Easier said than done, Detective Cavanaugh, Toni thought as she left the room and went back up the stairs to her room.
* * *
It got a tiny bit easier after that, but not much. And the waiting, the expectation, just grew that much harder.
Twice during the week that followed, she thought they had Padilla, only to discover that either the report was false or they had just missed him.
Whether he was lucky, or just that good, the drug lord continued to elude them.
They had a little more success when it came to tracking down the actual delivery date of the next drug shipment. Although plenty of false leads had been planted, one by one those were weeded out.
They were getting closer.
However the continuing follow-ups and the waiting were beginning to take a real toll on her nerves. Dugan could see it in her face even though she wasn’t saying anything.
“You know, you can bail anytime you want,” Dugan told her in his car, not for the first time.
She was not about to do that, and if he thought she was, Toni thought, the man was crazy. “The only thing worse than dealing with all these false leads is sitting home, hearing about all these false leads. At least this way I’m doing something. If I were just sitting at home, waiting for you to tell me it’s over, I’d be slowly going crazy.”
She was forgetting about something, Dugan thought. “What about Heather?”
Toni shrugged. “She’s too busy being a baby to notice anything going wrong at this stage.”
He frowned at her. “No, I meant wouldn’t you be busy taking care of her? Wouldn’t that be enough to keep you busy?” he asked. His association with Toni and her baby had quickly educated him as to how much attention a baby really required.
“Babies are a lot of work,” she told him, knowing that was the point he thought he was making. “But there’s a lot of downtime in between those work periods,” she pointed out. “I don’t do downtime well,” she confided. “I’m more like you. I’m a doer.”
There had to be something she could do other than put herself in the path of danger. “What about your work?” Dugan reminded her. “You could write.”
She knew he meant well, but the man obviously didn’t understand.
“I’m an investigative journalist, Cavanaugh,” she reminded him. “There’s not much to investigate if you’re confined to the house with a three month old. Besides,” she continued. “If I were home, you’d want me to stay home until you catch Padilla, right?”
There was no point in telling her she was wrong. “You’re right, I would,” he answered. He pulled into her driveway. He could see that his presence seemed to irritate her. It was the last thing he wanted to do. “Look, if you’d rather have someone else as your bodyguard, I understand.”
“Well, you might, but I don’t.” She turned in her seat to get a better look at him. “Why would I want someone else guarding Heather and me? After all, you packed your bag and everything,” she pointed out with a big smile. “Can’t let all that packing go to waste, now, can I?”
He looked at her, exasperated by her attitude as well as happy that she hadn’t agreed that she’d be better off with someone else guarding her. “You know what I mean.”
“Nope, sorry, I don’t.” She gazed into his eyes, daring him to prove her wrong.
“Okay, never mind,” he told her, surrendering. Dugan got out of the vehicle. “Let’s go see what Lucinda made for dinner tonight.”
Toni got out on her side. “Lucy loves cooking for you, you know. She likes the compliments that you pay her.”
He didn’t see why that was such a big deal. “Well, the food’s good,” Dugan pointed out. “Why shouldn’t I tell her that I like it?”
She could only laugh as she shook her head. There were times that the man was incredibly innocent.
“You have no idea how rare that is. I mean, I tell her something’s good, but that doesn’t make an impression because she feels I’ll say that even if she serves up three-day-old shoe leather. You, on the other hand, well, you’re a guy.”
“Thank you for noticing,” he commented dryly.
“My point,” she stressed as they walked up to the front door, “is that guys don’t usually notice things like that. She had three brothers and not one of them ever had anything good to say about her cooking.”
He tried to come up with a reason. “Maybe they just thought it was understood. Some people are uncomfortable giving compliments,” he told her.
“True,” Toni agreed. “But other people are just brainless dolts. I think her brothers fall into the latter category,” she told Dugan. Even as the words were out of her mouth, she realized why he wouldn’t have even thought of that. “You wouldn’t understand that because your family’s perfect.”
“Ha!” was Dugan’s immediate response. “They’re not perfect. Not by a long shot.”
She knew she could argue that point, but she decided to let it go for now. Dugan knew how lucky he was. No reason to belabor that thought.
“Okay, for the sake of argument, just let me put it this way. Your family is a lot more perfect than most families,” she told him.
“Who’s a lot more perfect?” Lucinda asked as she walked into the room, bringing Heather with her. She paused by the playpen and put the baby down in it. “By the way, dinner’s going to be delayed. Her royal highness decided she was staying up longer and needed more attention.”
“I’m fine with that,” Dugan said. He walked over to the playpen and scooped the baby up into his arms. “Nothing like coming home to a baby at the end of another long, frustratingly unproductive day,” he declared. Just holding her in his arms seemed to make him feel better. “Hi, sunshine, so how was your day? Was it good?” he asked.
Heather gurgled as if she was actually responding to his question.
Dugan laughed. “You don’t say? It was that good, huh? Maybe you and I should trade days tomorrow. I’ll stay and hang around here while you can go in and pretend you’re me.”
Toni looked at him, her eyes taking the measure of both the detective and the baby he was holding in his arms. “I think they might notice the height difference,” she commented.
Dugan held the baby up, pretending to examine her from all sides. “You think there’s a height difference? Where?”
“Lucy, I think the detective might need a drink tonight to make things clearer for him,” Toni told the other woman.
“Naw,” Dugan said, waving away Toni’s suggestion. “All I need is right here, isn’t it, doll-face?” he said, asking the baby for her input.
Heather gurgled again, as if to agree.
Chapter 18
“What if you never get Padilla?” Toni asked Dugan out of the blue several days later.
Their lives had taken on a certain routine now. They left together in the morning and came home together at night—her home, not his. Occasionally, Dugan would swing by his place to get his mail or another change of clothing, but even then, they always wound up at her house. She had even taken to doing his laundry along with her own, the baby’s and Lucinda’s.
In a way, at least temporarily, they had become a family of sorts. But she didn’t want to get accustomed to this, accustomed to having him around, which was why she asked the question now.
“We’ll get him,” Dugan told her, sounding completely confident.
They were alone in the living room. Dinner was long over and the dishes had been cleared away. Lucinda had put the baby down and then gone to bed herself. The house felt oddly quiet right now.
So quiet that Toni could almost hear herself think, and her thoughts were disquieting.
She found herself looking forward to each day because she and Dugan would be together and the feeling did make her wary. She already knew she couldn’t depend on having a man in her life. Heather�
��s father was proof of that.
“But what if you don’t?” Toni pressed. “Are you planning on being my bodyguard for the rest of my life?”
He looked at her, trying to understand where she was going with this. Was she just feeling him out, or was there a note of hostility in her voice?
“Would that be so bad?” he asked, watching her.
“Well, sure,” Toni said. “For you,” she added, watching him to see his reaction.
“Are you trying to get rid of me, Toni?” Dugan asked her, his voice sounding a little silkier than it normally did.
“Of course not,” she told him, her eyes still on Dugan, “I just hate being a burden.”
He waved away the thought. “Well, you’re not.”
But she wasn’t about to let that go just yet. “Sure I am. You don’t get to be you at the end of the day. You’re too busy guarding me, being alert,” she stressed.
Dugan gave her another take on it. “Well, maybe that is me.”
She wasn’t buying it. “No, it’s not. The first time I met you—the night you helped deliver Heather—you were coming back after a night of celebrating something at Malone’s. Malone’s is where you go to unwind and hang out. Malone’s is also the place you haven’t gone to since you started this side detail of ‘guarding Toni.’”
He weighed his words carefully, not wanting to give too much away, but wanting to negate what she seemed to believe.
“Look, if I had a problem with this assignment, someone else would be spelling me. But the truth of it is...” He paused for a moment, gauging her response. “I feel better being the one who’s looking out for you. I don’t trust anyone to do a better job of guarding you than me.”
His eyes were on hers. He was standing too close to her again, Dugan thought, upbraiding himself. That had been happening a lot these last couple of days. It was almost as if he was secretly daring himself to see how close he could get to her and still be able to reel himself back in without having done anything.
Without acting on his feelings.
It was, he thought, getting harder and harder for him.
“If I do have any problem with this,” he continued, his mouth suddenly feeling as if he’d tried to swallow a large wad of cotton, “it’s—oh, hell, never mind.”
“No, finish what you were about to say,” Toni insisted, getting in his way as Dugan tried to turn from her.
He was deliberately trying to put some distance between them. His impulses were becoming more difficult to sublimate. Did she always wear that perfume? Because right now, it was filling his head.
Turning away again, he told her, “It’s not worth finishing.”
“Yes, it is,” Toni insisted. She followed him across the room, then put her hand on his shoulder, forcibly turning him around. “Now tell me, what were you going to say?”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re in my space,” he told her gruffly.
If he meant to intimidate her, he wasn’t about to succeed, Toni thought. She’d seen the man beneath that harsh facade, beneath that bluster. She’d seen the man who delivered her baby, the man who talked to Heather as if she were a cognizant tiny human being. That wasn’t the kind of man given to focusing only on himself and not on anyone else.
She didn’t want him turning away or hiding behind words. She wanted him to really talk to her, to tell her what was on his mind. There was something buzzing between them and she wanted it to become clearer, not disappear under a barrage of grunts and double-talk.
“I noticed,” Toni acknowledged. “And I’m not about to back off until you finish telling me what you started to say.”
He lifted his shoulders in a vague, careless shrug. “I lost my train of thought,” he told her.
Rather than backing off, the way he thought she would, Toni dug in.
“Then let me help,” she offered. “You said that if you did have any problem with this assignment, it was because—” She looked up at him. “Now you fill in the blank.”
He could almost feel her presence against him. Feel himself losing this battle he was unsuccessfully trying to wage. Annoyance bubbled up within him.
“Damn it, woman, I’m only a man.”
He saw the smile that came into her eyes. “I’m not complaining.”
He knew he should just push her away, but he couldn’t get himself to do that. But maybe if he warned her, he could get her to back off on her own.
“If you don’t let me put any distance between us, Toni,” he told her, “I might not be responsible for what happens.”
Toni caught her lip between her teeth, never taking her eyes off him. “And that would be...?” she asked breathlessly.
Hell, if he couldn’t verbally get her to back off, he was just going to have to frighten her away. Taking hold of her shoulders, he shortened what was already practically a nonexistent space between them. Pulling her to him, Dugan kissed her.
Not with the sort of tenderness he might have exhibited if this was any other situation, but roughly, so that she would finally understand what was going on here and run for her life.
But a funny thing happened when he kissed her, Dugan discovered. She wasn’t frightened away. She didn’t come to her senses and run. Instead, Toni reacted exactly the way she had in his fantasy.
She kissed him back.
Her arms went around his neck, her body pressed against his and she kissed him with every fiber of her being. Kissed him as if this was the very first time she’d ever kissed anyone and she didn’t want it to end. Ever.
Toni took his breath away, and in that moment, she managed to also do away with his defenses, reducing him to a mass of pulsating desire and burning passion.
It took a great deal of willpower for Dugan to force himself to break off the kiss and pull back from her. He very nearly didn’t make it, but the training he had gone through as a police officer and then a detective provided him with the inner fortitude and the background he needed in order to pull it off.
Stepping back, he created the opening between them that allowed him to clear his head. In very short order, she had managed to fill every part of him with a longing he found next to impossible to control.
Slightly disoriented, she looked up at him. Why had he pulled away? “What’s wrong? Don’t you want to kiss me? Because if you don’t, then I’ll back off and—”
Don’t you want to kiss me?
She had to be kidding. It was all he thought about every moment of every day when he wasn’t forcing himself to think about the case.
The last bit of resistance he had completely crumbled. He knew every reason he shouldn’t be doing this, why, if he was thinking straight, he should go back to his car and guard her from a distance.
But he wasn’t thinking straight and none of that mattered.
All that mattered was this incredible desire that he’d been trying to dam up since the first moment he’d laid eyes on her. The desire that had broken through his reinforcements and come pouring out, rushing like a raging river that had finally been allowed to run free.
Catching her up in his arms again, Dugan began kissing her with feeling, as if his very soul depended on it.
The more he kissed her, the more intense his desire for her became.
This time, when they came up for air, she was the one to put the brakes on, at least for that moment.
“Not here,” she breathed.
He understood.
Taking her hand, he led the way up the stairs to her bedroom. Once they reached it, Dugan had barely closed the door before she was back in his arms, her mouth sealed to his.
He kissed her over and over again, only marginally aware that they were taking each other’s clothes off as his lips devoured her.
They found their way from the door to her bed, although that, too, wasn’t a totally conscious process.
The only thing Toni was actually aware of was just how much she wanted him.
Yes, she’d been attracted to him and, yes, there had been this latent desire to discover what it would be like to be with him in the most intimate of ways. But she had no idea that once she began to explore she would feel as if she had been set on fire. A fire that was all-consuming and not only wouldn’t let up, but just grew larger.
Everything she did only made her want him that much more.
She kissed Dugan’s mouth, his neck, his face, working her way down along his upper torso, thrilling herself with every indulgence, every step forward she took. As she was getting totally caught up in feasting on him, suddenly he caught her hands in one of his, immobilizing her and holding her prisoner.
Toni blinked, looking at him, confusion in her eyes. “What?”
“You can’t have all the fun,” he whispered against her ear, his breath stirring her as it glided along her skin. And, just like that, he became the aggressor.
His hands and lips were passing over her body, anointing her, marking her, taking inventory of all of her as he made her twist and turn against him.
She bit her lip to keep from moaning. The nursery and the guest room were both clear down the hallway, but she didn’t want to take a chance on waking Lucinda up. What was happening between the two of them was far too gloriously private for her to share with anyone else, even a person she regarded like a sister.
This—and he—were hers alone and she intended to keep it that way.
The sound of her heavy breathing filled the air as he brought her up to higher and higher plateaus of heart-racing enjoyment until she was afraid that she was going to lose control and cry out from the sheer ecstasy of what she was experiencing.
Somehow, although she really wasn’t sure how, Toni managed to keep from screaming out her reaction.
But even so, she did her best to have him feel the very same building desire, to find himself tottering on the brink of almost excruciating, mind-numbing ecstasy.
Catching her hands, Dugan held them above her head as he moved his body slowly and seductively along hers, bringing her closer and closer to the uplifting crescendo her whole body was throbbing to experience. She felt herself hungering to feel that final wondrous moment and could hardly keep herself in check.
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