Cavanaugh's Surrender (19 page)

He certainly isn’t a stranger now, is he?

No, he wasn’t. But, other than being her temporary partner for this case, she really didn’t know
what
Logan was.

Logan had propped himself up on his elbow and was looking down at her face. The smile on his lips went straight to the place responsible for taking memories and pressing them between the pages of time, to remember and treasure for as long as possible.

“I certainly have no complaints on my end,” he assured her softly.

Destiny could feel desire stirring within her. Again.

Okay, this was just impossible. How could she have turned into this insatiable, love-hungry creature after all these years of doing without and getting along just fine? she silently demanded. Until yesterday, she’d been completely convinced that she didn’t need
this kind of reaffirmation, that sex was something she could easily do without, thank you very much.

Now, given a choice of lovemaking or breathing, she would have gravitated toward the former without a second thought.

He was making her want him just by
looking
at her, for heaven’s sake. Just by smiling at her. Not to mention that feeling his breath on her skin was making everything quicken inside her.

She needed to get up, to start moving, to distance herself from this man who had such power over her, Destiny told herself.

Otherwise, she was just going to jump his bones again. It was only a matter of time.

“I’m going to make us breakfast,” she announced, sitting up. “You hungry?”

“Yes,” he answered, his eyes on hers, his voice so low it seemed to softly ripple along her skin.

He wasn’t talking about food, Destiny thought, her stomach muscles quivering. She thought about rallying, about resisting.

And then she stopped thinking altogether.

“Oh, the hell with it,” she cried, surrendering.

Logan yanked her back down onto the bed. “My thoughts exactly,” he agreed just before he brought his mouth down on hers.

And just like that, they set each other’s worlds on fire again.

* * *

Destiny congratulated herself on getting better at giving back as good as she’d gotten, taking things that Logan had done to rock her world and using them to do the same to his. A sense of euphoria wove itself through her.

As the final climax seized her, it was all Destiny could do not to yell out Logan’s name. But the sensation, rather than bursting apart and then fading, insisted on building, taking her up even farther than she’d already gone with him those other times.

Exhausted, drained and contented beyond words, she focused on the hard task of just breathing.

Cocooned in the vanishing embrace of ecstasy, she had absolutely no idea why this extraneous thought had come out of nowhere and engaged her brain.

If, propelled by a need to know, she had attempted to explore its origins, she might have said that her own lovemaking experience had made her more sympathetic to her sister, to what Paula must have felt when she suddenly found herself abandoned by the man she had planned to be with for the rest of her life, and
that
was why her mind kept returning to the case.

“Cell phone!” Destiny cried suddenly just as the euphoria faded.

Spent, Logan turned his head and looked at her quizzically. “Well, that’s a new one. I don’t think anyone has ever yelled that out when they’ve climaxed.”

Her brain, still in a haze, was going three different directions at once, and his comment only confused her. “What?”

“You just yelled out ‘cell phone,’” he told her. “Is that your new nickname for me, or were you just thinking of calling someone while we were...?”

Embarrassed, she covered her face with her hands. “No. Oh, God, no,” she cried.

And then it began coming together for her. She could slowly make sense of everything, especially the blurry, elusive thought that had nagged at her.

Destiny bolted upright in the bed, the light blue top sheet pooling about her waist. For the moment, she was completely oblivious to the fact that she was naked from the waist up.

She grabbed Logan’s wrist as she talked, as if to pull him into her thought process.

“We’ve cross-referenced all the people the six dead women worked with, all the people they socialized with, the churches they went to, and none of it has turned up a link.”

He could see that she was going somewhere with this. “Keep talking,” he encouraged, waiting for the bottom line.

That was just the problem. She knew if she let herself, she’d start rambling, pulling in sidebars. Destiny forced herself to focus.

“Okay, if you have a lover who wants to remain out of the spotlight, in order to humor him you wouldn’t have his name anywhere that someone else could discover it, like on a list of clients.” The last was a direct reference to Debra West’s list of people she worked with as a trainer.

“Makes sense,” he agreed, still waiting for Destiny to get to her “eureka” moment.

“But you do want to be able to get in contact with him whenever you want to talk to him or see him, right?” She didn’t wait for Logan to agree. “So, what would be the harm in having his number programmed into your cell phone?” she posed.

Her question gave birth to another question in his mind. “Is that what you did?”

She hadn’t seen that one coming. For a moment, to save her pride, Destiny was going to say something flippant, or just say “yes” and move on with her point, but that would be lying and she didn’t want to lie to him. Besides, lies had a way of tripping you up.

So she shrugged and told him the truth. “I’ve never had a lover I wanted to reach at a moment’s notice.” That still conveyed the wrong message, and she knew it. That sounded as if she’d had lovers before, but those men in her past, they had just been casual relationships. She didn’t want Logan thinking something that wasn’t true. “I’ve never actually had a serious lover before.”

That surprised him. He looked at her for a long moment before finally asking, “So that makes me your first?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.” She wasn’t a virgin. She figured he was experienced enough to realize that. But, if there was such a thing, in the past few years she’d become practically a virgin—until last night.

Wait—what was he saying? She looked at him, her surprise and confusion registering plainly on her face. “Are you saying that you’re my lover, or just that we made love?” She needed to get that straight. It might not make a difference to him, but it made all the difference in the world to her.

“Yes,” he answered, deliberately leaving it ambiguous for now. And then, before she could ask anything further, the detective in him stepped to the foreground. “But I think you have something there with the cell phone.”

She knew she did. It only made sense. She knew Paula. Paula would have wanted to be able to reach the man she was involved with whenever she could.

Thinking out loud, Destiny said, “What we need is to get the records of all the dead women’s cell phone calls for, let’s say the last three months before they were killed, and what we
really
need is someone who can come up with a program that will cross-reference all the calls our victims made to see if there’s a phone number that shows up on all six phones.”

From where she stood, that sounded like an incredibly daunting task that, undertaken manually, would make a person cross-eyed and send them running to an optometrist within a matter of a day. But it didn’t need to be done manually.

“You have access to anyone like that?” he asked.

Destiny grinned, surprised that he didn’t know the answer to that. “Your cousin Dax’s wife, Brenda. She can make a computer roll over, sit up and beg in less than sixty seconds.”

He’d heard his father mention the name a couple of times, but to be honest, he hadn’t been paying all that much attention. He hadn’t realized that the woman was a computer wizard
or
a relative, although the latter was by marriage.

“We don’t need it to beg,” he told her. “We just need it to come up with a common phone number.”

“That, too,” she promised. Excited, she said, “I think we’re finally getting somewhere.”

Logan liked the way her eyes danced when she was excited. He surprised her by pulling her back down onto the bed and then beneath him.

“I’m counting on it,” he told her, his voice a deep, sexy whisper.

There went her heart again, skipping beats and pounding madly in between.

And in that heart, she knew that as lovely as this interlude with Logan was, it was only temporary. Maybe even just for the weekend, no matter how beguilingly he talked.

Which meant that she needed to savor every second of it before it no longer was.

“It’s Sunday,” she told him, her body heating as he pressed a kiss to the side of her neck. “I can call her later.”

“Good idea,” he agreed, getting back to the earnest, all-consuming endeavor of making love with her for as long as he had a breath left within him.

The way he saw it, it was a noble ambition and one hell of a way to go.

* * *

It took Brenda less than twelve hours after she was presented with the challenge to come up with a program that could take all six lists of cell phone numbers called and cross-reference them against one another.

And in exactly twelve hours and thirty-nine minutes, Logan and Destiny had their linking phone number.

“Do you know who it belongs to?” Logan asked the chief of detective’s daughter-in-law.

Brenda grinned. “Is the pope Catholic? The number belongs to Drake Simmons. It’s apparently his private number.” Then, in case they didn’t know, Brenda added, “He’s a big-shot CEO with—”

Destiny cut her short. “Yes, we know,” she said between gritted teeth. And to think that he’d had the nerve to look so mournful at Paula’s funeral. “He spoke to me at her funeral and told me to call on him at any time if there was any way that he could help us find Paula’s killer.”

“Apparently, it looks like he’s in a good position to point him out to you,” Brenda surmised.

Nodding, disgusted, Destiny was in a hurry to get going. “Thanks, Brenda, you’re the best.”

Brenda flashed her a grin. “Of course I am. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a stack of emergencies all waiting to be first.” She was already turning her attention to the next case as Destiny and Logan walked out.

“Let’s go get the bastard,” Destiny said, seething.

“Let’s see just how he’s connected to all the other women before we go paying Mr. Simmons a visit,” Logan advised.

He wanted to be able to make this stick, and he knew she did, too, but she was letting her emotions get the better of her. Not that he could really blame her. If it had been one of his sisters who had been murdered, he knew he would have gone off half-cocked himself. Which was why detectives had partners.

“I don’t want to ‘talk’ to him,” Destiny retorted angrily as she walked toward the elevator. “I want to beat him to a pulp.”

“Talking first,” he emphasized. “And then we’ll see about the beating part.”

She knew he didn’t mean it. Most likely, he knew she didn’t either. That she was just blowing off steam, just talking. But for the first time in her life, the thought of physically beating someone did not leave her repulsed. Drake Simmons had killed her baby sister, and she wanted to make him pay for it. She wanted to hurt him.

Being civil to this man who’d made such a show of wanting to help bring Paula’s killer to justice, all the while knowing that he was the one responsible for killing her, would not be easy.

As if sensing the turmoil within her, Logan looked at her just before they got on the elevator. “You going to be all right?” he asked.

No, I’m not going to be all right. I may never be all right. Paula’s dead, and that preening Cheshire Cat killed her.

But that, she knew, wasn’t what Logan wanted to hear, and if she told him that he’d find a way to stop her from coming with him.

So instead, she said, “Once we nail this son of a bitch and he’s in jail, I’ll be just peachy.”

There was sarcasm if he’d ever heard it, he thought. And he had a feeling that he had his work cut out for him.

* * *

Once they knew that Simmons was the “mysterious lover” whom each of the six women were involved with before their untimely deaths, finding the exact connection proved to be easy.

Five years ago, Adele Atkins, the flight attendant, had been on duty on a trans-Atlantic flight that Simmons had taken. Their affair started the moment the plane landed.

Four years ago, Barbara Watson had been his son’s junior high school math teacher, and they’d met on back-to-school night. Apparently, what he’d met at back-to-school night he’d taken back to his love nest. That lasted six months before it abruptly ended. Her “suicide” followed in less than a week after the affair was over.

Jennifer Bedlow was next. She was the wedding planner three years ago who handled his daughter Margaret’s wedding and was in turn
handled
by Simmons for what appeared to be four months before that, too, ended, only to be shortly followed by her death three days later.

Two years ago Eloise Jorgansen was the hands-on owner of what was, for nine months, Simmons’s favorite restaurant. And then he just stopped going there.

A year ago Debra West had taken Simmons on as her “special” client, training him in private whenever he called, day or night. For that she was paid twice her going rate before she, too, joined the suicide brigade.

And last but definitely not least, Paula had met and apparently fallen for Simmons while asking him to have his company contribute a sizable sum to the Children’s Hospital of Aurora.

At first glance, Simmons had very aboveboard reasons for his initial interaction with all these women. It was only when the interactions became intensified and exclusive that things began to look questionable.

And she had just the questions she wanted to ask him once they brought Simmons in.

I’ll get him, Paula,
she silently promised as she got into the department vehicle beside Logan, who was driving.
He’s going to pay for what he did to you, I swear.