Baby, Don't Go Read online

  What could he say? If she’d been an Oakland cop for four years, she was qualified, mouthy little brat or not. He nodded.

  “Fine. Then do you want me to stay or to go? Make up your mind, because I’m not playing this game again.”

  “Stay.” Shit. He regretted the choice the instant it left his mouth, but he needed someone, she was here, and she was qualified. He’d just have to live with it.

  But damned if the concessions would all be one-sided. “Provided you can act like a woman who’s been trained by the academy, and not some loose cannon commando queen.”

  Her jaw tightened, but she said, “I can do that.” She stooped to gather up two plastic grocery bags, then walked to the kitchen. After opening the refrigerator, she started emptying the bags.

  “You brought your own groceries?” He walked over to see.

  “I didn’t know how long I’d be here and I hate going home to spoiled food.” She set a half gallon of milk on the shelf next to the quart of orange juice she’d already put there, and reached in her bag for two oranges, a container of fresh pineapple, and a container of cubed cantaloupe.

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just toss it out?”

  “I don’t waste perfectly good food, rich boy.”

  He blew out a frustrated breath. Maybe if he changed the subject it would take his mind off how good it would feel to wring that long, slender neck. “There’s space in the garage if you want to move your car in. I’m surprised you managed to find parking out on the street.”

  “I didn’t.” Daisy shut the fridge door and turned to face him. “I came by Muni.”

  “By bus? You don’t have a car?” He couldn’t conceive of life without wheels.

  Her expression was hostile. “We can’t all be born with a silver spoon in our mouths.”

  “Dammit, Daisy, would you give that a rest?” Ten lousy minutes in her company and all his emotions were seething. “I’m not rich, okay? Hell, compared to my friends I’m dead broke.”

  “If you can write me a check for four thousand dollars, trust me, you’re not dead broke. I know about broke. Until Reggie deposited your check I had exactly one hundred thirty-eight dollars and forty-one cents in my account.”

  “Yeah? In that case, I’d think you’d be a whole lot nicer to me.”

  She made a rude sound. “Oh, please, do me a favor. Hold your breath waiting for that to happen.”

  “Sounds to me like I’m single-handedly keeping the wolf from your door, cupcake.”

  She looked him dead in the eye and said, “Then isn’t it funny how, every time I look at you, all I can think is, What very big teeth you have, Grandma?” She rubbed her arms as if chilled. “And I moved in with you anyway.”

  Nick watched her come out from behind the breakfast bar and said, “Listen, Daisy, maybe we oughtta clear the air.”

  She walked over to the couch and sat, leaning forward to snap open the clasps on the case she’d set on the trunk earlier. Thumbs poised on the lid, she looked over at him. “Clear the air of what?” She raised the lid and reached inside.

  Nick looked away, then back at her profile. “We’ve got to talk about the night of Mo’s wedding.” An apology from him was long overdue.

  Daisy couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less. Rising to her feet, she faced him, her face stonily unencouraging and the pistol she’d picked out of the case held down at her side. “You can’t be terribly smart,” she said flatly, “or you’d never mention that night when I have a gun in my hand.” Especially when that hand trembled with the overwhelming desire to point it straight at his lying heart. She turned and carefully placed the weapon back in its slot in the box. “Luckily for you, I’m a professional.”

  “Listen, all I wanted to say—”

  “I don’t give a rip what you want to say, all right? Just drop it.”

  “Dammit, Daisy, I—”

  Deliberately tuning him out, she headed for the bathroom. She needed a few minutes with a door that locked and water she could run to drown out his voice. He seemed determined to keep pushing, and she was terrified it might goad her into committing an irrevocably stupid act. Nothing punched her buttons the way that night with Nick did, and the smart thing would be to remove herself from the situation until she could shake the desire to respond on a personal level. She needed to gather her professionalism around her like a bulletproof vest.

  When her arm was suddenly grabbed in a steely grip, whirling her around, she didn’t stop to think—she simply reacted. Spinning in to press her back against his front, she gripped his arm, twisted, and bent forward with a snap.

  Nick flipped over her shoulder and sailed several feet, landing flat on his back on the floor.

  3

  “HOLY shit, Daisy!” Nick pushed up on an elbow and sucked in a careful breath. “All I wanted to do was apologize.”

  “Save it for someone who cares.”

  “I’d say you must care a whole hell of a lot, or you wouldn’t be trying to slam the breath out of me.”

  She laughed without humor. “Don’t flatter yourself. I cared once, but I don’t anymore.”

  She did lean down and offer him a hand, however, hauling him to his feet when he reached out and gripped it. It was ludicrous to miss the warmth of her hand when she dropped his an instant later, yet he did.

  “The only way this arrangement has a snowball’s chance of working is if we keep things between us purely professional,” she said coolly. “And, okay, I admit maybe this wasn’t exactly the way to start us off.” Her shrug didn’t strike Nick as particularly repentant, and her chin was elevated as she added, “Leave it alone, Nick. You got what you wanted when you copped my cherry, then walked out on me.” She turned away.

  God, that was almost funny, considering. He hadn’t walked out; he’d run, and it had been an act of pure self-defense.

  All his life he’d watched his father go through wives like a kid through a Pez dispenser, and had seen the havoc it had wreaked. It had made him decide at a young age that he would never marry, and he’d given up even bothering to get to know his various stepsiblings, since they were never around long enough to make the effort worthwhile. Mo had been the only person he could count on to be there for him through the good times and the bad.

  Then, the year he graduated from college, Daisy had come into their lives.

  Right from the start she’d proved different from the stepsiblings who had come and gone before her. She hadn’t even been in the Coltrane mansion an hour before she’d begun to make her presence felt. At sixteen, she’d already been out-spoken and full of attitude. She’d run through the corridors, flopped on the furniture, and hadn’t thought twice about putting her size-nine feet on a couch or a coffee table. She’d done all the things he and Mo had rarely dared to do. There had just been something about her, a warm quality that drew anyone who got close to her, and she’d been eager as a puppy to be his and Mo’s sister.

  Her sloppy, rampant emotions had tugged at something in him, perhaps because he was always so careful to keep his own strictly under control. He’d been drawn not only to her uninhibited laughter but to her stormy rages, and her sheer lack of restraint had made him itch to get close to her. But his feelings had never been the least bit brotherly, and that—he hadn’t doubted for an instant—was a dangerous thing. So he’d watched her from a distance whenever he was home, but carefully rebuffed every overture she’d made.

  It had turned out to be the right decision, too, for their parents’ marriage had started to go sour a few weeks shy of its first anniversary. And thanks to Dad’s decision not to be stuck with yet another alimony payment and his subsequent machinations, Daisy and her mother had been packed and gone before that date ever rolled around.

  Nick watched Daisy now as she sat on the couch and picked up another pistol, efficiently breaking it open and searching for God-only-knew-what inside. He sat down on the love seat at right angles to the couch and raised his camera up to his eyes,
looking at her through the viewfinder. He clicked off a few frames, and she looked up.

  “Don’t take my picture.”

  “Why not? I’ve always liked your face.”

  She scowled at him and he clicked off a shot of that, too. She must have decided it wasn’t worth fighting over, for she went back to the gun, loading it and placing it back in its slot, then reaching for another weapon.

  He had always liked her face, from the very first time he’d seen it. It was expressive and full of character. She had big Hershey’s-Kisses-colored eyes and high cheekbones. Her eyebrows, several shades darker than her hair, tilted up at the outside corners, her nose was prominent, and she had a soft mouth that was offset by the stubbornness of her chin. Daisy’s thoughts were generally right there for the world to read on her face, although she’d clearly become adept at hiding them when she wanted to. He clicked off another shot.

  “Would you put that stupid camera down!” Daisy leapt to her feet, tucking the gun into an inside holster in the front of her jeans and covering the butt of its handle with the hem of her sweater.

  “This stupid camera is what gave me four thousand dollars to turn over to you,” Nick replied mildly as he lowered the camera.

  She moved restlessly. “I’d like to get out of here for a while. Let’s go walk the grounds. The wall around this place looks pretty substantial, so I’d like to see how Hubby’s goons were able to get in here yesterday.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He climbed to his feet, happy to forsake his little stroll down memory lane. Daisy was right: they needed to keep their relationship on a purely professional footing.

  So the last thing he should do was revisit that evening nine years ago in a hotel room with Blondie, ten floors above his sister’s waning wedding reception.

  Reid Cavanaugh tracked his wife to the study. He walked straight up to the desk where Mo sat tallying figures and slapped the paper in his hand down on the polished surface in front of her. “You want to tell me what this is?”

  She marked her place on the column of numbers with her fingertip and looked first at his face, then at the legal document in front of her. Then she looked back up at him again, and Reid’s gut knotted. God, she was so incredibly cool these days. “It’s notice of a paid loan.”

  “Paid by you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is your name anywhere on the original loan papers, Maureen?”

  “No, but—”

  “No, period. Mine is. I cosigned for the fuc…for the loan.” Hands braced on the desktop, he leaned forward to level a look into her clear blue eyes. “Not you. Me.”

  “That’s all very well, Reid, but I notice you didn’t loan Pettigrew the money through Cavanaugh Bank.”

  “That’s right. He didn’t have the proper collateral to satisfy the loan committee.”

  “Yet you personally cosigned?”

  “He needed the money, Mo.”

  “They always need money, Reid! God, you’re such a soft touch! And every deadbeat ex-school-chum knows it. What earthshaking emergency did Pettigrew have, a sudden need for a new polo pony?”

  “Are you really interested in knowing, or would you rather sit there on your moral high ground, tossing off sarcastic remarks?”

  “You lent our money to someone you’d never consider in a professional capacity!”

  “Oh, so today it’s our money, huh? Don’t you think that’s a touch hypocritical, considering any reference you’ve made to our finances in the past several years has been strictly in terms of your money or mine? Besides, he’ll pay it back.”

  “I heard you telling someone on the phone the other day that Pettigrew defaulted and left you holding the bag.”

  “And if you’d eavesdropped a few minutes longer, or bothered to talk to me when I got off the phone, you would have heard me say that I know he’ll be good for it in the end.”

  She simply gave him that pitying look she was so good at, and he knew she thought he was dreaming. Again. Her continued lack of faith in his judgment flicked him on the raw. “It was my problem, Mo! I’ve been working on a contingency plan until Pettigrew comes through, but could you trust me to handle it myself? Hell, no. Who do I have to thank for that, I wonder? My guess would be Big Daddy, if you and your brother are anything to go by. The two of you sure put the fun back in dysfunctional.”

  Cheeks reddening, she surged to her feet. “That’s low. And unfair.” The space that separated them was suddenly much narrower than it had been a moment ago, and it crackled with emotion.

  He leaned forward, bringing them closer yet. “Maybe so, but it’s also dead-on accurate. We’ve tiptoed around the mess our marriage has become way too long. Your dad was an emotional screw-up, so Nick takes a hike whenever a relationship even hints at growing serious. And you”—he laughed without humor—“well, you’re pretty well determined to stick with me to the bitter end no matter what, aren’t you, Mo? We sure wouldn’t want you to be accused of being anything like your father.”

  Her cheeks went from red to white. “Is that what this is really about? Do you want a divorce?”

  “What I want is for you to believe in me for just one lousy minute. I want to be treated like a contributing member of this family, not some incompetent teenager who needs his mom to get him out of a jam.” What he wanted was his old Mo back—but she’d been gone a long time now, and for all he knew, she was gone forever. Somewhere along the line, their marriage, which had started out so happy and full of love and hope, had grown stagnant and stale. They used to spend every moment they could steal away from their obligations together. Now they rarely saw each other at all. And the thing she’d once loved best about him, his optimistic willingness to lend a hand to a friend in need, was the very issue that had driven a wedge between them. Which was ironic when you considered the way she was forever jumping in to solve everyone’s problems for them.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said in frustration. “I’ve never risked the roof over your head or the food on your table. You had no business butting in—you should have left it the hell alone.”

  She hesitated and then gave him a tight smile. “Believe me, you don’t know how much I wish I’d done exactly that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have quite a bit of work to do.” Without another word, she resumed her seat and went back to tallying the column of figures as if he’d ceased to exist.

  4

  tuesday

  DAISY awoke to find Nick squatting next to the couch, his face less than a foot from hers. Mumbling an oath, she scrambled upright, her hand reaching beneath the pillow for her gun, her gaze scanning the apartment. “What? What is it? Is someone trying to get in?”

  He didn’t immediately answer. Following his gaze, she saw that her blanket had slipped, revealing glimpses of the tank top and panties she’d slept in. Although neither was exceptionally revealing, she pushed upright against the end of the couch and pulled the errant cover up around her neck, a heightened awareness snapping along her nerve endings. “What do you want, Nick?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  The morning light, pouring through the mullioned windows, picked out the subtle streaks of gold, russet, and mahogany in his thick brown hair. Overlong and ruler-straight, it had the rich luxuriousness of an animal pelt.

  He snapped his fingers in her face. “Earth calling Blondie.” She blinked, and he said, “I said we’ve got to leave in forty-five minutes. If you want a shower, you’d better grab it now. I know how long it takes you women to get ready to go anywhere.”

  She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. Giving his stupid crack the zero attention it deserved, she locked on to the one pertinent word in the conversation. “Leave? Leave for where?” A huge yawn cracked her jaw and she shook her head in disgust. “Sorry. I don’t function very well before my first cup of coffee.”

  “I’ll make you one. You go take your shower.” He headed for the kitchen.

  Wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, s
he clutched it closed with one hand and pulled her gun out with the other. Then she padded after him. “Wait a minute. What did you mean when you said we had to leave in forty-five minutes?”

  Nick looked at his Rolex. “Forty, now.”

  “The number’s not the point, Coltrane. I don’t recommend you go anywhere. We need to establish some parameters to assure your safety.”

  “You’ll just have to do that on the move, cupcake. I’ve got commitments to honor.”

  “Like what? Got a hot date?” Oh, not good, Daisy. Remember your professionalism.

  “No,” he replied evenly. “I’ve got back-to-back photo shoots scheduled.”

  She drew in a deep breath and slowly eased it out. “I strongly advise you to curtail those appointments wherever possible. I’m very good at what I do, Nick, but I’m only one person, and the risk factor goes up exponentially whenever you appear in public.”

  “Just do your best, Daisy. I committed to these photo shoots months ago, and except for one or two, they’re all for date-specific events and can’t be postponed.”

  “Send them to another photographer.”

  He poured the beans he’d just ground into a filtered drip cone, fit the cone over a glass pot, and held it under an Insta Hot tap. Steam drifted up as he glanced over at her. “They want the best.”

  She snorted. “And—what?—Annie Leibovitz wasn’t available?”

  “Ouch.” A grin split his face, and he slapped one hand over his heart as if mortally wounded. He slid a coffee mug onto the counter in front of her and reached for the pot. When her cup was full he looked up at her, and the smile had disappeared from his face. “I gave them my word.”

  She sighed. Giving one’s word was a concept she understood. She was just surprised that he did. Rearranging the blanket to allow her hand through, she set the gun on the counter and scooped up the mug.