A crime-scene investigator and a gorgeous cop must track down a serial killer in USA TODAY bestselling author Marie Ferrarella’s explosive new novel!

For Susannah Quinn, heartbreakingly handsome detective Christian Cavanaugh O’Bannon is trouble that she doesn’t need. Still, her CSI instincts tell her a serial killer’s on the loose, so she agrees to work this case with Chris through long days—and even hotter nights. But his reckless charm is allowing him perilously close to her darkest secrets.

Going by the book has never been freewheeling Chris’s style, so an unofficial partnership with Susannah is just what he needs to stop a vicious murderer in his tracks. While he struggles to win the beautiful blonde’s trust, mutual desire puts them both in harm’s way...

“You must think I’m crazy,” Suzie whispered.

Chris shook his head. “Nope, don’t think that, either.”

She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself. She still felt as if she was coming undone. “I must look like a mess.”

“Not possible,” he told her, taking out his handkerchief. Very carefully, his eyes on hers, he began to wipe away the tears from her cheeks. “See,” he murmured, “better already.”

Before he knew exactly how it happened, Chris found himself lowering his mouth to Suzie’s and kissing her. Kissing away her pain.

With what felt like the last ounce of his strength, Chris put his hands on her shoulders and drew her away from him.

“Suzie,” he cautioned. “You don’t want to do this.”

She felt bewildered and not a little stunned, as if she was being pulled in two different directions at once. “I don’t?”

“I mean, you don’t want to do something you’re going to regret.”

“Then don’t make me regret it,” she whispered, taking hold of the front of Chris’s shirt and pulling him to her...

* * *

Be sure to check out the next books

in this exciting series:

Cavanaugh Justice—Where Aurora’s finest

are always in action

Cavanaugh in the Rough

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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To

Susan Kyser Frank

For Always Having

Such Great Things to Say.

This One’s For You

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

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

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

Extract

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

A host of thoughts, mostly fragmented, were playing ping-pong in Detective Christian Cavanaugh O’Bannon’s head as he drove to work. He was just a tad punchy, having gotten virtually no sleep. His goal was to go in early so that he could leave early and get his life back on track.

For now, that was the plan.

Last night’s revelry was still clinging to him like the light scent of expensive perfume that sold by the fraction of an ounce. Perfume worn by the woman he’d been trying to corner at the party he’d attended. She’d been friendly and warm, and just when he thought he was finally getting somewhere, he’d turned around and she was gone.

He’d stuck around, thinking their paths would cross again, but they hadn’t. There’d been other single women there, just as attractive in their own way, but somehow he couldn’t work up the enthusiasm about any of them the way he had about the one who “got away.”

Consequently, he was still somewhat frustrated, as well as just the slightest bit slow, rather than energized, the latter being his usual state.

This was why he’d almost missed them. Missed the two boys, barely in their teens, running as if one of those zombie creatures was after them.

What caught Chris’s attention, other than the fact that the teens were all but flying, was that the two looked paler than vanilla ice cream buried beneath a three-day snowfall.

Intrigued and definitely curious, Chris stopped going over just what had gone wrong with his fail-safe strategy last night, and became instantly alert and focused on what was happening right now.

It was a little after six in the morning and the sun had already staked out its position in the sky, so Chris knew his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. That his mind wasn’t doing creative things with the night’s leftover shadows. There were no shadows, only two teenage boys running from a strip mall as if their very lives depended on just how far away they could get and how fast they could do it.

Braking abruptly—and silently grateful that there was no one behind him—Chris did a creative U-turn and drove into the strip mall, instantly going in the same direction the boys were running—or fleeing, if that turned out to be the case. Part of his gut instincts—inherited from a family tree enormously populated by law enforcement agents—told him that “fleeing” was the more likely description.

Within a heartbeat, Chris brought his vehicle to a screeching halt right in front of the taller of the two teenagers. The youth fell, then quickly scrambled back up to his feet.

Fear and confusion were in both teens’ eyes.

They stared at him, not like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, but like two deer that had seen something really, really awful.

Chris rolled down the window closest to the teens.

“Something wrong, boys?”

Neither answered him, not because they were trying to be evasive or difficult, but because neither one of them seemed able to speak. They were both struggling to catch their breath, their lungs all but bursting from their effort to put as much distance between themselves and whatever it was that they had either seen or encountered within the empty department store.

Making a judgment call, Chris turned off his engine and got out of his vehicle.

His eyes swept over the two teens, making a quick evaluation of any potential threat they might pose. This was Aurora, CA, deemed to be a normally safe city. But no place was perfect, and as his mother, Maeve, was fond of saying, even paradise had its serpent, as Adam and Eve sadly discovered.

Shorter and of slighter build than he was, the two teens didn’t seem to pose any sort of a threat. Wearing light windbreakers that had flapped wildly as they ran, the duo didn’t look to be carrying any weapons, either, concealed or otherwise.

“Take your time,” Chris told them patiently. “Catch your breath and then tell me what has you both so spooked.”

Still gasping, the shorter one pointed frantically behind him to the building he and his friend had just vacated like two fledgling bats out of hell.

Chris took the opportunity to attempt to fill in some of the blanks and coax the story out of the breathless, frightened teens.

“Kresky’s,” he said, identifying their point of exit.

The duo nodded vigorously in response, but still didn’t seem to be able to form any actual words.

In its day, Kresky’s had been an upper-end department store, a chain of shops owned and developed by a wealthy East Coast-based family more than eighty years ago. At its zenith, the stores were located in major cities in almost every state in the country. They offered everything from clothing to cookware to toys. Prices were reasonable and customers were plentiful—until they weren’t.

Once it stopped being the place where everyone shopped, the stores grew fewer in number until there were almost none left at all. The one in Aurora was among the last to give up the ghost and had just recently—four months ago, if Chris recalled correctly—held its going-out-of-business sale, before permanently closing its doors.

“What about Kresky’s?” Chris asked, following that question with another one. “And what were you two doing in the store? It’s been cleared out for months. Why would you want to break in?”

As far as he knew, that final sale had included virtually everything in the place, including the fixtures. Only the plumbing and the walls were left, a sad testimony to a once thriving store where he had accompanied Sally Howe, the love of his life his last year in high school, to pick out her senior prom dress.

Neither teen in front of him seemed to have sucked enough air into his lungs to attempt to explain why they would break into an abandoned department store. Instead, the taller of them had only two words, barely audible, to offer.

The moment Chris heard them, he realized that he wasn’t being told why they had entered the building, but why they had exited it in such a huge hurry and why their complexions had turned so pasty white in the process.

“Dead body!”

Chapter 1

Sean Cavanaugh was accustomed to being the first one in the crime lab each morning. As the day shift crime scene lab manager, he liked getting a jump start on the day, as well as any work that might have been left over from the night before.

He had a top-notch, highly skilled crew that needed no hand-holding or close overseeing, beyond what might have been deemed necessary from a general organizational standpoint.

However, he could no longer lay claim to being the first one in each morning, not since his newest crime scene investigator had transferred in from out of state a little over nine months ago. Susannah Quinn, affectionately referred to by the people who worked with her as Suzie Q, seemed to always be somewhere on the premises no matter what the hour. She came in before anyone else, and no matter how late Sean stayed, she frequently stayed even longer. She also pulled double shifts on occasion and thought nothing of covering for her fellow CSI agents if they called in sick or took an unexpected vacation day.

The fact that she didn’t rust in the occasional California rain was just about the only thing that convinced Sean the newest addition to the team wasn’t a robot.

Walking into the lab on the way to his office, Sean, father of seven, uncle of countless more, many of whom were on the Aurora police force, stopped by Suzie’s work area and set down a large covered cup of coffee he had picked up on his way in to work.

“Good morning. What’s this?” she asked her superior, nodding at the container.

He’d picked up a smaller container of black coffee for himself. Sean liked his coffee the way he preferred his cases: simple. Young people, he’d discovered, liked creative coffee.

“I’m told it’s the latest in fad coffee,” he told her.

“And you bought it for me?” Suzie asked uncertainly.

Was he doing it in order to soften a blow? she couldn’t help wondering. She’d come to like Sean Cavanaugh a great deal, since taking this position at the crime lab, but she had paid a painful price to learn to take nothing—and no one—at face value.

Sean nodded. “I knew you’d be here.” After removing the lid from his own coffee, he paused to take a sip of the black liquid, savoring the heat as it wound through his veins and kick-started his system. “You know, Suzie,” he went on, snapping the lid back on the container, “indentured servitude was abolished in this country about four centuries ago. People who get paid for what they do for a living get to keep regular hours—at least most of the time. That means—in most cases—they come in at a reasonable hour in the morning and then go home at a reasonable hour at night.”

She smiled at him. It was a sunny smile that lit up a room and was meant to put whoever was speaking to her at ease. For the most part, it did, but every so often Sean had a feeling there was something behind the smile that no one was supposed to see. A secret that only Suzie was privy to.

Since he was a firm believer in other people’s privacy, Sean made no effort to push through the barriers. He did, however, do what he could to make it clear to Suzie that if she ever needed to talk about anything—and that included subjects that had nothing whatsoever to do with work—she could always talk to him.

“I know that,” she responded cheerfully. Reaching into the bottom drawer of her desk, she pulled out the small messenger bag she kept there. Taking out her wallet, she asked, “What do I owe you for the coffee?”

“How about you go home early for a change and we’ll call it even?” Sean suggested.

It wasn’t a deal Suzie felt she could honor. She shook her head, sending her straight hair swinging.

“That’s okay. I don’t mind staying longer if the job calls for it,” she replied. “Besides, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I left early.”

She thought Sean would drop the subject there, but she thought wrong. He actually had a list of suggestions ready for her. “You could get a hobby, get a pet, catch a movie, enroll in a cooking class, learn to windsurf.” The smile on his lips was nothing if not encouraging as he paused before adding, “The possibilities are endless.”

One by one Suzie addressed his points matter-of-factly. “My hobby is crime solving. With the hours I keep, I wouldn’t leave a pet alone all day—it wouldn’t be fair. There’s nothing currently playing in the movie theaters that I want to see. And FYI, I already know how to cook and windsurf,” she concluded. “Besides, I like my job, so why shouldn’t I put in some extra hours every now and then?”

Sean bit his tongue to keep from pointing out that it was a lot more than “every now and then.” It seemed she put in extra hours every day.

“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” he said with a laugh.

Suzie was careful when she made her response. She didn’t want Sean thinking of her as being argumentative. “At least for the points you raised.”

Sean looked at the young woman thoughtfully. The way Suzie had worded her reply made him think that there was something she didn’t have an answer to, something she wasn’t willing to talk about. He was tempted to ask if he was right, but again, that would be prying, and if she wanted him to know more than what she’d said, she would have told him.

The woman was a puzzle, no doubt about it. But puzzles took time to solve. Time and patience. Fortunately, he had both.

“Then I’ll leave you to those reports.” He started to leave, but then paused to add one more thing. “You do realize that you’re probably the only one of my people who willingly sits down to face reports without being hounded and threatened to do it.”

That in itself had him wondering about her. Susannah Quinn was young, beautiful and smart. Surely she had to have a life beyond these four walls and the crime scenes she investigated.

But from all indications, as far as he could see, she didn’t. There were no pictures on her desk, no mention of family or friends. There wasn’t even a next-of-kin or the name of someone to notify in case of an emergency on her work application.

Why?

Suzie turned his comparison over in her head. “Paperwork isn’t exactly something people really aspire to do.”

“But you do it,” Sean pointed out.

To her, paperwork was something to do to stave off going home and being alone with her thoughts. With her memories.

But she couldn’t tell Sean this.

So she shrugged. “It’s part of the job.”

Sean laughed as he walked away. “I’m going to ask Brian if there’s any money to be found in the budget so I can have you cloned.”

Brian Cavanaugh was his brother and Aurora’s chief of detectives. As such he was far more into the budget end of the police department than Sean was.

“Until then, I’ll just work faster,” Suzie promised, getting back to the report again.

Sean stopped just short of the doorway. “Don’t you dare. There’s such a thing as working yourself to death and you’ll do none of us any good—least of all yourself—if you do that. I’m serious, Suzie,” he told her, his voice dropping an octave. “I want you to go home at least at a regular time if not earlier today.”

Suzie made a noise in response that told him she had heard his voice, but hadn’t heard the words or the gist of what he was saying.

This wasn’t over, Sean promised himself. And then he laughed under his breath. He knew a lot of managers who would love being in his place, love having an employee who never seemed to get enough of work and always seemed to be tirelessly on the job.

But as a father, he just didn’t think that kind of behavior was healthy. If nothing else, Suzie was too tunnel-visioned. Suzie Quinn needed to have balance in her life. She was far too young to be strictly all about work, especially since she gave him the impression that she wasn’t doing it to get ahead. If he had to make a guess, he would have said she was doing it for the sake of justice.

It made him wonder if Suzie was hiding from something. Or more to the point, if there was something she was running from.

If things continued this way, Sean told himself as he walked into his office, he would have to do a little digging.

* * *

Suzie listened for the sound of a door closing. When she heard it, she released the breath she’d been holding and relaxed a little. She knew that her boss meant well when he tried to urge her to go home early, but he just didn’t understand. There was no reason for her to do so because there was no one and nothing waiting for her. No anticipated mail in her mailbox, no long-awaited email on her computer, no texts or messages of any sort from anyone she wanted to hear from.

Suzie heard from her brother, Lane, only on the occasional holiday—and not always then. Her mother was no longer among the living, but her father still was. However, she had absolutely no desire to hear from the senior member of her now defunct family. So there was nothing and no one to fill her off-hours.

Oh, a sense of curiosity mixed with desperation had made her actually give in and attempt to do something outside work, but that experiment, undertaken yesterday, had fallen rather flat, so there was no point in revisiting it.

All it had accomplished was making her come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t cut out for anything beyond work. She just wished that everyone else would come to the same conclusion and allow her to get on with her life the way she saw fit.

The immediate problem was that right now there was no case to occupy her mind or her skills, which was why, to fill the time, Suzie was doing the paperwork she had put off. It wasn’t that she was more conscientious than most of the people who worked in the crime lab. She just didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts. At least not yet. Not until she learned how to herd them all into a cage and keep them there, away from the day-to-day fabric of her life.

Aurora’s criminal element, such as it was, wasn’t cooperating. Although she would have been the first to admit that a crime-free city was a wonderful thing, Suzie couldn’t help hoping that something would come up by the time she put the last of the stack of paperwork to bed.

More than anything, she really didn’t want to be left to her own devices.

* * *

It wasn’t all that long ago that Chris had been the exact same age as the boys he’d just cornered. What he couldn’t remember, though, was ever being as scared as they appeared to be.

At the moment, he was having a difficult time getting either one to be coherent, even after they had recovered their breaths and voices. Now the problem seemed to be that they were both talking over one another. The end result was an annoying cacophony that left him as unenlightened as he had been when he’d first cornered them.

Straining to follow both disjointed monologues, Chris finally gave up trying to make heads or tails out of the dissonance. He drew in a breath, whistled long and loud, until both teenagers finally stopped talking at the speed of a runaway freight train.

Stunned, they stared at the man who had pulled them over.

“Don’t you want to hear what happened?” they cried in unison. It was the first time since they’d come flying out of the building that they were both intelligible.

“More than you can possibly know,” Chris assured them, “but I won’t find anything out if you keep on talking over one another like two screech owls in a barnyard competition. You,” he said, randomly picking the taller of the two. “What’s your name?”

“Bill,” the teen answered nervously, apparently worried that he was being singled out. “Bill Peterson.”

“And I’m—” The other teenager began to give his name, but Chris held up his hand.

“You’ll have your turn. Okay, Bill Peterson,” he said, addressing the first teenager. “Why were you and your friend here flying out of the old Kresky building like the devil himself was after you?”

The question had the teenagers turning ghostly pale again. Bill cleared his throat before speaking. “You’re not going to believe me.”

“Try me,” Chris said patiently, giving the impression that he wasn’t about to go anywhere until he got the truth out of them.

The two teenagers exchanged looks.

“Look at me, Bill,” he ordered. “Look at me when you answer.”

Bill flushed. “Maybe we better show you,” he muttered.

Instead of urging them on, Chris glanced from one to the other. He figured it was time to get the second teen’s name just in case the two got it into their heads to take off again. If they went in different directions, he could go after only one. Having both their names—if they weren’t lying—at least gave him a fighting chance of bringing the teenagers in.

He had a feeling this wasn’t just some prank. Something definitely was going on.

“And your name is?” His no-nonsense stare seemed to glue the second teen’s feet to the ground.

“Allen, sir.” The youth actually swallowed. Any second, Chris expected to see his Adam’s apple dance. “Allen Kott.”

“Okay, Allen Kott, why don’t you and Bill here show me what got the two of you looking paler than Snow White.” When the duo looked as if they intended to walk back into the building behind him, Chris gestured that they were to lead the way. He wanted to keep an eye on them the whole time.

The teens complied.

“How did you two happen to be in the building?” Chris asked casually as they crossed to the abandoned department store. “It’s supposed to be locked up.”

Bill laughed nervously. “Yeah, supposed to be.”

“But it wasn’t,” Chris assumed. This was prime real estate. Most of the strip malls and stores in the city were. He couldn’t see the building being left haphazardly opened so that anyone could have access to it. A great deal of destruction could be done in a minimum of time. That could generate a costly problem for anyone who’d just bought the property. “Did you break in?”

“No, it was already open,” Allen told him. “I swear,” he quickly added.

Chris was still having a hard time buying that. “How did you know?” he asked. “Or did you just keep trying different doors until you got lucky?”

“We figured we’d find it open because this was where the big bash was last night,” Allen told him matter-of-factly.

“What big bash?” Chris asked.

Were they pulling his leg, after all? But there was no mistaking the look of fear he’d seen. That had been very real and there had to be a cause behind it. How did it connect to this so-called “big bash” they were talking about?

“The big one.” When Chris gave no indication that he was any clearer on the subject than he had been a moment ago, Allen stressed, “The floating one.”

“A floating big bash,” Chris repeated. It still wasn’t making any sense to him.

“Yeah, man,” Bill said almost impatiently. “These rich guys, they find these big, empty venues to hold these big, flashy parties. Lots of food, lots of dancing, lots of really gorgeous women in expensive clothes with expensive jewelry. None of this fake stuff, you know?” he asked, as if trying to make himself clear. “Everything about these women is super-real.”

Chris stopped walking, his suspicions aroused. “And you know this how?”

“We’ve seen them,” Bill said. Allen hit him in the ribs with his elbow. “What’s that for?” he demanded.

The answer to that was evident by the way Chris looked at the teens. “You’ve been to these parties?”

“Not exactly,” Bill said, with far less bravado. “We kinda hid out and watched them all go in.”

Chris looked from one teen to the other, waiting. “Go on.”

Allen picked up the thread as they began walking again. “When it was over and everyone left, we thought we’d go in and, you know, scout around. See if anybody left anything behind, like maybe dropped some money or some jewelry we could sell.” He looked to see if the detective understood what he was saying. “We weren’t stealing or nothing.”

Chris used a more descriptive word. “You were scavenging.”

“We were hunters,” Bill said, with just a touch of indignation, attempting to glide right over the fact that they were both trespassing on what was at bottom private property.

For now, Chris went along with the euphemism. “Okay, and exactly what was it that you two big game hunters found?”

The teens’ bravado was gone again, vanishing like the first blush of spring beneath a sun grown too hot too fast.

And then Chris saw why.

They were inside the deserted department store now, and rather than finding the debris that was usually left behind after a building was all but gutted, Chris saw glitter strewn across the floor like the confetti left after a parade.

And over in the corner, hidden behind a long table that had been brought in to accommodate food or a VJ or something along those lines, was the unclad body of a young woman whose color had been drained out of her less than a day ago.

Chapter 2

Taking out his flashlight, Chris crossed over to the body quickly. While there was some light coming in through the store windows, they were far enough away to make visibility around the body rather dim.

Chris panned around the area slowly. The dead woman appeared to be a blonde in her midtwenties. There was nothing to distinguish her from any of the hundreds of other hopeful, beautiful blondes who flocked to Southern California each year, their heads full of dreams, searching for fame and fortune.

This blonde’s search had been traumatically and permanently terminated, Chris thought, wondering who she was and how many lives were going to be affected by her death.

He squatted down to get a closer look at the immediate crime scene, searching for anything that could give him a glimmer of insight as to why she’d been killed and why she’d been left like this.

Behind him, the two teenagers who had led him here were becoming antsy. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure they weren’t getting ready to flee.

“She was like that when we found her, honest,” Allen cried the second Chris made eye contact with him.

Bill added his agitated voice to his friend’s testimony. “We didn’t do anything to her!”

Because of the lack of blood in the immediate area, Chris assumed that the woman had been killed somewhere else and then moved.

The question now was who moved her, the killer or these agitated teenagers. Turning off his flashlight, Chris got back up to his feet and faced them. “Did either one of you touch her?” he asked.

“You mean, like when she was dead?” Allen cried, his brown eyes widening. The idea clearly horrified him. “Hell, no!” he declared emphatically. “She’s dead.”

Chris turned to the other teen, waiting for his answer. Bill looked as if he was in danger of swallowing his own tongue—or throwing up. He shook his head vigorously. When he finally regained his ability to talk, he said, “We got out of here as soon as we saw her. We’re not freaks.” Stunned by the suggestion Chris had made, he cried, “Hey, man, what kind of people do you know?”

“Not the kind that you would invite to a party,” Chris murmured. Taking out his phone, he started to put in a call to his precinct. But he stopped when he saw that the teens were about to leave. “Where do you think you two are going?”

Bill and Allen exchanged looks. “We got class,” Bill told him, as if that was their get-out-of-jail-free card.

His call temporarily put on hold, Chris moved to block their exit. “Not right now, you don’t.”

Allen appeared distressed. “But I’ve got a second-period test,” the teen complained, then all but wailed, “I can’t miss it.”

“I’ll write you a note,” Chris told him dismissively. “Stay put or I’ll have to cuff you.” He didn’t trust them to obey. “Now stand over there where I can watch you,” he instructed, indicating the wall right behind the dead woman who had sent them running.

The teens regarded the body nervously.

“Could we stand over here instead, not so close to her?” Allen asked, pointing to an area in the opposite direction.

“Death isn’t catching,” Chris informed him in a no-nonsense voice. “Unless, of course, you and your friend try to run.”

Pinning them with a look that all but nailed the two teens to the spot, Chris completed his call to the precinct and started the ball rolling.

* * *

Dispatched by Sean Cavanaugh, Dirk Bogart peered into the lab, looking for the woman he’d been told by his boss to fetch.

Spotting her at the far end of the room, Bogart smiled as he called out, “Put your papers aside, Suzie Q. We’ve got a live one. Or rather,” he corrected with a grin that went from ear to ear, “a dead one. Boss man says to tell you that you’re up. I’ll drive.”

The words came out like rapid gunfire, one after another, barely allowing Suzie to absorb one sentence before Bogart had already moved on to the third.

Replaying the words a beat or so behind their actual lightning-fast delivery, Suzie nodded and grabbed the gear she personally packed and then repacked after each trip to a crime scene. Experience had taught her that anything else would already be in the car and ready to go.

Because she liked being in control of any situation she found herself in, Suzie preferred driving to the crime scene and she preferred to do that driving alone. But she knew that making waves, even little waves, put people off, and in this case she had to admit it really wasn’t worth it. She was careful to pick her battles and fought only those that really needed to be fought.

This was not one of them.

Although, she thought several minutes into the drive, she would have done a lot better on her own. If there was anything that Dirk liked better than the sound of his own voice, Suzie had a feeling it hadn’t been discovered yet.

The two-year CSI vet talked the entire way to the crime scene. He talked about the weather, the state of the country and how he was a thrill junky, which was why, he went on to tell her, he’d taken this job in the first place.

For the most part, Suzie managed to tune him out, and made appropriate noises that might have been taken as agreement only when it sounded as if he was ready to challenge her if she didn’t concur with his many stated opinions.

When Bogart finally brought the vehicle to a stop at what was clearly a roped-off area, Suzie was quick to get out of the car, clutching her crime scene case to her. She was glad to see that Sean was already on the scene.

Spotting him, she made a beeline for the man.

“I see we managed to get you away from your paperwork,” Sean observed pleasantly.

“Could we get me away from Bogart now, as well?”

The words just slipped out, surprising her as much as they obviously did Sean. Ordinarily, she wasn’t given to complaining and she could see that her request immediately registered with the man.

He laughed, an understanding look on his face. “Couldn’t stop talking, could he?”

Following her superior into the abandoned department store, Suzie shook her head. “Not for a second. I didn’t know a human being was capable of saying that many words a minute.”

Sean walked toward the taped-off area. “I thought that maybe being in your company, he’d pick up a few tips on how to be silent. Guess not,” he concluded philosophically. “Next time, you can ride with me.”

“I think I’d really like that.” She tried to sound neutral about it, but didn’t quite succeed. She heard the older man laugh again.

“He’ll hit his stride, given enough time,” Sean told her.

“What if that is his stride?” Suzie asked, far from comfortable with that thought.

“People transfer out of the department on occasion,” Sean answered, as if that was something that might give her hope. “The crime scene is right over there.” He pointed ahead of them.

Relieved that Bogart hadn’t caught up to them with the rest of the equipment yet, Suzie hurried closer to Sean.

“Do we know anything yet?” she asked, assuming that whoever had called the crime into their division had given a few details.

“Only that apparently Aurora has a whole nightlife I know nothing about,” said a man who walked up behind them. “According to the two kids who found the body, there are supposedly decadent ‘floating’ parties being thrown in abandoned, high-end buildings all through Southern California.”

Sean nodded, taking the scene in. “Anything else, Chris?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” the newcomer replied. That was when his voice finally struck a familiar chord for her and Suzie turned around.

About to say something else to his uncle, Chris could only stare at the young woman who had come in with Sean. Recognition came, riding a thunderbolt, in less than a heartbeat.

The woman from last night’s party.

The one he hadn’t been able to get to first base with.

First base? Hell, he didn’t even get to pick up the bat to begin to play the game. Their entire interaction had consisted of a great many back-and-forth exchanges that had passed as banter, at least to his ear. Looking back, he realized that it might not have necessarily seemed that way to her.

As a matter of fact, since she had disappeared the way she had, he was sure of it.

Yet here she was, standing in front of him, looking very different in the light of day—and yet enticingly the same, except that she was wearing jeans and a jacket instead of the clinging cocktail dress she’d worn last night.

“You,” Chris stated.

A great deal was inferred in that single word. It spoke of the party she’d attended and the time he’d spent attempting to get to know her. It spoke of his bewilderment when he’d turned away just for a moment, only to find her gone. He’d scanned the area, trying to find her, before he finally gave up and moved on.

Moving on had ultimately proved more fruitful, which was why he was so tired this morning.

Tired, but far from satisfied.

He had to get it into his head that he wasn’t eighteen anymore, Chris told himself, and that any all-nighters he pulled had to be centered around work, not partying.

“Me,” Suzie replied with a smile, neither her expression nor her voice giving anything away.

For all Chris knew, it could be just an automatic response. Except that it was her, the woman who had, like a very old song had once said, drawn him from across a crowded room. He was sure of it.

Sean looked from his nephew to the young woman he felt had all the earmarks of becoming his best investigator, once whatever baggage she was secretly carrying was unpacked and put away. “You two know one another?” he asked, interested. It certainly sounded that way to him.

Chris was the first to speak up. “Apparently not,” he admitted, thinking of the way last night had gone and the vanishing act she had pulled. He’d waited around before ultimately moving on, but his mystery woman never made a reappearance. He’d just assumed she had left the club. “But not for lack of trying,” he added significantly, still looking at the woman who had come in with his uncle. From the way she was dressed, she was obviously part of the department. Something else that hadn’t come up last night.

Rather than being annoyed or feeling as if he had been played, Chris found himself intrigued.

“Then let me introduce you,” Sean proposed, looking from his nephew to the young investigator as he quickly assessed the situation. He’d been exposed to enough younger Cavanaugh males and their robust hormones when it came to dealings with the opposite sex to pick up on what was going on—and what possibly hadn’t, as well.

“Chris, this is Suzie Quinn, the newest crime scene investigator on my team. She’s a lot sharper than her very youthful appearance might lead you to believe,” he assured his nephew—or maybe it was more like a warning. “Nothing gets by her,” Sean said proudly. “Suzie, this is Detective Christian Cavanaugh O’Bannon, one of my nephews. One of my many nephews,” he added with a laugh.

She knew there were more than a few Cavanaughs scattered throughout the various departments of the Aurora Police Department, but up until now, she had to admit she hadn’t really paid all that much attention to the fact. It wasn’t something that seemed work-related to her.

“How many nephews do you have?” she asked, turning her attention to her supervisor rather than the guy who had tried to make points with her on her one and only venture into a social scene in the last three years.

She’d learned her lesson there.

Sean’s smile was almost rueful. “To be honest, I no longer know. Every time I turn around there seem to be more of them—nieces and nephews,” he clarified. “We have a very prolific family tree.”

“Apparently,” Suzie murmured.

“However,” Sean continued, turning his attention to the young woman whose death had brought them all here, “being prolific is something this poor individual will never get the chance to be.” He looked back at his nephew. “Do we know how she got here?”

“All we know at the moment is that according to those two kids—” Chris indicated the duo he had standing nearby “—there was something like a wild party here last night. I’m assuming that she attended that event, and somewhere during the evening or early hours, became a casualty.”

“Did those two boys witness anything?” Sean asked.

Chris laughed shortly. “According to them, everything and nothing. All I could get out of them was that they fell asleep waiting for the party to be over. When they woke up, everyone was long gone. They went into the building—which they claimed was unlocked—to see if they could find anything of value that the partygoers might have left behind.”

Sean saw that Suzie had moved closer to the dead woman and crouched down, studying her intently.

“She looks like she might have been valuable to someone,” she murmured, more to herself than to either of the two men next to her.

“Why don’t you try to talk to those two boys, Suzie?” Sean suggested when she rose to her feet again. “See if you can get anything more out of them than they told Chris.”

Although generally mild mannered and easygoing, Chris reacted to what he felt his uncle wasn’t saying aloud, but was inferring: that he had done less than a good job with the teens.

“I didn’t exactly use a rubber hose on them, Sean,” he protested. “I was my usual charming, persuasive self.”

“Then it’s a wonder those poor guys aren’t traumatized,” Suzie said wryly as she went to interview the two boys.

Torn between going with her just to see if she could do better with the duo, and hanging back to ask his uncle a few questions about the woman, Chris decided to go with the latter, but only for a few moments.

He had to admit that he was still feeling his way around in this brand-new family hierarchy. There were some people within the department who were less charitable. They referred to the Cavanaughs as a dynasty—and not in a kind way.

To Chris, the fact that he had so many relatives in the police department just made it the family business. A great many family members followed one another into a line of work. For his, that involved all different walks of law enforcement. That there were so many of them didn’t change the fact that they were still, at heart, a family. And as such, they shared things. Like information.

The information he required was of a very specific nature.

“How long has Suzie been working for you?” Chris asked as he followed his uncle.

Sean began to process the crime scene. Bogart had finally entered and was setting up the equipment he’d carried in.

“Nine months,” Sean replied.

That seemed like a short amount of time. Chris couldn’t help wondering where she’d worked before that, and asked.

“She wasn’t working for me.” Sean glanced up at him and smiled. “Arizona. Same field,” he added, before his nephew could ask. Obviously there was something about Suzie that Chris found intriguing. It wasn’t hard to see why. Sean had noticed that Dirk had been dancing around her, showing off like an eager puppy. To her credit, Suzie appeared to be oblivious to all of this. “Anything else?”

He might as well go for broke. “Is she married?” Chris asked bluntly.

Sean paused and looked at his nephew for a long moment. He didn’t want to see either of them getting hurt. “Don’t go getting ideas about this one, Chris.”

Chris came to the only conclusion he could. “Then she’s married.”

“I didn’t say that.”

He circled around to get in front of his uncle. “What are you saying?” he asked.

Sean thought of the impression he’d gotten more than once when he’d talked with Suzie. “That some people need to work things out before they can come out and play.”

Chris wasn’t sure he understood. “What kind of things?”

“Things they don’t broadcast.” Suzie’s issues were her own. Sean wasn’t about to intrude or second-guess what was going on in the young woman’s head. “She’s very good at her job, Chris. I don’t want to lose her.”

“Don’t worry,” he replied, flashing a confident grin. “I have no intention of making her go away, Uncle Sean.” Chris reverted to the more familiar form of address, since they were alone. “In fact,” he said, walking off to see how Suzie’s interview with the teens was going, “it’s the exact opposite.”

“Just remember that I have your mother on speed dial,” Sean called after him.

Blowing out a breath, Sean shook his head. He supposed, if he thought long enough, he could remember being that young and feeling that invincible once. But right now, it seemed an eternity ago.

Maybe two eternities.

Sean roused himself. He had a crime scene to get back to and assess. And a young woman to avenge. Everything else had to take second place.

“Ah, Dirk,” he said, beckoning Bogart forward. “Just in time.”

He pretended not to notice the disappointment on the investigator’s face as he kept the young man from joining Suzie.

Chapter 3

It was totally unexpected. Striding across the former department store toward Suzie, Chris was just in time to see it.

To see her smile.

She turned around just as he reached her, and the smile on her lips was nothing short of dazzling. It actually seemed to light up the area.

“Wait right there, boys,” Suzie said as she left the two teens and joined him. “Detective O’Bannon will probably want to talk to you before he lets you leave.”

Reaching the crime scene investigator, Chris turned his back to the teenagers so that they weren’t able to overhear his conversation with her. He couldn’t help noticing that she seemed exceptionally pleased with herself. It piqued his curiosity.

“You’ve made yourself at home with my witnesses,” he noted.

“Crime scene witnesses,” Suzie corrected. “And I think I’ve got everything that you might want.”

He couldn’t contain the grin that curved his lips. “No question about that.”

Suzie’s eyes narrowed, telling him she didn’t find him witty, nor was she flattered. “I was talking about the crime scene.”

“Okay, we’ll go with that for now,” Chris agreed. “And what is it you’ve got that I wasn’t able to get?” he challenged gamely.

Suzie deliberately started small. “I have their names and addresses—”

He waved dismissively. “Already got that,” he told her.

She hated being cut off like this. He could have the decency to hear her out. “I wasn’t finished,” she informed him.

Chris inclined his head as if to tender an apology. “Sorry, go ahead.”

“I have their names and addresses,” she repeated, “so that we can send them their cell phones once our computer technician takes a look at them.”

He thought of the mind-numbing selfies that were probably on both cell phones. “And she’d want to do that because?”

Obviously, she was going to have to spell this all out for him, Suzie thought. The preening homicide detective wasn’t quite as brilliant as he thought himself to be. “Because our teen voyeurs and would-be enterprising thieves might not have gotten into the party while it was going on, but they were tenacious enough to find a window that wasn’t covered, and they took videos of the people attending. It might amount to nothing,” she said, “but then again...”

“It might be something,” Chris agreed, instantly hopping on her bandwagon. He looked over her shoulder at the teens waiting to be released, and frowned. “They didn’t tell me they took videos of the party attendees with their phones.”

The look on Suzie’s face said he should have figured that part out for himself because it was so obvious. “They’re teenagers with smart phones. They take videos of everything at this age.”

Rather than appearing annoyed the way she’d expected him to, there was admiration in the detective’s eyes. It took her aback.

“You’re good,” he told her.

He expected her to preen a little, because it was her due, given the circumstances. But she wound up surprising him by merely shrugging her shoulders. “Just doing my job.”

In his opinion, what she’d just done could make his job a whole lot easier. “If we didn’t have an audience, I’d kiss you,” he declared, looking at the two cell phones she produced. She was holding them gingerly with a handkerchief.

“Then lucky for you we have an audience, because otherwise I’d be forced to deck you,” Suzie responded, offering him a spasmodic smile at the end of her statement.

The corners of her mouth went down again as she became serious. Sealing each phone, one at a time, into an evidence bag, Suzie carefully wrote down the time, date and which youth it belonged to.

Finished, she held the transparent bags out to Chris. “Drop these off with the lab tech after you take these boys to their school.”

Rather than grow irritated that the woman he had tried and failed to pick up last night was issuing orders to him, Chris took it all in stride. “You do have a take-charge personality, don’t you?”

Suzie waited for him to challenge her. When he didn’t, she said simply, “Again, just doing what needs to be done.”

Chris was about to say something further to her but she turned away, shifting her attention to the next thing on the list: taking close-ups of the dead woman, as well as the area around her. The victim might not have been killed in this exact place, but there could be some sort of clue accidentally left behind that would lead them to identify where the woman had been murdered.

Chris knew when he was being dismissed. For now, because he wanted to get the cell phones logged into evidence and then to the computer lab as soon as possible, he let it go.

“C’mon, guys. Teacher’s issuing you a hall pass,” he told the two teenagers. “Looks like you’ll be going to school, after all.”

Allen and his friend exchanged glances as they were being herded out of the former department store. Bill nodded in response to Allen’s unspoken question. Two minds with a single thought: ditching school.

“Hey, if it’s all the same to you, can you just drop us off at the Golden Gate Plaza?” Allen asked, referring to the largest shopping mall in Aurora.

“During school hours?” Chris asked, dramatically putting his hand to his chest. “Now what kind of an officer of the law would I be if I aided and abetted your hooky playing?” he asked. “You’re going to school, boys,” he told them cheerfully. “And I’m taking you there.”

The duo grumbled quietly—until they reached Chris’s car, a Lincoln Continental from a by-gone era when fins still meant something. The car was large, and provided the protection of a tank.

“Hey, is this yours?” Bill asked, as he and Allen stopped next to the vehicle Chris had brought them to.

Chris looked at the duo as if he was dealing with a pair of living brain donors. “No, when I saw you two running, I stole someone else’s ride so I could cut you off in an impressive car. Of course this is mine,” he said in irritation as he unlocked the doors.

Neither teenager seemed to be insulted by the sarcastic response. Allen ran his hand along the panel closest to him. “I guess I didn’t notice what an outstanding piece of craftsmanship this was.”

Chris noted that the teen was all but drooling on his car. He anticipated the next question that either boy was going to ask and headed it off. “I got the car by saving up every spare dime and working really, really hard. I think that the two of you should stop fixating on my ride and start figuring out what you’re going to tell your parents.”

Bill looked at him as if he had just begun speaking in a foreign language that the teenager couldn’t quite grasp. “Our parents?”

Digging deep, Chris searched for even simpler words to use as he explained. “Well, yeah, because after I drop you off, I’m going to make it a point to pay a visit to your parents. I think they’re entitled to know how you’re spending your school nights.”

“Yesterday wasn’t a school night,” Bill protested. “It was a Sunday.”

The teen wasn’t following him, Chris thought. Definitely not the shiniest apple on the tree. “But today’s a school day, isn’t it?”

Bill still didn’t look as if he understood where this was going. “Huh?”

Chris shook his head as he turned into the high school parking lot. “See, if you studied more and lurked less, you’d understand what I’m talking about. Look sharp, guys,” he told them, pointing to the building on the right. “School’s up ahead.”

It grew very quiet in his car as he pulled into a parking space that had a time limit of twenty minutes printed right above it.

* * *

“Can you put a rush on it?” Chris asked the slender, pretty computer technician less than half an hour after depositing the teenagers at the school.

Valri Cavanaugh frowned ever so slightly as she looked down at the two bagged cell phones that had just been placed on her desk. Raising her eyes to her cousin’s, she said, “You do realize that just because your middle name is Cavanaugh doesn’t mean you automatically go to the head of the line, right?”

“Right,” he agreed, then went on to enumerate the reasons he felt he could ask his cousin to put a rush on lifting videos from the two phones. “This goes to the head of the line because it might show us who killed a perfectly innocent young woman who looked enough like you to be your sister. Because the teenaged boys who own these devices are even now having withdrawal symptoms, enduring traumatic separations from their cell phones, and we all know they would have rather given up a kidney. And last but not least, because I’m trying to impress this really cute crime scene investigator with my crime solving powers.” Finished, he took in a deep breath, then said, “For all the above reasons, I need you and your really clever expertise to lift and enhance the videos on these phones”

This was not Valri’s first rodeo—nor was it her first sweet-talking relative. Growing up with her brothers had made her all but immune to this sort of charismatic persuasion. “What you need, Detective O’Bannon,” she informed him, “is help.”

Chris was all innocence as he replied, “That’s what I’m asking for.”

Valri wouldn’t budge. “Really serious help.”

“Still on the same page,” Chris told her.

“Serious mental help, Christian,” she emphasized, feeling as if she still wasn’t getting through to him.

“Haven’t had your morning tea yet, have you?” Chris asked sympathetically. He knew that his cousin was partial to tea, unlike the rest of his clan, who all but ran on black coffee.

“Haven’t had my breakfast yet,” Valri complained in a weak moment. “I came in early to try to catch up on my backlog.”

And that was clearly not happening, she thought, looking accusingly at the sealed cell phones on her desk. It was just a matter of time before she gave in and she knew it.

“Well, if you do this—” he nodded at the evidence bags “—it’ll be that much less backlog you’ll have to deal with.”

Valri blew out a breath. She’d made a valiant attempt, but now had to give up. The less time she spent resisting, the more she would have for the rest of her work.

“All right, I’ll do it,” she declared. “It’ll be worth it just to get you out of my hair.”

Chris sifted a long, silky blond strand through his fingers. “And such lovely hair it is, too.”

Valri pulled the strand away from him. “You can cut the blarney, Chris. I already agreed to process the cell phones.”

He pretended to look stunned. “Valri, I’m surprised at you. We don’t avail ourselves of ‘blarney.’ That’s for the Irish. Our ancestors came from Scotland.”

Valri sighed. The man had a wonderful baritone voice that made the most trivial information sound important. But even so, it was time to get him out of her lab.

“You know, the longer you talk,” she told him, “the longer it’s going to take for me to go through all this.”

“Consider me gone,” Chris announced, already heading for the door. “Oh, and don’t forget to make copies of those party videos,” he reminded her. “Uncle Sean’s going to want to take a look at them himself. You know how hands-on he is.”

“As opposed to being all handsy,” Valri countered, looking at her cousin knowingly.

Rather than pretend not to understand what she was talking about, Chris grinned. “We all have our calling,” he said, and then winked. “But between you and me, my hands never go anywhere they’re not invited.”

“Just go!” Valri ordered, pointing to the doorway with a laugh.

“Like I was never here,” he replied and made himself scarce.

* * *

“Miss me?” Chris asked late that afternoon, stepping into Suzie’s work area.

Lost in thought as she’d been, she stifled a gasp. The detective had caught her by surprise and it took an effort not to show it. Suzie didn’t like revealing any sort of vulnerability, and to be caught off guard or unprepared was to be vulnerable, in her book.

Collecting herself, she answered with a careless, “Not even for a second.” Then suggested, “Try being gone longer.”

“Maybe next time,” he promised.

Although she wanted to ignore him, she couldn’t. It wasn’t just that his presence seemed to fill up the room, even one as large as the lab. He’d brought something with him, as well.

“What’s that?” she asked, nodding at the tablet he had just dropped on her desk.

“That is your very own copy of Aurora’s wild nightlife,” he told her.

“I thought I was already looking at it,” Suzie deadpanned.

Chris inclined his head. “Touché,” he replied, then, playing along, said, “This is the video version. Or more specifically, a copy of what our very own wizard of a computer technician managed to get off the Three Stooges Minus One’s cell phone videos of the so-called ‘floating’ party that they couldn’t crash—thanks to you,” he added, because, after all, if Suzie hadn’t asked the right questions and found out about the videos the teenagers had made, they wouldn’t have this potential lead.

“Nice save,” Suzie allowed, amused despite herself. “But you don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings if you don’t mention my part in securing the videos. I’m not in this for the credit.”

Chris leaned casually against her desk, every inch the consummate laid-back detective. “What are you in this for?” he asked.

She could feel his eyes pinning her down even if she deliberately didn’t look up and make eye contact. “A regular paycheck at the end of the week,” she told him dismissively.

“Uh-uh,” Chris said.

He leaned down in front of her, getting in her face and making it impossible for her to avoid eye contact with him. His gaze felt as if it could delve right into her soul and she really resented the invasion.

“That isn’t it, either,” he told her confidently.

“Then what is?” she asked, doing her best not to allow her temper to flare.

Suzie braced herself to listen to the detective spin his outlandish theories. At the very least, she expected to hear him spout some grandiose rhetoric. But it was her turn to be surprised by him.

“I don’t know yet,” Chris told her honestly. “But I’m working on it. I’ll let you know when I come up with an answer.”

Suzie frowned. She didn’t have time to waste watching this too-handsome-for-his-own-good detective trying to mesmerize her. She had work to do and so did he.

“Your time would be better spent coming up with answers regarding our dead woman,” she said in a no-nonsense tone.

Our.

Her slip of the tongue was not lost on Chris. The grin on his lips told her so before he uttered a word. “Our first joint venture. We should savor this.”

“What I’d savor,” she informed him, “is some peace and quiet so I can work. Specifically, some time away from you.”

The expression that came over Chris’s face was one of doubt. “Now, if we spend time apart, how are we going to work on this case together?” he asked, conveying that what she’d just said lacked logic.

Suzie had only one word to give him in response to his question. “Productively.”

With that, she went back to doing her work, but that lasted for only a few moments. A minute at best. Though she tried to block out his presence, he still managed to get to her.

He was standing exactly where he had been, watching her so intently that she could literally feel his eyes on her skin. It caused her powers of concentration to deteriorate until they finally became nonexistent.

Unable to stand it, she looked up and glared at him. “What do you want, O’Bannon?” she muttered. It took everything she had not to shout the question at him. The man was making her crazy.

Chris never hesitated as he answered her. “Dinner.”

She clenched her jaw. “You can buy it in any supermarket,” she informed him coldly.

He sidestepped the roadblocks she was throwing up as if they weren’t there.

“With you.”

This time Suzie was the one who didn’t hesitate for a second. “Not at any price. Now please go before I take out my manual on workplace harassment and start underlining passages to get you banned from my lab.”

“It’s the crime scene lab, not yours,” he reminded her pleasantly, taking a page out of her book. And then Chris inclined his head. “Until the next time.”

“There is no next time,” she countered, steaming even though she refused to look up again.

“Don’t forget we’re working this case together,” he told her cheerfully.

He thought he heard Suzie say “Damn” under her breath as he left the lab.

Chris smiled to himself.

Chapter 4

Suzie counted to a hundred.

Slowly.

She’d already gotten the impression that O’Bannon was the impatient type, so if he was planning on doubling back to make a reappearance in her lab, she was fairly certain he’d do it way before she reached a hundred.

Just to be sure, she counted to a hundred a second time.

Finished, she relaxed and turned her attention to the tablet the detective had deposited almost carelessly on her desk—as if he didn’t know that her interest would immediately be drawn to it. She mentally crossed her fingers that the two fumbling teens had somehow managed to capture something of significance on their phones, and that it wasn’t all just blurred videos.

Heaven knew she wasn’t getting anywhere with the photos she’d taken at what now amounted to the secondary crime scene, Suzie thought. If the woman’s killer had dumped her body there—and Suzie was certain that whoever it was had—she had no hope of singling out his or her shoe prints from all the other prints that were so pervasive around the body.

She hadn’t found any traces of blood in the area, either. None belonging to the victim and none that might have pointed to her would-be killer. In addition, Suzie hadn’t seen anything beneath the young woman’s nails to indicate that she had tried to fight off her killer.

What she did find, however, was a great deal of spilled alcohol, all varieties, on the floor, as well as traces of drugs that at first assessment appeared to be of the recreational variety.

She found it rather ironic that she was dealing with that sort of party scene now. She herself had almost gone that route when the scandal had broken wide open. Only her fierce resolve to hold herself together for her mother’s sake had kept her from doing it. Kept her from availing herself of the alcohol and drugs that would have numbed her acute pain, as well as her acute shame, and brought her peace, at least for a little while.

And then, after the trial was over, her mother had killed herself, abruptly bringing what was left of Suzie’s own shattered world crashing down on her.

She paused for a moment, drawing in a long breath as she struggled to center herself and put the barriers back up where they belonged. She needed to contain those memories, to keep them as far away from her mind as she possibly could.

Though she hated admitting to weakness, she knew that she couldn’t handle those memories yet.

Maybe she never would.

Squaring her shoulders, she pulled the tablet closer and activated the video. She had clues to find and a murder to make sense of. She owed it to the dead girl.

She owed it to a lot of dead girls.

* * *

It felt like she’d been staring at the videos, playing them over and over again, for hours now. Each time she did, she picked up something new she hadn’t seen before.

But now her eyes felt as if they were burning.

Leaning back in her chair for a moment, Suzie closed them.

When she opened her eyes again, only the extreme control that she had learned to exercise kept her from screaming. Even so, her heart pounded like a war drum.

When she’d shut her eyes to momentarily rest them, she’d been alone in the lab. When she opened them, she found she wasn’t alone any longer.

Chris was standing right in front of her, less than two feet away.

Damn O’Bannon, he would wind up giving her a heart attack.

“Why are you sneaking up on me?” she demanded, unconsciously pressing her hand against her chest, as if to keep her heart from leaping out.

“I wasn’t sneaking,” Chris told her innocently. “Although I did leave my tap shoes at home. The chief of d’s frowns on scuff marks the taps make on the wood,” he explained, keeping an entirely straight face.

She didn’t have the patience to listen to him go on and on. Her composure had faded hours ago.

“It’s late, O’Bannon. What are you doing here?” she asked.

Rather than becoming defensive, he turned the tables on her, saying mildly, “I could ask you the same thing.”

She didn’t care for the nature of his question, or his attitude. She hadn’t invaded his work space; he had invaded hers.

And she wanted him gone.

“I have work to do. I like working late,” she emphasized. “There’s usually no one around to bother me,” she added, looking at him pointedly. Her message was clear.

Or so she thought.

Chris nodded. “I had a hunch,” he told her. “That’s why I came back.”

Give the situation, he wasn’t making any sense. But then, she was beginning to think that he was doing that on purpose. Well, whatever his game was, she didn’t have the time or the desire to play. She wanted him gone.

Now.

“Unless you have some new information for me—” Suzie began, but she never got the opportunity to finish.

“No, no new information,” Chris confessed, making no move to leave.

“Well then—”

Again he didn’t give her a chance to finish. “I do, however, have this.”

She still had no idea what he was talking about—or why the man just couldn’t take a hint, even if she was hitting him over the head with it.

“‘This?’” she questioned.

She looked on in surprise as he hefted a large paper bag from the floor and placed it on her desk—obviously one he’d brought in when she had her eyes closed. Chris began to unpack its contents.

Within seconds, he’d taken out five steaming white containers, each embossed with red Chinese characters on the sides.

“You know the old saying, if the mountain won’t come to Moh—”

“I am neither the mountain nor the person in your imaginary drama,” Suzie pointed out sharply.

Chris rolled with the punches. “Okay, then let’s just call it a mercy dinner.” Since she didn’t instantly protest, he continued. “You haven’t moved from that spot since I dropped off the videos. You’ve got to be starving by now.”

Suzie’s mouth dropped open, but she recovered quickly. “You’re spying on me?” she cried, not knowing if she should be creeped out or just angry. Who did this man think he was to take over this way? To keep tabs on her every movement?

“No,” he stated. “What I did was have a casual conversation with my uncle.” Before she could take him to task any further, he added, “I called him to let him know I’d gotten the cell phone videos copied and that I’d dropped them off with you. That’s when he mentioned your habit of burning the midnight oil and that you’d probably be doing the same thing with this. He expressed concern that you had a habit of forgetting to eat.”

Chris glanced at her pointedly as he flattened the now empty bag, setting it off to one side. He had put out the boxes, as well as the chopsticks and napkins that had come with the order. He also laid out the two sets of plastic cutlery he had specifically requested. He had no idea if Suzie knew how to use chopsticks, and he’d come prepared.

“If you recall, I did mention dinner today,” he reminded her.

“And if you recall, I mentioned the word no,” she countered with a defiant note.

Chris shrugged, unfazed. He dragged over a chair from another workstation.

“I just figured that was before you got hungry.” He noticed that she still wasn’t making a move to open any of the containers. “It’s here. You might as well have some,” he coaxed, opening a container close to him. She still made no move toward the food. “Were you always this stubborn?” he asked. “Or is it just me who sets you off?”

Suzie sighed. She supposed he was right. The food was here and it wasn’t as if she was making some sort of a commitment if she actually ate some of it.

Erasing the unfriendly expression from her face, she peeled back the paper wrapping from a set of chopsticks, separated the two pieces and deftly clasped them in her fingers. “Thank you,” she murmured almost grudgingly.

Glancing up at her, Chris stopped eating for a moment, saying, “I’m impressed.”

Despite her best efforts, Suzie could feel her back going up. “Because I thanked you?” she asked, ready to tell him to take his butt off the stool and make himself scarce.

“No,” he replied easily, defusing her instant reaction, “because you can use chopsticks. I’m not any good at it.”

She would be the last to flatter him—nor did he need to have his ego bolstered—but what he was saying was absurd.

“It’s not like playing a cello,” she told him. “You just take the two pieces like so...” She demonstrated. “Then you pick up the food and bring it to your mouth, like so.” She proceeded to go through the motions, slowly and elaborately.

When she was finished, Chris attempted to mimic her actions. But he wound up failing miserably, actually sending one chopstick flying.

Unable to help herself, Suzie started to laugh at what was at best a very sad display of artlessness and ineptitude.

Rather than take offense, he appeared pleased. “So you actually can laugh,” he observed.

She had to say it. “At particularly hapless displays of ineptitude? Yes,” she allowed. “I can.”

“Well,” he said philosophically, “I’m always happy to please a lovely lady.”

The laughter faded and Suzie became serious again. “Don’t do that,” she told him.

“Don’t do what? Call you lovely?” Chris asked innocently.

That went without saying. She didn’t like hearing empty words of flattery, but she knew it was also pointless to tell him that. He wouldn’t listen.

“No, don’t keep trying to hit on me.” Suzie paused to consider her words. He wasn’t going to listen to that, either. “Although I guess that’s kind of like telling you not to breathe.”

Chris just smiled warmly at her. Was he humoring her or agreeing with her? She couldn’t tell.

“We can consider the possibilities while we eat,” he told her, the same warm, inviting smile on his lips.

Suzie shook her head in disbelief. She had to laugh again. When he looked at her, an unspoken question in his eyes, she explained, “You’re like that blow-up clown doll, aren’t you? The one that no matter how many times you punch it just bounces back up again—right in your face.”

“Well, that’s a new one,” he said, rolling the image over in his mind. “Never been compared to a blow-up clown doll before.”

Suzie had no idea why, but she suddenly felt bad. O’Bannon had, after all, brought her dinner even after she’d been less than friendly toward him, all but telling him to get lost.

She relented. “That wasn’t exactly meant as an insult,” she murmured.

And then there was the grin again, the one that belonged to the happy-go-lucky, lighthearted boy he had to have been. The one, for all she knew, he still was.

“I know,” he told her with a conspiratorial wink.

That pulled her up short. Either they were on some kind of a wavelength she was totally unaware of, or he had one hell of an ego.

“You know?”

“Why don’t we stop dancing around like this, Suzie Q, and eat before it gets cold?” he suggested, pulling a carton closer to him. He opened it up. “Although I have to admit I do like Chinese food cold.” He raised his eyes to hers, creating, just like that, an intimate air. “For breakfast the next day.”

Suzie pressed her lips together in annoyance, waiting for some sort of innuendo or maybe even a graphic scenario to follow. But there was none. There was just Chris, grappling with his chopsticks as he tried to bring at least a few strands of lo mein to his mouth.

He failed, but tried again. And again, valiantly trying to conquer the two slender pieces of polished wood and make them do his bidding.

Unable to stand it any longer, Suzie put down her own chopsticks, then picked up his and carefully positioned them in his hand.

When the result was less than successful, she tried another approach.

This time, she placed the chopsticks in his fingers and wrapped her hand around his, carefully guiding it to the contents in the container.

After three attempts, Chris, with her help, managed to secure a single morsel of shrimp. When, with her hand still around his, he brought the piece to his lips, Suzie experienced a feeling of triumph that somehow, in the next moment, seemed to transform into a completely different emotion.

She felt a warmth traveling through her limbs and torso, and even felt, heaven help her, a momentary shortness of breath that had nothing to do any condition that might have sent her hurrying to the ER, and everything to do with the man she was attempting to instruct.

Suzie pulled her hand away as if she had just come in contact with a hot frying pan filled with boiling oil.

“I think you have the hang of it,” she said crisply, doing what she could to distance herself from the moment—and from the man.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Chris confessed. “But it certainly isn’t for lack of you trying. You know,” he told her with a laugh, “I think I might have discovered a brand-new kind of diet. We could call it the chopstick diet. Dexterity-challenged people like me eat all their meals using chopsticks. The pounds’ll start dropping off from day one,” he enthused. “And people won’t have to invest in some big initial layout of cash. All they have to buy is a pair of chopsticks and then try to eat what they normally eat.” He smiled broadly at her. “I can smell the success from here.”

Suzie shook her head. He was actually laughing at himself. He really was one of a kind, she thought. She pushed the plastic fork toward him.

“Eat,” she told him. “You don’t need to lose any weight. You’re fine the way you are.”

Chris put his hand over his chest, feigning surprise. “Why, Suzie Q, is that a compliment?”

“That,” she informed him, “was a slip of the tongue. Now eat,” she ordered. “These containers can’t stay here while I do my work, so once I finish eating, they’re going to have to be cleared away.”

“Fair enough,” he agreed, nodding. “I consider myself warned.”

As she watched, he picked up the chopsticks again. “Use the fork,” she told him.

If he continued to eat using the chopsticks, he would be here half the night, and despite what she’d just said, she couldn’t very well toss him out, not after he’d sprung for dinner the way he had—never mind that she hadn’t asked him to.

But he’d already begun to eat again.

To her surprise, as she watched, Chris didn’t drop anything. As a matter of fact, he was wielding the chopsticks like someone who didn’t just use them on occasion, but who was very skilled with them.

When he looked up to see her watching him, her lips slightly parted in surprise, Chris set down his chopsticks for a moment.

“What can I say?” he asked with an expression she was forced—unwillingly—to describe as modest. “I learned from the very best, and you, Suzie Q, are a very skillful teacher,” he concluded, adding a postscript. “Thanks for taking the time to teach me.”

He was good, she thought. Ordinarily, she would have said he was a con artist. But in this case, she didn’t know if O’Bannon was being genuine, or if she’d just been played.

He did look sincere.

Because she couldn’t decide one way or the other, for now she decided to concentrate strictly on the meal, which she had to admit, with its variety, was excellent. If nothing else, Christian Cavanaugh O’Bannon did have one redeeming quality.

The detective knew where to find a good Chinese restaurant.

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