Cavanaugh Watch (7 page)

Point and counterpoint.

Janelle stuffed both plates on top of the napkins, then closed the pizza-box lid. Getting up, she set the box aside on the kitchen counter. When she turned around, she saw that Sawyer had gotten up as well, an empty soda can in either hand. He put them on top of the pizza box.

“Okay,” Janelle began gamely, picking up on his comment regarding worthwhile conversation, “tell me about yourself.”

When he said nothing, she watched him expectantly. Had she not been staring, the movement of his head from side to side would have been imperceptible. “Not worth talking about.”

“Modesty?” she asked.

“Fact,” he stated flatly.

He might have no say in the assignment he was given, but no way was he about to let this person elbow her way into his private life. His private life was going to remain just that, private. No one else’s business.

She studied his face as she spoke. “Everyone’s life is worth talking about, Sawyer.”

Just his luck to be told to guard a woman who could talk the ears off a stone statue. “It’s getting late,” he told her. “Maybe we should call it a day.”

There were a few other things she wanted to call it—and him—but she kept that to herself.

She glanced over toward the television set. The program had ended without her noticing or finding out who was behind the murders. The eleven o’clock news with its barrage of depressing sound bites was just announcing the main headlines. While programs that dealt with solving crimes captured her interest, the news did not. There was too much sadness in the world for her to actively seek out more. Fiction she enjoyed. Reality was another matter.

Crossing over to the television set, she was about to shut it off only to have the picture suddenly fade into nothingness before her outstretched hand. She turned around behind her to see that Sawyer was holding the remote. He was aiming it at the set.

Typical male.

And yet, not so typical, really. At least, not when she compared him to the men in her family. Of course, her cousin Teri was married to Hawk, another detective on the Aurora police force. To say that the man had come across as less than a ray of sunshine when he’d originally hooked up with her cousin was a vast understatement.

Inside of every dark soul was a bit of sunshine, she thought. You just had to work the mine until you finally found it.

Janelle shoved her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and took a defensive stance. Why did she even care if this man she was forced to put up with in her apartment even
had
a ray of sunshine inside of him? It made no different to her one way or another. He was just the thorn in her side right now, nothing more.

A temporary thorn, she underscored silently. Once the case was wrapped up, the powers that be were going to pull this thorn out and she would be alone again. Away from electric-blue eyes that seemed to penetrate her very skin and look right into her. Away from a man who made her feel unsettled and nervous and who seemed to be going out of his way to irritate the hell out of her.

She couldn’t wait.

Chapter 7

J
anelle punched her pillow for the umpteenth time. Defeated, the pillow could no longer rise to the occasion but lay there, as flat as her attempts to find slumber, or even some semblance of rest.

This wasn’t going to work. If she didn’t find a way around this situation, or how to at least tolerate it, she was going to wind up being a zombie by the time she had to show up in court.

Glancing to the side, she looked at the clock on her nightstand. The electric red numbers told her it was three minutes past two.

Janelle groaned.

Normally able to instantly fall sleep, she’d been tossing and turning since she’d slipped in between the sheets at midnight. All because there was a man, an unwanted man, in her living room, supposedly sitting guard.

A man about whom there was surprisingly little information available. She’d turned in at eleven and then had spent the next hour on her computer, hooking up into all the standard programs available to her and finding next to nothing. Name, rank and employee number, that was the extent of it. That and the fact that he’d been in the marines, then on the L.A. police force. She didn’t even know where he was born.

Or if, she added sarcastically. For the most part, the man behaved like a robot.

How could there be no history of him? she wondered, frustrated. It was the same question that pulsed through her brain now. With the same answer. She hadn’t a clue.

After shutting down her computer, she’d put in a call to Brenda. She’d asked for help once she’d apologized for having woken her up. Brenda had promised her that if there was anything to find, she’d find it. Janelle had hung up the phone thinking how nice it was that all her brothers had found women to share their lives with who were utterly likeable. There were families that splintered after siblings got married. Hers just grew closer together.

That thought and the fact that she might get information about her mysterious man-with-no-history bodyguard heartened her. For a few minutes.

But hope was slowly eroded as the darkness of night stained its fabric.

Not that she expected Brenda to call back within the hour. That was absurd. But her own inability to find anything had made her begin to think that maybe there was nothing to find. Which meant she was dealing with someone whose background had been covered up for some reason. Which led her to the question: Why?

She was getting punchy. Punchy and edgy and just this side of slightly irrational. And lying here like this was only going to get her more so.

Throwing back the covers, she sat up and swung her legs over the side. There were reference books in the bookcase in the other room that might be helpful with the Wayne case. No sense in just lying here, doing a bad imitation of a spinning top. She might as well do something useful with this downtime.

She didn’t bother with the slippers at the foot of the bed. After grabbing her robe out of her closet, Janelle slipped it on and opened the door. From where she stood, she could see the back of Sawyer’s head. He was sitting, not lying, on the sofa.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t asleep, Janelle thought. Plenty of people dozed off sitting up. She’d even fallen asleep once paging through a legal brief. But then, the kind of language that was found in a legal brief did not exactly make for scintillating reading.

Very softly, still watching the back of Sawyer’s head, she made her way to the other room.

She was only three steps closer when Sawyer turned his head in her direction. She felt her heart sink. The man
was
a robot. With super hearing. She’d even been holding her breath.

“Going somewhere?”

“Sleepwalking,” she countered.

He nodded, as if that were a perfectly plausible explanation for her moving around in the middle of the night.

“As long as I know,” he murmured, going back to reading his book.

Curiosity got the better of her. She drew closer to try to see what was written on the cover. “What is it you’re reading?”

His fingers were spaced so that they completely blotted out the title and author on the worn cover. “A book.”

There wasn’t enough light to make anything out. He’d shut off all the lights except the one on the side table and he’d turned that down to the lowest wattage. The scene might have even been construed as romantic, if Sawyer hadn’t been the one on the sofa.

“I can see that,” she retorted evenly. “What kind of book?”

“A good one.”

His picture had to be in the dictionary, under infuriating. “Are you doing this on purpose to annoy me,” she asked, “or does being a wiseass just come naturally to you?”

When she took another step closer, Sawyer half rolled up his book like a fat magazine and stuffed it into his back pocket.

“It’s still early,” he told her, changing the subject. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”

Her eyes narrowed. Even as a kid, she hadn’t liked being told what to do. And that was by people who had a right to do it. He didn’t.

“If I wanted a recommendation or your opinion on the matter, I would have asked for it.” Her statement would have sounded more forceful without the yawn that insisted on pushing its way in at the last moment. She blinked, focusing in on the kitchen. Her coffeemaker sat on the counter, dormant. If she was going to read—and make sense of what she was reading—she needed caffeine. “You want coffee?”

He considered her question for a moment. “I could stand to drink a cup.”

“Good, so could I. Go make it,” she instructed glibly. “The filters are in the cupboard just above the coffeemaker.” She pointed toward it for his benefit. “I keep the coffee inside the refrigerator door.”

She’d tricked him. Sawyer was about to say as much, but then stopped before the words had a chance to form. She’d caught him fair and square, he thought grudgingly, turned his own words around and used them against him. What was she like when it really counted?

The woman was probably hell on wheels in a courtroom, he judged. Maybe he’d watch her in action sometime. It’d be nice to see someone else on the receiving end of that smart mouth of hers.

But that was for later. Right now, he thought as he got up from the sofa, he had a couple of cups of coffee to make.

The scent of coffee, deep, rich, filled the predawn air and wafted into the room where Janelle was sitting, breaking up what could be best described as her extremely frail train of thought. There was just something almost sensual about sipping that first cup of coffee in the morning, having it seduce her senses.

Rousing herself, Janelle cocked her head, listening. Straining to hear.

But there was nothing to hear. No sound of someone approaching.

The man probably moved like a stealth bomber and was proud of it. Nevertheless, Janelle decided to get up and investigate.

Sawyer was back sitting on the sofa, a mug in one hand, his mysterious book in the other. He didn’t even glance in her direction when she planted herself right in front of him, the backs of her calves hitting the coffee table. “I thought I asked you to make coffee.”

“You did. I did,” he said, the simple sentences echoing rhythmically like the staccato beat of high heels resounding against tile. Sawyer briefly raised his eyes from the book. “You didn’t ask me to bring it to you,” he pointed out.

“Next time I’ll try to be clearer,” she muttered under her breath as she moved toward the kitchen and the coffeepot.

“You do that.” He hid a smile as he lowered his eyes back to the page he was reading.

Janelle’s muttering continued. So did his smile.

She went back to bed shortly after that, deciding to try to snatch at least a few hours of sleep before she had to go in. It didn’t matter that she’d had the coffee, or that it was the type that could have been used to resurface a driveway. Coffee had never acted as a deterrent for her when it came to sleeping. It had no effect on her.

Just bodyguards camped out in her living room seemed to induce insomnia, she thought darkly before she fell into a fitful sleep.

When she woke up again, streams of daylight were pushing their way into her room.

She was late.

Janelle hit the floor running. She lost no time in getting ready, showering and dressing in just under twenty minutes. Making her bed took another two.

Fastening her second earring, Janelle opened the door leading out of her room. Sawyer wasn’t on the sofa. For a moment, she thought that maybe she was alone, but then she saw him in the kitchen, making a fresh pot of coffee.

At least he’s good for something.

He had on a different shirt, she suddenly realized. And, coming closer, she noticed that his hair was slightly damp. There was a bathroom in the spare bedroom. That would explain his damp hair, she thought, trying not to let her mind stray too far in that direction. But it didn’t explain the shirt.

Taking the bread out of the refrigerator, she put two slices into the toaster and slid down the timer. “You go home during the night?”

The first drops of brew made their appearance in the clear coffeepot, accompanied by the usual sound effects. “No. Why?”

She glanced in his direction. Was it her imagination, or was the material clinging to his torso? And why did that look so sexy? “The shirt, it’s different.”

“I keep a change of clothes in the car,” he told her. Sawyer slipped the coffeepot out and poured its spare contents into the mug he’d used last night. “Several,” he added.

She should have known. “Prepared,” she acknowledged. “Like a Boy Scout.”

Boy Scouts tended to group together. He was a loner. Always had been, except for a brief period of time. When Allison had been part of his life.

“Like a man who’s liable to be sent off on assignment,” he corrected.

On second thought, she decided, there was nothing Boy Scout–like about this man. Boy Scouts made you think of baseball, apple pie and Mom. Boy Scouts were generally harmless.
Harmless
was the last word she would have used to describe Sawyer Boone.

For a second she entertained the thought of dragging him off to breakfast at her uncle Andrew’s house just to see his reaction. The door to her uncle’s house was always open. Rain or shine, no matter what the occasion or lack thereof, every morning the man made breakfast for an army.

If everyone showed up—and her uncle liked nothing better—it was a scene out of a crowd controller’s worst nightmare. But Uncle Andrew loved it. The more, the merrier. If she hadn’t been lucky enough to have the father that she had, Uncle Andrew would have been her hero. As it stood, it was close to a tie.

The toast popped. Taking the two slices out, she put them on a plate and pushed it along the counter to Sawyer. He raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment and she nodded back.

“Margarine’s in the refrigerator,” she told him.

He picked up the top slice. “I take it dry.”

“Of course you do.” And at home, he probably slept on a bed of nails—when he slept, she amended.

She had a hunch that Sawyer would have felt out of place in her uncle’s kitchen, at least initially. But Uncle Andrew had a way of making people come around. And if for some reason he couldn’t, there was always someone present at the table who could. She wondered how long it would take to breathe some life into Sawyer.

Janelle slanted a glance at him as her own toast popped up. He looked like a hard nut to crack. Hard, but not impossible.

Might be interesting to experiment. But the next moment she dismissed the thought. Sawyer was nothing to her, other than annoyance. There was no reason to put her family through the ordeal of having to break in yet another surly man at the table.

Meetings and an unexpected development in one of her other cases kept Janelle from finding the time to pick up the phone and make good on her promise to call her father the next day. And the next. Before she realized it, more than a week had gone by.

Meanwhile, as she labored and juggled the cases she had on her desk, trying to give each as much time as she was able, she became aware of the fact that she was feeling progressively more claustrophobic. Because of Sawyer.

Not that he smothered her in rhetoric. If anything, he’d become even more quiet than before. During her long workday, marked by endless incoming calls, mountains of reference texts and a parade of nondescript fast food in overly greasy wrappers, she noticed that Sawyer just sat there, reading the bent, dog-eared book he kept shoved in his jacket pocket.

Even so, he gave her the impression that he could spring into action at less than a moment’s notice. A coiled snake, ready to strike if there was a need. He was every bit the protector. But that didn’t negate the fact that his very presence seemed to throw a heavy blanket over her very being, pressing her down until she felt almost flattened. And sealed off from the rest of the world.

She did her best to shake the feeling. When that didn’t work, she tried to ignore it. It only became worse. Worse because she felt that if they truly butted heads, she would be sent flying. She didn’t like feeling as if she were in second place. She hadn’t tolerated it with her brothers and she wasn’t going to tolerate it with Sawyer. But until the Wayne case was over, she was just going to have to make the best of it.

Pausing for a moment, she opened her drawer and took out a half-empty bottle of extra-strength aspirin. She screwed off the lid and shook out two tablets, then popped them into her mouth, swallowing without the benefit of water. She’d gotten good at that.

“Those things’ll burn a hole in your stomach.”

She could have sworn he was reading. Just went to show, he was watching her constantly. The claustrophobic feeling grew worse.

“They keep my head from falling off,” she informed him.

“Whatever you say.” He went back to reading.

She stared at him for a moment, at a loss for words if not emotions. Though he hid the title of the book he was reading, she could have sworn he was back at the beginning again. Was this some philosophical work of nonfiction that he subscribed to? A bible he read and reread, committing it to memory?