Cavanaugh Judgment

by Marie Ferrarella

  She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “In case you don’t feel comfortable, or…” Her voice trailed off as the words she needed to use deserted her.

  He was silent for a moment, and then he smiled. Slightly. “Looks to me like you’re the one who feels uncomfortable.”

  He was right, Greer thought. She was uncomfortable. Uncomfortable with the emotions that he’d aroused within her last night, uncomfortable with how easily she’d capitulated to those emotions. She was usually stronger than that.

  Damn it, she should have fought harder to resist him. He didn’t strike her as the kind of man who would take advantage of the situation, or of her if she had said no. It had been up to her to stop things before they’d gotten out of hand. Instead, she’d wound up doing everything in her power to speed them along.

  “I should have been more in control,” she finally told him.

  His eyes made her feel that he was looking into her soul, seeing all of her secrets. “There was no pillaging going on,” he murmured wryly. “Seems to me that we were equally in control.”

  Greer read between the lines. Blake obviously thought she was talking about the actual lovemaking. But she wasn’t. She was talking about the fact that she shouldn’t have allowed last night to have happened in the first place.

  The very thought of the night they’d spent together made her pulse begin to accelerate again. Damn it, what was wrong with her?

  “You’re blushing, Detective,” Blake pointed out, amused.

  She tossed her head, sending her hair flying over her shoulder like a blond shower.

  “It’s just hot in here.” This time, she avoided his eyes. It was safer that way. “I’ve got to get back into the kitchen and finish making breakfast before the eggs burn,” she said, breezing by him and heading toward the kitchen.

  Turning on his heel, Blake followed her. “Isn’t my father watching them for you?”

  “No, I haven’t seen your dad yet this morning. He told Jeff last night that he felt tired,” she told him, repeating what her partner had said to her before he left. “Maybe he decided to sleep in this morning.”

  Blake frowned. His father was usually up with the roosters. “That’s not like him,” he commented. “But then, I wasn’t myself either last night.”

  Entering the kitchen, she slanted a glance at the judge. “Regrets?” she asked, trying her damnedest to sound nonchalant.

  “Maybe,” he allowed. When she looked at him, he explained further. “That I didn’t do it sooner.”

  She was doing her best to put emotional distance between them, but all the while, she caught herself yearning for an encore of last night. Damn it, was she losing her mind? She didn’t behave this way. What had he done to her?

  “It has been two years—”

  He didn’t let her finish. He realized that she didn’t understand what he was saying. “That I didn’t do it sooner with you,” he clarified. He’d felt the sexual pull between them that first day in court, when she’d flown over his desk to shield him.

  There went her heart, she thought, feeling it lodge into her throat. Their eyes met and she caught herself holding her breath.

  Don’t buy into this, she cautioned herself. It’s going to hurt like hell when it’s over if you do.

  She knew she was lying to herself. It was going to hurt like hell when it was over no matter what. She was already standing on the threshold of pain.

  Greer changed the subject. “Maybe you should go upstairs and see what’s keeping your father. Tell him breakfast is almost ready.”

  He nodded. “Maybe,” he agreed, but instead of going upstairs, Blake remained where he was, trying to properly frame what he was about to say. Ordinarily, words were no problem for him, but he had no experience in this area. He wasn’t someone given to exposing his feelings. But she obviously needed to be reassured, he thought. “I just want you to know that I enjoyed last night.”

  Greer took in a long breath, as if that would somehow help her maintain her outer calm. She’d indulged in a breech of protocol last night.

  “Yeah, me, too. Doesn’t change the fact that I behaved unprofessionally.”

  Did she think he was going to put her on report? “For the record,” he told her, “you ‘behaved’ just perfectly.”

  With that, he turned away and walked back toward the stairs, leaving her to contemplate her own thoughts.

  Why did life have to be so complicated? Greer wondered, swiftly stirring the eggs that threatened to harden in a clump.

  If she’d met Blake under different circumstances, then maybe last night would have been the beginning of something special rather than just an anomaly.

  An anomaly, she caught herself thinking as she went to the refrigerator, that she would have dearly loved to have happen again at least one more time before her assignment here ended. But then—

  Greer stopped looking for the butter and drew her head out of the interior of the refrigerator. She could have sworn she’d just heard her name being called.

  Was Blake calling her? Or was that—?

  No, she was right. She did hear Blake calling for her. Again. And there was an urgency in his voice. Oh, damn, what was wrong?

  Turning the stove off and moving the large frying pan onto a cool burner, she hurried out of the kitchen. Passing the hall table, she grabbed her handgun, yanking it out of its holster—just in case.

  She made it up the stairs in record time.

  “Blake?”

  Judge, she should have called him Judge, not something as familiar as his first name. She was on duty, for God’s sake.

  Once blurred, the lines were hard to restore.

  “In here!” he called out to her.

  Following his voice, not knowing what to expect, she burst into the doorway of the room he was calling from. She held her weapon out in front of her, braced in both hands.

  It was his father’s room. Blake had the senior Kincannon on the floor, lying on his back. Blake was in the middle of counting off compressions, one hand pressed on top of the other and both pressing down on the older man’s chest. His father was unconscious and Blake was performing CPR.

  “Call 911,” he cried. “I think he had a heart attack.”

  Stunned, Greer lost no time in putting in a call to her dispatch at the police station. Giving her badge number, she rattled off the circumstances and the patient’s address.

  Flipping her phone closed, she tucked it away again. “They’ll be here right away,” she guaranteed. “They like to keep Aurora’s ‘finest’ in top running condition.” She came closer to him. Blake hadn’t missed a single beat, performing CPR for all he was worth.

  “What happened?” she wanted to know as she looked at his unconscious father on the floor.

  Blake shook his head. “I don’t know. When he didn’t answer my knock, I opened the door and found him like this.” He knew that time was of the essence. The quicker his father got treatment, the better his chances for a full recovery would be. “I don’t know how long he’s been unconscious.”

  Greer bent down. Pressing two fingers against the other man’s throat, she felt for a pulse. It was thin and reedy, but it was there. Relieved, she told Blake, “At least he’s still alive.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know how long he’d been like this,” Blake repeated, worried.

  “It wasn’t all night,” she assured him. “When I was getting my things together to go downstairs, I heard your father moving around in the next bedroom. That had to be some time between one and two.”

  Blake glanced at his watch as he continued working over his father. “It’s six now. What if he’s been like this for the past five hours?” he asked. “What if he—”

  Greer laid a gentling hand on his shoulder. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she advised sympathetically. Looking at the man on the floor, she thought she saw a slight movement. Greer rallied around it. Slight was better than nothing.

  “Look,” she pointed out excitedly. “
Your father’s trying to open his eyes. His eyelashes just fluttered, I’m sure of it!”

  Sitting back on his heels, Blake sighed with relief. He’d thought he’d only imagined it. Wishful thinking. But if Greer saw it, too, they couldn’t both be hallucinating.

  “Thank God,” Blake ground out.

  There was no masking his pleasure that his father appeared to be coming around and that, with a little bit of luck, was going to be okay. For one awful second, when he’d walked into the room after not receiving any answer to his knock, he’d thought the older man was dead.

  The first thing that occurred to him was that Munro had somehow found out his address.

  What if the drug dealer had somehow gained access into the house and had killed his father first? He would have never forgiven himself.

  But to his relief, a quick check around his father’s body showed no blood. There’d been no attack. Immediately something else suggested itself to him. And if that was true, it wasn’t exactly a cause for celebration, either. The words heart attack loomed over him with twelve-feet high letters.

  Blake knew that his grandfather—his father’s father—had died of a heart attack at a relatively young age. Gunny had bragged the other day about already outliving his father. Under normal circumstances, he gave no credence to superstitions, but he didn’t believe in thumbing his nose at fate, either.

  In the background, the sound of an approaching siren began to register, growing stronger by the second. They’d be here soon, he thought.

  “Dad?” Blake cried. He leaned over his father’s body, his lips close to the man’s ear. “Dad, can you hear me?”

  Lips that felt as dry as dust came together in an attempt to form words. When he finally managed, they came out in a whisper.

  On her knees on the other side of Blake’s father, Greer leaned in to hear what he was trying to tell them. His voice was too low.

  “Could you repeat that, Gunny?” Greer asked, her voice deliberately loud.

  “Not…deaf…” Gunny told her, his breath just barely sustaining him. He was obviously referring to the fact that his son was fairly shouting when he addressed him.

  Shaking his head, Blake blew out a breath. “He’s still an ornery old man,” he observed. “That’s a good sign.”

  “A very good sign,” she agreed, patting his shoulder firmly. Getting up, she moved toward the doorway. “I’ll go downstairs and let the paramedics in,” she told Blake just before she left.

  Blake wasn’t sure if he said that was a good idea or if he’d only thought it without actually telling her that. His attention was completely focused on his father’s ashen face. And on keeping him alive. “You hang in there, old man. Help’s on its way.”

  “Don’t…need…help…just…need…to…rest,” Gunny gasped out the words as if each was being wrenched out of him with rusty pliers.

  “If you don’t want to be resting permanently, old man, you’ll accept help,” Blake all but ordered him tersely. “I’m not ready to lose you yet, understand?”

  “Why? You…got…a…cute…replacement…waiting…in…the…wings,” his father said, laboring over each word.

  Oh, no, he wasn’t about to admit to anything right now. And definitely not to his father. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad.”

  He would have smirked if he could have. But he was almost too weak to even draw a single breath. Still, this might be the last conversation he was going to have with his son.

  “Saw…her…coming…out…of…your…room…this…morning.” Alexander began coughing. “You really don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad. You’re hallucinating,” Blake told him. Now wasn’t the time to get into this. Once his father was better—and once he knew if what was between the long-legged detective and him had a future, then there was time enough to talk about things. Right now, the only thing that mattered was that his father recovered. “Save your breath for something important—like breathing,” he ordered.

  The next minute, two paramedics came hurrying in. One of them was bringing a gurney. They collapsed it so that it was beside his father.

  Rising, Blake moved out of their way, but not so far that he couldn’t observe every move that the paramedics made.

  “He’s going to be all right,” Greer told him, her voice confident and firm. For just a second, she rested her hand on his shoulder in mute reassurance.

  Blake placed his own hand over hers, as if that could somehow transfuse some of her faith into him. As an unmanageable fear gripped his stomach, Blake only wished he could believe her. But he had always been, first and foremost, a realist and realists knew that everything could change in less than a heartbeat. It had already happened to him once.

  Was it happening again?

  Chapter 14

  “See, I told you he’d be all right,” Greer couldn’t resist reminding Blake cheerfully.

  It was a little more than twelve hours later and they were finally driving home again. Twelve hours earlier, Blake had ridden in the ambulance with his father and she had followed directly behind them in her car. Thinking ahead, she wanted to ensure that they would have a way home once things settled down.

  Once she got a prognosis from the E.R. doctor, Greer contacted the precinct, placing calls to her captain, the chief and Jeff to bring them up to speed on this latest development and to assure all of them that, aside from being worried, the judge was just fine.

  Once the danger had passed, they had left his father, alert and complaining, in the coronary care unit on the first floor of Aurora Memorial, the same hospital whose fundraiser they had just attended the night before.

  It was a small world, Greer remembered thinking when she’d arrived there and parked her vehicle in the E.R. lot. The world got even smaller when one of the cardiologists who had been at that function and had engaged them in conversation during the evening turned out to be the doctor who was on call this morning. The physician wound up treating Blake’s father.

  Blake was not impressed with her prediction coming true. Mainly because it hadn’t actually been a prediction. “You only said that because that’s what people say to make other people feel better in dire times.”

  “No,” she contradicted, easing down on the brake as she approached a red light, “I said that because I really felt your father was going to be all right. Gunny’s strong as an ox and, for the most part, he eats rather healthy.”

  “For the past three weeks,” he agreed, then told her, “That’s all on you. Until you started cooking, takeout was all either one of us had had for the past couple of years. In my father’s case, probably a lot longer.”

  She’d thought the takeout thing was just a temporary aberration. To think of two grown, capable men having nothing else but whatever food they could have brought to their door was mind-boggling. “Seriously?”

  Blake laughed shortly. “Seriously. You’ve made changes in his life. In our lives,” he amended, then abruptly stopped. Maybe he’d said too much. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to make these kinds of admissions yet.

  “Nice to know,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. Foot on the accelerator again, she switched lanes to move faster than the beige Cadillac in front of them. “Your father should be fine and back on his feet in a couple of days.”

  That was the projection the doctor had made, as well, but Blake wasn’t buying into it wholeheartedly. “If that’s the case, why wouldn’t they let me take my father home again? Why are they keeping him in CCU?”

  She knew the answer to that. “They’re just following standard procedure. Everyone experiencing ‘an episode,’” she told him, referring to the heart attack his father’d had in the neutral terms that doctors used, “is kept in CCU for twenty-four hours because the doctors want to observe the patient, make sure nothing else is going on that could prove fatal.”

  It sounded to him as if Greer knew what she was talking about. “I take it you’ve been through this before?”

 
; She nodded grimly. “One of the detectives in the squad, a guy by the name of Ray Walker.” She always felt a story sounded more real and personal if the people in it had names. “The man should have retired long ago except that he had nothing to retire to except four walls and silence. So he managed to convince the chief to let him stay a little while longer. Well, one day he tried to chase down a perp over half his age and had one of those ‘episodes.’ Luckily, the ambulance attendants rushed him to this hospital.”

  She’d gotten him curious. “This Detective Walker, he still working at the precinct?”

  Greer shook her head. “With such a recent history of heart trouble, the brass made him retire. They didn’t want to hear any excuses.”

  He knew of former judges, devoid of any hobbies to hold their interest, who just seemed to fade away once they retired. Their lives seemingly without purpose, they died less than a year after they left the bench. In one case, it was more like two months.

  “How did this detective handle his retirement?”

  Greer smiled then. “Not too badly—I gave him one of Hussy’s puppies so that he’d have something warm and loving licking his face each morning when he woke up.” She’d visited Walker just before landing this assignment. Master and dog were doing just fine. Nothing could have pleased her more. “Seems to have worked out well for everyone.”

  Nodding, Blake put his own spin on the story. “So you moonlight as a terminal do-gooder?”

  She’d never cared for the term “do-gooder” but she wasn’t averse to the actual act. “Hey, life’s hard enough as it is. No reason we can’t make it a little more bearable for the people we interact with if we can.”

  Margaret would have liked this woman, he couldn’t help thinking. They would have probably become good friends. The thought made him relax a little and allow his guard to slip again.

  He thought of the past few weeks and said, “Well, you certainly made it more bearable for my father.” And then, because that wasn’t all, he lowered his voice and added, “And for me.”

  There it went again, she suddenly realized. Her pulse was accelerating just because the man had lowered his voice. Hearing it had made her imagination take off and she found herself thinking about last night. About every glorious second of lovemaking that had taken place between them.