Cavanaugh Undercover

by Marie Ferrarella

  This was getting pretty complicated and she was getting rather punchy at this point. She either needed a scorecard or some sleep in order to keep what he was telling her straight.

  Tiana opted for sleep and held up her hand, signaling she wanted him to pause.

  “Why don’t you give me the full rundown once my mind kicks in tomorrow morning?” she suggested. The way she felt right now, she would have trouble following the story line within a nursery rhyme.

  He grinned at her. “Deal. You’re calling the shots here,” was what he told her, but even in her less than sharp condition, she knew he was just humoring her. He was the one in charge and they both knew that.

  However, she appreciated the lip service he’d just given. At this stage of the game, she would take whatever she could get.

  “You sure you don’t want to sit this out?” he asked her, his tone almost kind. “I promise that I’ll keep you up to date on what’s going on.”

  Did he think she was some empty-headed, frail little thing who could just be patted on the head and sent home to wait for the phone to ring? Boy, did he have the wrong person!

  “No offense, Cavanaugh, but I can keep myself up to date by being right there.”

  “Look, Venus, you’re too close to this whole thing.”

  “Don’t you understand?” she asked, cutting him off, suddenly getting a second wind, however fleeting it might prove to be. “Close is the only way to solve this. This isn’t something to be handled from a distance by remote control. And maybe having someone invested in the outcome, really invested, will provide that extra push that’s needed to bring these scum down.”

  “Following that line of thinking, we’d have to say yes to all the fathers, all the parents of those missing girls if they wanted to take part in this operation and then we’d have something akin to the scene where the villagers storm the castle, carrying pitchforks and torches and yelling for someone’s blood to be spilled.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” she insisted angrily. “I don’t own a pitchfork and I don’t have a torch. What I do have is law enforcement training. That’s the difference. Now, if you have a problem with that, okay, I can’t force you to take me with you.”

  She aroused his suspicions immediately. “That’s too reasonable,” he said.

  “No,” she pointed out, “it’s what you want to hear.” She shrugged as if she didn’t care which path she took, as long as it got her to where she wanted to go. “I’ll just do this on my own, that’s all.”

  “That’s what I don’t want to hear,” he said with a sigh, resigned. “I’d rather have you next to me, where I can keep my eye on you, than operating somewhere out there with me looking over my shoulder all the time, wondering exactly where you are and if you’ve gotten yourself into trouble. If nothing else, this way will be safer. For both of us,” he emphasized.

  The grin was self-satisfied and triumphant. “Good choice.”

  “I don’t know about good,” he told her as if he’d considered the matter from all sides, “but right now it’s the only option open to me—other than tying you up and leaving you in a closet. With my luck, you probably know how to get out of every knot I learned how to make as a Boy Scout.”

  She didn’t answer him. But her smile said it all. It told him that he’d made a pretty damn good guess.

  Chapter 10

  Having made her point, Tiana hardly remembered getting out of the elevator or walking down the hotel hallway to Brennan’s room. Almost out of the blue, she’d been hit by an overwhelming wave of exhaustion.

  Closing the door behind them, Brennan glanced in her direction—and then paused to look at her more closely. “No offense,” he told her, “but you really look like you’re wiped out.”

  He was right, but she absolutely hated appearing anything but up at the top of her game, ready to go on for hours. Her sense of competition wouldn’t allow her to admit he was right in his assessment.

  “Give me a second and I’ll be ready to go another five rounds or more,” she promised, sinking down onto the sofa.

  “Then you’ll have to find someone else to go those rounds with, because I’m pretty wiped out myself,” Brennan told her.

  As he spoke, he moved slowly through the area, checking everything in the double-room suite to make certain that no one had been there.

  Satisfied that nothing had been touched and no one had left any bugs or microdigital cameras for the purpose of covertly recording their movements and conversation, he turned around to see that she hadn’t moved an inch off the sofa.

  “The agreement was that you take the bed and I take the sofa, and that hasn’t changed,” he pointed out, crossing back to her. “I’m a man of my word—and you are a woman fast asleep,” he realized with a resigned sigh now that he was closer to her.

  Brennan debated picking her up—she didn’t look as if she weighed more than a hundred, a hundred ten pounds—and putting her in bed. But with his luck, she’d wake up just as he set her down and she’d probably shoot him with some peashooter she had hidden away.

  It was easier on both of them to just leave her where she was, he decided. Although, as he reassessed the situation, she was probably going to wake up with one hell of a stiff neck if she stayed in the exact same position she was in until morning.

  To avoid that, he’d have to lay her down without waking her up, a tricky proposition at best.

  “You sure don’t make it easy for a guy, do you?” he muttered to himself.

  If he had an iota of sense in his head, Brennan thought, he’d leave her like this, stiff neck be damned. But he couldn’t do that. She just looked so damn vulnerable right now, he found himself feeling for her. He really had no choice in the matter.

  The truth was, she stirred his sense of compassion and he felt sorry for her—although if he even hinted at that, he had a feeling she’d take his head off without so much as blinking an eye.

  The vulnerability he saw went beyond just her appearance. She’d said that her sister was her only family, and he couldn’t begin to imagine what that had to feel like. He’d always been aware of family from his very first memory somewhere around the age of about three. Family had always been the basic foundation of his life, a given he’d never even thought to question.

  Even when he was on these lengthy assignments that took him away from everyone, in the back of his mind was the reassuring thought that they were there, his family, ready to step in with a word, a gesture—or actual backup if he was in a jam professionally and needed them to come in, guns drawn.

  They had his back and he had theirs. That was just the way things were.

  This woman sleeping in front of him didn’t have that, and yet she was here, toughing it out, determined to go against all odds, straight into the belly of the beast to find and rescue her sister.

  You had to admire a woman like that. Now if only she weren’t so attractive. Her looks, her whole in-your-face personality, distracted him on many levels.

  Having lowered Tiana onto the sofa so that her head rested against the cushioned arm, Brennan took a second to study her further. Asleep, all her hard edges, all her bravado, faded into the background, leaving the softer woman beneath exposed for viewing.

  She looked even prettier this way, he realized.

  Great, in danger up to your eyeballs and you’re standing here like some wet-behind-the-ears rookie, rating her looks and having thoughts no way in hell you should be having.

  Brennan reminded himself that this was not some stilted reality program. This was life, with a capital L. Real and hard and just possibly hiding death behind every corner. He had to remember that.

  Once they got the bad guys, he could rate her looks and her manner. Right now he had enough to do keeping them both alive.

  With a weary sigh, Brennan dou
ble-checked the locks on the door one last time. Deciding to take a very old-fashioned precaution—sometimes the old methods were the best ones—he dragged a chair over to the door. He then angled it beneath the doorknob so that it acted as barrier for anyone trying to break in by picking the lock or accessing entrance by somehow duplicating the key card he’d been issued.

  Having the chair wedged in like that would allow it to make just enough noise if it was moved to wake him up. If he trained himself to sleep any lighter, a falling eyelash would wake him, he thought sarcastically.

  “Okay, evening ritual completed,” he murmured under his breath. “And the princess is still asleep,” he noted, glancing in her direction. Nodding, he lowered himself into the chair that faced the door, his weapon drawn and ready, resting against his knees. “See you in the morning, Venus,” he whispered to the woman on the sofa as he closed his eyes.

  * * *

  Tiana didn’t wake up so much as she jackknifed up.

  One moment she was on the sofa, her eyes still closed as she languidly stretched her body the way she did each morning as she tried to rouse herself into a wakeful state; the next she’d opened her eyes. Instead of being somewhere familiar—or at the very least, somewhere alone—she found herself on a sofa being studied by the man who had been part of her humiliating experience last night.

  Her body fairly snapped into an upright position as if it had been preset on some sort of a spring mechanism that went off at the slightest touch.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, her heart launching into a hard, arrhythmic beat in response to the way he was looking at her.

  “Right now I’m just waiting for you to wake up,” he told her mildly.

  “Right now,” she repeated, trying to make some sort of sense out of what he was saying. “And before?”

  It was obvious by the expression on his face that Brennan wasn’t sure what she was referring to. “Before when?”

  “Before ‘right now,’” she emphasized, not knowing how to make it any clearer than that. Was he just trying to confuse her? Because if he was, he had damn well succeeded.

  Tiana tried to remember how she had gotten in his hotel room and just how she’d wound up on the sofa. Right now all her thoughts seemed to be jumbled and there was this killer headache absorbing all parts of her.

  After a moment, Brennan began to answer her. “Well, got dressed, showered, woke up—”

  “Wait,” she ordered, staring at him. “What? You got dressed, then showered?” she questioned incredulously.

  Tiana looked at him warily. Was he crazy? Or was he just trying to make her feel that way?

  “Of course not,” he told her with a laugh. “I showered, then got dressed.”

  “But you just said—”

  “You said you wanted me to recount what I’d done before now,” he reminded her, cutting in. “I didn’t know how far back you wanted me to go, so I just recited the most recent thing I’d done,” he told her glibly. “Then said what I did before that, and then before that, and then—”

  He was making her headache infinitely worse. “I get it, I get it,” she snapped, holding her head.

  Right now it felt as if her head was going to come off and from where she sat, it almost seemed like a blessing. She wasn’t subjected to these pounding recitals of throbbing veins often, but they were excruciating when they hit, starting her morning with her and refusing to abate, sometimes for the duration of the whole day.

  She’d been assured that these headaches weren’t migraines, and that more than likely, tension was responsible for creating them. But knowing that—or at least being told that—didn’t make the pain any easier to tolerate.

  “Are you always this perverse in the morning?” she asked. As she spoke, she squeezed her eyes shut, trying vainly to block out the sunlight that came into the room.

  “I like rising to a challenge,” he cracked. He looked at her more closely. “What’s wrong?”

  She was not about to sit here and admit her pain. The man would probably use any excuse to make her drop out of whatever he was planning to do. “Nothing.”

  “Then why do you look as if your head might implode at any second?”

  At this point, Tiana hurt far too much to pretend she didn’t. Besides, what did it matter if he knew? It wasn’t a disabling condition, just a very, very painful one. If he tried to use this as an excuse to make her stay here, out of his way, he was going to find out just how stubborn she could be. This headache made her far less tolerant and more inclined to speak her mind without pausing to choose the nicest phrasing.

  “Because it might,” she admitted.

  “Headache?” he asked.

  If she didn’t know better, she would have said that he sounded almost sympathetic.

  Tiana shifted on the sofa, trying to will herself to get up—but that would require movement, and movement right now would only intensify this awful pain.

  Maybe she could just wait it out. Even a few minutes might make some sort of a difference.

  “Head-quake is more like it,” she admitted.

  “I take it this isn’t the first time,” he guessed.

  She tried to shrug and stopped because that just seemed to add to the pain. “It happens,” she admitted vaguely.

  “Have you seen a doctor about it?” Brennan asked.

  “I don’t have a brain tumor if that’s what you’re wondering,” she told him. “It’s not even a migraine according to the specialist. He tells me it’s just stress.” Which, the way she saw it, was just a cop-out. “When in doubt, blame it on stress,” she quipped, keeping her voice down low because almost anything above a whisper echoed inside her head and sent out long, scratchy fingers that poked absolutely everywhere.

  “So technically, you’re saying you need to destress?” Brennan asked.

  “Yeah, that would be nice.” She laughed softly at the very idea, considering the situation that they were dealing with. She opened her eyes just a slit. “Got any suggestions?”

  To her surprise he said, “A couple.”

  She opened her eyes a little farther and raised them to his. They locked for a moment and she instantly guessed exactly what his first suggestion as to “destressing” entailed.

  “Other than that,” she told him. “If anything, something physical like that would probably make my head explode,” she predicted.

  Any sudden movement was really hard for her. How was she going to get ready? This pain she was experiencing was already lasting longer than most of her attacks, which struck hard, then faded into the background by inches. But if anything, this seemed to be getting stronger. Or at least remaining as strong as it had been to begin with.

  What if it refused to abate? How was she going to be able to drive, to work with this man on trying to find a way to rescue her sister and the other girls?

  A wave of angry despair washed over her.

  Caught up in the web of pain that was relentlessly assaulting her, she didn’t realize Brennan had circled behind her until she felt his fingertips lightly touching her temples on either side of her head.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, then winced because her own voice sounded too loud and caused the pain in her head to intensify exponentially.

  “Shh,” Brennan chided, then advised her to “Just relax.”

  “With you standing behind me like that?” she asked. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I’m deadly serious,” he said, his voice low, melodic and, despite the score of little men equipped with jackhammers pounding in her head, very nearly damn seductive. “Now do as I say,” he told her. “Relax.”

  “I can’t, I—”

  Tiana didn’t finish her protest because, startlingly enough, the tension began to leach away from her. Not in any large wav
e that left an instant impression on her, but in tiny yet noticeable increments.

  First the tension receded from her toes, then her feet and slowly, from her ankles. Her lower legs were next, then her knees, her thighs and so on. It was a slow progression to the heart of her, working its way up her neck and face until it finally reached her temples, the origin of the pain and the only area that Brennan was touching.

  His fingers worked along her temples in steady, concentric circles that acted almost like gently pulsating radio waves, reaching everything, working their magic where it was needed.

  “Is it working?” Brennan asked after a few minutes, observing. “Because your shoulders no longer look as if you could land Boeing 747s on them. One of your shoulders is actually even drooping a little,” he noted.

  This was incredible. He had succeeded in making her feel human in an infinitely short amount of time. He’d succeeded where an emergency room physician had once failed.

  “You didn’t tell me you were part magician,” she said to him.

  “You didn’t ask,” he quipped.

  She could almost hear him grin. Funny thing about it was, it didn’t really bother her.

  “Anything else I should ask that I didn’t?” she asked, barely able to form words, he had her that relaxed.

  “Maybe we’ll get to that by and by, Venus,” Brennan deadpanned.

  “I should be worried, shouldn’t I?” Tiana said, knowing that in order to keep strictly safe, she should be moving out of the range of those incredible fingers of his, but he was making her feel good again and she was afraid if she made him stop, all the pain would come rushing back, maybe even twice as bad as before. As far as she was concerned, he was working a miracle.

  As he massaged her temples, Brennan had the strongest urge to slide his hands along the sides of her slender neck and onto her shoulders.

  Be honest, man, that’s not where you want your hands to stop and you know it.

  Rousing himself, Brennan made himself focus on what she’d just said and not what he was feeling right now. “My mother used to say ‘Don’t borrow trouble. It’ll find you soon enough.’”