“Not trying to talk you into it,” he contradicted. “I’m just trying to talk you out of turning your back on something until you have all the facts.”
It was the most elementary of reasons, and she should have realized it herself. Rayne frowned, looking out the window. “I’m a cop, I should know that.”
He wondered if she was always this hard on herself. “You’re a person and not quite as perfect as you’d like to believe.”
Rayne looked at him sharply. She sat up in her seat. “I don’t believe I’m perfect.”
She caught the smile lurking at the corners of his mouth. “‘Quite’ as perfect,” he corrected.
He was trying to help her out with her problem when she should have been trying to help him with his. The clock was ticking for him. For her, it had long since gone into overtime.
Exasperated with herself, she tendered what she hoped passed for an apology. “God, here I am, spilling out my guts to you and completely ignoring why we came here in the first place.”
He hadn’t forgotten and he really doubted that she had, either. But this was something that was troubling her, that she needed to work out. Hearing her share it with him had placed him in a very odd position. An intimate one he both welcomed and felt uneasy about.
This wasn’t casual anymore, this thing that was buzzing between them that neither of them wanted to name. Hell, if he were being honest with himself, it never really had been casual. Though she tried to give off that impression, Rayne Cavanaugh was by no means a casual woman. She was the kind of woman who hollowed out a place for herself in your life and stayed there, even long after she’d physically left.
He could already feel pieces of himself being chipped away.
“We’re on the road back,” he noted. “Nothing we can do about it until we reach Aurora again.”
He’d be lying if he pretended that the information they’d just obtained from Kathy Fallon’s upstairs neighbor didn’t excite him. It renewed his hope that they could find whoever it was that had killed Kathy.
Someone other than his brother.
Mentally, she’d already reached home. “When we do, I want to go to the Shannon.” The Shannon was the local hang-out located near the precinct. The one where all the police personnel went to let off a little steam at the end of the day in an attempt to dull their senses and forget what they had seen on the dark side of the streets. “Longwell hangs out there.”
He nodded. “Sounds like a plan to me.”
Longwell wasn’t there.
They arrived after five. Rayne knew that the police officer’s shift ended then and he always capped off his day by stopping here, at least for one beer. It was a habit he rarely broke.
The moment she walked into the noisy bar with Cole, Rayne noticed that the very atmosphere seemed to change. The din lowered considerably.
It took very little imagination to believe that every single pair of eyes had turned in their direction.
Trying not to be obvious, she looked around the crowded room for a sibling, or a cousin, or at the very least, a friendly face. The best she got was impassive.
There was no family to be found here tonight, real or artificial.
Shoulders braced, she walked up to the bar. The bartender, Raul, a devote weight-lifter and the brother of a man in blue, raised a brow in her direction.
“Beer?” he asked.
Before she could answer, Cole reached over her, putting down a ten on the bar. He held up two fingers to underscore his request.
“Two,” he said.
“Tap?” Raul looked from Rayne to Cole. Both nodded their assent.
With a shrug, the bartender poured two mugs from the beer on tap and set them on the bar. Foamy heads slid their contents down the side as he took the ten and made change.
Rayne leaned over the bar, not wanting to raise her voice if she could avoid it. “Have you seen Longwell?”
“Nope.” Leaving the change on the bar, Raul moved to the other end. One of the customers was waving to him.
“Not very friendly,” Cole commented.
He was, usually. Which only meant one thing.
A voice coming from the other end confirmed it. “Word gets around.”
Turning almost in unison, they looked to see a uniformed officer standing several feet away from them. Rayne recognized the man as Longwell’s partner, Roy Williams.
Cole knew menacing when he was confronted with it. “What kind of word?”
The other man took long, cold measure of him as his brown eyes swept over his torso. Cole already knew what the verdict was. “That someone’s looking to stir up trouble.”
Rayne held up her hand, placing it on Cole’s chest and stopping him as he stepped forward. He was about to defend her, she could see it, could almost see the heated words rising to his lips.
But this was her fight and she was nothing if she couldn’t be her own person. She looked at Williams coldly. She’d never liked the man. The feeling was mutual. “I’m not looking to stir up anything but the truth.”
Williams sneered. “You’ve already got the truth. Now I’m sorry you can’t deal with it,” the officer told Cole, “but your little brother killed her and we’ve got him dead to rights.”
She moved again, placing her body between the two men. She could tell Williams wanted to take a swing at Cole and the latter was not going to just stand still and take it. “You’re Longwell’s partner.”
“Yeah.” Williams spat out the word contemptuously as his very look dared her to make something of it.
“You with him when he called in Kathy Fallon’s murder?” She hadn’t seen his name on the report, but if he was there, then she had questions for him.
But Williams shook his head. “Doctor’s appointment.” And then he picked up the banner for his partner. Loyalty demanded it. “I didn’t have to be there. Everything went by the book.” He leaned in, his manner just short of menacing. “Those of us who don’t have relatives to get us promotions are real careful not to mess up things like that.”
Rayne could feel her blood beginning to boil. She’d been through this before, heard the accusations that because her father was the former chief of police and her uncle was the current chief of detectives, she’d had an easy time of it.
That was strictly jealousy talking, but knowing didn’t help curb the anger she felt. She could feel it flaring now.
“Look, just because the only better place your relatives could help you get is a higher rock at the zoo, don’t take it out on me,” Rayne countered. Wanting desperately to flatten him or at the very least, to wipe the smirk off his face, she struggled to regain control. “I just need to talk to Longwell.”
“He’s out of town today. His father’s sick, so he took some personal time. You know about personal time, don’t you?” Williams sneered, his eyes shifting toward Cole before returning to her face. “Some of us don’t use it to help twist the evidence.”
Cole’d had about all he could take. He knew that saying anything at all was just playing into Williams’s hands, but he couldn’t just stand here, listening to the man mouth off at Rayne without saying something, doing something.
So he got into the man’s face. “Why don’t you just quit while you’re ahead?” He saw the contempt in the other man’s face. “While you still have all your teeth in your mouth?”
It was exactly what Williams wanted. He puffed his barrel chest out and looked around the room in triumph. “You must be really stupid, Garrison, threatening an officer of the law in front of witnesses.”
“I’m not threatening, I’m making an observation,” Cole said easily, though his voice was steely. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“Okay, that’s enough. Break it up.”
To her surprise, it was Patterson, her own partner, who came up to step in between the two men and separate them. She knew for a fact that while Patterson liked Longwell, he had very little respect for Williams.
“No reason to throw yo
ur lip around, Williams,” he said. “Cavanaugh just wants to talk to her former partner, that’s all.” Patterson looked at Cole pointedly. “Right, Cavanaugh?”
Cole did his best to look innocent, even though they all knew he was more than willing to take a shot at separating Williams from his attitude. “Right.”
“Well, he’s not here,” Patterson told him, then looked at Rayne. “Won’t be back until tomorrow, maybe the day after. Now why don’t you take any other questions out of here?” he suggested, talking directly to Rayne.
The words were strict but the look in his eyes, for the first time that she could recall, was kindly.
To ensure her compliance, Patterson purposely walked out the door with the two of them.
But once they were outside, it was another story. His quiet demeanor flew out the proverbial window.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Patterson demanded, his ire reserved for Rayne. It reminded her of a hundred similar scenes she’d played out with her father when she was younger. For the first time, she felt as if she and Patterson had finally made a connection.
“You have a death wish?” he railed. “Right now, until this thing goes to trial, Cavanaugh or no Cavanaugh, you’re a pariah in their eyes. You should know better than to go waltzing in there—even with a bodyguard.” He jerked his thumb in Cole’s direction.
She heard only one thing and it wasn’t blotted out by his loud words. Thanks to her father, she’d become fluent in grumpy. “Thanks for sticking up for me.”
“I’m not sticking up for you, I’m sticking up for me,” Patterson corrected her. “I’m your partner. Guilt by association, remember?” He looked at Cole. “And you, you’re lucky they didn’t tear you apart. You’re the enemy. Anyone who threatens the reputation of the boys in blue is the enemy,” he underscored.
And then he paused as twenty-seven years of being on the force came to the fore. “What do you want with Longwell, anyway?”
It was best not to let anyone know she and Cole suspected Longwell of doing more than his duty in this case. “Just need to get some things cleared up,” she answered.
Patterson shook his head. The look in his eyes told her he knew better. “You’re as closemouthed as your old man.” He snorted. “Must be hell at your house when it’s just the two of you.” He looked at his watch. It was getting late. “I got a wife and a burnt dinner waiting for me. Thirty years and she hasn’t learned how to cook,” he grumbled, walking away.
Cole lost no time in getting them back to his car. They were living on borrowed time in more ways than one. If Williams followed them out, there was no telling where things could end. He’d do his brother no good from the wrong side of a set of bars.
“I want to talk to Kathy’s neighbors again,” Rayne told him the moment he got into the vehicle. “Show Longwell’s picture around.”
It didn’t take a genius to know what was on her mind. “You’re going to ask them if they noticed Longwell coming by a lot?”
She nodded. “There has to be one busybody in the complex to confirm what Klein told us.”
That was going to take more time and who was to say the one person they might want to talk to would be in just then? “Got a better idea,” he told her as they pulled out of the parking lot. “Why don’t we check her phone records against his?”
She blew out a breath. “I should have thought of that.”
“You would have,” Cole assured her. “Eventually.”
It was dark in the car, but she could have sworn she saw him grinning. Or maybe she just felt him grinning, felt the way his mouth moved as it curved.
She turned on the radio in self-defense.
They went to his hotel room. Rayne immediately got busy with Cole’s computer.
The sophisticated programs she found loaded on the hard drive took her breath away. They weren’t anything that could be found in the average businessman’s bag of tricks.
She nodded her thanks at the cup of coffee he put down beside her. “Just what business did you say you were in, again?”
“Remodeling,” he told her glibly. “But you never know when you might need some extra information.”
In her wilder days, she’d gone with a computer genius who liked challenging himself by hacking into hack-proof sites. His hobby had eventually landed him behind bars, but not before he’d taught her a few things about the art of making a computer perform mind-boggling feats.
She paused, her fingers poised over the keyboard. She thought like a cop these days, even at times against her will. “This is illegal, you know.”
He needed answers now. And no one needed to know they’d done a dry run first. “The law has gray areas. You can get a proper warrant in the morning and do this again. Right now, we need to see if we’re on the right track. No sense in bothering a judge for no reason.”
In his place, she knew she’d use the same reasoning. “Okay, let’s see if there was any phone talk that led to pillow talk.”
As she set about getting into the phone company’s records, Rayne tried to recall if there’d been anything in Longwell’s manner that should have alerted her. But there hadn’t been any indication that he was hiding anything, only that he resented her questioning his findings. At the time, she’d chalked it up to his pride, not any kind of apprehension on his part.
Was she wrong then?
Or was she wrong now?
There was more than one phone company to choose from and some had better safeguards than others. It took her a while, but she finally found what she was looking for. With triumph, she pointed to the screen.
“Kathy Fallon and Longwell definitely talked on the phone. There’s a total of twenty one-minute calls between the two once she took out her restraining order on Eric and I haven’t even looked into their cell phone calls.”
His hand on her shoulder, Cole leaned to look at the screen. He’d been less than three feet away the entire time she’d been conducting her search. At times, it was a little hard concentrating on what she was doing. The man was working his way under her skin.
“She could have been calling him about Eric.”
She looked at him in surprise. She would have thought he’d jump at this information, not try to discount it. “Whose side are you on?”
“Just playing devil’s advocate.”
She typed in another combination of keys, preparing the program she’d hacked into to bring up Kathy Fallon’s cell phone account. “I’d say you had that down pat, at least the devil part.”
And she was playing with fire, without an extinguisher in sight.
She felt something for Cole Garrison, had always felt something, however recessed she’d tried to keep it. And if she wasn’t careful, it was going to upset the order she’d always kept her affairs in.
Cole turned her chair around so that she faced him. Something quickened inside her stomach, but she brazened it out. “What are you doing?”
They’d been at this all day and for the most part, they’d been successful. But there was little more they could do, officially, until at least the morning. That left them with the night. And he knew what he wanted to do with it. “The devil has this very strong urge to play.”
She could feel her pulse revving up. “Is it overwhelming?”
He smiled into her eyes. What was it about this woman that made him want to throw all caution to the wind? “Several notches above overwhelming.”
She rose to her feet, her body coming in instant contact with his, sliding along it as she straightened. Electric waves undulated all through her. Telegraphing messages to the desires that were threatening to ravage her if she didn’t do something about them.
“Can’t have you causing havoc if you don’t get your way.”
Taking the hem of her sweater, he pulled it up over her head and then discarded it to the side. He’d been envisioning the way her breasts rose and fell, unencumbered by clothing, all day. “Nope.”
Not to be outdone, she yanked off h
is shirt, sending it to the floor. “I’ll guess I’ll just have to make the sacrifice to save mankind.”
He grinned and created a tidal wave in her stomach. “Very noble of you.”
She inclined her head, humor curving her mouth. “I’m a noble kind of girl.”
She felt his fingers brushing against her abdomen as he undid the button of her jeans. “Noble is not what I’m looking for right now.”
She grinned, her invitation clear. “Then why don’t you scratch the surface and see what happens?”
Chapter 14
The look in his eyes undulated its way into her system. “Scratching isn’t exactly what I had in mind, either.”
“Oh?”
Rayne shivered with anticipation as he opened the clasp behind her back. Her bra slipped forward. Sliding his thumbs along the swell, Cole coaxed the lacy blue material away from her breasts. She could feel everything quickening inside of her.
Ready.
“And just what did you have in mind?” Her mouth felt dryer than the desert after a three-year drought. The words all seemed to stick together on her tongue.
“Why don’t I show you instead?” He tugged down her slacks.
She stepped out of them, hardly daring to breathe. The next second, her pulse was racing as he grasped her buttocks, kneading the firm flesh to him. She could feel the hot imprint of his body against hers.
“I’m not very good with words,” he told her.
If her heart raced any faster, she could swear it was going to pop out of her chest. To keep from gasping, she measured out each word separately. “I guess you tend to be better with your hands.”
There was a hint of mischief in his eyes. “You tell me.”
As he kissed her, his fingers began to explore the inner core of her, each movement bringing her closer to the edge of a climax.
How did he manage to do that so fast? Was it her anticipation that urged the process on so quickly? It seemed as if she was halfway there from the very first moment he touched her.
His chuckle vibrated against her lips, echoing in her head. She didn’t stop to ask if he was laughing at her, her needs were too great. The only thing she was aware of was that she wanted him. Wanted him now, before she erupted.
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