He took her hand in his, still reassuring himself that she was alive, that he’d gotten to her in time. “Well, if I make sure to watch your every move, maybe the next fifty years.”
Okay, it wasn’t getting any clearer. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“The way your mind works, I never know,” he admitted. “What is it you think I’m saying?” When she shook her head, unwilling or unable to elaborate, Ethan decided it was time to finally go the whole nine yards and put his feeling into words.
“Okay, maybe I’m not being very clear,” he admitted. Leaning in closer so that only she could hear, he said, “I’m asking you to marry me.”
A whole host of emotions charged through her like patrons in a theater where someone had just yelled “Fire!” Joy was prominently featured among the emotions, but joy was capped off by fear. Fear because she’d thought herself safe and happy once before, only to watch her world crumble to nothing right in front of her eyes.
She never wanted to be in that position again. “How about we move in together for a while and see how that goes?”
That wasn’t the answer he was hoping for. “You don’t want to marry me?”
Her first reaction was to shrug away his words, but she owed it to him to be honest more than she owed it to herself to protect herself. “I don’t want another broken heart.”
“That’s not going to happen,” he told her with feeling. “You have my word.” He held her hand between both of his. “Do you trust me?”
She thought of how he came riding to her rescue—literally. A weak smile curved her mouth. “I guess if I can’t trust the word of the man who just messed up the car he loves to save my life, who can I trust? You really sacrificed your car for me,” she marveled.
“It doesn’t kiss as well as you do,” he told her with a straight face.
“Lucky for me.”
“Hey, O’Brien.” Ortiz stuck his head in, then saw that Kansas was conscious. “How you feeling?” he asked her.
“Like a truck ran over me, but I’ll live,” she answered.
The detective grinned and nodded his approval. “Good.” Then he got back to what he wanted to say to Ethan. “We caught him,” he announced triumphantly. “Dispatch just called to say that Bonner was picked up at the Amtrak station, trying to buy a ticket to Sedona. Seems that the machine rejected his credit card.” He was looking directly at Ethan when he said the last part.
By the look on Ethan’s face, Kansas knew he had to have something to do with the credit card being rejected. “Just how long was I out?”
Ortiz withdrew and Ethan turned his attention back to her. “Long enough for me to get really worried.”
“You were worried about me?” She couldn’t remember the last time anyone cared enough to be worried about her. It was a good feeling.
This was going to take some time, he thought. But that was all right. He had time. Plenty of time. As long as he could spend it with her. “I tend to worry about the people I love.”
She struggled to sit up, leaning on her elbows. “Wait, say that again.”
“Which part?” he asked innocently. “ ‘I tend’?”
“No, the other part.”
“ ‘...to worry about’?”
She had enough leverage available to be able to hit his arm. “The last part.”
“Oh, you mean ‘love’?” he asked, watching her face.
“The people I love,” she repeated, her teeth gritted together.
“Oh?” He looked at her as if this were all new to him. “And who are these people that you love?”
Why was he toying with her? “Not me. You!” she cried, exasperated.
“You love me?” Ethan asked, looking at her in surprise and amazement.
“Of course I love you—I mean—” And then it hit her. “Wait, you tricked me.”
He saw no point in carrying on the little performance any longer. His grin went from ear to ear. “Whatever it takes to get the job done.”
She was feeling better. Much better. “Oh, just shut up and kiss me.”
This he could do. Easily. Taking hold of her shoulders to steady her, he said, “Your wish is my command.”
And it was.
Epilogue
Andrew Cavanaugh’s house was teeming with family members. All his family members. The former chief of police hadn’t merely extended an invitation this time, as was his habit—he had instructed everyone to come, telling them to do whatever they had to in order to change their schedule and make themselves available for a family gathering.
When his oldest son had pressed him why it was so important to have everyone there, Andrew had said that he would understand when the time came.
“Anyone know what this is about?” Patrick Cavanaugh asked, scanning the faces of his cousins, or as many as he could see from his position in his uncle’s expanded family room. There seemed to be family as far as the eye could see, spilling into the kitchen and parts beyond.
Callie, standing closest to her cousin, shook her head. “Not a clue.”
Rayne moved closer to her oldest sister, not an easy feat these days given her condition. Rayne was carrying twins whom she referred to as miniature gypsies, given their continuous restless state.
“Maybe he’s decided, since there’re so many of us, that we’re forming our own country and seceding from the union,” she quipped. Rayne laced her fingers through her husband’s as she added, “You never know with Dad.”
Kansas looked at Ethan and briefly entertained the idea—knowing that the Cavanaugh patriarch celebrated each family occasion with a party—that this might be because she and Ethan were engaged. So far, it was a secret. Or was it?
“You didn’t tell him, did you?” she whispered to Ethan.
Ethan shook his head, but the same thought had crossed his mind, as well. If not for the way the “invitation” had been worded, he wouldn’t have ruled out the possibility.
“From what I hear,” he whispered back, “there’s never a need to tell the man anything. He always just seems to know things.”
They heard Brian laugh and realized that the chief of detectives had somehow gotten directly behind them. “Despite the rumors, my older brother’s not a psychic,” Brian told them, highly amused.
This was the first opportunity Kansas had had to see the man since Bonner’s capture. In all the ensuing action, she hadn’t had a chance to tell him how grateful she was that he had come to her aid. Rescuing obviously ran in the family, she mused.
Turning around to face Brian, Kansas said, “I really want to thank you, Chief, for putting in a good word for me with the Crime Scene Investigation unit.”
“All I was doing was rubber-stamping a very good idea,” he told her, brushing off her thanks.
Brian had been instrumental in bringing up her name to the head of the unit. He’d done it to save her the discomfort of going back to the firehouse and trying to work with people who regarded her with hostility because she’d turned in one of their own.
Seeing her smile of relief was payment enough for him. “Thank you for agreeing to join the CSI unit. They’re damn lucky to have you,” he told her with feeling. “Hopefully, you’ll decide to stay with the department after Captain Lawrence comes to his senses and asks you to reconsider your resignation.”
Kansas shook her head. She sincerely doubted that Captain Lawrence would ever want her back. He all but came out and said so, commenting that he felt she would be “happier someplace else.” And he was right. She felt she’d finally found a home. In more ways than one.
“You have nothing to worry about there.” Things had gotten very uncomfortable for her within the firehouse after Bonner was caught and arraigned. Everyone agreed that Bonner should be held accountable for what he’d done, but the bad taste the whole case had generated wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. And it was primarily focused on her.
Transferring to another fire station wouldn’t help. Her “r
eputation” would only follow her. She would always be the outsider, the investigator who turned on her own. She’d had no choice but to resign. The moment she had, like an answer to a prayer, Brian Cavanaugh had come to her with an offer from the Crime Scene Investigation unit. The division welcomed her with open arms.
“Good. I know I speak for all the divisions when I say that we look forward to working with you on a regular basis.”
About to add something further, Brian fell silent as he saw his older brother walk into the center of the room. He, along with Lila and Rose, were the only other people who knew what was going on—if he didn’t count the eight people waiting to walk into the room.
This, Brian thought, was going to knock everyone’s proverbial socks off.
“Everybody, if I could have your attention,” Andrew requested, raising his deep baritone voice so that he could be heard above the din of other conversations. Silence swiftly ensued as all eyes turned toward him.
“What’s with the melodrama, Dad?” Rayne, his youngest and a card-carrying rebel until very recently, wanted to know, putting the question to him that was on everyone else’s mind.
“No melodrama,” Andrew assured her. “I just wanted all of you to hear this at the same time so I wouldn’t wind up having to repeat myself several dozen times. And so no one could complain that they were the last to know.” He was looking directly at Rayne as he said it.
“Repeat what several dozen times?” Zack called out from the far end of the room.
Andrew paused for a moment, then, taking a breath, began. “First of all, I think you should all know that your grandparents had four sons, not three.”
“Four?” Teri, Andrew’s middle daughter, echoed, stunned. “Where’s the fourth one?”
“Let him talk,” Janelle counseled.
“Good question,” Andrew allowed. “The son your grandparents had after Mike and before Brian only lived for nine months. Your grandmother woke up one morning to find that he had died in his sleep. What you also don’t know,” he continued, raising his voice again as snatches of disbelief were voiced throughout the room, “was that, for weeks after she first came home from the hospital, your grandmother kept insisting that they had switched babies on her. That Sean—that was the baby’s name—wasn’t her Sean. Nobody really paid attention to her, thinking she was just imagining things.” He paused again to let his words sink in before he came to the most incredible portion. At times, he still didn’t feel as if it was real.
“Recently, people—like your uncle Brian—have been coming up to me, asking me why I was ignoring them when they encountered me on the street. Other than thinking maybe I had an early onset of dementia—”
“Never happen,” Rose told him fiercely, threading her arm around her husband’s waist.
Andrew grinned down at the wife he’d gone to hell and back to find, bringing her home after everyone had assumed she was dead. “Anyway,” he told the others after planting a kiss on his wife’s forehead, “I started my own investigation into this so-called doppelgänger people were seeing. Long story short—”
“Too late,” Brian deadpanned.
Andrew ignored his brother. “It turns out that your grandmother was right, which will teach the male segment of this family never to doubt their women’s instincts. I won’t bore you with details—”
“Also too late,” Brian commented loud enough for everyone to hear.
Andrew slanted his brother a patient, tolerant glance. “Right now, I would like to introduce you to the end result of my investigation. Everyone, I’d like for you to meet your uncle Sean—oddly enough that’s what the people who raised him called him, too—and his seven kids...your cousins.”
The silence within the family room was deafening as eight more people walked into the room. Each and every one of them blended in perfectly with the people who were already there.
It would have been difficult to tell them apart.
“We really could start our own country,” Ethan murmured, remembering what Rayne had said earlier.
“I don’t know about our own country,” Kansas whispered in his ear, deciding that the time was right to tell him, “but we have gotten started on a family.”
He looked at her sharply. “Are you—?”
She grinned broadly at him. “I am.”
He couldn’t begin to describe the joy he was experiencing. “Now will you marry me?”
Her eyes sparkled. “You bet I will.”
If she was going to say anything else, it would have to wait. Because Ethan scooped her into his arms and kissed her. And he intended to go on kissing her for a very long time to come.
* * * * *
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Chapter 1
The Wyoming woods atop the tall mountains that cradled the town of Cold Plains were just beginning to take on a fall cast of color. This worked perfectly with the camouflage long-sleeved T-shirt and pants that Micah Grayson wore as he made his way through the thick brush and trees.
Although a gun holster rode his shoulder, he held his gun tight in his hand. Despite the fact that he had only been hiding out in the mountainous woods for two days and nights, he’d quickly learned that danger could come in the blink of an eye, a danger that might require the quick tic of his index finger on the trigger.
Twilight had long ago fallen but a near-full moon overhead worked as an additional enemy when it came to using the shield of darkness for cover.
As an ex-mercenary, Micah knew how to learn the terrain and use the weather to his advantage. He knew how to keep the reflection of the moonlight off his skin so as not to alert anyone to his presence. He could move through a bed of dry leaves and not make a sound. He could be wearing a black suit in a snowstorm and still figure out a way to become invisible.
The first twenty-four hours that he’d been in the woods he’d learned natural landmarks, studied pitfalls and figured out places he thought would make good hidey-holes if needed. He’d also come face-to-face with a moose, heard the distant call of a wolf and seen several elk and deer.
He now moved with the stealth of a big cat toward the rocky cliff he’d discovered the night before. As he crept low and light on his feet, he kept alert, his ears open for any alien sound that might not belong to the forest.
Despite the relative coolness of the night, a trickle of sweat trekked down the center of his back. During his thirty-eight years of life, Micah had faced a thousand life-threatening situations, the latest of which had been a bullet to his head that had sent him into a coma for months.
When he finally reached the rocky bluff he looked down at the lights dotting the little valley, the lights of the small town of Cold Plains, Wyoming. His brother Samuel’s town. Micah reached up and touched the scar, now barely discernible through his thick dark hair on the left side of his head, the place where Samuel’s henchman, Dax Roberts, had shot him while Micah had sa
t in his car. Dax had left him for dead.
Fortunately for Micah he hadn’t died, but had come out of a three-month coma with the fierce, driving need for revenge against the fraternal twin he’d always somehow known was a dangerous, narcissistic sociopath.
Unfortunately, Samuel was also charming and slick and powerful, making him a natural leader that people wanted to follow.
Five months ago Micah had been sitting in a small-town Kansas coffee shop where he’d landed after his last mission for a little downtime when he’d seen a face almost identical to his own flash across the television mounted to the wall.
Stunned, he’d watched a news story unfold that told him his brother Samuel was being questioned by the FBI and local police in connection with the murders of five women found all across Wyoming. All the women had one thing in common: Cold Plains, the town where his wealthy, motivational-speaker brother wielded unbelievable influence and power.
Micah had immediately contacted the FBI and been put in touch with an agent named Hawk Bledsoe. The two had made arrangements to meet the next day but, before Micah could make that meeting, he’d caught the bullet to his head.
He’d been in the coma for ninety-three long days and it had taken him another two months to feel up to the task he knew he had to do—take out Samuel before he could destroy any more people and lives.
Which was why he’d spent these last two days and nights in the woods adjacent to Cold Plains.
Minutes before he’d made his way to the bluff, he’d met with his FBI contact, Hawk. Hawk had grown up in Cold Plains and after years of being away from his hometown had returned to discover that the rough-around-the-edges place where he’d grown up as son of the town drunk had transformed into something eerily perfect. A town run by a group of people who others referred to under their breaths as the Devotees and their leader, the movie-star handsome, but frightening and dangerous Samuel Grayson.
For the past two nights Micah and Hawk had met at dusk in the woods so Hawk could keep Micah apprised of what was going on in town and how the FBI investigation into Samuel’s misdeeds was progressing.
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