in his rookie year and another just above his heart a couple of years ago. In both cases, he’d been lucky. Nothing vital had been injured.

But that wasn’t what she meant. “I wasn’t talking about body pain.”

The late-afternoon March sun filled the interior of the Crown Victoria, making it warmer than the temperature right outside the windows. Sunbeams got tangled in her hair.

Hawk looked at her for a long moment. Something tightened in the middle of his gut, fueled by the sharp urge that kept insistently reappearing each time he banked it down.

He pushed it away again.

They were partners and while he didn’t exactly relish their partnership, he had to admit Cavanaugh was a good cop—good at her job and honest. That counted for a lot. He didn’t really like having to work with anyone, but he supposed she was better than most.

Kissing her, making the first move himself this
time, would place everything they had so far into severe jeopardy.