Cavanaugh's Surrender (12 page)

A black-and-white copybook could have easily been turned into a diary, he thought. At any rate, since she seemed so positive, it was worth a look.

“Stand back,” he told her. “If it’s there, I’ll get it out.”

Destiny shook her head. “Your arm’s too big to angle under the refrigerator,” she told him. “You’ll only get stuck.”

He was way ahead of her there. “Wasn’t planning to go under it,” he said.

And then, very slowly, grasping the side of the refrigerator closest to him, he moved it as far as he could. Positioning himself on the other side of the appliance, he repeated the process. Logan went back and forth several times until he’d finally succeeded in “walking” the refrigerator away from the wall and out into the kitchen proper.

It was all the encouragement Destiny needed. Hopping onto the counter, Destiny slid her bottom along the slick tile. Perched on the edge, she looked down into the space he’d created.

She could see a corner of a black-and-white book. Triumph surged through her. “I was right. It’s a copybook.”

He looked around the refrigerator he’d just taken for a dance. “She really had trust issues, didn’t she?” he marveled.

Now, there was an ironic observation, given that they were about to read her sister’s most intimate, personal thoughts.

“Obviously justified,” Destiny retorted defensively for the sister who could no longer defend herself.

Scrambling over to one side, Destiny lowered herself into the small space. There wasn’t really much room between the appliance and the wall. She had just enough space to bend her knees. Sinking down as far as she could go, Destiny once more felt around.

Tapping into her patience—it was more difficult than she’d anticipated—Destiny finally managed to secure the book using just the edge of her fingertips. She moved it closer and closer to her until she could finally wrap her fingers around one corner.

She didn’t like what she was feeling.

The book was wet, as if the refrigerator had just recently leaked on it—or it had been dropped into something wet before someone slipped it back beneath the refrigerator.

But if that was the case, why go through all that trouble if she was dead?

Unless she hadn’t been dead at the time.

But then, if there was something in the diary someone else didn’t want coming to light, why not just take the diary and destroy it?

It didn’t make sense.

Still, there might be some clue they could get off one of the pages. With a less than triumphant sigh, she placed the rippled copybook on the counter next to her point of entry.

Seeing what he assumed was the diary, Logan marveled, “Son of a gun, you’re right.”

Trying to vault out of the enclosure, to her dismay Destiny discovered that her upper-body strength was not as good as she would have liked. Two more attempts to propel herself out of the small space failed before she finally turned her eyes toward Logan.

Logan appeared to be entertained by her unsuccessful attempts to get out of the small, enclosed area. His smile was annoying and far sexier than she would have been willing to admit.

“Can I get you something?” he offered. “A ladder maybe?” The suggestion was followed by the sound of his laughter.

Ordinarily, Destiny might have enjoyed the deep, somewhat sensual rumbling sound. But right now, she just felt exasperated.

“Okay, a little help here.” It was just short of a demand.

“Sure thing,” he said obligingly. “All you had to do was just ask.”

“Otherwise you’d just stand there for the rest of the night?” she asked.

He looked at her as if she’d gone simpleminded. “And get my head bitten off? Nope. I find that with women, to stay on the safe side, you have to wait until they make a request.
Then
you can come riding to the rescue.”

“Let’s get this clear. This is
not
riding to my rescue,” she informed him.

“It’s not?” Logan said innocently. “Then what is it?”

“This is just giving me a helping hand,” she fired back through gritted teeth.

He gave the impression of weighing her words. Finally, Logan lifted his shoulders in a careless shrug and said, “Whatever you say.”

He was still laughing at her, even though there wasn’t a sound. Losing patience, she said, “Get me out of here, Cavanaugh!”

“Your wish is my command,” he assured her.

The next moment, he put his hands on each side of her rib cage. With what seemed to be a minimum of effort, Logan easily lifted her out of the narrow space behind the refrigerator.

Bringing her up and over the counter, his hands slipped a fraction of an inch and he wound up holding her along the sides of her breasts.

If that wasn’t bad enough, somehow, as he brought her over the top, she’d wound up being
much
too close to Logan. For all intents and purposes, she was almost intimately close.

In response, her heart had begun hammering again and then that damn breath of hers had all but disappeared for a second time. But this time, exertion had nothing to do with it.

Proximity did.

When Logan set her down, the counter was against her back and he was pretty much against her front—or so it felt to her.

The world seemed to suddenly freeze in time for a moment—except that there was no ice, just heat. Lots and lots of heat, and it flashed back and forth between them with an intensity that would have taken her breath away—had she had any to take.

What the hell was going on with her? The question came on the heels of her reaction. Her
atypical
reaction. For a second—for just the briefest of seconds—she felt a very real, very strong temptation—to kiss Logan.

His lips were less than the breadth of an eyelash away from hers. All she had to do was rise up on her toes, tilt her face up to his and there they were.

The temptation was enormous.

Especially when she felt Logan’s breath along her face. The ache inside of her, hot and strong, came out of nowhere.

Destiny tried to tell herself that it came out of the emptiness she was experiencing because of Paula’s death, but that still didn’t make it go away or even lessen its intensity by so much as a fraction.

The longing grew.

Her pulse began to race as the urge multiplied, growing by leaps and bounds until it all but threatened to swallow her up.

What would be the harm?
her conscience whispered, turning on her.
What would be the harm, just this once, to give in?

Chapter 9

D
amn, but he was tempted.
Really, really
tempted.

If they weren’t working together, if they weren’t focused on trying to find who had killed her sister and possibly several other women, Logan would have felt freer to indulge his curiosity.

But he
was
walking a tightrope here.

It was up to him to make perfectly sure there were no missteps with this investigation so that if they actually found a viable suspect, the case wouldn’t be tossed out of court on some irritating-as-hell technicality.

Like tainted evidence.

Would kissing a fellow investigator in an unplanned moment of extreme attraction and overwhelming weakness be considered the basis for undermining such an investigation? Logan would have been the first to admit that he wasn’t really clear on the concept, but all the same, he didn’t think so.

Or was it that he didn’t
want
it to be so?

Oh, the hell with it, he thought with a surge of impatience as he symbolically threw up his hands in frustration.

The next moment those hands framed her face—odd how delicate she actually felt, considering that she came on like some indestructible gangbuster.

And then, anticipation coursing through his veins, Logan lowered his head and contact was made.

Extremely pleasant contact.

No, on second thought, Logan amended, the word
pleasant
had no place here. Mainly because the kiss wasn’t
pleasant.
It was overwhelming, breath stealing, earthmoving and a whole host of other descriptions meant to convey something incredible, something
leagues
out of the ordinary.
Pleasant
was a word meant to describe an old-fashioned drawing room comedy or a semicold beer—rather than a preferable completely cold one.
Pleasant
was a joke that made you smile, not laugh out loud.

This kiss made him want to
shout
.

Logan could almost
feel
his blood rushing through his veins and definitely could feel his adrenaline increasing in tempo. As for his heart, it was hammering so hard, he was surprised it hadn’t broken through his rib cage and fallen at her feet.

Without fully meaning to, he deepened the kiss, and lost himself in the revelry.

Oh, no, no, no!

What was she doing? Destiny silently demanded. Why was she kissing him back? She should be the one calling a halt to this, the one setting an example, not melting in his arms.

But the plain truth of it was, despite the fact that she knew all the reasons she shouldn’t be doing this, she knew of only one reason why she should.

Because she wanted it to continue.

Wanted to just lose herself in this man with the lethal lips. Wanted, just for a moment, not to think about
anything
. Not death, not being alone.

Not even Paula.

For this sliver of a moment in time she wanted just to
feel
. To absorb hot sensations and not make excuses or place them into neatly labeled categories.

Was that so wrong?

Yes,
when it interferes with getting your job done. When it interferes with getting Paula’s killer.

She had a dozen arguments against what was happening. And only one for it. It made her feel human. More than that, it made her
feel
something, and she hadn’t been in that particular place in her life for a very long while now. Long before she had discovered Paula’s lifeless body in the tub.

The desire that sprang up within her was fierce, intense, and it took her by surprise as it barreled through her.

Stop!
Destiny ordered herself. There was too much for her to do to dally like this, to allow this sort of thing to happen.

And yet...

Oh, and yet this was so delicious....

With effort steeped in the strict discipline that had seen her through so many difficult phases of her life, Destiny finally managed to pull her head back.

For a moment, they were both silent, looking at one another, trying to gauge the other’s thoughts and finding that they couldn’t.

Right now, Destiny secretly admitted that she was having trouble gauging her own thoughts, much less his. And more than anything, she really wished her damn pulse would stop racing like that. It made her dizzy and breathless.

But then, so did he, she realized.

Get a grip. This isn’t the time or the place!

“I think we’d better take a look at this copybook before we bag and tag it,” she heard herself say to Logan as she awkwardly dropped her hands to her sides. Her voice, sounding hoarse to begin with, cracked by the time she came to the end of her statement.

Her eyes on his, she held her breath. She hadn’t the slightest idea if he would pick up her cue—or demand to know if she was trying to lead him on and play him for a fool for some reason.

It seemed like an eternity later before Logan finally nodded.

“Makes sense,” he agreed.

Only then did she realize that Logan was still holding her by the shoulders. The next moment, he released her.

Once that last contact was broken, Destiny suddenly felt unsteady—and alone again.

Taking a breath, she nodded at the refrigerator, standing now like a lone sentry in the middle of the tiny kitchen.

“We’d better push that back where it was. Otherwise, it might look suspicious. We’re not supposed to be here,” she reminded him in case he didn’t understand why she wanted the appliance moved back against the wall.

It was the added explanation that brought a grin to his lips. “You just figured that out now?” he asked glibly.

Destiny resisted getting sucked into another round of trading remarks, even though for some reason the thought seemed oddly comforting to her. Maybe because that made it business as usual, or at least what seemed to be passing as usual between them.

Right now, she thought, looking down at the copybook, they might be holding the key to everything in their hands. Mentally, she crossed her fingers.

But the second she opened the copybook, Destiny felt her heart sink.

Despite the fact that it was definitely written in Paula’s hand, the pages between the covers were warped and the ink was all but washed out thanks to the leak from the refrigerator. Water had penetrated the thicker cover and had gotten through to most of the pages, making them semi or completely illegible, depending on what section she turned to.

Nonetheless, she placed the copybook on the counter and carefully turned each page, doing her best not to let them shred beneath her fingertips.

Disappointed, Logan shook his head as he looked at the halos of blue ink that seemed to brand each page to a greater or lesser degree.

“You’re not going to get anything out of that,” he told her. “You’re just wasting your time.”

Determined to find one viable scrap of
something,
Destiny was not about to give up.

“My time to waste,” she said defiantly. “You’re free to go home at any time, you know. You don’t have to stay here waiting for me to get finished.”

“I’m primary,” he reminded her. “That means I’m responsible for you while we’re working the case.” He didn’t add that he’d been told to keep an eye on her during the investigation. It didn’t take a genius to know she would take offense at that.

“Not if you didn’t know I was here,” she pointed out. And if he hadn’t played a hunch and shown up at the apartment, he
wouldn’t
have known she was here.