Cavanaugh's Surrender

“No.”

The truth of it was that despite her initial concerns, she’d been really hopeful that Paula was finally looking to settle into a lasting relationship. And due to that, she hadn’t wanted to cause any waves by hounding her sister for details.

“And you didn’t press her?” Logan asked incredulously. What kind of a woman didn’t ask for details? he couldn’t help wondering. Was it because she was too wrapped up in her own love life? Was there some guy she was going to go running home to, to cry on his shoulder?

From out of nowhere, Logan felt just the slightest prick of jealousy. He shrugged it off, thinking he was just frustrated because he’d had to break his date with Stacy.

Destiny could only shrug impotently. “I figured she’d tell me when she was ready.”

He couldn’t help staring at her. Was she for real? If this had been one of his sisters, the other two would have been all over her until she finally broke. The life expectancy of a secret in the household where he’d grown up had been about a day and a half—if the one with the secret was in a coma.

“Wow, a woman with no curiosity,” he marveled, only half in jest. “I thought that was like, you know, an urban myth or something. Kind of like a unicorn,” he tagged on.

If nothing else, the man was mixing his metaphors. He was also being colossally annoying.

“Unicorns don’t wander around urban areas,” she pointed out, irritated at the detective’s flippant manner and not bothering to hide the fact, even if he was Sean’s son. Maybe he was adopted, she thought. Her eyes narrowed as she pinned him with a glare. “Are you going to take this seriously or not?” she asked.

“I’m officially ruling this a murder,” Sean announced, interrupting what appeared to be an argument in the making—he knew for a fact that Logan didn’t like being challenged. “Don’t worry. He’ll take it seriously now,” he assured his assistant with a note of finality in his voice.

She was overreacting. Her sister’s murder—just finding Paula this way—was making her lose her perspective. If she continued down this road, then she really would wind up being thrown off the case.

And soon.

At the very least, she wasn’t any good to anyone if she unraveled this way.

Destiny took in a deep, shaky breath, getting herself back under control. Her spine snapped into place, ramrod straight.

“Sorry,” she said to Sean.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” Sean told her warmly. Placing a fatherly arm around her shoulders, he gently escorted Destiny from the room.

The sound of fresh activity was heard coming from the living room. The M.E.’s team had just arrived, pushing a gurney between them.

Nodding at the duo, Sean said, “The victim’s in the bathtub. She’s had a preliminary workup and is ready to go.”

“It’s a suicide, right?” one of the men asked, looking at the sheet attached to his clipboard. The latter was lying on top of the gurney.

“No, it’s a homicide,” Logan corrected, answering for his father.

He wasn’t oblivious to the relieved smile that Destiny shot him. Though it lasted only half a second, he’d been right. Her smile did have the makings to light up a room.

Hearing what Logan said, one of the two men sighed and shook his head. “It’s going to be another long night,” he anticipated, addressing his words to no one in particular.

“C’mon, don’t just stand there and make it any longer,” the other man prodded.

Pushing the gurney before them, they entered the next room.

Once they were gone, Sean turned to Destiny. “I should be the one who’s saying he’s sorry,” he said to her, continuing what he was saying before the two assistants from the M.E.’s office had entered the apartment. “And I am. I am deeply sorry for your loss,” he emphasized. “And we will find the person responsible for this, Destiny,” he said. “I give you my word.”

Destiny blinked back her tears. It felt as if she’d been fighting them all along. Her supervisor wasn’t making things any easier for her.

“I believe you,” she murmured, her voice hardly above a whisper. Any louder and she knew she would risk breaking down entirely.

Again.

To the best of Logan’s knowledge, it was the first time he’d ever heard his father make a promise that he wasn’t a hundred percent certain ahead of time that he could back up.

This assistant had to mean a lot to him, he concluded, then couldn’t help wondering why.

Chapter 3

“Were you two on the outs?” Logan asked Destiny as his father continued processing the rest of the small apartment.

Why did he keep coming back to that?

“No. She was my only family. We were close—as close as two people who lived two different, busy lives could be,” she qualified, emphasizing the word busy. “We didn’t get together as much as I would have liked, but that couldn’t have been helped.” Her eyes narrowed slightly as she regarded Logan, looking for some kind of an indication as to what was really on his mind. She began to suspect that he wasn’t the typical vapid, shallow pretty boy. There was substance, a trait she’d always found far sexier than looks.

But right now, she was in a place where things like that didn’t matter.

“Why are you asking?” she asked.

He answered her question with a question. “Is there any reason you can think of why she wouldn’t have told you who she was seeing?”

Logan was still having a lot of trouble swallowing the scenario the woman’s sister had given him. All three of his sisters not only knew everything there was to know about each other’s boyfriends, or, in Bridget’s case, her fiancé, they were also aware of their friends’ current dates. He couldn’t fathom a woman who was willingly oblivious to that sort of information—and actually content to remain that way.

Suppressing a sigh, she said, “Probably to avoid hearing me tell her to go slow and to be careful.” She saw the question in the detective’s eyes. Under another set of circumstances, they might have even been intriguing eyes. Right now, they were just annoyingly probing. “My sister doesn’t—didn’t,” she corrected herself, hating the fact that she had to, “have the greatest track record when it came to picking men. They were all very good-looking on the outside. On the inside, not so much.”

Holding her hand out, she waffled it to indicate just how much each of the previous men in her sister’s life had deviated from the straight-and-narrow path. There hadn’t been a decent one in the lot.

“So in other words, she didn’t give you any details about who she was seeing because she didn’t want you to be judgmental,” Logan concluded succinctly.

She nodded, wishing with all her heart that she hadn’t come down as hard on Paula over the last one as she had. Not that he didn’t deserve every insulting adjective she had hurled at his memory. Slick, charming, with a Southern drawl, Bo Wilkins had managed to deplete half of Paula’s bank account—granted, that didn’t exactly amount to a king’s ransom, but it was still Paula’s money—before just vanishing off the face of the earth.

She’d begged Paula to let her know the next time she gave away her heart, because she’d said she intended to run a check on whomever the next Romeo was. If no prior arrests came up, then at least her sister would have a fighting chance of keeping the fillings in her teeth.

Paula hadn’t found that funny, she recalled. And she deliberately hadn’t said anything about meeting someone new—until she’d been pinned down.

That was when Paula had told her that she didn’t want to say anything yet because she didn’t want to jinx the relationship. And, if it became serious, then she would say something.

Given that, Destiny had seen no reason to push.

But apparently, it had been serious. Which meant that Paula had lied to her, Destiny realized with a sharp pang. It obviously had to have been serious if Paula had been despondent enough to text that message to her.

If she texted that message, a little voice in Destiny’s head whispered.

Her eyes widened as the thought sank in.

What if Paula hadn’t even been the one to text that message? What if her killer had? The same killer who had botched the appearance of a suicide by slashing her wrists upside down.