Cavanaugh's Bodyguard (12 page)

He was curling her toes. Not to mention curling other stray body parts as well, including all ten fingers of her hands.

It was a lucky thing she was curling them, Bridget thought, because it kept her from lacing her hands around his neck. That would make it look as if she were compliant with what was happening. She really didn’t want him to think that.

Even if it were true.

She wasn’t sure she was ready to admit that to him. Or even to herself.

She
would
admit that she now saw what the noise was all about when it came to Josh. And she understood why Josh could get away with being such a player without having been shot yet. A woman could probably forget and forgive a great deal if she thought she might be on the receiving end of this amazing experience again sometime in the near future.

God, but it felt good.
Really
good.

It was becoming harder and harder for her not to thread her arms around his neck, despite the emergency brake that separated them.

She definitely felt as if she were on fire and about to go up in smoke. What’s more, she didn’t care.

Josh couldn’t have really explained what had come over him just then, or what had prompted him to kiss his partner at this particular junction of their working day.

But now that he was doing it, he was glad. Glad that his resistance was down and his thinking had abruptly taken a holiday. Otherwise, he would have never discovered that the woman he’d been partnered with for the last three years, the woman with whom he had shared thoughts and body armor, and to whom, he had to admit, he felt closer than he did to any other human being on the face of the earth, had the ability to fry his brain.

Fried or not, Josh knew one thing to be true. Bridget Cavelli, aka Cavanaugh, was hot. She was also a woman of substance. Who would have thought it?

The desire to deepen the kiss and take it to the next level urgently, insistently, clawed at him, grew stronger by the moment. Any second now, he was certain, it would get to unmanageable proportions and this was neither the time nor the place to allow that.

This
should go at a slower pace. He’d just willingly stepped out onto a minefield and one misstep would rend him into tiny smithereens.

He needed to pull back.

No matter how much he didn’t want to.

Bridget struggled between desire and a sense that Josh was suddenly drawing away. The world, listing badly on its axis, was only gradually righting itself and coming back into focus.

She blinked, staring at Josh, wondering if she’d somehow slipped into another reality via an invisible vortex. She had no other plausible explanation for what had just happened—or for her reaction to it.

“Surprise,” Josh finally said in a soft voice.

He’d drawn away, but not far enough so that she couldn’t feel the warmth of his breath. Goose bumps popped up in response.

He was grinning that lopsided grin of his, the one that simultaneously annoyed and enticed her.

“What?” she bit off breathlessly. She decided that her best recourse here was to act as if she was angry and offended despite the fact that she was neither.

“You said to surprise you,” he reminded her.

The words she’d uttered an eternity ago, before the world had tipped over, came back to her. Doubling her fist, Bridget took the opportunity to punch him in the shoulder, hard.

“Idiot!” she bit off. “I was talking about food.”

His eyes dipped down to look intently at her lips. “Some might say that was food for the soul.”

She raised her chin, looking as if she was ready to go fifteen rounds with him, after which she fully expected to be declared the winner. “And some might say that you’ve just gone off your nut.”

For a second, Josh inclined his head, as if agreeing with her. But then he said, “And others might say that it was the smartest thing I’d ever done.” His eyes held hers for a second. There was only a trace of humor on his lips. “I had no idea you could kiss like that, Bridget.”

The inside of her mouth had gone inexplicably dry. If it had been up to her to spit on a fire to put it out, the fire would have raged out of control. It took effort not to allow her words to stick to the roof of her mouth.

“The subject never came up,” she finally replied. Deftly changing the topic before she fell headlong into it—or grabbed him so that he would kiss her again—she abruptly said, “Chinese.”

“Chinese?”

“Yes, Chinese. I pick Chinese,” she told him impatiently. “Food,” she added when he gave no indication that he understood where she was coming from. “Chinese food. Unless you’ve changed your mind and decided to skip dinner.”

“Well,” he allowed, squelching the urge to run his thumb along her very alluring lower lip, “some might say that I’ve already had dessert so maybe I’d better backtrack and have some dinner now,” he said philosophically.

She glanced at him, then looked away. “If you know what’s good for you.”

Bridget was casting her vote on the side of putting all this behind them and just going on as if nothing had happened. But they both knew that you couldn’t un-open the floodgates once they’d been raised and the waters were rushing at you.

“Trouble is,” Josh said as he finally started up the car, “I think I do.”

It was all he said and for once, he didn’t elaborate, leaving Bridget to try to figure out if that meant that he wanted to kiss her again, or felt it was safer and more prudent not to.

Had Josh kissed her because of some silent challenge he had issued to himself—or because he actually really wanted to?

Bridget was undecided as to which side she was rooting for. Both were problematic for different reasons So, for now, she pushed the whole incident—fleeting by most standards—behind her.

Or tried to.

* * *

“Anything?” Bridget called out to the three detectives they were working with as she and Josh walked into the squad room.

Just about on their way out, the three detectives on loan, Cox, Langford and Kennedy, stopped and looked at what Bridget and Josh had just brought in. Especially Josh, who balanced various white bags in a large cardboard box. Between the two of them there had to be eight white bags, all embossed with the logo of The Sun Dragon, a red dragon exhaling a wall of fire. It was an agreed-upon fact that The Sun Dragon was the best restaurant around Aurora, possibly the county, for Chinese food.

“Is that to bribe us to stay?” Joel Langford, the youngest of the three, asked.

“Well, there’s no overtime pay authorized—
yet
,” she emphasized with conviction, sure that once the cases were reviewed—and solved—there would be. “So we thought we could at least feed you. You have to eat, right? And you have to be sitting somewhere while you eat, right? So why not here? And if you continue glancing through the files, what’s the harm? A lot of people read while they eat,” she said innocently.

Cox exchanged looks with the other two detectives. No one appeared taken in by her innocent expression, but the food did smell tempting.

“When she says it, it sounds so logical,” Cox told the other two men. He was already shedding his jacket and putting it on the back of his chair again.

“When you’ve been around her as long as I have,” Josh told the others, “you learn not to waste your breath arguing with Cavanaugh. There’s no winning against her so you might as well just say yes, shut up and sit down. Save yourself a lot of grief that way.” He placed the bags in a central location and proceeded to take the large containers out of each one.

Kennedy laughed, following Cox’s example and making himself comfortable again.

“You sound more like a husband than a partner,” he told Josh.

“God forbid.” Josh laughed, pulling up a chair.

And that is something you have to remember,
Bridget told herself as Josh’s words echoed in her head. The man might stir the blood, but he simply wasn’t the kind to stick around. Ever. She’d seen him go through enough girlfriends in the last three years to fill up a medium-size theater. No matter what, Josh put his philosophy into play every single time.

The problem was, she could still taste him on her lips. It made her thinking process a little fuzzy.

Determined to erase all physical traces of Josh from her lips, she went for the shrimp in lobster sauce first, relying on the fact that there were always a lot of onions, as well as garlic, in the mix.

That, and a little amnesia, should do the trick, she thought. Or at least she hoped so.

Chapter 9

T
he Lady Killer’s first known victim, a twenty-five-year-old redhead named Phyllis Jones, came complete with a distraught fiancé who, according to Detective McGee’s notes in the file, had an alibi for the time of her murder. And while Bridget hated the thought of dredging up her murder again for the man if he actually was innocent, they still needed to interview the man to see if he had alibis for the time of the two most recent murders.

If he didn’t, they’d take it from there.

It still wasn’t an interview she was particularly looking forward to.

“I’ll go with you,” Josh volunteered when she announced where she was going and why.

“You don’t have to,” she told him. “God knows there’s enough work here to keep you busy even if you worked at warp speed—which you don’t.”

“Yeah, I do ‘have to,’” he said stubbornly. “On the outside chance that you turn out to be right,” he added.

Pulling her jacket from the back of her chair, Bridget stopped and looked at him. “Are you telling me that you don’t think I can take care of myself?”

The edge in her voice did not go unnoticed. “You?” he laughed. “Hell, if you’re right, I’m going along to protect the ‘suspect.’ Given the way you feel about these murders, you’re liable to put a bullet between his eyes just as soon as bring him in.”

She squared her shoulders as she gave Josh a frosty glance. “I can control myself,” she informed him. Her eyes narrowed. “You’re the one who can’t.” With that, she turned on her heel and walked out of the squad room.

“Uh-huh.” The word might have indicated he agreed with what she’d just said, but there was very little conviction in it.

For now, Bridget gave up and let him come along. Two opinions were always better than one.

* * *

Ryan Roberts, a freelance architect and the first victim’s fiancé, was home, working, when they rang his bell forty minutes later. He opened the door a crack, an uncertain expression on his face until Bridget held up her identification. Absently, she noted that was the first time she’d used her new ID since she’d had the name on it changed.

“Detectives Youngblood and Cavanaugh. We’re with the Aurora Police Department’s homicide division,” she told Roberts, putting her wallet back after a beat.

Still wary, Roberts opened the door and stepped back. “Why are you here?” And then he answered his own question with another question. “Did you find him?” he asked, looking from one detective to the other. “Did you find the bastard who killed my Phyllis?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Josh answered with more compassion than he usually employed, Bridget noted.

“Then I don’t understand.” Average in height and slight in build, the man became reticent again. “Why are you here?”

“We just needed to ask you a few more questions, Mr. Roberts,” Bridget told him, slipping into her friendliest tone to put him at his ease.

It didn’t work. There was still a look of suspicion on Roberts’s face. “I already told the other detectives everything I knew three years ago. They’d grilled me over and over again like they thought I was the one who did it, wasting all that time instead of going after the real killer.”

Josh moved in a little closer to the man. “You sound as if you know who that was.”

“I don’t know his name,” Roberts admitted, “but I know what he looks like.”

Bridget exchanged looks with Josh. This was something new. There was no mention of another man in the file they had gone over. “How do you know that?” Bridget asked.

“I know because the little creep kept following her around, trying to talk to her, to get her to pay attention to him.” A flash of anger was in his dark green eyes. “Phyllis was nice to everyone. Too nice. I guess because she did talk to him, he thought she was interested. He asked her out and she told him that she couldn’t go out with him. That she was already engaged to me. He called her a liar, that he didn’t see any ring.” There was a tortured expression on Ryan’s face when he told them, “I was saving up for one. I wanted it to be special, like she was.”

A ragged sigh broke free from his lips. After all this time, Roberts was apparently still beating himself up. “I should have given her a cheap one until I could have afforded better. He would have never bothered her if he’d seen the ring. It’s my fault she’s dead.”

Moved, Bridget put her hand on his shoulder. “It is
not
your fault,” she insisted. “This man is sick. Chances are he would have still stalked Phyllis and killed her anyway.”

A weak attempt at a grateful smile came and went from his lips. “I guess we’ll never know, will we?”

“Would you happen to know if this guy asked Phyllis out on Valentine’s Day?” Josh asked.

Ryan cocked his head slightly, thinking. “Yeah, he did. That was the day.”

“And she never mentioned his name?” Josh pressed, hoping that Roberts might remember a chance reference to the other man.

Roberts shook his head. “No. She just referred to him as ‘that sad little man.’”

Josh tried another approach that might lead them to a few answers. “How did she meet him?”

Roberts was silent for a moment. It was obvious he was trying to remember. “I think she said he came into her store—she managed a pet shop that specialized in food for exotic pets. He told her that he had a pet cockatiel that was sickly. He kept coming back with more questions, most likely just so that he could talk to her.” Roberts’s voice trailed off.

This was definitely a possible suspect worth looking into, Bridget thought. “Would you mind if we got you together with a sketch artist?” she proposed. “See if we can come up with a picture of this guy?”