LITMIR.BIZ

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his biceps bulge as he turned from the car with the girl in his arms.

      Maren led the way into the E.R. room. The electronic doors sprang open the second she stepped in front of them. The area was filled with personnel, none of whom seemed to notice them coming in. Looking around, Maren was just about to grab an older-looking nurse when Jared called, “I need some help here!”

      Redirected by the entreaty, the nurse Maren was about to buttonhole terminated her conversation with an orderly and focused on the situation.

      “What happened?” the matronly looking woman asked Jared.

      He rattled off the particulars of the incident quickly and crisply, ending by saying, “Her fingertip was packed in ice.”

      The dark-skinned woman whose badge proclaimed her to be Rowena O’Brien looked expectantly from him to Maren. “Where is it?”

      “Right there.” Jared nodded toward Maren. The latter quickly produced the plastic bag out of her purse.

      Pleased, the nurse nodded her approval. “Good work.” Scanning the area, she pointed toward the first empty bed that came into view. Long floor-to-ceiling curtains separated each bed from its brethren. “Put her right there,” the nurse instructed.

      Maren noticed that Jared placed the girl on the gurney as if he were handling something delicate and precious. His compassion impressed her more than the way he conducted himself in an emergency situation.

      April clutched at his arm as he began to withdraw. A fresh wave of panic had entered her eyes. “Are you going?”

      Jared paused to squeeze her good hand, communicating support and comfort as best he could. “We’ll be right outside,” he promised. “In the waiting room.”

      The nurse indicated outer doors that would take them there. It was only as he followed Maren through them that he realized he was still wearing his apron. He slipped the loop off his neck and took off the apron, bunching it up in his hand like an unwanted appendage. He dropped it in the first empty chair he came to.

      They had their choice of places to sit since the waiting room was largely empty.

      “I take it you’ve been here before.” Maren took the seat beside him.

      She looked restless, he thought, as if she didn’t want to be here. Two of his cousins hated hospitals. His uncle Mike had died in one, Aurora General. A bullet to the chest in the line of duty had taken him permanently away from them.

      He shrugged in response to her question. “One emergency room is pretty much like another.”

      A note of interest entered her eyes. “What was the matter?”

      He caught himself thinking that her eyes were beautiful. So blue if you stared at them for any length of time, they could make your soul ache. For a second, he lost the thread of the conversation. “What?”

      She wanted to distract herself. Papa Joe had been in a place like this. She was eighteen at the time, about to go off to college, to stand on the brink of new horizons, when he’d been in a car accident. She remembered how terrified she’d been, praying in the small chapel on the premise that he wouldn’t die and leave her alone. One moment he was this big, larger-than-life man, the next, she was facing the possibility of his being taken from her. The edifice of her confidence was never the same again because she’d discovered that the foundations were built on sand.

      She’d spent the spring nursing him back to health and the summer arguing with him that she wasn’t going to college, that she couldn’t leave him alone. Eventually he prevailed upon her to go, that he was fine.

      Being here brought it all back to her; the fear, the uncertainty. She needed something to get her mind off that. So she turned to the man beside her, hoping for some kind of respite. “Why did you need to go to the emergency room?”

      Because my partner was shot buying drugs off a dealer we spent two months setting up. Two cops wandered in, thought we were junkies. Messed up the sting.

      It wasn’t the kind of explanation he could give her. Jared thought for a moment, digging around in his past for something plausible that he would remember in case she asked about it later. “My sister had appendicitis.”

      A family threat. Instantly she related to it. “Did you get her there in time?”

      It had been his father who’d brought Janelle in, but he let that part go, nodding instead in response. “The appendix burst on the operating table. Doctor said it was touch and go at the time.”

      So this wasn’t an isolated incident. Maren took new measure of the man beside her. “You’re pretty cool under fire, aren’t you?”

      The smile he offered her was almost shy. Maren felt herself warming to him despite resolutions not to. “Don’t see much point in losing your head. Just makes things that much worse.”

      She liked that. The man didn’t fold under pressure. So many people stood back, waiting for someone else to do something, never wanting to be the first. Maybe hiring him was not such a bad thing, after all. “Your sister, how old is she?”

      He found it safest and easier to stick as close to the truth as possible. Lies had a way of tripping you up. He’d played so many people since he’d joined the force, the various names were hard to keep straight. If he’d added a different life for each, it would have been impossible. Besides, something told him that Maren Minnesota reacted well to tales of hearth and home. “Younger than me by a couple of years.”

      “Just the two of you?”

      He was right, he thought. There was more than just mild curiosity in her voice. It was as if she was hungry for information. Almost as hungry as he was, but for an entirely different reason. His job was to find out as much as he could about everyone there and to see how they figured into this tale of money laundering that had been brought to the department.

      “Four,” he corrected. “I’ve got two more brothers.”

      Her blue eyes became almost animated. “Younger? Older?”

      He thought of Dax and Troy, both were detectives in the Aurora police department, although neither had ever gone under cover. “One of each.”

      He watched in fascination as a smile literally lit up her face. “Must be nice.”

      “It has its moments,” he allowed. It was no secret that they were close. All the Cavanaughs were now that they had reached adulthood. “But when we were growing up, my mother would have given us away to the first person with stamina who came to the door.”

      She laughed and he found himself reacting to the sound. It was soft, like wind tiptoeing through rose petals. He pulled himself back. The important thing was that the ice between them had been broken. He couldn’t have done this any better than if he’d planned the scenario.

      Shifting in his seat, he looked at her. “What about you?”

      He could all but see the edge of the curtain as it began to come down again in her eyes. Maren’s smile remained, but it became a little more formal. She didn’t give her trust easily and he wondered if she had secrets. Was she involved in any part of the money laundering if those allegations turned out to be true?

      “What do you mean?” Maren asked as she rose to her feet again.

      “Do you have any siblings?” Jared watched as she began to move restlessly around the area.

      “No.”

      There was a note of longing in her voice. Which would explain the wistful look in her eyes when he’d mentioned his siblings. He turned as she drifted toward the TV mounted on the wall in the far corner. “You’re an only child, then.”

      The shrug was casual, dismissive. “As far as I know.”

      It was an odd thing to say. Unless she was an orphan, he realized suddenly. April had alluded to a relationship between Maren and Joe Collins. He knew

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