Cavanaugh's Bodyguard

“Careful, your libido is showing.”

“And I was trying so hard to hide it.”

“What’s the matter, Josh, no new woman in your life?”

“Not in the usual sense, no.”

Bridget’s throat had gone very dry. “Then in what sense?”

He needed to leave before he did something stupid. And yet he wasn’t moving.

And then he was. But he was moving to close the tiny bit of space between them.

The only way she was going to save herself was through bravado, and she knew it.

“You’re in my space, Youngblood,” Bridget informed him hoarsely, trying to sound annoyed.

“What are you going to do about it?”

He half expected her to shove him back. The one thing he hadn’t expected was for Bridget to grab him and press her mouth urgently against his.

And just before she did, he could have sworn that she’d whispered, “Damn you!”

Dear Reader,

Welcome back to the newest branch of the Cavanaughs, the one belonging to Sean, Brian and Andrew’s long-lost brother. This time the story is about Sean’s oldest daughter, Bridget, who finds herself grappling with what she views as a brand-new identity. This while becoming aware of feelings for her partner of three years, Josh Youngblood, feelings she has been trying to ignore because, after all, the man’s relationships have the life expectancy of a fruit fly.

But Josh surprises her by being the one who is there for her while she’s trying to sort out how she feels about this new family connection that has suddenly cropped up in her life as well as the lives of her immediate family members. And all this is played out while Bridget and Josh desperately try to bring down The Lady Killer, a serial killer who surfaces every February to kill as many redheaded women between the ages of twenty and thirty as he can in that short month. Interested? Then please keep reading. I promise to try to entertain you as best as I can.

With all my heart I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

Until the next time,

Marie Ferrarella

MARIE FERRARELLA, a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author, has written more than two hundred books, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website at www.marieferrarella.com.

Cavanaugh’s

Bodyguard

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Charlie,

who turned the month of February

into something special

all those years ago.

Chapter 1

Finally.

The thought flashed through Detective Bridget Cavelli’s mind at the same time that she glanced up to verify that the movement she’d detected out of the corner of her eye was her partner and no one else. She’d been waiting for her sexier-than-should-be-legally-allowed partner, Detective Joshua Youngblood, to walk into the squad room for the last half hour. This was precisely the amount of time she’d been going over the notes she had taken a year ago this month.

Her partner wasn’t late. He was on time. She was the one who was early, but that didn’t help to assuage her impatience. She needed to share this with him.

Now.

She struggled to rein in her impatience. It could have been worse. He could have been coming off a forty-eight-hour marathon date and running late rather than coming in right on time.

“He’s back,” Bridget announced to her partner, raising her voice in order to catch his attention.

Detective Joshua Youngblood said nothing in response as he continued walking to his desk. His green eyes were hidden behind exceptionally dark sunglasses. His measured, rhythmic gait brought him to the desk that had been assigned to him for the last three years.

After setting down the extra large container of ink-black coffee, Josh set himself down as well. His chair groaned. It needed oiling.

Once he was seated opposite her did he even acknowledge that he’d heard what Bridget had said by asking in a monotone voice, “Who’s back?”

Bridget, who’d been his partner for as long as he’d been at this desk, leaned back slightly in her chair as she studied his expressionless face. The fact that Josh was still partially hidden behind the sunglasses told her all she needed to know. It was Monday and more likely than not, Josh hadn’t amassed enough sleep over the weekend to keep a squirrel bright-eyed and bushy-tailed or even moderately functioning.

Temporarily forgetting the very cold chill that had gone zigzagging down her spine when the new acting lieutenant had told her the news earlier, Bridget asked her zombie-channeling partner a personal question, taking care not to show the slight spike of jealousy she suddenly experienced. “So, what’s this one’s name?”

For the time being, Josh left his sunglasses on. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He was focused on removing the lid from the newly purchased, life-affirming black liquid. Josh absolutely hated tasting plastic when he drank his coffee and no matter how careful he tried to be, if he left the lid on, he could taste plastic with each sip.

This morning his hands felt like clumsy bear paws. This was what he got for going to bed ninety minutes before he was due in to work, he silently upbraided himself.

With a suppressed sigh, Bridget rose from her desk and made her way around to his. With a flick of her wrist, she made quick work of the coffee lid, tossing it into his waste paper basket. A thin plume of steam rose up from the inky sea.

“So, this one evaporated your brain as well as your energy?” she asked glibly, deliberately sounding chipper as she commented, “Busy little bee.”

“I was up with a sick friend,” Josh informed her after he had taken an incredibly long sip of his coffee. He could feel it winding through his system. Ever so slowly, he began to feel human again.

“I’ve never known you to make a woman sick, Josh. A little nauseous maybe, but not sick.” Leaning her hip against his desk, Bridget crossed her arms before her and shook her head as she pinned him with a penetrating look. “Don’t you think you should start acting your age, Youngblood? Partying and staying out all night all weekend is great when you’re in college or in your early twenties, but all that’s supposed to be out of your system by the time you start approaching thirty.”

Josh appeared not to be paying any attention to her. Then he surprised her by sighing. “If you’re going to lecture me—” he began.

She pretended to hang on his every word. “Yes?”

He took in a huge fortifying breath before warning her, “Don’t.”

A thousand little devils with tiny hammers pounded and danced around in his head. He was in no mood to listen to a lecture or any so-called words of wisdom his overly talkative partner might want to impart. From the first moment he’d seen her, he’d been of the opinion that she was exceptionally easy on the eyes, but definitely not always so easy on the ears.

“I’m just trying to look out for you, Partner,” Bridget told him, deliberately smiling brightly at him. “Because whatever you do reflects on me.” With that, she removed the black sunglasses from his face and gingerly placed them on his desk next to his computer. She did a quick assessment of his face. The last three days had left their mark. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him this exhausted, and that included the time they had pulled a double surveillance shift.

Bridget told herself that it shouldn’t bother her that he spent all his free time with women whose bust sizes were higher than their IQs—but it did.

Just sisterly concern, nothing more, she silently insisted.

“I suppose you don’t look so bad—for a hungover Peter Pan,” she commented.

“I’m not hungover,” Josh protested, although without much verve. “For your information, I had the flu this weekend and I’m trying to get over it.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. That hadn’t taken long. She’d caught him in a lie already. “I thought you said you were up with a sick friend.”

Josh never hesitated or wavered. “Where do you think I got the flu?”

He sounded almost indignant, but she wasn’t buying it, not for a second. She knew him too well. Joshua Youngblood, second-generation cop and handsomer than sin, was a consummate ladies’ man from the word go. The verb was also his rule of thumb whenever things began to look even remotely serious. The second a woman stopped viewing him less as a good time and more as husband material, Josh was gone. To his credit, he made no secret of it, made no promises that took in a month from now, much less “forever.”

“You know,” Bridget said glibly, “you might think about becoming a writer. I hear a lot of cops with a gift for fantasy start spinning stories on paper in their free time. Who knows? You might find your name on the binding of a book someday.”

A third big gulp came precariously close to draining his container despite its large size. Josh set the cup down and did his best to focus his attention on Bridget. The woman was smart as well as a damn good detective. There was no one who he would rather have watching his back than her, but at times he could easily strangle her as well.

Like now.

All he wanted was to have his coffee in peace and then slowly ease into his day. Hopefully accomplishing both with a minimum of noise and pain until he could focus not just his mind but his eyes.

Didn’t look as if that would happen. What he needed to do since he couldn’t strangle her—at least not in a building full of cops—was deflect Bridget’s attention away from him.

“You said something about someone being back,” he reminded her. The coffee, strong enough to be used as a substitute for asphalt in a pinch, was beginning to finally work its magic. All he needed was another half hour or so before last night, Ivy Potter and the now empty bottle of Southern Comfort were all securely behind him.

“Yes, I did.”

He sighed. Obviously she was going to make him work for this. “Okay, who’s back?” he repeated.

“Who do you think?” Bridget crossed back to her desk and, for the moment, sat down. Or rather, she perched on the edge of her chair, too much tension dancing through her body for her to sit down properly.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking, would I?” Josh retorted with more than a trace of irritability in his voice.

As he spoke, he began to go through his drawers, opening one after another and rifling through them. He was searching for a bottle of desperately needed aspirin. If he didn’t find it soon, he was damn near certain that the top of his head would come off.

Instead of answering him, Bridget asked, “What month is it?”

Frustrated, Josh raised his eyes to hers for a moment. “More tough questions?” he quipped. When she didn’t say anything, he sighed, clearly exasperated as he continued with his up to this point fruitless search.

Damn it, there’d been a huge bottle of aspirin here just the other day. It couldn’t have just disappeared. Where is it? he silently demanded.

“February,” Josh bit off. “What does that have to do with—” And then he stopped and raised his eyes to hers again. The answer came crashing back to him. He fervently hoped he was wrong. Very fervently. “February,” he repeated.

“February,” Bridget echoed grimly with a nod of her head.

On her feet again, she went back to his desk. Moving him out of the way, she opened the bottom drawer, which was deeper than the rest, and, reaching in, she pushed aside several folders. Extracting the white and green bottle she knew he was looking for, she placed it on Josh’s blotter in front of him without a word. She didn’t need to talk. Her meaning was clear. Even though he was a great detective, there were times when the man had trouble finding his face when he was looking into the mirror.

What went unsaid, and she would have gone to her grave denying it, was that the trait was somewhat endearing to her.

Grabbing the bottle the second she’d produced it for him, Josh twisted off the top, shook out two rectangular pills and popped them into his mouth. He downed them with the last few drops of coffee lingering on the bottom of the giant container. Now all he could do was wait for the aspirin to take effect.

With a deep breath, he leaned back in his chair and fixed his partner with an incredulous look. “I was really hoping he was dead.”

Bridget nodded. “Weren’t we all,” she readily agreed.

“You sure it was him?” Josh asked grimly. Before her eyes, he seemed to transform from the exceptionally handsome playboy who thought a long-term relationship meant one that lasted from one weekend to the next, into the razor-sharp investigator with keen instincts she both enjoyed and looked forward to working with.

Bridget answered him by reciting the details she’d just read of the latest victim’s description. “Pretty redhead in her early twenties. Her hands were neatly folded just above her abdomen and she had a big, gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be. Yeah, I’m sure.”

She sighed, shaking her head as she picked up the folder the lieutenant had given her and brought it over to Josh for his examination. After his last spree, the serial killer, whimsically dubbed the Lady Killer by a label-hungry media, had disappeared for almost a year and they had all nursed the hope that this time it was because he was dead and not because he seemed to have a quirk about the month when Cupid was celebrated.

“You know, I’m really beginning to hate Februaries,” she told him.

Preoccupied with scanning the report submitted by the initial officer on the scene, Josh read that the policeman had found the body laid out in an alley behind a popular night club. Belatedly, Bridget’s words registered in his head.

He glanced up and spared her an amused, knowing look. “I bet you were the little girl in elementary school who always got the most valentines dropped off at her desk on Valentine’s Day.” Bridget was the kind of woman the label “hot” had been coined for and there were times that he had to stop and remind himself that she was his partner and that he couldn’t cross the lines that he ordinarily stepped over without a second thought. There would be consequences and he liked working with her too much to risk them.

“Then you would have lost that bet,” Bridget told him matter-of-factly. “I was the girl in elementary school who never got any.” She could vividly remember hating the approach of the holiday each year, her feelings of inadequacy ballooning to giant proportions every February fourteenth.

Josh looked up from the folder, surprised. “None?” he questioned suspiciously.

Bridget had to be pulling his leg for some strange reason of her own. Blond, with incredibly vivid blue eyes and a killer figure that not even a burlap sack could disguise, she had to have legions of guys drooling over her since she had first emerged out of her crib.

And, he thought again, he would have been among them if fate hadn’t made them partners in the field.

“None,” Bridget confirmed with a sharp nod of her head. It was still painful to recall those days and the way she’d felt. There were times now, when she looked into the mirror, that she felt as if that insecure little girl were still alive and well inside her. “I was a real ugly duckling as a kid,” she told him. “I absolutely hated Valentine’s Day back then. It always made me feel awkward, like everyone was looking at me and knew that I didn’t get a single card from anyone. I thought it was a horrible holiday.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Josh said, closing the sparse report and watching her.

Bridget looked at him, curious. She’d obviously missed something. “What’s ‘it’?”

“Maybe the killer is some psycho getting even,” he suggested. As he spoke, it began to make more and more sense to him. “Our guy asked this redheaded goddess out on a date for Valentine’s Day and she turned him down, maybe even laughed at him for daring to ask her.” As he spoke, Josh’s voice grew louder and more resonant. “His pride wounded, he doesn’t step aside and lick his wounds like most guys, he gets even. Really gets even.

“Now, every February, he’s relives that—or maybe relives what he wanted to do but didn’t at the time—and takes out his revenge on girls who look like the one who rejected him.”

Bridget turned what Josh had just said over in her head, studying it. “So what are you telling me? That you think our killer is Charlie Brown?” she asked him, amused despite the gruesome details of the case.

It seemed almost absurd—except for the fact that it did keep on happening. In the last two years, nine redheads, their hearts very neatly cut out, had been found in alleys throughout Aurora.

Josh surprised her by explaining why her tongue-in-cheek theory didn’t hold. “No, Charlie Brown never got his nerve up to ask the little redheaded girl out, so she couldn’t reject him. She’s just his eternal dream.”

His eternal dream. That was almost poetic, she thought.

Bridget eyed her partner, amazed—and amused. Every time that she was about to write him off as being shallow, there’d be this glimmer of sensitivity that would just pull her back in.

She supposed that was one of the reasons women always flocked to him. That, a small waist and a rock-solid body that showed off his active gym membership.

“My God, Youngblood, I’m impressed,” she told him after a beat. “I had no idea that you were so sensitive.”

Josh stared at her for a long moment. And then his smile, the one she’d dubbed his “bad boy” smile, which could melt the heart of a statue, curved the corners of his mouth. “There’re lot of things about me that you don’t know.”

Now he was just trying to jockey for leverage and mess with her mind, Bridget thought. There was just one little flaw with his allegation.

“I grew up with four brothers.” She loved all of them dearly, but at times, when she’d been growing up, the verbal fights had been brutal. “They’d more than held their own, but I really doubt that there’s very much about a living, breathing male that I can’t second-guess,” she told Josh with a smile.

Before Josh could say anything in response, their acting lieutenant, Jack Howard, came out of his office, saw them and immediately came over. Howard, a rather self-centered man who enjoyed hearing the sound of his own voice, had been the one to hand Bridget the case this morning once he saw that she and Youngblood had worked on it a year ago.

He looked from Bridget to Josh. “You two solve the case yet?” he asked in what appeared to be genuine seriousness.

Bridget knew better than to think he was kidding when he asked the question, but she played along, uncertain where this was going. She had a gut feeling that wherever it was, neither she nor Josh were going to like it. There was something very pompous about the man. Added to that, she had a feeling that he resented the fact that she was related to the police department’s well-respected hierarchy.

“No, sir, not yet,” she answered, allowing her voice to be neither submissive nor combative. She merely gave him the respect that his position was due. It had nothing to do with the man.

She and Josh had originally heard about the case two years ago, after the second body had been discovered. None of the clues at the time had led the investigating detectives anywhere substantial. Four bodies had turned up and then the killer seemed to just vanish into thin air.

Until last February when he surfaced again.

This time, the case became theirs and the killer wound up leaving five women in his wake, five women who were all left in the same pose as this latest one. Hands neatly folded below where their hearts should have been. All in all, it made for a very gruesome picture.

“Then why are you just sitting around?” Howard demanded, his voice no longer friendly. He turned on Bridget. “Just because you suddenly found out that your uncle’s the chief of detectives doesn’t give you any extra points in my book or cut you any extra slack. Do you understand Cavelli—Cavanaugh?” Flummoxed, he glared at her. “What the hell do you want me to call you?” Howard demanded.

Bridget squared her shoulders like a soldier who had found herself under fire and was making the best of it. She didn’t like Howard, and his harping on her recent situation just underscored her negative feelings for the man.

God, would this tempest in a teapot never be resolved? It was bad enough that Josh had teased her about it. But he at least didn’t seem jealous of this brand-new status she found herself struggling with, a status she’d never sought out or wanted in the first place.

But here it was, anyway.

Ever since the five-decades-old mix-up in the hospital had come to light, uncovering the fact that her father and some other infant male had accidentally been switched at birth and that her father—and so, consequently affecting all the rest of them—was not Sean Cavelli but Sean Cavanaugh, brother to both the former police chief and the current chief of detectives of the Aurora Police Department, she and her siblings had had no peace.

They were assaulted with questions, innuendos and their share of jealous remarks on a regular basis. They were no longer judged on their own merits but on the fact that they were all part of what was considered by others to be the “royal family” of the police department.

Now that she actually thought about it, it seemed as if there was at least one Cavanaugh in almost every branch of the department. Despite the fact that it was completely without a basis, nepotism and favoritism were words that were constantly being bandied about when it came to talk about their jobs and she for one was sick of it.

She’d gotten here by her own merit long before she’d ever been made aware of her surprising connection to the Cavanaughs.

It was enough to make a woman bitter, Bridget thought, eternally grateful that she at least had a large, thriving optimistic streak coupled with healthy dose of self-esteem—now.

“‘Detective’ will do fine,” Bridget informed the lieutenant with a deliberate, wide smile that might have been called flirtatious under somewhat different circumstances.

Josh wasn’t fooled. He knew she’d flashed the smile on purpose, to throw Howard off and confuse him. If he didn’t miss his guess, his partner would have rather eaten dirt than be even remotely coupled with the new lieutenant and the fact that Howard was married had nothing to do with it. He’d only been on the job for a day before it became apparent that Jack Howard had an ego the size of Pittsburgh.

“Well, ‘Detective,’” the lieutenant said curtly, giving her a withering glance, “you and your sleepy-looking partner can get off your butts and do some honest police work and catch this son of a bitch before he louses up my record for cleared cases!” Howard snapped.

With that, the lieutenant turned on the heel of his Italian leather, three-hundred-dollar shoes, and marched back into his office, confident that he had made a dramatic impact on not just the two detectives but the rest of the squad room as well.

Josh glanced over toward Bridget and saw the way her hand closed over the stapler on her desk—like she was debating hurling it.

He put his hand over hers, keeping the stapler where it was. “Not worth it, partner,” he murmured.