LITMIR.BIZ

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claimed it was his way of keeping track of his brood and anyone else who wanted to show up at the table for a meal. There was never a shortage of food. Or love, for that matter, though that was not always as blatantly on display as the plates were. But it was understood. You had a problem, no matter what your age, you showed up at the table. There’d be someone along to help sort things out, by and by.

      All five of the Cavanaugh children had followed in their father’s footsteps and joined the Aurora Police Department. Even Lorrayne, the youngest and the official family hellion had finally come around, after giving her father twelve years of grief and turning the rest of his black hair gray. The fact that all of them chose to go into law enforcement was a testament to the regard with which they held their father.

      Callie took a sip from the glass of orange juice that was next to her plate. There were times when it seemed to her that everyone named Cavanaugh found their way into law enforcement eventually. Her grandfather had served, as had both of her father’s brothers. The younger of the two, Brian, was currently the chief of detectives. Another brother, Mike, two years his junior, had died in the line of duty fifteen years ago. His son, Patrick, had joined the force, as well.

      Only Uncle Mike’s daughter, Patience, had broken away from the family mould and become a veterinarian. But even she had ties to the department. In her capacity as vet, she treated all the dogs that had been recruited into the K-9 division.

      Uncle Brian’s only daughter, Janelle, worked in the D.A.’s office while his sons Troy, Jarrod and Dax had all taken the long, blue path into law enforcement, as well.

      “So, what kept you?” Andrew wanted to know as he placed a piece of French toast dusted with powdered sugar on Callie’s plate.

      She looked down at the serving. It was quite possibly the largest piece of French toast to ever have come out of a pan, but then, Andrew believed bigger was better when it came to breakfast. He knew that quite often there would be no time for lunch or possibly even dinner until the wee hours. So breakfast, he maintained, was a definite necessity for survival, and the more, the better.

      “I caught every red light from the apartment to here.” It was a lie, but Callie felt it could be excused. If she told her father the truth, he’d look at her with those sympathetic blue-gray eyes of his, and she wasn’t up to that right now. Better sarcasm than kindness. Kindness had a way of creeping under the layers of the barriers she’d laid around herself and undermining all her hard work. She smiled prettily at him. “Wouldn’t want me speeding now, would you?”

      He saw right through her, the way he did all his children. It was the sixth sense that some parents were blessed with. Or cursed with, depending on the point of view.

      Still, he played along, knowing what saving face was all about. More than once he’d drifted in the same rudderless boat his daughter had occupied. And on occasion, it came by to give him a return trip to the land of hopelessness. The only difference was that for him, there’d never been any real closure, no tangible evidence to extinguish the last flicker of hope that Rose was still alive.

      “No,” he agreed. “Would like to see you getting up earlier, though, so you could make it while the meal was still hot.”

      She looked down at the serving he’d just placed before her. There was steam curling from it. “Any hotter, Dad, and my plate’ll go up in smoke.” She waited until he finished filling her coffee cup, then reached for it. “You know, I can pour my own cup of coffee.”

      Andrew stopped to top off Shaw’s cup before placing the pot back on its stand. “I know. So can I.” He raised one semidark eyebrow as he fixed her with a penetrating look. “Or would you want to deny an old man one of the few pleasures he has left in life?”

      Shaw snorted as he polished off the last of his own breakfast. “Old man,” he echoed. “That’ll be the day.”

      Adding a drop of cream to her pitch-black coffee, Callie smiled at the wordplay. She picked up the cup with both hands and took a long, deep sip. Her father’s coffee was guaranteed to get a stopped heart beating again, and this morning she knew she needed all the help she could get.

      She’d barely slept, having finally drifted off, if it could be called that, somewhere around three. Memories of Kyle insisted on haunting her. Last Saturday had marked one year since his death.

      Funny, she’d thought she was finally making progress, finally moving on with her life. Wrong.

      Just went to show you that you could never count on anything. Other than family, she amended. The sun would stop rising in the east before she would ever stop counting on her family to come through for her.

      But this wasn’t the kind of thing her family could really help with. The best they could do was just silently be there for her. Support her with their presence, but not their words. Words were useless.

      Callie counted on her work to take up the slack, to blanket the pain until she could handle it. So far, the pain was refusing to let itself be pushed into the background for more than a few days at a time.

      It wasn’t that she wanted to forget Kyle. Kyle embodied so many of the best moments of her life. She just wanted to be able to think of him without shards of glass cutting into her chest and gut, making it an effort to breathe.

      That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

      As if reading her mind, she felt her father’s hand on her shoulder. Just a little extra pressure, nothing more. But it was enough. She smiled her thanks, grateful for his understanding. Equally grateful that he didn’t verbalize anything.

      And then he was on his way, back to the stove and his first love. They all knew, because he’d told them countless times, how he’d put himself through school as a short-order cook and had managed to develop into one hell of a chef over the years, whenever his career didn’t put demands on him.

      The stack of French toast piled on the platter beside the stove was beginning to rival the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Andrew drew over a second platter and decreased the pile, then glanced over his shoulder toward the table.

      “Seconds, anyone?”

      It was a misleading question. Most of them had already had seconds. By the looks of it, Clay was on thirds. Their father’s cooking was far too good to resist. Callie was thoroughly convinced that even Gandhi would have been tempted to at least temporarily turn his back on his well-publicized fast to sample a little of her father’s creations.

      But just as Andrew asked, the sound of a beeper going off framed his words. Five sets of eyes went to the appendages they kept clipped to their belts.

      A blue light highlighting a phone number was looking back at her. “Mine,” Callie declared.

      “And we have a winner,” Andrew sighed, shaking his head.

      Andrew knew she would be leaving momentarily. On the other side of the fence now, he felt the frustration that he knew his wife had had to endure every time he’d been called away from the table, or missed a meal because of the demands of his job.

      He glanced accusingly at the barely touched fare on his oldest daughter’s plate. The powder hadn’t even faded yet. “You haven’t had time to eat enough food to keep a hummingbird alive.”

      “They eat twice their body weight, Dad,” Teri informed him as she broke off a piece of what was to become her third serving of French toast. “You wouldn’t want Callie to roll out of here, would you?”

      “No chance of that happening even if she ate three times her body weight,” Clay, Teri’s younger brother by two and a half minutes, commented. Though they were twins, they hardly looked alike. Fair, with long blond hair, Teri looked like their mother, while Clay, though not as dark as Shaw, had their father’s black Irish look.

      Callie held her hand up for silence as she dug out her cell phone. She might as well not have wasted the effort. There was an annoying message on her LCD screen. She frowned. “No signal.”

      “Must be Clay’s

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