“I wouldn’t go that far,” she murmured under her breath.
Chris heard her, but pretended not to. He just smiled to himself.
Chapter 15
How bad could it be?
The question she’d asked herself echoed over and over in Suzie’s head as she went through the motions of getting ready for the Cavanaugh gathering she’d said she would attend.
Ordinarily, preparing to leave the house was an automatic ritual, but for the last three years, all she’d gotten ready for was to go to work. Here, and before Aurora, for in the crime lab where she’d worked in Phoenix.
All that getting ready required of her was to shower, then get dressed in something that was serviceable and allowed her to hit the ground running when a crime scene was involved.
In these last three years, she hadn’t once “gone out” in the normal definition of the term. She hadn’t seen anyone socially, either alone or in a group, except for that one failed attempt when Chris had tried to pick her up. With a sigh, Suzie realized that she was all but a hermit now, and mingling was beyond her usual scope of life. She didn’t mingle, didn’t socialize and didn’t do well in crowds, all of which she knew this afternoon definitely promised.
She shouldn’t have agreed, she told herself as she stared, unseeing, at her wardrobe mirror.
She needed to “unagree” the moment O’Bannon came to her door, to pick her up as if she were a package to be delivered.
What was the worst thing that would happen? Chris would leave without her, possibly mumbling something less than flattering about her under his breath. Nothing she hadn’t been subjected to before. No matter how annoyed he might get by her reversal, he certainly wasn’t going to grab her by her hair and drag her to this thing like some lumbering caveman.
“All you have to do is say no. You know how to say no, don’t you?” she challenged the woman looking back at her in the mirror. “You’ve heard the word often enough,” she murmured, remembering her other life after the roof had caved in.
Suzie squared her shoulders and psyched herself up, ready to launch into the fray—until she heard the doorbell.
Suddenly, her shoulders seemed to cave in as the sound registered.
He was here.
“Hang tough,” she ordered her reflection. The girl in the light blue sundress looked uncertain. Suzie walked to the door. “Hang tough,” she repeated. “He can’t make you go if you don’t want to.”
It sounded good.
The problem was, she had a feeling that somehow she would wind up going—and sticking out like a daisy at a rose convention.
Why wouldn’t everyone just leave her alone?
“Ready?” Chris asked cheerfully, the moment she opened the door in response to his knock.
She all but glared at him, and snapped, “No!” in response.
His eyes skimmed over her. In his opinion, she looked ready. Gorgeous and ready. But he had sisters, so he knew all about not being ready despite appearances.
“Oh, okay.” Walking in the door, Chris leaned casually against the wall. “I’ll wait.”
“In vain,” she countered. She was aware that the words sounded combative.
Chris looked like the soul of innocence as he asked, “You’re not really going to disappoint my uncle, are you?”
“No,” she answered, and then, before he could misunderstand her meaning, she added, “because he won’t even notice I’m not there. How could he?” she cried. “There’ll be too many other people there. It’s like saying he’d miss a grain of sand on the beach.”
The look on O’Bannon’s face told her he thought she was gravely oversimplifying the matter. “Oh, Uncle Sean’ll notice,” he assured her with conviction. “You’re underestimating his powers of observation.”
She all but laughed in his face. “At last count, there were enough Cavanaughs and Cavanaughs-by-relation to fill a midsized football stadium. There’s no way he’ll notice that I’m not there—if you don’t bring it to his attention,” she said, emphasizing each word.
Chris wasn’t about to lie. He didn’t believe in it. “Well, I’ll have to if he asks.”
She had the perfect solution to that. “Then stay out of his line of vision and he won’t ask. There,” she concluded. “Simple.”
Chris laughed. He couldn’t help it. She seemed adorably naive.
“Even if this ‘plan’ of yours works,” he told her, “there’s always Monday morning.”
Suzie didn’t understand. “Monday morning?”
“Yes. Monday morning. That’s when he’ll mention not having seen you. Probably first thing,” Chris guessed. “What are you going to do then?”
Her exasperation had almost reached the breaking point. “Monday is two days away,” she cried, throwing up her hands. “I’ll come up with something by then.”
“You know,” O’Bannon told her after some deliberation, “you never struck me as being cowardly.”
He was making her squirm inside. Any second she was going to be squirming on the outside, too.
“I’m not,” she snapped.
“Good, my mistake,” he said in a particularly chipper voice. “Then it’s settled.”
That was when he took her by the hand and began to draw her out the door. For a second, Suzie was stunned. He’d caught her off guard and had completely thrown her by taking her hand. It was the first real physical contact between them, and Suzie berated herself for the fact that she felt her pulse accelerating.
Annoyed with him and with herself, she yanked her hand away.
“I can walk,” she informed him curtly.
“And I look forward to watching that,” he told her, gesturing her in the general direction of his car. “By the way, you look nice.”
“I look dressed,” Suzie corrected tersely, since she felt that there was nothing particularly outstanding about what she had on.
“That’s one way to describe it,” he allowed, wanting to avoid getting into an argument with her if at all possible. “Now all you have to do is not look as if I’m leading you to your execution, and everything’ll be just fine.”
She made one last-ditch attempt. “I don’t do well in crowds.”
“Speaking on behalf of ‘the crowd,’ we don’t want you to ‘do’ anything,” he told Suzie. “We just want you to be.”
“Be what?” she asked, when he didn’t seem about to finish his sentence.
By now he’d gotten her all the way over to his car, which he’d left in the first spot in guest parking.
“Be,” Chris repeated. “Just be, Suzie Q. As in exist. You know, I don’t understand why you’re so spooked about this,” he told her quite honestly. “It’s just a bunch of cops getting together. You’re around cops every day,” he pointed out.
“No,” she contradicted stubbornly, “I’m in the lab every day. By myself. The cops come and go.”
“The last couple of weeks have been different,” he pointed out to her patiently. She knew that. She didn’t need him to spell it out to her. “Honestly,” he went on, “we don’t bite. Not even my mother.”
Suzie had gotten into his car, but froze as she was fastening her seat belt. “Your mother?”
He nodded, smoothly blending in with the rest of the traffic as he pulled out of the complex.
“As far as I know, she’ll be there. She’s one of those ‘dreaded Cavanaughs.’ By birth,” Chris added cheerfully.
“Your mother,” Suzie repeated, as if his words were barely sinking in.
“Yes. She’ll be there. We’ve established that fact, Suzie Q. She’s actually very nice,” he told her. “I didn’t think that for a few years back when I was in high school, but then my mother called those my ‘wild years.’”
“And when will they be over, exactly?” Suzie asked sarcastically.
“Score one for the lab jockey,” he said magnanimously. “Tell you what,” he suggested as he drove the familiar route to the former chief of police’s recently renova
ted and expanded house, “Give this get-together an hour. If you still feel like jumping ship, then we’ll leave.”
He was just saying that to get her to lower her guard.
“What if I can’t find you in an hour?” Suzie challenged.
“You think I’m going to bail on you?” he asked, intrigued.
The man could make innocent look believable, she thought—except that she knew better. “Something like that.”
“Not a chance, Suzie Q,” he promised. “But if, for some reason, we do get separated—” he began.
“Ha!” Suzie declared, as if he’d just proved her point.
Chris never blinked. “I was going to say, send up a flare, I’ll find you.”
She sighed deeply. She could probably set her hair on fire and he’d pretend not to see her.
“This is a mistake.”
“No,” he retorted. “A mistake is not facing what you’re afraid of—because if you don’t face it, it’ll haunt you forever.”
“You sound like a fortune cookie,” she said dismissively.
“That’s too long to fit into a fortune cookie.” Changing the subject as he turned into a residential development, he stated, “We’re almost there.”
Suzie blinked, surprised. She had no idea she lived so close to the former chief.
“This looks like a parking lot,” she cried, when he drove onto the block where Andrew Cavanaugh lived. There were cars lining both sides of the street as far as she could see.
“Told you,” Chris said, vindicated. “Carpooling is the only way to go.”
“All these the people who drove these vehicles carpooled?” she asked incredulously. She’d lost count of the vehicles. “Just how many of you are there?”
“You can do an official head count when we get there if you want.” He continued scanning the area, searching for an empty spot. “By the way, we’re allowed to bring friends. Like you.”
Suzie made no comment.
They found a space two blocks away—a block that had a large residential playground on it, which accounted for the free space. It meant they had a long walk to the house.
“I would have let you out by the front door,” Chris told her as they exited the car, “but I was afraid you’d make a break for it.”
“Is that what you actually thought?” she asked as they started toward their destination.
“Yes.” He wondered if he’d just opened the door to another argument. Her response surprised him.
“You’re smarter than you look,” she was forced to admit.
Chris laughed and shook his head. “Looks like I’m not the only one who’s going to have to brush up on their flattery skills,” he observed, remembering what she’d said to him the other day.
“I know how to conduct myself around people.” The look in his eyes was rather doubtful. She knew what he was thinking—which was a scary thought in itself. She chose not to dwell on it. “You’re a different matter. You’re not people.”
He laughed as they reached the chief’s block. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Suzie tossed her head, sending her hair swaying against her back like a sultry blond wave. “It wasn’t meant to be.”
“I know.” His eyes glinted with humor. “But I’m taking it that way, anyway.”
They had reached his uncle’s front door, but rather than knock on it, Chris put his hand on the doorknob and began to turn it.
“Aren’t you going to knock?” she asked, surprised that he was just going to walk in.
“Nobody’ll probably hear,” he told her. “They’re a noisy bunch and they’re too busy having fun.” Gesturing for her to enter, he said with deliberate politeness, “After you.”
“You’re just afraid if you go first, I’ll run off.”
He merely smiled at her, still waiting for her to go first. “We do think alike,” he agreed.
“Heaven forbid.” With a sigh, she walked in.
Suzie became aware of the wall of noise, of blended voices the moment she walked into the house. She was also aware that more than a couple people glanced in their direction—and that they were all smiling as they nodded a greeting.
Most of all, she was aware of the warmth, both in temperature and in atmosphere. It was immediately evident that all these people got along and liked each other.
She could feel deep-seated apprehension rising to the surface.
How would they take her presence here? Yes, she was part of law enforcement, but she wasn’t part of them. She was an interloper. People she’d known all her life, people who were more family to her than her own family, had turned their backs on her when it came to light that her father might have been the dreaded serial killer who had preyed on homeless women in and around their town. They didn’t even wait until it was a proved fact, they just accepted it as gospel.
And then it had been hatred by association.
“You must be Chris’s new partner.” The deep rumbling voice and the older woman it belonged to ambushed her. She took Suzie’s hands, her own soft and comforting, and giving Suzie an odd feeling of well-being when they made contact.
“I’m his long-suffering mother, Maeve,” the woman introduced herself. “Maeve Cavanaugh O’Bannon.”
Just slightly taller than Suzie, Maeve easily out-weighed her by a good twenty, twenty-five pounds, all of which were evenly distributed to create the impression of a powerful woman who knew her own mind and who took no garbage from anyone, not her children and especially not her brothers.
“I’m not his partner,” Suzie corrected politely. “We’re just temporarily working together on a case.”
Rather than looking annoyed at being corrected, Maeve took the words in stride. “Ah, my mistake. The way Chris talked, I thought you two were lifelong partners. How’s the case coming along? Any closer to catching the bastard?” Maeve asked, sounding as if she was genuinely interested.
That was when Chris placed himself between them. “She didn’t come here to talk shop, Ma. She came here to sample some of Uncle Andrew’s famous cooking.”
Maeve patted her arm, never missing a beat as she changed topics. “Prepare to have your taste buds think they’ve died and gone to heaven. If I’d grown up around this man, I’d be three times as large as I am now,” she confided to Suzie with a broad wink.
And then she turned to her son. “Where are your manners, Christian? I didn’t raise you in a closet. Take this girl and introduce her around to the others. Make her feel welcome, for heaven’s sake.” And then Maeve seemed to think better of her last instruction. “Never mind. That’s our job,” she decided.
He caught Suzie’s urgent, if silent cry for help, and came to the rescue. “Give her some breathing space, Ma.”
Although he loved his mother dearly, in his opinion she came on too strong.
“You want breathing space, take her outside,” Maeve told him. “Your uncle’s got the buffet table set up back there. You can get that precious breathing space and stuffed mushrooms at the same time,” she told them. The next moment, Maeve O’Bannon had moved on.
“You okay?” Chris asked, leaning close to Suzie. When she nodded, he began to usher her out through the patio doors to the backyard. “Ma can be a little overwhelming at times,” he confided. “But she means well.”
Suzie was still trying to come to terms with something the older woman had said to her. “You told her about me?” she asked.
“I didn’t go out of my way to say anything, but she likes being kept in the loop and calls me like once a week, same as she does the others,” he said, referring to his siblings. Weekly calls even though they all lived close to one another was a given. It was how they stayed in touch. “You were part of the answer to ‘How’s your newest case going?’”
Suzie stared at him. “You talk to your mother once a week?” she asked incredulously.
“Sure. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, but I’d watch my back if I were you,” she warn
ed. “They might stick you in a museum.”
“I take it you don’t talk to your mother often.”
She pressed her lips together, debating not saying anything at all. But he could find out if he wanted to. She had listed that in her background information. “Can’t. She’s been dead for three years.”
Damn, he’d walked all over that, he thought, upbraiding himself.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up old wounds. But that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to her,” he told her. When Suzie looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, he was more than happy to set her straight. “I talk to my dad sometimes and he’s been dead for a real long time.”
She remembered him mentioning that a while ago. Suzie shook her head. “You are weird.”
“So some people have said,” he allowed with a laugh. “Let me lead you to the food and you’ll forget all about how weird I am.”
“That would take a lot of food,” she cracked.
“Lucky for both of us, ‘a lot’ doesn’t even begin to describe this spread.”
Which was when she saw the buffet table—and discovered that the man beside her was actually given to understatement.
Chapter 16
True to his word, despite obviously having a good time with the members of his extended family, Chris resisted being drawn away by his cousins when they wanted to play a game of pool, or when Bryce wanted to take him for a ride to show him what his new sport car could do on the open road.
Instead, Chris O’Bannon never left Suzie’s side. Not only that, but the man really did appear to be ready to leave the gathering whenever she indicated that she wanted to leave.
It wasn’t anything that he said, but Suzie could feel it in the way he looked at her, the way he’d touch her shoulder as he ushered from one group to another when he wanted her to see something. And because Chris appeared to be so willing to take his cues from her, Suzie found herself progressively lowering her guard by small increments. Before long, she could feel herself relaxing and enjoying the company of these people, who all seemed to genuinely like one another and get along so well.
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