“A month,” Kelly said.

“With a partner,” she added as clarification since Durant wasn’t answering her. Not if that disinterested look he’d just sent her way was any indication. “Is that the life expectancy of a partnership with you?”

Kane shrugged, apparently totally uninterested in her choice of topics to verbally pursue. “Give or take,” he finally replied vaguely, aware of the way she was looking at him, waiting for an answer. “I don’t keep track.”

Or so he thought.

Kelly nodded. “Fair enough,” she told him. “I just wanted to know what I was up against, that’s all.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kane asked.

“I’m going to look at this partnership as a challenge. If I can hang on beyond a certain point, say longer than your longest lasting partner, then it’s okay. I made it. You know, kind of like staying on a bucking horse for eight seconds.”

He looked at her as if she were a few cards short of a complete deck. If the woman wanted a challenge, he had one for her.

***

Be sure to check out the next books in

Cavanaugh Justice— Where Aurora’s finest are always in action.

How to Seduce a Cavanaugh

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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

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Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

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

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

Fear clawed at his small, heaving chest. It felt like long, sharp nails tearing into his very flesh.

He was aware of breathing hard, of being dizzy because he was unable to get in enough air.

A feeling of déjà vu oppressively weighed him down, pressing harder than an actual boulder could.

He’d been through this before, felt this way before, even though it was happening right before his eyes, so achingly vivid he couldn’t look away.

Not even for an instant.

Not even if his own survival depended on it.

Kane Durant was small for his age. But even if he hadn’t been, if he had been bigger and stronger than he actually was, he still would have been powerless against the big man.

Powerless to make him stop.

His father was a hulk of a man and only seemed to become more so when he was enraged.

Just the way he was now.

Enraged and spewing obscenities, hurling them at the trembling woman kneeling before him on the cracked vinyl kitchen floor.

The bruises on his mother’s face from his father’s last eruption were just now beginning to fade. The arguments, the rages, they were occurring more and more frequently these days, leaving an ugly rainbow of colors on every limb of her body.

The sense of constant anxiety never really went away anymore.

From the very moment he opened his eyes in the morning, Kane felt the frightening tension. Even during the lulls, which came less and less frequently, he knew it was just a matter of time before the next vicious outburst happened.

He’d been in his bed, fearfully watching the shadows moving on his ceiling when he’d heard his father bellowing, heard his mother crying out in fear and then in pain.

He was just a scrawny boy of ten, but the moment he heard his father yelling at his mother, he had abandoned his room and run into the kitchen to try to help his mother in any way he could.

To protect her.

Thin and fragile, she was no match against his father’s wrath.

Neither was he, but maybe together...

Kane had gotten to the kitchen just as his father’s anger had hit a new high.

The flash from the handgun seized his attention as he struggled to process what he saw. What his brain already knew. He was terrified.

He ran to his mother to block the bullet, to divert it from its course.

But he was too late.

The bullet from his father’s handgun had found its intended target less than a split second earlier.

His mother’s face abruptly froze, highlighting surprise and pain. And then she pitched backward. Blood poured freely from the newly created hole in her abdomen.

Kane opened his mouth to scream his protest, but nothing came out. Not a single sound came out to express his fear, his anger, his horrified outrage at the senselessness of it all.

Unable to voice his reaction, Kane put all his energy into attempting to stop the bleeding. But his hands were too small for the task. Blood squeezed its way through his delicate, ineffective fingers, underscoring his helplessness.

“Don’t die. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me,” he begged the woman who was already gone.

His voice only served to irritate his father further. “You love her that much, you little bastard? Then you’re going to join her!”

The next second he heard his father’s gun discharge. Felt something sharp and painful tear through his chest. Felt something else oozing out.

Blood.

Was that his?

Yes. He was bleeding. His blood was mingling with his mother’s.

He sank to his knees in slow motion.

At least it felt that way. The last thing he heard was the roar of the handgun again.

The last thing he saw was his father going down.

A cry of traumatized anguish tore from his lips. The sound of heavy breathing echoed in the empty room as he bolted upright.

In his bed.

In his bedroom.

Kane looked down at his torso, checking for bullet holes. There were none. Just the scar of one, but it had healed.

He was soaked, but it was with sweat, not blood.

Shaking, Kane dragged his hand through his hair, doing his best to reclaim some sort of calm, and then resigning himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to find it in what was left of the night.

The dream had found him again.

He hadn’t had it in a long, long time, but now it was back, forcing him back to square one. He had to work at getting himself back on an even keel.

Again.

He was exhausted—and restless beyond words.

Throwing off the covers, he got up. Beyond his window, darkness still embraced the city of Aurora, but there was no way he was going to go back to sleep. Not now.

Resigned, Kane made his way to the kitchen, fervently wishing he hadn’t given up smoking last month.

It looked as if his nerves were going to have to calm down on their own.

He bit off a couple of colorful words under his breath.

It wasn’t going to be easy.

Chapter 1

The detective was ignoring her.

Well, not so much ignoring her, Kelly Cavanaugh silently amended, as acting as if no one else was sitting in the chief of detectives’ office, waiting for the man to come in, except for him.

They actually did know one another—by sight at least—from the department they both worked in. Robbery, a division in the Aurora Police Department, wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t exactly miniscule, either. She saw Detective Kane Durant in passing almost every day. He’d even nodded at her a couple of times in response to her voiced greeting, but they had never had any sort of conversation—not even an inane one—and that was on him. Kane Durant apparently wasn’t one for small talk.

He didn’t seem to be one for big talk, either, Kelly thought now, even though she had tried to draw him out a time or two. His responses involved the absolute minimum of words. If something called for five words, she would offer ten if not more. Durant, however, seemed to be the type who would be hard-pressed to render more than three under the same set of circumstances.

Doing her best not to fidget, Kelly tried engaging the stoic, dark blond detective in some sort of conversation now. The reason for that was her curiosity had gotten the best of her.

“Do you know why we’re here?”

Durant continued staring straight ahead, as if he was memorizing the titles of the books on the shelf behind the chief’s desk.

Just when she decided he was going to continue ignoring her, the detective answered in a monotone voice, “Chief of ds called us in.”

She took a breath. “Fair enough.” If the man had been any stiffer he easily could have played the part of the Tin Man in a production of The Wizard of Oz. Willing to give the stoic detective the benefit of the doubt, she told herself that maybe she should have been more specific in her query. “Do you know why he called us in?”

“No.” The answer was given to the bookshelf, not to her.

Kelly shook her head. She’d heard of the strong, silent type, but this was carrying things a bit too far. “You know, I had a hand puppet as a kid that talked more than you do.”

This time, Kane spared her a glance before turning back around. It wasn’t exactly the kind of look that warmed a person’s soul, Kelly noted. It was meant to cut someone dead.

Lucky for her, she had a thick skin and didn’t take offense easily.

Just then she heard the door behind them open.

Thank God! Kelly thought.

It was all she could do to keep from breathing a huge sigh of relief. The ordeal of sitting here with this exceptionally good-looking sphinx hopefully would be over with soon.

To acknowledge the chief’s presence, both she and the silent detective rose from their seats.

“Sorry to keep you two waiting. I’m afraid I’m running a little behind today. But I didn’t have Raleigh bring you here to listen to my excuses.”

Rounding his desk, Brian Cavanaugh, Aurora PD’s chief of detectives as well as Kelly’s granduncle, greeted both detectives in his office with an easy smile.

“Sit, please,” he told the duo, underscoring his words with a hand gesture that indicated they should sink back into the seats they had vacated.

Like everyone else in his family, Brian Cavanaugh had worked his way up in the ranks. He’d held down his current position for a number of years now and, by all accounts, the men and women who served under him gave him not only their undying loyalty but their admiration, as well. That, to him, was far better than any badge of honor or official recognition he would ever receive.

His intent was to always do right by the department’s men and women.

“Do either of you know why I called you in?” Brian asked, looking from the solemn-faced detective to his far more cheerful grandniece.

He was looking at two completely different people. One reminded him of a sunny spring morning; the other made him think of a pending storm rolling in in the middle of the night.

Neither, however, was answering the question he had posed.

This was Brian’s first official meeting with Durant and, actually, his first professional meeting with Kelly, as well. The handful of other times he had interacted with the young woman had all taken place at his older brother’s house. Andrew Cavanaugh, the former police chief, was wont to use absolutely any available excuse to get their extended clan together to break bread and just unwind.

Brian regarded the two detectives for a moment before assuring them genially, “There’re no points taken off for a wrong answer.”

Kelly slanted a quick glance at the man to her right. His was a profile that lent itself well to one of those Greek statues she’d seen on the museum field trips her mother had insisted on years ago.

Durant probably had the warmth of one of those statues as well, she couldn’t help thinking. She tried to recall if she had ever seen the man smile when their paths had crossed.

She couldn’t remember a single instance.

Since the stoic detective wasn’t saying anything, she decided to go first. “Well, I don’t know about Detective Durant, but I’m thinking that you called me in because of Amos.”

Even saying the man’s name brought in a wave of sadness to her.

Detective Amos Barkley was her partner. Or rather, he had been until last week. After twenty-one years on the job, her friend and mentor had put in his papers. He’d said he’d protected and served long enough, and now he wanted to do something for himself. Informing her before he made his intentions public, Amos had told her that he wanted to go fishing “before I’m just too damn old to hold on to a fishing pole and land anything bigger than a minnow.”

Those also had been his words, addressed to people in the squad room, during the retirement party she had thrown for him at the station. It had made her wonder if Amos had been trying to convince his friends or himself as to his reasons for retiring.

Kane, she’d noted at the time, had been the only one who hadn’t officially attended Amos’s retirement party. He’d been in squad room during the celebration, but he had employed what she could only think of as tunnel vision, managing to block out everything that had been going on except for the paperwork he’d been focusing on.

He’d even turned down a slice of the three-layer cake she’d had brought in from Amos’s favorite bakery. Detectives from several other departments had turned up for the going-away party, but Durant had deliberately isolated himself from it and then promptly disappeared at the very height of the celebration.

Brian nodded at her response. “Yes, I did,” he confirmed. “That’s also, in part, why I called you in as well, Durant,” he said, this time directing his words to the solemn detective. “Captain Collins,” he went on, citing the head of the robbery division, “told me that your current partner requested to either have a new partner assigned to him or to be transferred out of Robbery and into another division entirely. According to him, he didn’t care which it was, as long as it didn’t involve you.”

Brian paused as if he was waiting for his words to sink in.

“How many partners does that make, detective?” he asked the younger man.

“Three,” Kane replied in a voice that gave no indication if it bothered him in the slightest that his partners all had sought to get away from him.

“Since you were assigned to Robbery,” Brian agreed, nodding his head. “And how many partners before that?”

“Two,” Kane replied, again without hesitation.

“Three,” Brian corrected.

“Technically, Rawlins didn’t request a transfer,” Kane said, his voice devoid of emotion. “He was shot and decided he wanted to pursue a different career.” It was highly likely that had that not happened, the man would have requested a transfer, but Kane assumed the chief was dealing in facts, not conjecture.

Brian inclined his head as if willing to go with the younger man’s version of the circumstances.

“I’ll accept that,” Brian allowed. And then he got down to the heart of the meeting he had called. “You’re a good, reliable detective who is outstanding at his job,” he acknowledged. “At the same time, unfortunately, getting along with people doesn’t exactly seem to be your strong suit, Detective Durant.”

Kane didn’t waste his breath by denying the chief’s observation. There was no point, especially since what the chief said was essentially true.

“I do better on my own, sir,” Kane replied quietly.

“You may think that,” Brian allowed. “But no one does better alone.” He said the words like a man who was firmly convinced in his stand. He left no room for either argument or speculation. “You need a partner to pick up on things you might have missed, to watch your back and,” he continued, looking at Kane pointedly, “to keep you grounded.”

The last thing he needed was someone grounding him. To Kane that was just another way of saying “interfering.” He didn’t like being interfered with.

“With all due respect, sir, I don’t need someone yapping at my heels, telling me what they think I’m doing wrong,” Kane told the chief. Cavanaugh was a fair and reasonable man. There had to be a way to get the chief to agree to let him go solo.

“Agreed,” Brian replied genially. Then amusement curved the corners of his mouth. “Which is exactly why I’m not assigning you to partner with one of the department’s German shepherds.”

Brian leaned back in his chair and gestured first toward Kane, then toward his grandniece whose performance was at times a little bit unorthodox. But by all counts she was both professional and tenacious—and she got results, which was what he was ultimately shooting for.

He smiled at her now, just before saying, “Detective Kane Durant, meet your new partner, Detective Kelly Cavanaugh.”

Durant’s expression never changed, Kelly observed, but she thought she saw a flicker—just for a moment—in the other man’s eyes that told her the thirty-two-year-old detective was far from happy about this newest coupling that was taking place.

“I’m not an unreasonable man,” Brian went on to say. “If this partnership isn’t working for either one of you after, say, a couple of months, you can request a reassignment and I’ll consider the matter. Nothing is written in stone,” the chief went on to assure the duo.

“But before either one of you decides to make that request, I want you to give this partnership a decent try.” He emphasized the words decent try. “Remember, nothing worth keeping comes easy. The rewards that are the sweetest are those that are hard-won.” Deep green eyes swept over both detectives, one at a time. “Do I make myself clear?” he asked.

“Perfectly,” Kelly replied with all but unbridled enthusiasm.

“Yes, sir,” Kane said. His low-key voice was all but flat.

Satisfied, Brian nodded. “Good. Now good luck—and goodbye,” he added. Just like that the meeting was over.

Kane lost no time leaving the chief’s office. Walking briskly through the outer office, he headed straight for the elevators.

Kelly found she had to lengthen her stride to keep up with her new partner. The latter gave absolutely no indication he wanted her to catch up.

He certainly wasn’t willing to slow down long enough for her to accomplish that small thing.

Too bad, she thought, lengthening her stride with determination.

Kelly arrived at the elevators just after her new partner did.

The man was going to take some getting used to. Right now, he seemed to be all blustery, like a bull confined in the proverbial china shop. He couldn’t seem to turn around without knocking something down and breaking it.

The worst part, she thought, was that he was aware of what he was doing—and not even the most subtle display of remorse was forthcoming from the man. There was obviously a good reason for that—he was feeling no remorse. Or, if by some chance he actually was, he was exceedingly careful not to show it.

He wasn’t like the other detectives. Something had made him different. It was up to her to make different synonymous with extra capable. Her granduncle saw qualities in this man, she could tell. She’d heard that Brian Cavanaugh had never been wrong when it came to doing what was best for his police force.

Although she was somewhat skeptical about this particular arrangement working out, Kelly decided she was just going to have to proceed on faith.

“How do you want to do this?” she asked her new partner brightly, breaking what was beginning to feel like an ironclad silence. Kane had given absolutely no indication he would say anything if she didn’t prod him into it.

“‘This’?” Kane echoed. The elevator arrived and he stepped inside. He noted how she seemed almost to hop in, claiming the space directly next to him.

Terrific, the chief had assigned him to partner up with a rabbit, Kane thought darkly. A chipper, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed rabbit.

The idea did not inspire him.

“Yes,” she confirmed. After almost a minute went by, she realized that her new partner didn’t have a clue what she was referring to. So she elaborated. “You have your desk and I have mine,” she pointed out.

“So? Is this where you tell me something informative about desks?” he asked with more than a touch of impatience in his voice.

“So one of us has to make a move. Amos cleared his desk out before he left,” she told him, hoping that Muhammad would opt to come to the mountain rather than deal with the mountain coming to him. “Your partner did the same when he transferred out of Robbery and into Vice,” she concluded.

Kane looked at her sharply. Just how closely had this eager little beaver been paying attention? His most recent partner, Woodward, had abruptly just picked up and left. Since the chief of ds had known all about it, Kane assumed Woodward had left with the man’s blessings—his didn’t count, even though he’d made no secret that he was glad to be rid of the man. Until just now, he’d had no idea where the detective had gone, nor had he cared, as long as it was away from him.

He just assumed it would be the same deal when it came to his current partner. A few weeks would go by—maybe even the two months to which the chief had referred—and then his newest so-called partner would bolt, and he would be more than glad to be rid of her.

But for now, he had a question he wanted answered. “How do you know which division Woodward transferred to?”

“I pay attention,” she answered simply. She waited for Kane to answer her question about which of them would be transferring desks, but that didn’t look as if it was about to happen. She began to doubt he was even listening to her.

In that case, the man had a serious attention deficit disorder. She tried again, since it was obvious that what she considered to be a possible dilemma didn’t seem to have occurred to her new partner at all.

“Okay,” she began again. “Now, do you want to switch desks or should—”

A curt “No” cut her down midsentence. Trying hard not to look annoyed, Kelly tried another approach to pin the man down.

Was he saying no to everything or just to the first part of her sentence? Kelly dug deep for her patience.

“Do you mean no, you don’t want to switch desks? Or no, you don’t—”

Kane cut in as if she wasn’t saying anything—at least nothing worthwhile. “You want me to hire a skywriter? Would that help you understand?” he asked impatiently.

Words rose to her lips that would only fan the flames and turn this into a full-fledged raging forest fire. She practiced restraint—although it was far from easy. She settled for sarcasm.

“No need to go to that expense. Just use your words, Durant. Do you want to move?”

“No,” he bit off. “I don’t want to move.”

There was nothing to be gained by echoing his sentiment and saying she didn’t want to move, either. One of them had to and, apparently, at least for now, she had been awarded the role of the flexible one.

“Okay,” she agreed gamely. “Then I’ll be the one to move.”

Kane wanted to say no to that as well, but he knew he couldn’t, not without consequences. When the chief of ds said he wanted him to give the partnership two months, the man meant two months. So, for now, he was forced to go along with this most unlikely, not to mention unsuitable, coupling.

“See, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?” she asked, employing a cheerfulness she definitely wasn’t feeling. Just for good measure she decided to add, “Wait and see, we’ll have you talking in full sentences in no time.”

Kane’s eyes narrowed as he momentarily glared at her just as the elevator doors opened again, this time on their floor. Kane got out. She was quick to follow him.

“Although,” she continued as if they were actually carrying on a conversation instead of what was mostly a monologue on her part, “there is something to be said for silence, too,” she admitted, carefully avoiding getting on the wrong side of Kane’s dark expression.

She was bending over backward. This was not going to be easy. But then, her late mother had told her more than once that she had the ability to get along with the devil.

The devil, Kelly silently contemplated, turning the thought over in her mind. That definitely would go a very long way toward describing her new partner’s disposition.

Who would have ever thought that the devil was this handsome?

A small smile played along her lips. Who’d known her mother had had the ability to look into the future?

Now all she had to do was prove the rest of her mother’s statement right.

Chapter 2

“Good, you’re back.”

The abrupt greeting came from Captain Lawrence Collins, a ruddy-faced man of medium height who was currently in charge of the robbery division. He’d come out of his office the instant that Kane and Kelly had walked into the squad room.

Kane glanced at the stocky man with his fading red hair, but said nothing in response to his greeting. Clearly, he was waiting for the man to continue.

However, it wasn’t in Kelly’s nature to just sit back and wait when she could just as easily jump into the middle of whatever was going on.

So she did.

“Did you want to speak to us, Captain?” she asked, more than eager to sink her teeth into a case. Her last case had been closed right after Amos’s retirement party and she was itching to get involved in something that could, just possibly, bring her and the sphinx she was assigned to a little closer together.

Probably not, but a girl could dream, Kelly thought whimsically.

“Want to? No,” Collins retorted. The bags under his eyes, Kelly noticed, seemed extra deep today. “What I want is to find some way to retire and enjoy myself the way I’m sure Barkley’s doing right now.” The captain sighed, acting more put-upon than weary. “But that’s not going to happen for another ten years, so in the meantime I get to hand out assignments to hotshots and hope for the best.”

Collins hesitated for a moment. He looked tempted to hand the piece of paper he was holding to her, but after several seconds of what appeared to be deliberation, he turned over the paper where he had jotted down all the pertinent information that had come in and handed it to her new partner.

Just as well, Kelly thought. Durant most definitely had a chip on those big broad shoulders of his, and if the captain had singled her out to take lead on this new case, Durant probably would have felt slighted. He had, after all, been with the department longer than she had. And if it appeared that Collins favored her over Mr. Congeniality, she had a feeling the end result would be less than pleasant.

This way was better for both of them.

“Looks like you two just caught your first case together,” Collins told the pair. “Make me proud,” he added as he nodded at the paper he’d just given Kane. He began to walk away, then stopped in his tracks for a few seconds. “Oh, and, Durant?”

After reading the address written on the white notepaper, Kane looked up and waited for the captain to continue.

“See if you can hold on to this partner for longer than a month, okay? The paperwork that’s generated every time you break up with your partner is hell,” Collins complained as he made his way back to his office.

This time Kane’s eyes slid over the woman who had hurried to catch up to him and was currently standing less than an inch away.

“I’ll do my best,” Kane murmured more or less to himself.

“Do better than that.” Collins apparently had heard Kane’s comment despite the growing distance between them as he walked back to his glass-enclosed office.

To Kelly’s momentary surprise, Kane turned around and walked out of the office again. She found herself hurrying again just not to lose sight of him.

The sooner they got to the location the captain had handed over to Kane, the sooner they could start working on the case.

“Is that your personal best?” Kelly asked him as they went out again.

“Is what my personal best?” Kane asked brusquely. What the hell was she talking about? The woman apparently could jump from topic to topic faster than a frog touching down on a pond filled with burning lily pads.

“A month. With a partner,” Kelly added as clarification since Durant wasn’t answering her and gave no indication he planned to. Not if that disinterested look he’d just sent her way was any indication. “Is that the life expectancy of a partnership with you?” she asked.

Kane shrugged, apparently totally uninterested in her choice of topics or her edification as to his professional habits.

“Give or take,” he finally replied vaguely, aware of the way she was watching him, waiting for an answer. “I don’t keep track,” he added with an air of finality that was meant to close the subject once and for all.

Or so he had naively thought.

Kelly nodded. “Fair enough,” she told him. Then she explained, “I just wanted to know what I was up against, that’s all.”

His eyebrows drew together in an outward sign of confusion. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Kane asked.

She gave him a roundabout explanation. “I’m planning to look at this partnership as a challenge. If I can hang on beyond a certain point, say longer than your longest-lasting partner, then it’s okay. I made it. You know, kind of like staying on a bucking bronco for eight seconds.”

If the woman wanted a challenge, he had one for her. He’d challenge her to make sense out of the gibberish she had just spouted. Instead, though, he settled for a throwaway line that he assumed would tell her just how disinterested he was in anything she had to say beyond whatever pertained to the case they were about to investigate.

“Whatever floats your boat,” Kane muttered dismissively.

“Where are we going?” she asked as they got back on the elevator.

“To the scene of the robbery,” he told her matter-of-factly.

If he was trying to rankle her or get her to lose her temper, Kelly thought, it was going to take more than that. Having grown up with four brothers, not to mention two sisters, she had learned how to survive under adverse conditions.

“Which is...?” she asked him patiently.

He seemed deliberately to wait several minutes before saying, “Quail Hill.”

Kelly whistled, impressed. For the most part, the citizens of Aurora were middle-class and upper middle-class. But Quail Hill was where the beautiful people with deep pockets lived.

After reaching the first floor, the elevator came to a stop and opened its doors. The moment they stepped out, Kane resumed his quickened pace, letting her know in no uncertain terms that he didn’t like the idea of being coupled with her. He was putting distance between them as quickly as he possibly could. She was welcome to keep up—if she could.

Too bad, Durant, but I don’t like this any better than you do, she thought, once again lengthening her stride.

“Well, if I was a thief, that’s where I’d go to pull off a heist,” she said, addressing Kane’s back. “The really filthy rich part of town.”

Kane merely grunted in response as he came to a stop before a dark sedan. He hit the release button on his key, opening all four doors simultaneously.

Kelly looked at his vehicle in surprise. He seemed to take it for granted that she was just going to let him take over every little aspect of their partnership.

“That’s it?” she questioned. “No discussion about which car we’re using and who’s driving?”

Rather than answer her, Kane opened the driver’s side door and got in behind the steering wheel.

“I guess not,” Kelly concluded, answering her own question.

Opening the passenger side, she slid in. The moment she inserted the metal tongue into the slot of her seat belt, Kane took off. Kelly felt the jolt. The sedan was instantly hugging the road, doing the speed limit—and just beyond.

Kelly gave it to the count of ten in her head, allowing her new partner to gather his thoughts together before he said something.

Anything.

When there was only silence riding along in the car with them, Kelly decided that the man she’d been assigned to was comfortable with this level of silence.

She, however, was not.

“You know, you’re going to have to talk to me sometime,” Kelly pointed out patiently. There was no point in raising her voice or losing her temper. That wasn’t the way to go with this man.

Kane continued looking straight ahead as he drove onto one of the city’s main thoroughfares.

“Why?” His voice was steely, his interest in the conversation barely engaged.

Exasperation hovered around the edges of her voice, but Kelly managed to keep it in check.

“Because that’s what partners do. They talk. They share and somewhere in between the small talk and the theory spinning, they solve crimes.”

“If you say so,” Kane responded in quite possibly the most disinterested, distant voice she had ever heard. “But it’s cliché.”

She wasn’t trying to be original, just to make a point. There was nothing wrong with using a cliché if it applied to the situation—and this, in her opinion, did.

“I’ve got another one for you,” she told Kane, her stubborn streak rearing its head. “Ever hear the old saying, ‘Two heads are better than one’?”

“You planning on growing another head, Cavanaugh?” he asked.

If he meant to get her annoyed with that, he was going to be disappointed, she thought.

“Was that a joke, Durant? Could it be that you actually have a sense of humor buried beneath that muscle-bound, hulking exterior?” she asked, feigning shock as she splayed her hand across her chest.

He merely slanted a dismissive look her way before returning his gaze to the road.

Taking a deep breath, Kelly decided she had nothing to lose by taking this new partner of hers to task about his attitude when it came to her. “Look, Durant, I don’t know what your problem is—”

He pointed up to the rearview mirror. “Mirror’s right there,” he said, his meaning clear.

Kelly dug in. “Subtle. Wrong, but subtle. I’m not your problem, Durant,” she told him. “I’m not the one who’s had six partners bail on her since joining the force.”

“Five,” he corrected, looking, in her estimation, completely unfazed.

“I’m not convinced that it was getting shot that made that partner of yours to decide to take a different career path, but if it makes you happy to believe that, fine,” she said. “The count is back down to five.”

It was obvious that she was deliberately humoring him, the way an indulgent parent humored a child. He didn’t like it.

“What would make me happy,” he told her, feeling his jaw clench as he spoke, “is if you said goodbye.”

Okay, maybe it was time to take this head-on, Kelly thought. Sidestepping and humoring this man weren’t getting her anywhere.

“What is it that you think you’ve got against me?” she asked. “You hardly know me.”

“And I’d like to keep it that way,” Kane told her in no uncertain terms. “Having a partner—any partner—just gets in my way,” Kane said in a no-nonsense voice. “I don’t have time to watch your back.”

Rather than get angry—or throw her hands up and just give up—Kelly tried another approach. It was obvious the man was keeping something buried. Something that had caused him to become soured on life as well as the world.

She aimed to find out what that was.

“And you don’t have time to have your own back watched?” Kelly asked.

He laughed shortly. There was absolutely no humor in the sound. “No offense, but if I were in trouble, knowing you were out there with a gun wouldn’t exactly reinforce my feeling of well-being,” he told her.

Kelly stared at his rigid profile. It looked as if his whole body was clenched, not just his jaw. Did the man even know how to relax? Or was he just perpetually angry at the world?

Why?

She had nothing to lose by asking. Heaven knew she wasn’t sacrificing any rapport she might have built up with Durant. There certainly wasn’t any to be had.

“Were you always like this?” she asked. “Or did something happen to turn you into this distrusting outsider?”

That was the deal breaker. If she didn’t put in for a transfer, then he would—the moment they got back to the precinct, Kane promised himself. “And just about the very last thing I need or want is a partner who fancies herself a shrink.”

“Not a shrink,” Kelly contradicted. “An observer. Someone to talk to when things get to be too difficult for you.”

It seemed as if he was missing every single light, Kane thought, gripping the steering wheel harder. Missing the intersection lights just made his disposition that much more surly.

“What if you’re what’s too difficult for me?” he asked.

She smiled, the expression filtering into her eyes, making them all but shine with warmth.

Now why the hell had that thought even crossed his mind, Kane upbraided himself.

“We can talk about that, too,” Kelly told him.

The look he shot her was not the sort that cemented partnerships. “Got an answer for everything, is that it?” he asked sarcastically.

“Pretty much,” she said, giving no indication that his attitude was getting to her.

Something—or someone, she decided—had done a number on this new partner of hers, very effectively destroying his ability to relate to anyone. To risk relating to anyone, she amended.

Either that or he was just an ornery SOB and there really was no reaching him.

The moment she started to consider the second possibility, Kelly quickly dismissed it. Nobody on earth would want to be the way Durant was on any kind of a regular basis, Kelly thought. Something had to have happened to him to make him like this.

But what?

And how did she find out? Heaven knew she couldn’t approach him outright about that. At least, not without proper prep work first.

She made up her mind to do some digging into her new partner’s past and see if she could answer any of the questions that were popping up rather insistently in her brain.

Kelly began planning her strategy and who she would talk to first about Durant. A number of possibilities occurred to her, along with another thought. She was going to make Kane Durant her private rehabilitation project.

Lost in thought and making extensive plans, she didn’t immediately become aware that Durant had stopped driving.

After parking his sedan at the curb, he got out and then spared her a glance. Against his better nature, he prodded her.

“Coming?” he asked her. “Or are you waiting for a private, hand-carved invitation?”

Kelly didn’t lie as a rule. But she saw no shame in shading the truth sometimes, especially when she was dealing with someone such as Kane Durant, a man who probably had last smiled on the day he’d been brought home from the hospital.

Possibly not even then.

“Just gathering my thoughts together,” she told Kane cheerfully. She did, however, avoid his eyes when she said it. That, and she devoted an extra drop of care to getting out of his sedan on the passenger side.

“Well, that certainly doesn’t require a long time,” Kane commented under his breath.

She ignored the obvious meaning behind his comment—that her thoughts were woefully few. “No, not at this time,” she easily agreed.

She could see that her noncombative answer surprised him.

Brace yourself, Durant. There’s more where that came from, she promised silently. I intend to kill you with kindness. It’s probably the only way to win you over.

Or so she hoped.

A patrol car was parked at the end of the long, winding driveway. The vehicle looked sadly out of place beside the two other cars that were there. One was a late-model Mercedes and the other was a Lexus that was so new it didn’t have plates on yet.

Both cars had been vandalized. Their windows were smashed and huge red letters scarred the body of each vehicle.

“Looks like someone was taking out some really dark personal issues on the cars,” she commented. “Maybe they were using the cars as proxies for the people the perp or perps really wanted to harm.”

Very quietly, Kane slowly circled the two cars, taking in every inch of the destruction that had occurred here, so close to home. At first glance, it seemed like a case of determined vandalism. But there might be something that they were missing, he thought.

That was why the department had such a highly developed crime scene investigation unit. “Ask CSI to pass on their findings to me—to us,” he corrected himself, although not overly cheerfully, “once they’re finished examining the cars,” he instructed.

Kelly nodded her head. “Consider it done,” she replied.

Kane glanced at her and appeared on the verge of responding. Then he obviously thought better of it and merely shrugged his shoulders.

Taking in everything about his surroundings, Kane continued walking to the building’s ornate, massive front door.

The door was wide-open. A patrolman could be seen just inside the foyer. He seemed to be on guard. Against what was still unclear.

The foyer, a veritable shrine to all things marble, contained uncommonly high vaulted ceilings. It clearly gave the impression of wealth as well as wide-open spaces.

“God, I’d hate to have to pay the heating bill on this place,” she murmured as they walked in.

Kelly hardly knew where to look first. She was accustomed to nice houses, but this was a whole new frontier. She was impressed but determined not to sound like some highly impressionable schoolgirl.

“What do you think it runs them?” she asked in idle curiosity. “The heating bill,” she repeated so Durant knew what she was talking about.

For a moment, she’d forgotten who she was paired up with. The question was something she would have asked Amos. The latter would have speculated about the price and offered a decent guess. That was what she had loved about Amos. She could engage him in any sort of topic and he would always try to keep the conversation going.

This new partner didn’t even indicate that he had heard her question.

She glanced around and took in the security system keypad that was mounted right inside the door. “Looks sophisticated,” she commented.

“Also useless if it didn’t alert the home owners that an intruder or intruders were coming in,” Kane pronounced rather dismissively.

She was about to say something along the lines of “He speaks” but immediately dismissed the urge. She wanted to encourage Durant to share his thoughts with her. If she said anything remotely mocking or derogatory, she knew it would only make matters that much worse.

And completely blow any chance of a decent partnership right out of the water.

She also had a feeling that at this stage of their nonrelationship, kidding him was not the way to go. Instead, she played her role as the faithful sidekick and asked innocently, “Think it might be an inside job? You know, maybe someone who had a hand in installing the security system?”

“Too soon to think anything,” he told her as he continued moving around the foyer, taking in as many details as he could before going to speak to the home owners. Both were badly shaken, according to the initial report that had come in from the patrolman who had been the first on the scene.

The home owners were not difficult to locate. Kane followed the sound of raised voices and crying into the next room.

Chapter 3

The woman’s back was to the doorway, so she didn’t seem to be aware that anyone else had entered her home—and her living room—until she heard an unfamiliar, deep male voice say, “Excuse me.”

No doubt surprised and frightened, Judith Osborn jumped and stifled a scream as she swung around toward the sound of the voice she heard, apparently much to her husband’s disgust, if the expression on his face was any indication.

“Damn it, Judith, get hold of yourself. They’re obviously with the police.” Randolph Osborn’s small, deep-set brown eyes shifted back and forth between the two strangers who had entered his home, as if he was assessing them. “You are with the police, right?”

Kane took out his wallet and badge at the same time that she did. Kelly let him do the introductions as she continued to study the pair. The wife’s nerves seemed to be very close to the surface, while her husband just looked angry. Very angry.

“Detectives Durant and Cavanaugh,” Kane told the robbery victims. Closing his wallet, he returned it to his jacket pocket. “Are either of you hurt?” he asked even as he did a quick visual check.

Neither seemed to be bleeding, which was a positive sign.

Osborn fisted his hands and then relaxed them again. His frown—as well as his annoyance—appeared to be deepening. “I think I lost all feeling in my hands and my back’s killing me.”

“We can call the paramedics if you like,” Kelly offered sympathetically. Her focus was more on Mrs. Osborn than on the woman’s husband. The latter had an irritating manner about him, which might or might not have been due to finding himself the victim of a robbery. Kelly had a feeling it went far deeper than that. “They can take you to the hospital to be checked out.”

Osborn looked at her as if he thought she’d lost her mind to make such a plebeian suggestion.

“What? Checked out by butchers? No, thanks. I have my own top-rated specialist on retainer.” Wearing a robe over his pajamas, Osborn began to head for the nearest extension. “I’d like to call him now if you’re finished here.”

He was summarily dismissing them.

Kelly could see that Kane didn’t like the man’s superior attitude any more than she did.

“As a matter of fact,” Kane told the home invasion victim, “we’re not finished.” He put his hand down on the landline Osborn was about to dial. “We have a few questions we’d like you to answer.”

“What more do you want from us?” Mrs. Osborn asked, an edge of hysteria rising in her voice. “We’ve already told that...that beat cop standing outside what happened. What else is there?” she demanded again, her voice breaking.

Judith Osborn ran her hand along her throat, as if she was protecting herself from some sort of invisible noose hanging around her neck. That was when Kane noticed the ligature marks around Judith’s wrist. Picking up the hand closest to him, he examined it more closely.

It didn’t take much to guess what had happened. “You were restrained,” he concluded.

Judith timidly pulled her hand away as she whispered hoarsely, “Yes.”

At the same time her husband spat out, “Damn right we were. That little vermin had us tied up like turkeys waiting to be slaughtered,” he proclaimed indignantly. “I want that bastard’s head on a platter and I want it now!” It was clear he intended to get exactly what he demanded—or he was going to make someone else suffer for what he had gone through.

“I can understand you feeling that way, Mr. Osborn,” Kane told the man, sounding almost compassionate. “But that’s not quite the way we do things on the police force these days.”

The expression on Osborn’s face all but shouted that he didn’t give a damn how the detectives did things. He wanted revenge for being humiliated and held prisoner in his own home. “Then after you bring him in, just let me have ten minutes with him—”

Kane saw the same set of ligature marks on Osborn’s wrists. “Looks to me as if you’ve already had more than ten minutes with him.”

Accustomed to always getting his way, Randolph was obviously fuming at Kane’s comment. He made a show of pulling the cuffs of his pajamas down over the marks on his wrists.

To Kelly it was a little like the clichéd remark about closing the barn door after the horses had been stolen.

“He came into our bedroom while we were asleep. Our bedroom!” Osborn all but shouted to get his point across. “And he had the gall to hit me to wake me up!” His wife whimpered pitifully as Osborn re-created the scene they had just gone through. “Then he had my wife tie me up. My wife,” he emphasized. Osborn glared now at the woman who, it was quite evident by his manner, he felt had betrayed him.

“I had to, Randolph,” Judith cried, distraught. “He was holding a gun on me. What did you expect me to do?” she asked. The almost painfully thin woman began to shake again.

“I expect you to think for a change,” Osborn retorted. “If you had given him any sort of resistance, I could have used that to get him off guard and taken his gun away from that pathetic sack of—”

“What you would have more likely taken,” Kane said, interrupting the abrasive man he was taking a real disliking to, “is a bullet, most likely to the stomach. And you would have bled out before we got here. Heroics don’t usually pay off,” he told the man matter-of-factly.

Osborn ran his hand through his graying hair. “I don’t need to stand here and be lectured to by a two-bit detective,” he bit off angrily.

“Well, it’s obvious that you certainly do need something,” Kelly said, cutting in. Her eyes met Osborn’s. Kelly didn’t look away. “A course in manners comes to mind.”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” Osborn shouted at her.

“It seems that I apparently just did,” Kelly replied with a wide, genial smile that was anything but.

Osborn began to breathe hard as he clenched his impotent fists next to his sides. “Do you have any idea who I am?” he demanded.

“Yes,” Kane replied in an even, controlled voice. “You’re a citizen of Aurora who has been robbed and as such you and your wife will get our full attention. There’s nothing to be gained by throwing your weight around. That doesn’t impress us. As a matter of fact, that really doesn’t work in your favor.”

“Did either one of you get a look at this guy—there was only one, right?” Kelly wanted to ascertain. She was doing her level best to get the couple’s attention back on the robbery and not on some high-spirited exchange between Kane and the male victim.

Judith bobbed her head up and down, a wreath of carefully salon-dyed brown hair floating about her face. “Yes. One. One horrible man.” She shuddered, running her hands up and down along her arms.

“Can you remember any physical features?” Kane pressed.

Judith shrugged. One of her nightgown straps slid down. She nervously tugged it up into place again, glancing in her husband’s direction as she did so.

Osborn was the one who ran the show, Kelly concluded. Mrs. Osborn gave them a description. “Average build, average height. Around Randolph’s age—”

“Which is the same as yours,” her husband bit off, taking offense that she had made it sound as if he was older than she was.

In response, Judith looked down at the rug, avoiding his eyes.

“Was there anything familiar about this man?” Kane asked. “Anything at all? The way he spoke or held his head? The way he moved around, perhaps?”

“Familiar?” The haughty inquiry came from Osborn. “We’re not in the habit of fraternizing with common burglars and thieves. Besides, the bastard wore a mask.”

“What kind of a mask?” Kane asked, hoping to gain some insight into the burglar’s mind-set.

“It was a clown mask.” Kane noted that the man was most obviously holding himself in check to keep from allowing a shiver to snake down his spine. “I’ve always hated clowns. They’re grotesque.”

“Can’t argue with you there,” Kane replied almost under his breath as he made a further notation in his notepad. “Have you had a chance to assess what the robber made off with?”

“Two very rare paintings and an antique revolver I kept on display there.” Randolph pointed to the credenza in the dining room. The stand on top of it was glaringly empty.

“Were the paintings down here, too?” Kelly asked.

Judith bobbed her head up and down in response to the question.

“They were the first thing anyone saw when they came into the house,” Osborn answered bitterly, gesturing to the vacant spaces on the wall. The only things that testified to the paintings’ existence were two nails in the wall.

“Did he take anything else?” Kelly asked the angry home owner.

“No.” He shook his head. “Just the paintings and the revolver.”

She realized the man hadn’t been outside to see his vandalized automobiles. Just as well right now, she told herself.

Despite Osborn’s answer, Kelly went down a list of popular items to steal—and fence. “No jewelry or expensive bottles of wine or—”

She didn’t get to finish her list. Osborn was glaring at her as he rudely interrupted. “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand, Detective?”

She was tempted to say something cutting that would put the man in his place, but considering the trauma he and his wife had just gone through, Kelly decided to cut him a little slack.

She turned toward her partner and bounced a theory off him. “Wouldn’t it have been easier just to take the paintings and the antique gun and disappear without bothering to wake up Mr. and Mrs. Osborn?” It seemed to her a far easier way to proceed as well as to avoid possibly getting overpowered and caught.

“Yes,” Kane agreed thoughtfully. After a beat, he added, “Unless—”

“Unless he wanted them to be alerted to what he was doing. He wanted to rub their noses in it,” she concluded, excited about this possible twist and its implications. Turning back to the home invasion victims, she asked Osborn, “Is there someone who would want to watch your reaction to the robbery? Maybe even take some pleasure in it?”

“The people at the club are all a bunch of jealous bastards,” Randolph spat out. “Any one of them could have done this.”

“No.” The nervous denial came from his wife. “They’re our friends.”

Osborn shot his wife a furious, disgusted look. “If you believe that, you stupid cow, you’re even more pathetic than I thought.”

“There’s no need to get abusive, Mr. Osborn,” Kane coldly informed the man, stepping between Osborn and his wife.

“I can get whatever the hell I want with my wife. I’ve just been robbed, and I sure as hell am not going to be lectured to by one of the Keystone Cops.”

It was Kelly’s turn to step in. She was beginning to realize it was going to be hard narrowing down the list of people who hated Osborn’s guts and wanted to see him humiliated. Undoubtedly, it was a nonexclusive, fast-growing club.

“I’d be very careful if I were you, Mr. Osborn,” Kelly warned the man in what sounded like a very deceptively mild voice. “Or you just might wind up reaping exactly what you sow.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Osborn angrily demanded.

Kelly didn’t bother explaining. “You’re a very smart man, Mr. Osborn. I’m sure you’ll figure it out on your own eventually. Now then, we’ll need a list of all these ‘unfriendly’ friends you think might be capable of breaking into your home for the opportunity to torture you by robbing you. Also an exact accounting of everything that was stolen.”

It was clear that Osborn was about to say something less than cooperative, but Kane cut him off before he could speak.

“When you finish with the list, you can give it to Officer Riley,” Kane told the man, pointing out the officer to him. He was fairly certain that although the officer had undoubtedly introduced himself to Osborn when he’d arrived on the scene, the latter had taken no note of his name, or even thought the man had a name.

The officer was now standing guard just inside the foyer.

“And where are you going to be?” Osborn demanded in less than genial tones. He sounded like an employer wanting an accounting from a lowly lackey.

“We’ll be off working your case,” Kane replied, the picture of restraint.

The only telltale sign of inner fury was that Kane’s breathing pattern had grown just a little bit shorter.

Kelly held her tongue until after they’d taken their leave. The minute they were outside the front door, Kelly’s words came rushing out.

“Wow. For a minute there I thought you were going to strangle him,” Kelly told him. “Not that anyone in the immediate world would have blamed you. That man was some piece of work.”

“If I strangled him, I might have done the world a favor,” Kane speculated. In his opinion, Randolph Osborn was a colossal waste of flesh.

“No argument,” Kelly agreed. “It’s just that you might have had to fight me for the honor of bringing about the man’s demise.” She shook her head as she looked over her shoulder at the twenty-room house. “Makes me think that this so-called robbery was definitely not just a random act of chance.”

Kane sounded her out. “You think someone targeted him?”

She couldn’t tell by Kane’s tone if he agreed with her or not. All she could do was tell him how she felt about the crime.

“With every fiber of my being,” she said with enthusiasm. “It only makes sense.” Her voice picked up speed. “Whoever did it wanted to see Osborn agonize over losing his precious treasures. There’s no other reason why he would have deliberately woken Osborn and his wife up, tied them up and then dragged them downstairs to bear witness to the robbery. It was most likely someone Osborn belittled or stiffed in some deal—or both. I’d bet my pension on it,” she concluded.

“Which probably amounts to fifty dollars a month at this point in your career,” Kane said dismissively. “As to it being someone Osborn had wronged somehow, it looks like that club includes everyone over the age of three. That’s a hell of a lot of people to question,” Kane concluded.

“There has to be a way to narrow down the list,” she told him.

Kane frowned as he reached his vehicle. Offhand he couldn’t think of a way to accomplish that. He glanced in her direction as he sat behind the steering wheel. “I’m open to suggestions if you have them.”

Getting into the passenger side, Kelly shook her head. “Right now all I can think of is that I’d like to strangle the condescending, smug, giant creep myself.”

For a second, Kane allowed himself to be amused. She was almost cute when she got angry. Now there was a word that shouldn’t ever be paired with the word partner. He knew without being told that if he said as much to her—that she was cute when she got angry—there would be hell to pay. Something to think about, he mused, “Tell me, does that go above or below the part that says protect and serve?” he asked.

She took no offense at his so-called question.

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out.” She turned her attention to another detail in the investigation. “Those marks on Mrs. Osborn’s wrists looked pretty deep,” she commented. “You think that whoever is responsible for this has a grudge against her, too?”

He shrugged. “It’s possible,” Kane allowed. “Or maybe, for our suspect, it’s a matter of guilt by association. She’s married to the miserable reptile, so in the burglar’s mind she’s every bit as bad as her husband is.”

She nodded. “Could be that, too,” she agreed.

“Let’s see what their so-called friends at the club have to say about the Osborns,” he suggested, then Kane looked at her. They were currently missing one little detail. “Did Osborn happen to mention what club he belongs to?”

She shook her head. “There are four clubs in Aurora that a man like Osborn might want to belong to. My vote is with the one that’s the most exclusive—and the most snobbish.”

Kane knew the exact place. “Valhalla,” he said. “That’s the one that checks into your lineage before allowing you to join. Members had to have relatives that go all the way back to the Mayflower.” He saw the frown on Kelly’s face. Out of left field, the thought came that even when she was frowning, this pain in his posterior was damn attractive. He promptly buried it, forcing himself to focus on the case. He caught himself wondering if she knew something he didn’t.

“What?”

She waved a hand at his question. Her reaction had nothing directly to do with the case. “I just hate snobs.”

“If your hunch is right, then apparently the snobs have the same kind of feelings about Randolph Osborn and his wife.”

Satisfied that they might be onto something, Kane put the key into the ignition. The engine had trouble catching the first two times. The third try was the charm. The sedan dutifully purred into service.

Kelly nodded toward the front of the car. “You should have that looked at,” she suggested.

Kane shrugged dismissively. “It’s just being temperamental.”

That he was assigning feelings to the vehicle took her completely by surprise. “It’s a car,” Kelly pointed out. “It doesn’t have any emotions to govern its actions.”

“My car might disagree,” he told her, completely tongue in cheek.

Kelly found herself laughing. “If you had a car that was actually capable of disagreeing, you’d be at least ten times more wealthy right now—if not more—and definitely living the life of ease.”

Money, and its lack or presence, didn’t play a role here. Not for him.

“If I were wealthy,” he told her, “I’d still be doing exactly what I’m doing right now. Protecting and serving. And chasing bad guys.”

The admission caught her completely off guard. She hadn’t pictured him as being that dedicated. “You’re kidding.”

“I don’t kid,” Kane deadpanned.

The way he said it, Kelly caught herself thinking that she could really believe it. But it was what he said next that really threw her for a loop.

“Cavanaugh.”

She turned her head to look at him, waiting for what she assumed was most likely going to be a put-down.

“Nice work back there.”

Stunned, for a moment she had absolutely no comeback for that.

Chapter 4

Was that a compliment?

Seriously?

Kelly looked at her solemn partner in barely contained astonishment.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me the first time,” he told her flatly.

“Actually, I did,” Kelly admitted, then smiled broadly at him when his glance toward her turned accusatory. “But it has such a nice ring to it. Humor me and say what you said again.”

Kane blew out a breath as he shook his head. Served him right for going soft for a second. So far, none of what transpired was convincing him that partnering was a good way to go for a man such as him. He returned to his original belief: There was no upside to having a partner. Definitely no upside to having a crazy partner.

“You’re a real pain in the butt, Cavanaugh. You know that?” Kane accused her.

Kelly pretended to seriously mull over his words. “No, I don’t think that’s what you said. It was something about my having done good work.”

Scowling at her, Kane continued to face forward, his eyes on the road. “Keep this up and you’ll negate any good effects you managed to accomplish.”

Kelly merely laughed as she shook her head. “You are a very tough crowd to please, Durant.”

He was beginning to think this woman he’d been stuck with would drive him crazy inside of a week. He didn’t do his best work agitated. One way or another, there would be a breakup in their future—and very soon.

“I don’t know what the hell that means,” he growled. “But I’m not going to ask.”

“It means—”

Still driving, Kane took his right hand off the steering wheel and held it up much the way an old-fashioned traffic cop directing the flow of vehicles would have.

“I said I’m not going to ask. That implies that I don’t want to hear you dissecting your own words. In case you’re unclear on the concept, that means—”

“Okay, moving right along,” she quipped, interrupting his explanation and calling a halt to that line of conversation. With a sigh, Kelly looked out the window at the road before them. For the first time she took note of the route he was taking. It was a different one than they had taken to the high-end residential community. “Are we going directly to the club?”

This time Kane didn’t even bother glancing in her direction. “What does it look like?”

She had a great deal of patience, but it was in finite supply. This man had to be put on some kind of notice, she thought. Otherwise, this testy behavior was liable to continue for days.

“It looks like one of us should seriously think about stopping by the hospital to have a boulder-sized chip removed from their shoulder,” she told him in a sweet, matter-of-fact manner that not even the most critical of people could find fault with.

“Then, once that chip is removed, maybe we’ll have a shot at working together a bit more smoothly.” Or at least she could hope that would be the outcome of the proposed venture, Kelly silently added.

The look he gave her was far from happy or even mildly approving. “This is as smooth as it is going to get.”

“You underestimate yourself,” she told him. Adding, “As well as me.”

He’d tried, he’d really tried, Kane thought. But there was a time when you just had to recognize that the deck was stacked against you. It was time for him to cut his losses and just withdraw.

“I have no estimation where you’re concerned,” he told her in a distant, removed voice. “As for me—no offense—but I just don’t like having a partner.”

“None taken,” she responded cavalierly. “And I kind of picked up on the fact that you are less than thrilled about this arrangement. But you know what, Durant? There’s a reason the department sends their detectives out in pairs, so you might as well get used to it.”

She didn’t think he would come up with an answer so fast, but he did. “It cuts down on the number of cars they have to provide.”

She stared at his profile, rather amazed at the way Kane’s mind worked. “Wow, you really are cynical, aren’t you?”

He continued watching the road as he went. “Never claimed to have a sunny disposition.”

And this woman was nothing if not a Pollyanna, Kane thought. Pollyannas required a happy, hopeful atmosphere around them. That just wasn’t him and it never would be.

“If you want to ask for another partner, I won’t contest it,” he said.

“Contest it?” she echoed. Just how dense did the man think she was? “You’d probably break into a happy dance.” The momentary mental image of the solemn, handsome detective suddenly swaying to some melody only he heard had Kelly grinning. “And that is something that I would actually pay to see,” she admitted. “But not enough to break up this beautiful friendship we’ve got going here between us.”

“What beautiful friendship?” he all but growled.

“The one I’m laying the groundwork for,” she replied cheerfully. “Pay attention, Durant. And FYI, I’m not a quitter. That means that I don’t take off at the first sign of a problem—or the promise of a difficult partner,” she deliberately added. “You’re just going to have to get used to that.

“So, if you were hoping to get rid of me by giving me a sample of your sunny disposition, sorry, it’s not going to happen. By the way, the answer to the question that I asked you earlier about why the department pairs up detectives, it’s so that they can have each other’s backs. I figure you’re too good a cop not to have mine, and I sure as hell am going to have yours,” she told him in no uncertain terms.

“As for the rest of it, you want to sulk and behave like some dark and brooding character out of one of Byron’s poems, go right ahead. Be my guest. But you’ll be missing out on some pretty terrific conversations,” she predicted.

The look he spared her was nothing if not skeptical. “Meaning with you?”

If he was trying to get her to back down or to intimidate her, he was going to have to work at it a lot harder than that, she thought. “I don’t see anyone else in the car. So, yes, meaning me.”

Kane laughed shortly. “Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

She raised her chin ever so slightly, which was the only indication that she might have found the question combative.

“What I just said has nothing to do with whether or not I think a lot of myself. I just happen to know my strengths and my limits. That’s all.

“And if you’re wondering,” she continued, “I have inside knowledge—no pun intended—on the way the male mind works. I grew up with four brothers who were anything but docile. They supplied me with my education, and I diligently took notes,” she told him completely straight-faced.

Without her realizing it, they had arrived at Valhalla.

After Kane showed his badge, the man at the club’s entrance reluctantly opened the gates to allow them to drive on to the grounds.

“Let’s see if you can put those so-called notes you took to good use,” Kane challenged her as he headed to the clubhouse.

The route to the impressive structure was marked with a great many expensive, well-cared-for vehicles. The most conservatively priced of the lot turned out to be a silver Mercedes.

“Never understood it,” she murmured, taking in the sea of pricey automobiles. The comment was more to herself than her partner since she just assumed Durant wasn’t paying attention to a word she said, anyway.

Kane surprised her by asking, “Never understood what?”

She managed to recover without missing a beat. “Pouring so much money into something that could so easily be totaled in the blink of an eye. Whether a car’s a Ford or a Ferrari, they’re both just a heartbeat away from becoming a mangled heap.”

Kane shrugged. Expensive cars meant nothing to him. They’d never moved him, not even as a young boy. Life had been far too serious for him to be infatuated with an automobile.

“They’re status symbols, I suppose,” he said.

She took in the groups of golfers on the course just before they reached the clubhouse. “I know that, but this crowd doesn’t strike me as the type to be impressed by someone dropping a quarter of a million on a Lamborghini.”

Thoughts of his father suddenly popped up in his brain. On those rare occasions when his father hadn’t been taking out his frustrations on him or his mother, his father had told him that if he ever won the lottery—the one that he was always faithfully buying tickets for—the first thing he’d intended to do was buy a fancy car. The kind that would make everyone sit up and take notice.

“I’d get my due respect then,” he’d said. “Not like now.”

Usually right after that, the scenario would disintegrate into his father blaming everyone else for his misfortunes. And shortly after that, Kane would be on the receiving end of a particularly vicious beating. That had seemed to be the only way his father could cope with the events in his life, by taking out all his frustration on either his wife or his son. Or both.

Thinking of that now, Kane regarded the pricey vehicles. “You’d be surprised at what does the trick for some people. To some people, it’s all about the kind of vehicle they drive. The flashier, the better.”

Not him, Kelly thought. Durant wasn’t the type to go for flashy status symbols. She would bet on it.

But someone in his life, past or present, had valued flashy status symbols, she decided. She could tell by the way his tone had changed when he’d mentioned it.

Kelly waited half a beat before falling in step directly behind Kane. She meant for him to go first. To her surprise, he deliberately slowed his pace just enough to allow her to catch up.

She was about to thank him, then decided that Kane probably didn’t want her thanks. The less said on the subject, the better was probably the way he liked it. He was going to cause her to reevaluate her whole approach to partnerships, Kelly mused.

“Is there something I can do for you?” a very tanned, very polished looking man in his midforties asked politely as he walked up to them. His clean cut looks and the touch of silver at his temples, in addition to his manner of carrying himself, all pointed to him as being someone in charge.

And he was.

“Detectives Durant and Cavanaugh,” Kane said, taking out his wallet and holding it steady to allow the man to have a closer look at his identification. Kelly did the same. “We were wondering if you could tell us if one of your members—a Randolph Osborn—was friendlier with any one of your members than he might have been with some of the others.”

“Leon Edwards,” the man introduced himself. “I’m the director here.” He got back to the question that had been put to him. “Friendlier?” Edwards questioned, clearly amused. “You are asking me about Randolph Osborn, correct?”

“We are,” Kane confirmed, clearly waiting for a more precise answer.

The director seemed to gauge his words carefully. Memberships and high revenues in the form of donations were at stake here.

“Mr. Osborn, I’m afraid, wasn’t what you would call friendly with any of the members,” Edwards said stiffly. “He did associate with a few of our members, if that’s what you mean.”

Kelly stepped in, knowing her partner would take that as an affront. Kane, she was beginning to see, didn’t exactly have the gift of diplomacy. He favored the direct approach rather than attempting to sugarcoat his words. The man obviously never had subscribed to the old philosophy of catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.

“Could you give us a list of the members’ names?” Kelly requested.

Edwards looked at her and it was obvious to Kelly that he liked what he saw here better than he did when he was interacting with Kane. But there were still rules he obviously was obligated to follow.

Edwards’s gray eyes shifted from one detective to the other. “Just what’s this all about, detectives?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Osborn were the victims of a home invasion last night,” Kane informed the director matter-of-factly.

The man’s eyes widened from their customary slits. Edwards appeared genuinely surprised. “Was anyone hurt?” he asked.

Kelly could tell that her partner was going to give the director a flat “no” in response. It hurt nothing to give Edwards a crumb, feeding his obvious need to get something exclusive on the man, however minute.

“Only Mr. Osborn’s pride,” Kelly confided, lowering her voice as if she was sharing something that deserved to be labeled a secret.

“Well, I can understand that,” the man replied, bobbing his head up and down. And then, as if his brain was on some sort of ten-second delay, he looked up at the two detectives before him, clearly stunned. “And you two think that someone here is responsible for that home invasion?”

That was stating it too blatantly. Kelly decided to reframe her answer so that it sounded more as if they were working with a turn-of-the-last-century mystery. “We think someone here can possibly give us a clue or some sort of a lead as to who might have wanted to do this to the Osborns.”

“You mean break into their house and steal something from them?” Edwards asked. “I assure you that—”

“No, we mean someone who might have wanted to humiliate Mr. Osborn,” Kelly was quick to correct the director’s misimpression.

She glanced at Kane, then made up her mind that allowing Edwards to learn a little bit of the truth would help them close this case sooner rather than later.

“We believe that whoever did it could have easily gotten in and out with the Osborns sleeping right through the entire ordeal, none the wiser,” Kane said. “The objects of the theft were on the first floor and the Osborns’ bedroom is on the second.

“But they were roused, tied up and made to sit through the robbery. The thief obviously wanted to observe their humiliation firsthand. Would you know of anyone here that Mr. Osborn might have had words with? Or maybe there was someone harboring ill will against him for some reason?” Kane supposed.

“Someone?” Edwards echoed with a smirk he didn’t bother hiding. “Would you like those names alphabetically, chronologically or listed by the size of the offense?” the director asked them.

“That many?” Kane marveled. Even he hadn’t expected this to be turned into a crowd scene, which was the way it was clearly heading.

The director looked to either side of him as if to see if there was anyone within earshot.

Apparently satisfied that he wasn’t going to be overheard, Edwards confided to the pair, “You didn’t get this from me, but that man never met an argument he didn’t like. It is getting to the point that the board is seriously considering asking Mr. Osborn to relinquish his membership if he can’t learn how to get along with the other members.

“It would definitely be a shame to revoke their membership since everyone likes his poor, long-suffering wife.” And then Edwards’s face sobered as he focused on the subject. “But Mr. Osborn is making it very difficult for us to turn a blind eye to his irritating manner. We do have to think of the other members...”

Kane glanced at her and Kelly could see by the look in her partner’s eyes that Kane felt the director had given them way more information than they wanted regarding the man in question.

More is better than less, Kelly had decided a long time ago.

“Absolutely,” Kelly heartily agreed. “Mr. Edwards, we don’t want to make your job any more difficult or challenging than it already must be, but we could really use that list of people that Mr. Osborn has had differences with.” When the director continued to look reluctant to comply, Kelly added, “We could get a warrant making you give us that list, but that would call a great deal of unwanted attention to your club. You don’t need that sort of publicity now, do you?”

“No, of course not,” Edwards answered, his tan growing a few shades lighter right before her eyes. “All right. If you have something to write with, I can give you that list right now.”

“You don’t have to check your records or surveillance tapes?” Kane questioned suspiciously.

In response, the director tapped his temple. “All the records are right here, and I can access them whenever I want. That way there’s no fear of someone hacking into our database and making off with some—shall I say?—less than favorable information.”

“Understood,” Kelly said, humoring the man. Then, just for good measure, she added another layer of sweetener. “This club is certainly lucky to have someone like you running the place.”

The director beamed and wrote faster—just as Kelly suspected he would.

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