THE PAST NEVER DIES…BUT IT CAN KILL

Esteban Fernandez only has one reason to live’and that reason vanishes when his cover is blown. As an undercover narcotics detective, Esteban wants to hunt the scum who killed his brother’and put his stepfather in prison for life. Reassigned and rootless, the brooding detective couldn’t care less about the sexy cop he’s now paired with…until they start finding bodies.

Kari Cavanaugh never asks for a new partner. Competent and self-contained, Kari makes the best of any situation’by herself. But when a series of murders points toward a serial killer, her scruffy new sidekick may have insights into the case. If only the heat rising between them doesn’t spark its own danger.

The kiss was to scare her away.

Instead, he managed to scare himself’but not before he took the so-called “warning” he was issuing to its full conclusion, devouring her the way a starving man devoured his first meal in countless days. Except that for Esteban, it had been countless months, not days. Countless months that had stumbled their way into years without his complete memory of the empty journey. Pleasures of the flesh hadn’t been important to him at the time.

Now, though, something seemed to be waking up within him....

Dear Reader,

Welcome back to the Cavanaugh world, where family is always the most important ingredient and love can break through the thickest walls.

This time we get to meet Sean’s daughter, Kari, who not only doesn’t have a problem when she discovers that, thanks to her father, she is actually a Cavanaugh, she welcomes the news. Kari has always made the best of every situation, which is why Brian Cavanaugh, the chief of detectives, feels she is the perfect partner for Esteban Fernandez, a former undercover narcotics officer. Esteban’s sole purpose in life is to avenge the deaths of his half brother and mother at the hands of the drug cartel. When that is taken away from him, he needs help finding a reason to go on. Kari decides that it is her mission to make him come around and see the good he can accomplish working with her as a police detective. She hadn’t counted on falling in love with her assignment. But nothing is ever without twists and turns in the Cavanaugh world, and this is no exception.

As always, I thank you for reading and from the bottom of my heart I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

All the best,

Marie Ferrarella

Cavanaugh on Duty

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MARIE FERRARELLA

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

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To Ian Conrad,

Welcome to the world, Little Man

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Excerpt

Prologue

Something was wrong.

He could feel it in his bones, smell it in the air. The minute Esteban stepped out of the run-down tenement apartment building he’d called home these past three years, he’d sensed it.

Something was off.

He had nothing concrete to base it on, except for a gut instinct. The same gut instinct that had helped him survive out here on the cusp of hell, slowly making his way up the cartel food chain, earning trust by seemingly not giving a damn.

It had been a juggling act all the way. The people within the drug cartel had an honor code without displaying a shred of real honor. Moreover, they expected a man to keep his word while they broke theirs with bone-chilling regularity.

Black was white, and white vacillated between nonexistent and a color he couldn’t begin to describe.

But he had managed to navigate these streets, being one of them while standing apart, and all the while sleeping with one eye open.

Although it had come at a great personal cost, he’d bided his time, waiting for the chance to even a score that would never truly be even.

But this thing he was feeling was different. His nerves twisted and tensed; a chill swept along his spine. Every fiber in his body was on high alert, listening intently even though he didn’t know for what.

And then he knew what he was listening for.

Because he heard it: the high-pitched whine of a bullet as it hurtled from its source.

A bullet with his name on it.

Abruptly, he swung to the right.

The bullet couldn’t.

It missed him.

The same gut instinct told him to keep on running if he wanted to live. Confronted with an actual choice between life and death, he surprised himself by deciding to live a little longer.

So he kept on running.

His job wasn’t finished. He still had people to bring to justice. After that, it didn’t matter what happened to him. He was already dead on the inside anyway.

Chapter 1

Brian Cavanaugh leaned back in his chair as he studied the young man in his office. Intense was the first word that sprang to mind, prefaced by very.

His own words were measured when he spoke, as his goal was to put the other man, freshly plucked out of undercover work, at ease.

“The first thing I want you to know is that this is not a demotion’”

It had been an exhausting thirty-six hours, beginning with a nerve-racking leap from the very jaws of hell. Esteban’s surroundings right now’clean, orderly, devoid of vermin’seemed almost surreal. He’d all but forgotten places like this existed.

But he’d chosen that netherworld over this because he had a purpose, a mission. The mission wasn’t accomplished yet. He needed to find a way back. Somehow.

“With all due respect, sir, when someone leads with that, it usually means that it is a demotion,” the man who had gone by the name Juan Dominguez for the past three years pointed out.

The corners of Brian’s mouth curved in apparent amusement. “You mean like when someone prefaces a statement with the phrase, ‘With all due respect,’ he or she usually doesn’t harbor that respect?”

Unable to contain his restlessness, the detective who’d been summoned to Brian’s office continued to pace. His broad shoulders stiffened slightly. “I wouldn’t know about that, sir. In this case, there is a great deal of respect. It’s just that’”

“It’s just that you feel as if you’ve been given a time-out, sent to stand in the corner, while everyone you know is still out on the playground, doing what they please,” Brian guessed, completing what he anticipated were the younger, somewhat disheveled-looking man’s thoughts on the matter.

“Something like that,” the detective murmured. He returned the Chief of D’s look, searching for an opening, a way to reverse what he knew in his gut the older man was planning on doing.

“You know you can sit down in my office,” Brian reminded him patiently. He’d already extended the invitation to the man whose real name, according to the requisitioned file on his desk, was Esteban Fernandez.

Esteban stopped pacing. His tone was polite, with just a hint of defiance, as he asked, “Is that an order, sir?”

Brian had not reached his rank by choosing his battles recklessly. This was not a battle, just a reassessment of a situation. Fernandez could be either a valuable asset’or a loose cannon.

“No, just a point of fact,” he replied calmly.

“Then if it’s all the same to you, sir,” Esteban said, “I’d rather stand.”

“Actually, it’s not,” Brian told him, his eyes holding Esteban’s. “But if you prefer to imitate a moving target, that’s your call.”

Esteban watched the Chief for a long moment. According to what he’d heard, Brian Cavanaugh was considered fair to a fault by the men and women who answered to him and whose undying allegiance he’d earned one by one.

Esteban wavered for a moment, wanting to stick to his guns, an army of one. Then, suppressing the sigh that rose to his throat, he lowered his lean, muscular frame into one of the two chairs that faced the Chief of D’s desk.

Brian smiled. There wasn’t so much as a hint of triumph in his voice as he said, “Thank you, Detective.”

Esteban barely nodded, bracing himself as he waited for the inevitable shoe to fall.

The wait was almost nonexistent.

The Chief of Detectives’ next words were the ones Esteban had been dreading for thirty-six hours, ever since Manny Diaz had opened fire on him. Part of him still didn’t know how he’d survived.

But there was no part of him that didn’t want to go back.

“You’re being pulled off the undercover assignment, Detective.”

Esteban winced.

He’d been preparing for this meeting, for these damning words, ever since he’d been made less than two days ago. That was when he’d been identified as an undercover cop rather than a drug dealer with a growing clientele.

Made or not, he wasn’t about to accept this decision quietly. “Sir, I could still’”

The Chief cut him off before Esteban could waste any more breath, because that was all that it would be. Just a waste of breath. His mind was made up. Not because he was an egotist who enjoyed wielding power, but because he was not about to allow any of his people to risk certain death. Life was far too precious for that.

“No, you couldn’t,” Brian said firmly. His voice was not without compassion as he continued, “You were made, Detective. There is now a price on your head. A price that doesn’t carry the option of ‘dead or alive,’ just ‘dead.’” He leaned forward over his desk, creating an aura of privacy between himself and the young detective. “Jorge Lopez doesn’t like being made a fool of...and discovering an undercover law enforcement officer operating as a dealer right under his nose makes him out to be a huge fool. He wants your head on a pike in order to save face.”

Brian lightened his tone. He didn’t want to strike fear into his detective’s heart, just arouse his dormant common sense.

“Call me selfish, but I’d prefer having your head just where it is. You’re being pulled out to save your life, Detective. As good as you are’and according to everyone who counts, you are very good’you won’t be any further use to us with a target on your back. So, unless you have a death wish, you will accept reassignment as graciously as you can.

“This is a good thing, Detective Fernandez,” Brian continued. “A lot of men who came before you and went into undercover work never got the chance to get out. At least, not alive,” he amended.

Esteban struggled to keep his reaction to the Chief of D’s words from showing on his face. He didn’t want to be gracious. He just wanted to continue doing what he’d been doing: getting rid of scum one drug dealer at a time. It was the only thing that gave purpose to his life.

“Yes, sir,” Esteban bit off, staring past the Chief of D’s head.

Brian heard the animosity in the other man’s voice’could almost feel it. But he wasn’t here to make friends at the expense of a man’s life. Even a single life was one too many.

His eyes held Esteban’s. “You don’t sound as if you believe me.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the Chief, it was just that he had no desire to play it safe, to get out of the game where he risked his life daily, betting that very same life against some pretty steep odds that he would see another sunrise.

“No, sir, I do believe you.” He cast about for the right way to say this. Maybe he actually had a shot at changing the Chief of D’s mind on this after all. “It’s just that’”

“You’re afraid of being bored to death,” Brian said. When Esteban looked at him in surprise, Brian allowed himself a moment to laugh. “I didn’t guess at that, Detective. I’ve been in your place. Granted, it feels like a hundred years ago now, but I worked undercover when I was about your age. In my case, it was to take down a sex-trafficking ring selling innocent, underage girls to the highest bidder. Trust me,” he continued, “I’m familiar with the adrenaline rush that comes from a job well done, a deadly exchange foiled, detection narrowly avoided. Can’t bottle that or find a pill to evoke the same kind of feeling.

“That comes from seeing firsthand that you’ve saved a life, maybe several lives, and prevented someone else from being kidnapped in the future. Doesn’t matter that that person will never know that, because of your efforts, they’ve been spared. All that counts is that they have been spared.”

Esteban looked at his superior with newfound respect. He hadn’t been aware that the Chief had ever actually walked the walk. “You were involved in something like that, sir?”

“I was and I know what a comedown it feels like to be handed a job that you feel an overage, half-witted Boy Scout could handle with one hand tied behind his back. But in all honesty, that feeling is unwarranted, not to mention inaccurate.”

Listening intently, Esteban waited for Cavanaugh to continue.

“Aurora,” Brian pointed out with pride, “seems like a sleepy little burg only because of the unending vigilance of the men and women in the police department, the officers who patrol and the detectives who piece together the puzzles.”

Brian took a breath, allowing his words a moment to sink in.

“So, to reiterate, this is not a demotion, but a lateral promotion. There’s been a recent opening in the Homicide Division.”

Brian paused again, trying to ascertain the best approach to winning this man over. There was no doubt in his mind that Fernandez was an asset. But an asset who needed to have his focus redirected’and that didn’t promise to be easy.

“We lost a good man two weeks ago,” Brian stated bluntly.

“In the line of duty?” Esteban asked, sensing that the Chief of D’s was waiting for him to respond in some way.

“Out of the line of fire,” Brian quipped. “Detective First Class Ernest Lau made it to retirement age and the second he did, his wife insisted that he stop pressing his luck and leave the force.”

“What’s he planning to do?” Esteban asked, not because he was the least bit curious, but because he sensed that this, also, was expected of him. He had gotten to where he was’and lived to talk about it’because he had the instincts to intuit in most cases what was expected of him in either deeds or words.

“Not get shot at anymore, for one.”

The answer hadn’t come from the Chief of D’s, but from the woman crossing the threshold directly behind him. Esteban turned in his chair to glance at this newcomer walking into the Chief’s office.

It wasn’t Cavanaugh’s administrative assistant. He knew because he’d passed the woman when he’d initially entered the Chief’s office. He’d noted that she looked like an attractive, contained woman in her late forties. This woman walking in looked as if she’d just popped out of a Cracker Jack box a few seconds ago, and the experience had clearly invigorated her to go on popping.

How did she figure into this? Esteban wondered, even as he had the sinking feeling that maybe he really didn’t want to know the answer to that question.

She also looked the slightest bit familiar.

Had their paths crossed?

And if so, when?

How?

For the past three-plus years, he’d dealt strictly with people who either were the dregs of society or had dealt with the dregs of society on a regular basis.

If anything, this perky, peppy, blue-eyed blonde would fall into the second category. And yet...

And yet he wasn’t all that certain he knew her in that capacity, either.

Maybe he didn’t know her, Esteban decided a second later.

For now, he would let it be. If he did know her, well, then he’d find out soon enough one way or another. It was just that simple’and possibly, just that complicated. What it wasn’t was worth his time wondering about it.

“You sent for me, sir?” she asked genially, directing her question as well as her attention to the man behind the desk.

She was also doing her very best not to stare at the other man in the room.

Even so, she couldn’t shake the feeling of recognition that had instantly come over her.

That was Steve. It had to be, she thought.

If it wasn’t, then it was his doppelgänger. No one else she knew had hair like that, so black that it almost looked as if it had steel-blue highlights woven through it.

And those intense blue eyes’they’d come from his mother, she recalled hearing him say once. Those same eyes were responsible for melting an entire squad of cheerleaders in high school, not to mention almost every other teenage girl within a five-mile radius of the hunky, popular quarterback.

God knew she hadn’t been immune to him either, but she’d had no desire to beat off a throng of adoring, salivating females just to get a little one-on-one time with the devastatingly handsome football player.

Funny thing about that. She’d always thought he would make a name for himself in the professional arena, but he seemed to have completely disappeared shortly after he’d graduated high school. They’d been exactly a year apart, even though she had shared a couple of classes with him.

Was this where he’d ultimately wound up? Working in law enforcement and looking like someone badly in need of a haircut and a shave, not to mention new clothes?

Maybe it wasn’t Steve, she thought, reconsidering. As she recalled, the heartthrob of the gridiron had a grin that had a way of imprinting itself on the souls of every female, young and old, whom he ever came in contact with.

This man in her newly discovered uncle’s office had a somber, almost sullen expression. It was the kind of expression that told the casual observer that he didn’t know how to smile.

She directed her wayward attention back to her uncle. The latter smiled warmly at her as he gestured toward the empty chair.

“Please, take a seat,” he urged. When she did, he undertook the introductions. “Detective Esteban Fernandez, I’d like you to meet Detective Kari Cavelli-Cavanaugh.” He paused for a moment to allow the names to sink in on both sides, then he added the all-important words, “Your new partner.”

Esteban visibly balked, his impassive expression cracking just long enough for his complete displeasure to show through.

“Sir,” he protested, “I haven’t worked with a partner for three years.”

“Then it’s high time that you did,” Brian told him matter-of-factly. “You’ve more than earned the right to have someone else watching your back.”

Brian could see that the news was not being received well, but then he’d known it would take time. Rome wasn’t the only thing that hadn’t been built in a day. Neither was trust. But it all started with taking the first step. And this was Fernandez’s first one, even if he abhorred it.

“Your lone-wolf days are over, Fernandez, so you might as well get used to it.”

The expression on his handsome, tanned face was far from accepting. “Sir, could I have some time to think about this?” he asked in a clipped voice.

Brian shrugged. “You can take the time it’ll take you to go home and clean up.”

For form’s sake, the Chief pretended to glance at his watch. He was well aware what time it was. It was one in the afternoon. Fernandez had come to him straight from the safe house he’d been whisked to when he’d had to flee from the run-down apartment he’d been renting from his contact to the cartel.

“Tell you what,” Brian amended. “You can take until tomorrow morning to decide.” He knew he’d be doing the detective a disservice if he didn’t offer this option.

“But be aware of the fact that there’s nowhere else I can put you right now, so your choice, I’m afraid, is limited to yes or no,” he said as Esteban rose to his feet. Getting up as well, Brian leaned over his desk and shook the other man’s hand. “I’d hate to lose you, Detective,” he added with conviction.

Esteban had lived the past three years exclusively in a world where lip service was commonplace and actions spoke far louder than anything that could be said.

Still, despite his wariness of the spoken word, Esteban had the feeling that the Chief was being sincere. It didn’t change what he felt was going to be the ultimate outcome of this meeting, but it was still nice to be appreciated, even if just for a fleeting moment.

“Think long and hard, Detective,” Brian counseled somberly.

“I plan to, sir,” Esteban answered.

Deliberately avoiding any eye contact with either the Chief of D’s or the pretty blonde in the room, Esteban strode out of the office.

Kari watched in silence as the detective walked away. She was still debating whether or not this was the same person who had created such a stir in high school eight short years ago.

His gait was different, she decided. But the set of his shoulders... That definitely reminded her of the Steve she knew. She had a feeling that if she came right out and asked whether he’d attended Aurora High School at the same time that she had, he would just find a way to stonewall her.

No, this was going to require a little detective work on her part.

Kari made a mental note to dig out her yearbook when she got home and look through it.

Right now she was still on the job. Sort of. Turning around, she faced the man whom she had recently established a personal connection with and looked into his eyes.

Never one to beat around the bush, she said, “He’s planning on turning you down, you know.”

It was nice to know that gut instinct and intuition were alive and well in the next generation, Brian thought with satisfaction.

“I know,” he replied. “I also know he doesn’t have anything else in his life.” Brian had always made it a point to know everything that was pertinent about his people and about those who were going to become his people. Detective Esteban Fernandez was no exception.

Then this couldn’t be the Steve she’d gone to high school with, Kari decided. That Steve had had a mother, a stepfather and a younger half brother he’d doted on. Julio had come to cheer him on in all the football games.

She’d only been a detective for a short while, but she had learned very quickly how to read her superiors without making it seem as if she was trying to second-guess them.

“Would you like me to see if I can change his mind for you?” she asked.

For his part, Brian did not answer yes or no. What he did was tell her simply, “I’d like you to be Kari.”

It was enough.

She smiled, inclined her head and said, “Yes, sir,” before turning on her heel and leaving his office.

She had people to see and information to gather.

Chapter 2

Kari focused on her assignment the moment she walked out of the Chief’s office. As far as she was concerned, it was unspoken but understood that she could avail herself of all the resources she needed in order to bring Detective Esteban Fernandez back into the fold.

Being a Cavanaugh certainly had its perks, Kari couldn’t help thinking with a smile. Because there were so many Cavanaughs in the actual police department, as well as various offshoots’such as the D.A.’s office’she had access to places and entities she hadn’t even known existed before she discovered her connection to the large family.

Technically, she hadn’t actually “discovered” the connection’she, along with the rest of her siblings, had been told about it by her father, who also happened to be the head of the CSI day unit. He’d called a family meeting shortly after he’d been informed by none other than Andrew Cavanaugh, the former Aurora chief of police, that he was actually a Cavanaugh.

According to Andrew, her father, Sean, had been the victim of a distraught nurse’s error. Reeling from the news that her fiancé had been killed serving overseas, she’d completed her rounds in a total emotional fog. It eventually came to light that during this time he and another male infant, born on the same day and having the same first name and the same first three letters of the last name, had accidentally been switched.

The end result was that her father had gone home with Mr. and Mrs. Cavelli, while the Cavellis’ real son had gone home with Shamus Cavanaugh and his wife.

Her father had grown up completely unaware of the mix-up, but secretly haunted by the strange feeling that something was off in his life. Not to mention that he didn’t resemble any of his four siblings.

Meanwhile, Kari and her family eventually found out that the real Sean Cavelli hadn’t grown up at all. He’d died in infancy, long before his first birthday, throwing the woman who ultimately turned out to be her grandmother into an all-consuming depression. That mental condition was compounded by the fact that even before the SIDS death had occurred, Martha Cavanaugh had maintained that the infant was not hers. That he was not the child she’d given birth to and held in her arms in the delivery room.

No one had paid any attention to her, thinking that she was just suffering from postpartum depression as well as the guilt and emotional trauma that went with losing an infant to what was then termed “crib death.” It wasn’t until more than four decades later, long after Martha had died, that she was proven right. The infant who had died wasn’t her son.

The discovery that the infants had been switched at birth threw both families into emotional tailspins. The various members on both sides dealt with the news in their own ways. The ones who were most affected, of course, were the Cavellis. Not only did the revelation create turmoil, but it also caused each of her six siblings as well as her father to suffer through their own personal identity crises.

But, unlike some of her siblings, finding out that she was actually a Cavanaugh did not throw Kari for a loop or cause her to stay up nights, questioning who she really was in the grand scheme of things. She accepted the change in status cheerfully, seeing it as an expansion of her base family.

In her heart, she was still a Cavelli’because to her, family had never just been about DNA or bloodlines, it was about a connection, a state of mind. Consequently, she only saw the upside in being related to the Cavanaughs, a large, prominent family most of whose members were dedicated to the principle of protecting and serving the citizens of the city in which they lived.

As far as Kari was concerned, one could never have too much family. A big, extended brood meant there was always someone to talk to, someone to side with you. Someone to have your back.

Happily, a large family also provided a wealth of connections to be tapped into. And that was exactly what she intended to take advantage of now in order to track down Fernandez’s permanent home address.

Or to at least find out where the man got his mail delivered when he wasn’t deeply immersed in the drug cartel. She reasoned that before he’d gone underground for the good of the department, he had to have hung up his clothes somewhere...and she intended to find out where that “somewhere” was located. Because with any luck, that was where he was now, weighing his options and contemplating his choices.

She intended to convince him that there was only one conceivable option with his name on it.

Brenda Cavanaugh, married to the Chief of Detectives’ son, Dax, was the police department’s reigning computer tech nonpareil. Though there were several other techs within the small department, if information was possibly obtainable, she was the one who could find it. To Kari’s way of thinking, even though Esteban Fernandez’s life had been off the grid for more than three years now, he’d initially lived somewhere under his own name. She was confident that Brenda would know how to backtrack and find it.

She was right.

Within twenty minutes of her inquiry, the Chief of Detectives’ daughter-in-law had discovered where Kari’s decidedly reluctant parter-to-be had lived before supposedly vanishing.

“Why didn’t you just go to HR?” Brenda asked curiously as she handed Kari the address she’d just printed out.

“Too much red tape,” she answered. Besides, as far as she knew, there were no family members in HR. Kari believed in using leverage whenever she could.

Glancing at the address, she folded the paper in half. Fernandez lived closer to the precinct than she’d thought. In fact, his place was on her way home.

Perfect.

“Besides, I don’t think I’m supposed to actually get my hands on this information without some kind of authorization,” she confessed.

“And yet, you did,” Brenda said, pointing out the obvious. “Why come to me with this request?”

“Other than the fact that you’re a freakin’ genius when it comes to finding things via the internet?” Kari asked without a hint of a smile on her lips.

Brenda’s grin was wide enough for both of them. “Other than that fact, yes.”

Kari nodded at the paper in her hand. “The Chief of D’s wants me to change this detective’s mind about handing in his shield.”

“And you’re planning on ambushing him at home, where he thinks he’s safe.”

Kari bobbed her head. “Like I said, you’re a genius.” However, despite the accolades, she could tell that the other woman wasn’t exactly gung ho about the situation.

True to form, Brenda indicated the paper she’d just handed to Kari. “As long as you know that you didn’t get that from me...” she cautioned, clearly wanting to distance herself from any possible fallout. With the ease of an unobtrusive pickpocket, using only her thumb and two of her fingers, Kari folded the paper into quarters until it disappeared entirely inside her palm. Then she unselfconsciously slid her hands into her pockets and smoothly deposited the paper with the address she’d requested.

“Get what?” she asked in complete innocence.

Brenda merely laughed and then waved her away. “Go. I’ve got work to do,” she told her unexpected visitor.

“I’m already gone,” Kari reassured her.

The next moment, opening the first door she came to, Kari made good on her promise.

* * *

Esteban frowned, mulling over his present situation and its apparent lack of options.

He had no idea what he was going to do with himself from here on in. Getting justice for his family had consumed all his time and energy for so long’ever since Julio’s overdose more than three years ago’he had no clue where his mission ended and he began. At this point, they were one and the same, and without this single-minded purpose, it was as if someone had sucked all the air out of his lungs...depriving him of the very will to breathe.

Now what? he silently demanded of the darkness around him.

The police department didn’t want him to work undercover anymore’and he knew why. They didn’t want him getting killed on their watch.

But he himself had no such concerns, no such worries shackling him. Death didn’t scare him. Inactivity was what scared him.

He had to be doing this, making a difference where it counted, doing everything in his power to bring down the cartel and its brethren, so that no one else’s brother or child would be discovered dead on the floor of their room after OD’ing on drugs.

And, by extension, he was doing this so no one else’s father would be grief-stricken enough to go out, half-crazed, and hunt down the dealer responsible for the overdose, killing him in cold blood and suffering the consequences of that action: prison for twenty years.

Maybe, Esteban thought as he poured himself another two fingers’ worth of whisky from the bottle he’d unearthed earlier, he could just become a crusader, fight these bastards on his own.

He didn’t need the police department’s blessings to do this, he mused, urging himself on. Fact of the matter was, he could accomplish this mission without them. He had a little money saved up and didn’t really require very much to live on.

The idea appealed to him.

He’d become an avenging angel.

“No,” he corrected himself out loud, “an avenging devil.” Because men like the one his stepfather had shot dead only understood a show of force. In this case, the show of force would be put on by a man whose soul was as black as theirs.

Maybe, in its own way, blacker.

“That’s it,” Esteban decided with a firm nod of his head, “I’ll be an avenging devil.”

He laughed, relishing the sound of that.

The next second, the laughter died in his throat as he froze. Immediately, his hand covered the hilt of the service revolver’his backup piece’that he’d tucked into his waistband before he and the bottle of whiskey had sat down together.

He’d heard something.

Someone was knocking on his door’the bell had long since given up the ghost and he’d had no reason to fix it. Visitors weren’t welcome.

Instantly alert, he stealthily made his way over to the front door in the dark. He saw no point in switching on any of the lights and giving whoever was on the other side of the door enough illumination to target him. The fact that his potential killer would announce himself by knocking on the door seemed completely plausible to him. Acting in a normal fashion was meant to throw him off, to quiet any of his suspicions that might arise.

At the door now, Esteban held his breath, anticipating whatever might happen next. He slowly drew his weapon out, holding it at the ready so that if his unexpected “caller” decided to break in, he’d be right here, waiting for him’

“Fernandez?”

His eyes narrowed as he stared at the door, as if that could somehow help him see whoever was on the other side.

The voice clearly belonged to a woman, but that could still be some sort of a trick, a way to get him to relax his guard’

“Fernandez? Are you inside there? It’s me. Cavelli-Cavanaugh, or just Cavelli...if that makes you more comfortable. Are you in there?” she asked again.

Kari had already circled the perimeter of the forty-year-old home once, and she had seen the car that she’d identified as the detective’s. It was parked over on the next block rather than in front of the house’by force of habit, no doubt.

But whether or not it was habit didn’t matter. What did matter was that the hood was still warm, but not hot. That meant that Esteban had driven it over sometime after he’d left the precinct.

That in turn meant that he was here.

“I come bearing gifts, Fernandez,” she informed him in a tone that was infinitely sweeter than the one she typically used day-to-day. “C’mon, open the door,” she coaxed, then added, “unless you want me to pick the lock, of course’because I do know how to do that.”

Of course she did, Esteban thought darkly. He’d intended to wait her out, but that course of action was quickly aborted when he saw the doorknob jiggling.

Muttering a curse under his breath, Esteban quickly released the locks and yanked open the door. His weapon was not only out, but ready, in case the woman the Chief of D’s was trying to push on him was here under duress.

But when he opened the door, he saw no one else but her. The shimmering moonlight, out in full force, had turned her skin almost a golden hue.

She belonged in someone’s dream, not on his doorstep, he thought in annoyance.

And it looked as though she was doing this of her own free will. It figured, he groused to himself. They weren’t even going to let him quit in peace.

Seeing a drawn weapon, Kari’s immediate reaction would normally have been to pull out her own service revolver, but she had no desire to exchange fire with the potently sexy man she’d come to coerce.

With effort, she managed to silently talk herself down and keep her own weapon holstered.

There was absolutely no light coming from inside the house. Had the streetlamp behind her been out and with a new moon in the sky, she wouldn’t have been able to see her unwilling partner at all.

“Are you raising bats or orchids in there?” she quipped, crossing the threshold. “Or did you just not pay your electric bill?”

From the surly look on his face, she could tell he wasn’t in the mood to exchange banter. He clearly wanted to be left alone.

“What are you doing here?” Esteban bit off, making no effort to hide his hostility. After all, the woman was invading his space, a space she wasn’t even supposed to know about.

Can’t trust anyone these days, the former undercover detective fumed.

“Not being welcomed for one,” she answered glibly.

His eyes narrowed. “Then go home. No one’s stopping you.”

“And turn my back on such a charming invitation?” she deadpanned. “No way.”

He had no idea what she was talking about. Somewhere, he was convinced, a village was searching for their idiot. Just his luck, she’d turned up here.

“What charming invitation?” he muttered.

Kari remained blissfully unfazed by the daggers his eyes were shooting at her.

“The one you silently extended to me back at the precinct. You know, indicating that you wanted me to share a drink with you,” she answered. As if to reinforce her point, she held up the bottle of expensive whiskey she’d thought to bring with her. “I even brought the bottle in case you didn’t have any’or started without me and ran out.”

That, she felt, was a pretty safe bet. Leaning slightly forward, she gave him her best, most innocent smile. “But I see that you did remember to pick up a bottle on your way home.”

He was not about to get sucked into this mindless babble. He just wanted to be left alone, to get drunk out of his mind, pass out and not think for a while. This highly annoying Pollyanna was interfering with his plans.

“Look,” he ground out, “I don’t have time for crazy women’”

“Good, neither do I,” she concurred. Feeling her way around the room, she found a light switch and turned it on. Illumination instantly flooded the room.

“Turn it off!” he ordered.

But she didn’t. Instead, she informed him blithely, “Just looking for another glass.” She opened one cabinet, then another. Both were empty. This man lived worse than a hermit. “You do have another one, right?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him. “Otherwise, one of us is going to have to drink out of the bottle.”

Esteban stared at the woman in his house, feeling like someone who had just been slammed by a runaway train that had come barreling out of nowhere. She still hadn’t answered his question.

“How the hell did you find out where I live?”

“I’m a very resourceful person,” Kari told him with a wide grin. “You’ll find that out when we start working together.”

“We’re not going to be working together,” Esteban snapped. This was like some bad dream that refused to fade. Did he have to bodily carry her out of his house to get rid of her?

“Of course we are,” Kari countered brightly. “Fighting the inevitable is just a waste of time and energy. You like being a cop, I like being a cop and right now, the Chief of Detectives wants us to be cops together.” She looked at him as if he should have known that he couldn’t win this battle. “He always gets what he wants.”

The look he gave her was darker than any look she’d ever seen on a perp’s face. “Not this time he won’t,” he growled.

Chapter 3

The woman who had brazenly invaded his much-needed solitude smiled at him as if his strongly voiced protest was destined to fall by the wayside.

Outraged by her impertinence, Esteban could feel his already-fanned flames of anger swiftly growing.

He was well aware that he was physically strong enough to simply toss this golden-haired irritant with the sexy mouth out of his house, but, even with more than half a bottle of bourbon in him, Esteban didn’t want to resort to the behavior of the very lowlifes he was attempting to get off the streets.

However, if he ever was inclined to give a woman the bum’s rush, it definitely would have been this vexing thorn in his side.

“Who sent you?” he demanded, his eyes darkening into a frown. “The Chief of Detectives?”

She wasn’t about to hide behind her uncle, or allow Esteban to think she was nothing more than a puppet, obediently doing what she was told. So, rather than say that Brian Cavanaugh had indirectly asked her to bring him into the fold, what she told Esteban instead was, “I came to find out why you don’t want to work with me.”

Which was in actuality part of the reason why she was here.

Esteban looked down contemptuously at the bottle of aged bourbon she’d brought with her. “So you thought, what? That you’d liquor me up and I’d tell you everything?”

She looked at the bottle she’d placed on the counter out of the way while she searched for another glass. “No, this is to fortify me so I can put up with you,” she told him bluntly. “But as I already offered, you’re certainly welcome to share it with me if you’d like.” She lifted her bright blue eyes to his. “I might have a lot of faults, but stinginess is not one of them.”

Esteban’s expression remained inscrutable. She caught herself holding her breath, waiting to see if she’d managed to burrow her way into his inner sanctum at least a little bit.

“Is that supposed to impress me?” he wanted to know. “Your bravado?”

If she blinked and backed off, Kari knew that she’d lose any chance of making the tiniest bit of headway with him. And as for gaining any ground, well that was just an unfulfilled fantasy at this point.

So, with nothing to lose, she decided to duke it out instead. “I don’t know, is it?”

Esteban uttered a sound that was a cross between an intolerant, short laugh and a contemptuously dismissive one. And then his eyes darkened again as they swept over her.

The same strange note of familiarity whispered through him with no more clarification than the last time. Except that this time the thought that she was damn attractive and too sexy for his own good insisted on taking root.

“You don’t want me working with you,” he warned.

There was absolutely no hesitation whatsoever on her part. “Sure I do.”

“No,” he repeated firmly, his voice almost ominous in timbre. “Trust me, you don’t.”

She had never accepted anything at face value or just because she was told to. She’d always needed proof, ever since she was very young.

It was no different now.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why wouldn’t I want to work with you?”

As she spoke, Kari poured herself two fingers of bourbon, taking it neat, then offered the bottle to him.

Esteban poured twice as much for himself into his glass, then tossed it back quickly, making it disappear between his lips all at once. His eyes, watering ever so slightly, were the only indication that the alcohol intake had even affected his body at all.

“Because you come on like some prep-school educated Barbie doll, and I’m not going to pretend to be Ken,” he informed her.

Before he had a chance to take another swig from her bottle, Kari laid claim to it, her lips lightly touching the rim as she tilted it back.

“Good,” she pronounced once she’d swallowed. “Ken has fake hair,” she reminded him matter-of-factly, as if she was talking about an actual living, breathing being instead of an iconic doll. “I never really liked Barbie’s boyfriend.” She held the bottle out to him again. “Don’t worry. I won’t get in your way.”

“Especially if you’re not there,” Esteban agreed flatly.

Kari shook her head. What the hell had the Chief gotten her into? “You are a hard devil to get close to,” she commented.

Now she was finally getting it, he thought. It was about damn time. “Not hard,” Esteban corrected. “Impossible’and I like it that way.”

She laid it out for him, although she was certain that he’d already figured this out on his own. What did he hope to gain by playing this little charade out? Did he think this was going to “put her in her place”? Establish their hierarchy in relation to one another?

“Well, it’s either partner with me or hit the road, and I think you’ve invested too much time into the job to just walk away. At the very least, you’d have to start all over again somewhere else.”

He paused his ongoing communion with the bottle she’d brought. His own’the one he’d opened tonight’was now empty and he wasn’t finished drinking. He was still standing. “I really don’t care what you think, Ms. Cavanaugh.”

“It’s Detective Cavelli-Cavanaugh,” she corrected him, deliberately slurring just a bit for his benefit.

Her apparent inebriation was, for the most part, staged. The drinks she’d been taking from the bottle, now that they had both forgone the niceties of actual glasses, were deliberately exaggerated in appearance. In reality, it all amounted to very little alcohol going down. Kari had no intention of getting drunk’and it wasn’t because she was worried about the regretful events that might consequently follow once she reached that state. Rather, it was because she just knew that if she couldn’t appear to hold her liquor, he would have even less respect for her than he did now.

And the point of this entire confrontation was to get Esteban to have a decent amount of respect for her, not less.

“Hell of a mouthful,” he muttered, referring to her hyphenated last name.

Kari smiled at him, the kind of smile that hinted at secrets being held back. “Yes,” she told him, “Actually, I am.”

“Think a lot of yourself, Cavelli-Cavanaugh, don’t you?” he asked, mocking the extralong name.

“Not a lot,” she assured him, then added, “just my due. And you can pick one of my last names to use. Just be consistent.”

He stared at her in stunned silence for a moment. And this time, when the laughter came, it was heartier and not quite so full of animosity. He’d already had more than his fair number of shots before this beautiful, ornery woman had descended on him bearing a liquid peace offering. He’d lost count by now just how much he’d consumed.

The upshot of it all was that, while he wasn’t feeling any more receptive to her now than before, the hostility that he did have’not so much against her as against the fact that he was being barred from continuing the work that had been his sole reason for living these past few years’was morphing into something else.

Something equally as strong and, from his somewhat detached point of view, equally as useless.

Something that, he was fairly certain, had he not been on his way to total intoxication, he would have been unaware of.

Namely that he felt attracted to this annoyance with the sexy legs. Not mildly or conveniently attracted, but teeth-jarringly, mindlessly, intensely attracted.

For the past three years, he had conducted his one-man crusade to bring down the men behind his half brother’s drug overdose’and his stepfather’s subsequent prison sentence’to the exclusion of everything else. This exclusion included not tending to any of his other needs beyond occasionally eating and sleeping...and he only paid nominal attention to those two things so he’d have enough stamina to continue working. Everything else’searching for creature comforts, entertaining desires of the flesh or even, moderately, of the soul’had been so completely neglected that they were just shut out as if they didn’t exist.

But they did.

And now, for some unknown reason that utterly confounded him, he felt a flare of desire in this woman’s presence. A flare of desire that didn’t just evaporate the way he’d fully expected it to, but went on to spread like a wildfire through his veins.

To spread and feed on itself, and before he knew it, this raging desire threatened to take possession of him entirely.

Esteban was staring at her as if he hadn’t seen her before, she thought, as she tried to understand what was happening. Was that the alcohol at work, or was he just trying to intimidate her into leaving?

It’s not that simple, partner. You can’t get rid of me that easily.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he barked at her.

“You already said that. Have we run out of conversation so soon, throwing us into some kind of verbal reruns?” she asked wryly.

He had no idea what the hell she was talking about. He just wanted her out of here. Now.

“No, you really shouldn’t be here,” he told her. But even as he said it, he drew closer, like an imminent danger from which there was no escape.

He was so close now that when he uttered his warning, she could literally feel his words on her skin, words that were wrapped up in his warm breath.

The lethal combination made her heart quicken. Had she been completely sober, and not slightly tipsy as she was right now, a red flag would have shot up for her instantly.

As it was, the flag did go up, but it went up in what felt like slow motion’and once it was up, it seemed to wave in a rather happy, lackadaisical manner.

Truth be told, she was far more fixated on the sensations erupting between them in the wake of this moment of unexpected physical closeness. “And why shouldn’t I be here?” she asked him, raising her chin a bit to defiantly punctuate her question.

Or maybe, she silently reconsidered, she wasn’t being defiant. Perhaps she was merely flirting with him.

Or at least the bourbon was, she amended.

Esteban realized in frustration that the words needed to explain why it was imperative that she go now seemed to have escaped him. But then, he’d always been a man of action rather than words anyway.

Even back when his world had been incredibly sheltered in comparison to his life now, he was more prone to doing than talking.

So rather than search for words that wouldn’t come, and an explanation that refused to present itself, Esteban showed her why she needed to leave.

More roughly than he’d intended, he took hold of her cheek with one hand, keeping her in place as he brought down his mouth on hers.

This kiss was meant to scare her away.

Instead, what he actually managed to accomplish was to scare himself away’but not before he took the so-called “warning” he was issuing to its full conclusion, devouring her the way a starving man devoured his first meal in countless days. Except that for Esteban, it had been countless months, not days. Countless months that had stumbled their way into years without his complete recollection of that empty journey.

Pleasures of the flesh hadn’t been important to him at the time.

Now, though, something seemed to be stirring within him....

This uninvited woman he found himself saddled with tasted of all the good things that he had consciously left behind the day he’d found his brother Julio dead on the bedroom floor. She tasted of forbidden fruit, the fruit a man like him had knowingly sworn off in exchange for the life he’d dedicated himself to leading.

A life that, if conducted correctly, would allow him to get rid of at least a few scum of the earth before he himself was terminated. That the last part was inevitable, he was well aware of. But he didn’t care as long as he took as many of them with him when it happened’if not before.

* * *

Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.

This time she had gotten more than she had bargained for. Maybe even more than she could possibly handle, Kari realized.

It felt as if her very soul was being sucked into a heated vortex.

The smart thing, she knew, was to push this man away and run for her life. But that presupposed that her knees and legs were still working’which they weren’t. Both had turned to mush of varying consistencies.

Besides, she didn’t really feel all that compelled to do the smart thing anyway. Not when it involved pulling away from what was the surprisingly delicious feast of his mouth.

Yes, the man, even in his scruffy state, was sexy and attractive to a fault, but who knew this lay beneath it all?

Her reluctant partner’s kiss left her feeling a hell of a lot more intoxicated than the amber liquid she had brought with her. The latter did not hold a candle to what he could accomplish with that mouth of his.

So, just for a moment longer’or so she tried to convince herself’she allowed herself to linger.

And linger.

Kari closed her arms around the man’s neck, leaning her body into his and patiently waiting for the kick of that mule that had somehow managed to sneak into all this to subside.

It didn’t.

If anything, it increased.

And, to her utter surprise, she had no complaints.

* * *

He hadn’t survived these last three years by allowing his emotions, or the sensations that were at times generated by those emotions, to decide his path for him. He was the one who forged the path, the one who kept himself safe in the most unsafe situations.

He didn’t do it letting down his guard by so much as a sliver.

That took strength. Strength he knew he had to tap into now.

So it was with superhuman effort that Esteban put his hands on her shoulders and pushed Cavanaugh’s niece away from him. “Get out of here,” he growled, secretly afraid of where the next step might take him. He had no room in his life for more regrets.

Kari stood her ground. “No.”

Her defiance temporarily threw him for a loop. He stared at her, as if not comprehending her negative response to his order.

What the hell was wrong with her?

Did she think this was easy for him? Being noble wasn’t exactly his calling.

“Get the hell out of here,” he repeated, his voice more malevolent now than it had been before. “I don’t think either one of us is ready for the consequences if you stay.”

She didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay, to see what happened. To see exactly where this would go and what she would feel when it got there.

Kari wavered inside, more than ready to deal with any consequences if this wondrous condition could be persuaded to continue.

But she had a feeling that what she felt here wasn’t important. Esteban was the important one in this scheme of things. He was the one she’d been sent to convince to remain in the department any way she could. She wasn’t fool enough to believe that if what was happening between them at this moment was allowed to go on to its logical conclusion’if they wound up making love’then he would remain.

She knew damn well that the exact opposite would occur.

If they made love tonight’and the promise of that was something she ached for with her entire being’then Esteban would disappear by morning, most likely never to be heard from again. Kari could sense that in every bone in her body.

So she banked down all the unleashed emotions that were now madly unfurling within her. She was struggling to hold them in check, struggling to keep herself from throwing her arms around Esteban once again and pulling him back to that hotbed of sensual heat their coming together had generated.

“All right,” she said thickly, doing her best not to suck in air as she spoke, but to take it in slowly and calmly. “I’ll go,” she agreed, then flippantly added, “It looks like we’re out of alcohol anyway, so I guess the party’s over for tonight.”

He barely glanced in the direction of the bottles. “Looks like,” he muttered in agreement. Anything to get her to leave’before he gave in to temptation and refused to let her walk out.

Taking a deep breath, Kari did what she could to center herself.

“You don’t have to bother showing me to the door,” she told him sweetly. “I can see myself out.”

Esteban merely nodded. “Wasn’t planning on it,” he retorted.

At least he was honest to a fault, she thought, though she would have preferred to hear a token protest from him.

But then, since he was so honest, she would always know where she stood with him.

If he became her partner.

She nodded in response to his last words, turning to leave. She stopped for one more second, looking at him over her shoulder.

“And you’ll be there tomorrow morning? At the precinct?” she added when he’d made no response to her question.

When he still remained silent, she took a step back toward him, her hand on her hip as she waited for him to say something.

He didn’t want her walking back in. What had caused him to kiss her was still very much with him, and this time around, he was fairly certain that kissing would be the least of it. The stakes were definitely set to go higher, and he had no idea just where’and if’it would stop.

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” he told her curtly, ready to say, to promise, anything just to get her to leave. To get her out of harm’s way before he did something that both of them would live to regret. “Now, go!”

She ignored his last words, focusing only on the first part. “Good,” she pronounced. Her hand on the doorknob, she uttered one last parting shot. “Just remember, I know where you live.”

Then, to forestall any further exchange’or, more important, any further temptation’she closed the door and left.

Chapter 4

Every time he walked into the state prison on visitor’s day, Esteban could feel a slight tightening in his chest. All his senses would go on high alert and he became even more aware of the details of everything that was going on around him, including each person within his line of vision.

It was more than just his survival instinct going into high gear, the way it did when he was working undercover.

Because every time he walked through those prison gates, the thought There but for the grace of God went he would echo through his brain and continue to do so until he was back in his car, driving away from the prison.

Esteban was well aware of the fact that it wouldn’t have taken much for his life to have gone off on a different path. At the very least, if he’d been home instead of away at school, he might have been murdered, as his mother was. But most likely, he would have been in prison now the way his stepfather was, because he would have been the one who had killed the dealer who’d sold drugs to his stepbrother.

The drugs that had cut short his young life.

Except that, unlike his stepfather, Esteban wouldn’t have stopped there and turned himself in. He would have wiped out everyone he came in contact with, everyone who’d had even the slightest connection to the drug ring and the distribution of that poison. He didn’t flatter himself and think he was invincible. Either the drug dealers or the police would have eventually taken him down, but he would have wiped out a lot of worthless scum before he went.

He went on automatic pilot as he was being processed for entrance to the visitors’ common room, enduring the metal detector, the pat-down, and emptying his pockets for the guard to rifle through. He didn’t like having his things pawed over, especially by a guard whose condescending look made him itch to take a swing and wipe that superior expression off his face.

Esteban realized that his hands were still clenched into fists at his sides, even though he’d entered the communal room and was now waiting for the guards to bring in the prisoners who had visitors. Exhaling slowly, he unclenched his fists.

The door to the communal room opened. After a beat, the prisoners, marching in single file, were allowed in. His stepfather was the fourth in line. Raising his hand, he waved to the man.

The moment Miguel saw him, his somber, lined face broke into a wreath of smiles, making him appear years younger. Sitting at a table, Esteban waited for him to cross to him.

Was it his imagination, or was the man getting frailer looking?

Esteban willed himself to relax, to drain the tension from his body. Seeing him upset or tense would only concern the man who had stepped up all those years ago to become, for all intents and purposes, his father. The only father he would ever know.

“Hello, Father.” Esteban greeted the slighter man with a warm smile.

“Hello, my son. You came.” Pleasure erased the weariness and etched lines from his face. “I didn’t think you could.”

His stepfather vaguely knew about his line of work, knew that he had to be careful about coming here because it could blow his cover. But even so, he found a way to come as often as he could.

And each time he did, each time he saw the pleasure in the older man’s yes, Esteban knew it was worth everything he risked just to connect with Miguel one more time.

“How could you have any doubt?” Esteban asked. “You know if there’s any way to be here, I would find it.”

Miguel looked around, noting who was near them. Life here had taught him to be very cautious. It was always better to take too many precautions than not enough.

“Yes,” he said in a low voice that carried only to his stepson, “but I also know that there isn’t always a way. And if you cannot come, I understand. I worry,” he admitted, because he knew without being told that Esteban lived his life in the line of fire daily, “but I understand.”

“Stop worrying about me’start looking after yourself,” Esteban advised. “You look a little pale, Dad.” Esteban slid to the edge of the seat, getting in as close as he could, since there was a table between them and he knew better than to do anything that might attract even an iota of extra attention. “Something I should know about?” he asked.

One of the guards had ridden him these last few days, but he didn’t want Esteban getting involved. This was his problem to deal with, his time to serve. The lawyer Esteban had managed to get for him had gotten his sentence reduced, wielding the term “temporary insanity due to grief” like a sword, but it could cut away only so many brambles. He was serving a twenty-year sentence and would be out in ten if he could continue maintaining his good behavior. That meant, among other things, not rising to the countless provocations that were seeded in his path.

Or sharing too much with the man he’d raised as his own. Miguel shook his head. “Just getting over a cold. Nothing to worry about. Really,” he underscored when the furrow along Esteban’s brow deepened. “How are you doing?” he asked, deliberately changing the topic. The tactic was not wasted on the younger man. “Watching your back at all times?” It wasn’t a question but a reminder.

He’d forgotten. He hadn’t been able to see Miguel since his narrow escape.

“They pulled me out, Dad,” Esteban told him matter-of-factly, placing no more significance on this newest action than he would have had he been a shoe salesman and gone from selling men’s shoes to women’s. It was understood that there could be no details forthcoming, but he wanted the man to know he could stop worrying about his exposure. At least that aspect of the danger was over. “I’m working with a partner now.”

“A partner?” Miguel echoed, well pleased. “Tell me, what’s he like?”

The corners of Esteban’s mouth curved ever so slightly as he refrained from giving his stepfather the first answer that came to him. A real pain. “Well, first off, he’s a she.”

“A she?” A twinkle entered the tired brown eyes. “That has to be a nice change for you, no?” Miguel speculated.

No was the immediate response, but again, he let it slide. He probably wasn’t being all that fair to the woman. In any case, he’d give this forced alliance a little time to take before he made his final judgment.

“We’ll see,” Esteban told his stepfather. He glanced at his watch. “I don’t think we’ve got that much time left.” He smiled at Miguel. “I just wanted to stop by to see how you were getting along in this hellhole. See if you needed anything.”

“Just for you to be safe. That is all I want. Now that you are doing something ‘different,’ I will be able to sleep again at night,” Miguel told him. “And as far as hellholes go, some of the others here tell me it’s not so bad.”

“Still, all it takes is one guard, one inmate who has your number...” He didn’t want to dredge up any details to frighten Miguel, just make him aware that there could be problems even down the line. “And if anyone gives you a hard time, I don’t care who it is, you’ll tell me, right?”

Miguel looked at him with an innocent smile. “Who else would I tell?”

The answer made Esteban even more skeptical than he already was. Miguel would keep the fact that someone was on his case a secret, just to protect him. That was the kind of father he was. But he didn’t want him having to endure anything. Just being locked up was difficult enough on the man.

“Dad’” There was a warning note in his voice.

The buzzer sounded, calling an end to the visit. “I have to get back to my cell,” Miguel said, using the sound as an excuse not to answer his son. “Come again when you can. Looking forward to your visits is what keeps me going,” the older man said, rising from the table. “Vaya con Dios, mi hijo,” he said just before he fell into formation again. Within moments, the orange line was marched out of the common room.

Y tu tambien, Padre, Esteban thought, watching Miguel leave. “And you, too, Dad,” he murmured out loud.

* * *

For what felt like the umpteenth time, Kari glanced up from her desk to the one butted against hers and sighed.

The chair facing hers was still empty.

The desktop was glaringly clear, save for the run-of-the-mill computer monitor and the single white coffee container perched in the middle of the scarred tabletop.

The coffee was her combination welcome-to-the-job/peace offering.

The dark-roasted blend that she’d picked up at a local coffee shop and placed on what was to be Esteban’s desk was probably cold by now. Standing unattended for over an hour, even though there was a lid on it, did that to any drink, even one that had started out scalding hot.

She had gotten it on the way to work because she thought Esteban might appreciate something a little better than the sickly brown liquid that came out of the precinct’s vending machines and was laughingly passed off as coffee.

She made the choice going on instinct rather than any information she had gleaned. When she’d gone to Brenda for Esteban’s address, she’d also asked for any background information on him that might be available. There was none.

Technically speaking, that actually hadn’t been exactly the case. There was some information, but whatever had been originally written down on the page had subsequently been redacted. Every line of type had been run through with a black permanent marker that promised not to disappear or fade over time.

So she had gone with her gut. Men like the one she’d met with last night’the man she still thought could be the Steve Fernandez she’d gone to high school with’didn’t care for any frills. That included fancy rhetoric and coffee that bore a longer, fancier name than some people she knew.

The coffee was black...just like the mood that was slowly coming over her.

When she’d departed his house last night, she’d been fairly confident that she’d gotten Fernandez to come around, to connect with her on the most basic level. Having her body tingle for more than an hour after she’d left him had been a small price to pay.

But now she was beginning to think that maybe she’d been wrong about his coming around, and it bothered her more than she cared to admit. To her way of thinking, she’d dropped the ball.

She didn’t like letting the Chief of D’s down, not because he was her uncle’or because she felt she had something to prove so she’d move up the food chain within the department. She didn’t like letting the Chief down, because he’d asked her to do something and she wanted him to know that she always delivered on her commitments.

This was the first thing he’d actually asked her to do, and she’d failed.

Granted, it was still early. The workday had barely started, but all that translated to was more time in which to feel like a colossal failure.

She’d arrived at the precinct almost an hour earlier than she was supposed to, anticipating Fernandez’s arrival. For her, the minutes had already stretched themselves out as thin as thread, each inching by as she waited for Fernandez to walk into the office.

It promised to be a very long day from where she was sitting.

“New guy not here yet?”

Startled, it took Kari a second to collect herself before she turned around to look at the man who had somehow managed to come up behind her without making a single sound.

The question had come from Lieutenant Tim Morrow, a rumpled, unimpressive-looking former vice detective with yellowish-white hair and a waist that was slowly becoming wider than the breadth of his shoulders. Morrow had worked his way diligently through the ranks.

At the moment, the lieutenant was looking at the empty chair opposite her own, but his expectant manner, as well as his question, was directed toward her.

She wondered if Morrow knew about her visit to the Chief of Detectives yesterday.

Of course he did, she upbraided herself the next moment. If Fernandez was supposedly going to be working for the department, Morrow would have been notified of everything pertaining to the former undercover detective.

Had she and Fernandez already had some sort of working relationship, she would have been quick to attempt to cover for him, giving Morrow some sort of plausible excuse as to why the other man wasn’t anywhere within eyeshot. Loyalty was something that was inbred in her, thanks to her father.

But since she didn’t know if Fernandez was even going to bother showing up at all, she felt no allegiance...no urgent need to cover for him.

“’Fraid not,” she replied to the Lieutenant’s question.

Although it was obvious that Fernandez wasn’t there, it was clearly not the answer that Morrow wanted to hear. He frowned, turning toward her. “You two are up,” he told her.

For the first time, she saw the paper the lieutenant was holding in his hand.

Since this was the department that dealt with homicides and questionable deaths, she assumed that a call had come in and that the lieutenant had written down the address and a few scattered details on the notepaper he was holding.

“I can go alone,” Kari volunteered, already on her feet. “Won’t be the first time,” she added needlessly to the man who had been in charge of training her when she’d first walked in through the precinct doors.

The story went that when Morrow had first arrived from the academy, Andrew Cavanaugh, who had gone on to become the chief of police before eventually retiring early to focus on raising his kids and searching for his missing wife, had trained the then-rookie cop.

What goes around comes around, she thought.

Pulling on her jacket, Kari put out her hand for the address.

“I’d rather there were two of you,” Morrow said even as he surrendered the sheet of paper. “But since you’re initially just checking out a bad smell’”

“A bad smell?” Kari repeated, puzzled. Since when had the police department started concerning itself with garbage detail?

“Yeah. Manager at a storage facility said one of the renters came to him complaining that there was a, quote, ‘really bad smell’ coming from the unit located right next to his.” His far from narrow shoulders rose and fell in a resigned shrug. “Could just be some food someone was stupid enough to stash away. Or an animal that had the bad luck to crawl into the unit when the door was open and became trapped inside, eventually expiring. Or’”

She noted that the lieutenant only awarded the dignity of death to people. Everything else “expired,” like a container of milk going sour, or a warranty on a product.

“Or a body someone had stashed in the unit while they tried to figure out how to make it disappear without calling attention to themselves,” she concluded for her boss.

Morrow nodded, his unruly, longer-than-regulation hair falling into his squinty, deep-set brown eyes. “Exactly.”

“Mind if I hope it’s fruit until I find out otherwise?” she asked.

The weather was turning unseasonably warmer. That meant that a body hidden in a storage unit was bound to decompose more quickly than usual. This was not an assignment she was looking forward to.

“It’s a free country,” the lieutenant replied magnanimously.

Kari glanced at the address before tucking it into her pocket. The storage facility wasn’t located far from the precinct, she noted.

Securing her weapon, she was just about to leave the office when she saw the look of surprise that fleetingly passed over the lieutenant’s craggy face. Since the man was facing the outer door that led to the hallway, she turned around to see what had caught his attention.

No wonder he looked surprised, she caught herself thinking. Esteban Fernandez created quite an imposing impression at first sight.

And even second and third, she mused.

To be honest, at first glance he didn’t even look like the man she’d spoken with last night. That man had been scruffy and raw. This one fell under the category of “tall, dark and handsome.” But there was still a dangerous edge to him despite his clean-shaven face. An enticing, dangerous edge.

But then, last night he was still embracing his other persona, the undercover cop he’d been’a role he’d played for the past three years, if the rumors were correct. And, at this point, that was all she really had to go on. Rumors. Law enforcement detectives involved in the undercover world did not exactly have readily accessible data that the regular force could easily refer to. Whatever they did was not supposed to ever see the light of day or be acknowledged’good or bad.

She made a mental note to take another crack at the Cavanaugh pipeline. So many of the Cavanaughs were involved with the various departments at the precinct, it only stood to reason that someone had to know something viable, something she could use when dealing with the man she assumed was going to be her new partner.

However long that association lasted, she did not want to be in the dark or at a disadvantage when it came to dealing with this man. At the very least, she wanted to know exactly who she was trusting to have her back.

“Fernandez?” Morrow inquired, obviously as stunned by his transformation as she briefly had been.

Esteban glanced over toward the lieutenant just as he reached his desk’since the desk was so blatantly empty, except for the computer and the coffee container, he’d made a logical deduction that it was going to be his.

For as long as he decided to remain here, he silently added as a footnote to placate himself.

“Yeah?” he asked the lieutenant.

Morrow looked far from pleased with this latest addition to his department. “It’s customary to report to your commanding officer when you first join a department,” he said, his gravelly voice rife with displeasure.

“Sorry, sir, I just now walked in,” Esteban pointed out needlessly. Right before he’d visited Miguel in prison, he’d made his decision to continue his association with the police department until he could figure out how to get back into undercover work. He’d gotten caught in morning rush-hour traffic on the drive back from the penitentiary, which accounted for his less than timely appearance.

His eyes met Kari’s and he gave her what amounted to the smallest, most imperceptible of nods, acknowledging her presence.

It was a start, she thought.

Kari heard Morrow grumble almost inaudibly under his breath. All she caught was something that made a vague reference to his retirement still being too far off. Then the man said more distinctly, “No time to make small talk right now. You and the hyphen here are up. She’s got the address. I’ll talk to you later,” he emphasized, looking accusingly at the newest member of his team before he went back into his glass-enclosed office.

“The hyphen?” Esteban repeated, looking at Kari. He’d told himself that for the most part, after last night, he was just going to ignore her, but for once his curiosity got the better of him.

“Cavelli-Cavanaugh,” she reminded him. “It’s hyphenated.”

He shook his head in disbelief. The last three years his very survival had depended on traveling under the radar, not attracting any attention to himself. He saw her name as being the exact opposite.

“You’re really using both?” he asked her.

To Kari, it was the only logical way to go and it made perfect sense.

“Since I thought I was born the one, but was really born the other and there’s family attached to both names, I figured...why not?” she asked.

Esteban shrugged indifferently in response to her rhetorical question. “Makes no difference to me,” he told her. “I don’t care what you call yourself as long as you answer if I call you.”

This, she thought, was going to be one hell of an interesting partnership’for as long as it lasted, and she still had her doubts it would live out the week, given his attitude.

“By the way, coffee’s yours,” she told him just as he was about to walk back toward the doorway.

Esteban stopped and regarded the container with less than enthusiastic interest. “I didn’t’”

“No,” she cut in, anticipating what he was about to say, “but I did.” Then, just in case he wasn’t following her’or possibly wasn’t even listening to her’she clarified, “I bought coffee for you. Sort of a welcome-to-the-department offering,” she explained before Fernandez could ask her why she had bothered to buy him coffee at all.

Esteban picked the container up and fell in place beside her.

“You were that sure I was going to come in?” he wanted to know. If that was the case, that put her one up on him, he thought, since he hadn’t known he was coming in until a couple of hours ago.

“You said you would,” she reminded him, leading the way down the hall to the elevator.

His laugh was dry and completely devoid of humor. “And you believed me?”

She would be the first to admit that she was entirely too trusting in her dealings with people. As a detective, that worked against her. As a human being, though, she felt it didn’t.

“You haven’t given me a reason not to yet,” she replied.

“The day’s still young,” he countered. He took the lid off the container and took a sip of the black brew. “It’s cold,” he told her. It wasn’t a complaint so much as an observation about the state of the liquid. Hot or cold, as long as the coffee was black, he wasn’t fussy. It all went down the same way.

“It wasn’t when I got it,” she told him pointedly.

It was a little after eight now. She must have come in before then. “Which was’?” He deliberately left it open for her to jump in.

She saw no reason not to oblige him. “At seven this morning.”

“You not only expected me to show up, you actually expected me to be early?” he asked incredulously.

Reaching the elevator door, they stopped and she pressed the down arrow on the tiled wall.

“Seemed like something you might possibly do, at least on your first day,” she answered.

Her eyes swept over him and she was again struck by the fact that this clean-cut man hardly looked like the man who she’d barged in on last night.

The man who had also briefly set fire to her world, she caught herself thinking with no small longing right now.

She’d promised herself not to dwell on that, Kari reminded herself sternly. However, the memory refused to fade. Exerting something akin to a superhuman effort, she managed to push all thoughts concerning Fernandez into a nether region, hoping that would free up the working part of her brain for more important things.

“You’re staring at me,” Esteban said abruptly just as the elevator arrived. The stainless-steel doors yawned open, temporarily awaiting their pleasure. “My shirt inside out or something?”

As he asked the question, he looked down to check himself out. Nothing appeared to be out of order to him, but he couldn’t see the total picture.

“Your clothes are just fine,” she told him, confident that he was already aware of that small fact.

His attitude might have sounded careless to the undiscerning ear, but her gut told her that Esteban Fernandez was far from a careless man. For one thing, he wouldn’t have been able to survive in the world he’d previously chosen to descend into if he’d been cavalier by nature.

“I was just thinking that you clean up nicely,” she finally told him.

Compliments, when they were intended for him rather than the persona he’d assumed these past three years, made Esteban uncomfortable. He had absolutely no idea how to accept them or what was expected from him by way of a response.

So he shrugged, trying to appear unfazed’something he had gotten exceedingly good at’and mumbled, “Thanks, you too.”

To Kari’s knowledge, yesterday she hadn’t exactly looked like something the cat had dragged in’the way he most definitely had’but rather than begin a debate and possibly set him off, she decided to ignore the comment. “Okay. Moving on now.”

They got out on the first floor, and she led the way to the rear of the building rather than to the front of it. The back was where the department vehicles were all kept parked.

“You okay with my driving?” she asked, turning toward him suddenly. At least one of her brothers and two of her old partners had never felt comfortable when she was behind the wheel. She came to the conclusion that they all had issues that had nothing to do with her. She, on the other hand, was secure enough to have someone else drive if that was what kept them happy.

“Why?’ he asked suspiciously. “Something wrong with your driving?”

It amused her that that was the first thing that occurred to him. “No, it’s just that most males prefer to be the ones behind the wheel.”

He shrugged again. “Well, not this male. You’re the one with the address, right?”

“Right.” She was still just a tad wary of his motives. That it might just be a simple matter seemed too simple. For now, she reserved her judgment.

“So, you drive.”

To him, it seemed like the logical, not to mention simple, approach. He only cared about being the one behind the wheel when he didn’t trust the other people in the car.

But he wasn’t part of that world anymore, he reminded himself for possibly the dozenth time since yesterday. Having someone else behind the wheel was the least of the things he was going to need to get accustomed to with this new job that had been thrust on him.

Provided he stuck around.

“Okay, then,” Kari declared, pushing open one of the glass double doors and walking out. “The car’s parked right over there.”

Pointing for form’s sake, she led the way down the steps and through the lot. Her route formed a rather zigzag pattern.

Esteban remained at her side, matching her step for step without offering a single word, like a tall, unobtrusive shadow.

That, Kari silently promised herself, was going to have to change.

And soon.

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