Internal Affair

The officer glanced over his shoulder. “Detective McKenna. Says she’s with you.”

Irritation was close to the surface this morning. Okay, who the hell was playing games and why? “Nobody’s with me,” Patrick retorted tersely.

He thought he heard the patrolman mutter, “You said it, I didn’t,” but his attention was focused on the blonde kneeling beside the vehicle.

Crossing to her quickly, he wasted no time with preambles and niceties. He didn’t like having his crime scene interfered with. “I thought I was assigned to this case.”

Maggi raised her eyes from what she was doing. The male voice was stern, definitely territorial. From what she’d been told, she’d expected nothing less. From her vantage point, six-three looked even taller than it ordinarily might have.

Patrick Cavanaugh.

Show time.

He was more formidable looking than his photograph, she thought. Also better looking. But that was neither here nor there. She was interested in beauty of the soul, not face or body. If she was, Maggi noted absently, someone might have said she’d hit the jackpot.

They’d said that Lucifer had been the most beautiful of the archangels.

“You are,” Maggi replied mildly.

Because she didn’t like the psychological advantage her position gave him, she rose to her feet, patently ignoring the extended hand he offered her. Ground rules had to be established immediately. She was her own person.

“Then what are you doing here?” Patrick demanded.

With the ease of someone slipping on a glove, she slid into the role she’d been assigned. Once upon a time, before the lure of the badge had gotten her, she’d entertained the idea of becoming an actress. Working undercover allowed her to combine both her loves.

“I guess they didn’t tell you.”

He had a crime scene to take charge of, he didn’t have time for guessing games initiated by fluffy blondes compromising his crime scene. “Tell me what?”

“That I’m your new partner.”

Chapter 2

“The hell you are.”

Patrick glared at this woman who looked as if she would be more at home on some runway in Paris, modeling the latest in impractical lingerie than standing beside a waterlogged corpse, pretending to look for clues.

“Yes,” Maggi replied with a smile. “The hell I am.”

No one had notified him. He hated having things sprung on him without warning. In his experience, most surprises turned out bad.

“Since when?”

“Since this morning. Last night, actually,” she corrected, “but it was too late to get started then.”

He couldn’t believe that someone actually believed that he and this woman could work together. He found working with another man difficult enough; working with a woman with all her accompanying quirks and baggage was out of the question.

“By whose authority?” he demanded.

“Captain Reynolds.” She gave him the name of his direct superior, although the pairing had not originated with Reynolds. The order had come from John Halliday, the man in charge of Internal Affairs. A fair, honest man, if not the easiest to work with, Halliday had found a subtle way of getting her in so that not even Reynolds knew the true purpose behind her becoming Cavanaugh’s new partner. “He said you wouldn’t be thrilled.”

Patrick’s frown deepened. He knew why Reynolds hadn’t said anything. It was because the captain didn’t care for confrontations from within. Well, he couldn’t just slide this blonde under his door and expect things to go well from there.

“Captain Reynolds has a gift for understatement.” His voice was brittle. “I haven’t seen you around.”

His icy blue eyes seemed to go right through her. She could see why others might find him intimidating. “I’ve been there. Around,” she clarified when he continued to stare at her. She shrugged casually. “I can’t help it if you haven’t noticed me.”

Oh, he would have noticed her, Patrick thought. A woman who looked the way she did was hard to miss. She was the kind that made heads turn and married men stop to rethink their choice in a life partner. He wasn’t given to socializing, but he would have noticed her.

Something didn’t feel right, though. “How long have you been a detective?” Patrick asked.

“Three months.”

Three months. A novice. What the hell was the captain thinking? Even a man as photo-op oriented as Reynolds had to know this was a bad idea. This woman needed training, aging, and that just wasn’t his line.

Patrick waved her away. “Tell Captain Reynolds I don’t do baby-sitting.”

“I don’t think that’ll matter to him,” she told him crisply. “He doesn’t have any school-aged children.” She indicated the vehicle next to her. “Now, why don’t we just make the best of this and get back to work?”

Patrick looked at her sharply, about to make his rejection plainer since she seemed to have trouble assimilating it, when her words echoed in his brain. “We?”

“We,” she repeated. There was more than ten inches difference between them in height. Maggi drew herself up as far as she could, refusing to appear cowed. “You’ve got to know that working with you isn’t exactly my idea of being on a picnic.”

His eyes were flat as he regarded her. “Then why do it?”

Halliday had told her to blend in, to stay quiet and gather as much information as possible about Cavanaugh and his dealings. The less attention drawn to herself, the better. But from what she’d managed to piece together about him, a man like Cavanaugh didn’t respect sheep. He sheared them and went on. What he respected was someone who’d stand up to him, who’d go toe-to-toe without flinching. That kind of a person stood a chance of finding out something useful. Someone who blended in didn’t.

Maggi had her battle plan laid out. “Because I go where they send me and I always follow orders.”

His eyes pinned her to the spot. “Always?”

She met his stare head-on, his blue eyes against her own green. “Always.”

Well, knowing Reynolds, that didn’t exactly surprise him. He wondered if she was someone’s daughter, someone’s niece. Someone Reynolds owed a favor to. You never knew when you had to call a favor in, especially when you had your eye on the political arena, the way Reynolds did.

“Terrific.” He looked at her without attempting to hide his disgust. “A by-the-book, wet-behind-the-ears rookie.”

She was far from a rookie, but this wasn’t the time to get into that. For now, she left him with his assumptions. “Guess that’s just your cross to bear,” she quipped, turning her attention back to the victim.

He was accustomed to people withdrawing from him, to avoiding him whenever possible. This was something a little different. He wondered if stupidity guided her, or if she had some kind of different agenda. “You’ve got a smart mouth.”

“Goes with my smart brain.” Deciding that the corpse wasn’t going anywhere, Maggi looked at the man whose soul she was going to have to crawl into. “I graduated top of my class from the academy.”

If that was meant to impress him, she’d fallen short of her mark, he thought. He couldn’t stomach newly minted detectives, spouting rhetoric and theories they’d picked up out of the safe pages of some textbook. “There’s a whole world of difference between a classroom and what you find outside of it.”

“I know.” It was going to be slow going, finding his good side. From what she’d gleaned, he might not even have one. But she felt he’d be less antagonistic if he felt she had some sort of experience. “I was in Vice in San Francisco.”

His eyes slid over her, taking full measure, seeing beneath the jacket and matching trousers. It took more than fabric to disguise her shape. She’d probably made one hell of a decoy. “Stopping it or starting it?”