Cavanaugh's Secret Delivery by Marie Ferrarella

Author:Marie Ferrarella [Ferrarella, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-04-12T18:17:46+00:00

Chapter 13

“Don’t you have to go to the precinct, fill out some kind of report about what just happened?” she asked Dugan as they sat in a booth in a small, all-night restaurant. Except for one other couple, they were the only ones there.

“I’ve got other people working on that,” Dugan told her.

Ordinarily, he didn’t delegate things. He would have been at the precinct right now, filing a report about how the case had gone down. But he’d opted to use his judgment, and right now he felt he could do more good here, sitting with her, than anything he could wind up accomplishing at the precinct. Oren and his bodyguard were dead, just like his CI was, another murder he had yet to solve.

Moreover, the shooter was currently in the wind, but there were half a dozen police officers still out looking for him. He doubted that they would find the man, but there was always hope.

He nodded at the coffee cup Toni was holding. “Sure I can’t get you anything?”

“You didn’t even have to get me this,” she pointed out. And then she smiled ruefully. He’d gone out of his way to be nice to her and she was being blasé about it. She knew why she was behaving this way. Because she was attracted to him and she was trying to keep him at a distance so she wouldn’t give herself away. “I’m sorry. I have trouble saying thank-you sometimes.”

“Really?” he asked, feigning surprise. “I hadn’t noticed.” And then the smile on Dugan’s face vanished and he grew serious. He was worried about her. He tried to tell himself that his reaction was just routine—but it wasn’t and he knew it. “You don’t have anything to thank me for. If anything, I should be apologizing. I put you in harm’s way.”

“No,” she argued, “I put me in harm’s way, remember? Whatever happened tonight, I was the one who got the ball rolling. If I hadn’t pretended to trip and fall into Oren’s arms, none of this would have happened.” She sighed, shaking her head. “I honestly thought I was doing some good, getting the ball rolling for you.”

He studied her for a long moment. She began to grow uncomfortable before he finally asked, “You always do this?”

“Do what?” she asked, unclear as to what he was talking about.

“Beat yourself up like this,” Dugan answered. “Because it’s pointless. Just stop,” he told her. “You could examine this from a thousand different angles, but that’s not going to change anything that happened. Nobody can successfully predict the future. You tried to help, but there was no way for you to know that your plans were going to be blown to smithereens by a shooter from a rival cartel.”

“Is that what he was?” Toni asked, suddenly coming to life. “He was from a rival gang?”

“The lab went over the footage from the surveillance cameras and managed to get a hit pretty quick. The shooter was David Padilla. His people

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