LITMIR.BIZ

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Since the officer at the door hadn’t tried to turn the man away, that had to mean that he was with the Aurora police force.

      Terrific. Just her luck. They’d sent a brash, cocky detective who looked as if he was in love with the sound of his own voice and, most likely, with the image he saw in his bathroom mirror each morning. Dark-haired, green-eyed, he was as handsome as they came, and she was certain that he knew it.

      She was familiar with the type, and right now it was the last thing she needed. She needed a professional detective, not a male model.

      “I’m with the crime scene investigation unit,” she told him, her voice low and remarkably stoic. She surprised herself.

      It was all she could do to hold it together. Part of Destiny still didn’t believe that any of this was actually happening. The other part felt as if she was slowly slipping into shock and would, at any moment, just completely lose it.

       You can’t. If you do, you won’t be able to help Paula.

      The moment the thought formed, it struck Destiny as ironic. After all, at this point nothing would help Paula. Nothing was going to bring her back.

      Destiny struggled to keep her angry tears in check.

      Logan nodded, taking the attractive woman’s information at face value. “I guess this is just an open-and-shut case,” he surmised. “A suicide,” he added, telling her what the lieutenant had told him. Then, his mouth curving in a particularly captivating smile, he asked, “How is it that I’ve never seen you before?” He would have certainly remembered someone who looked like her. He had a feeling that if she smiled, she could light up a room. Even somber, there was something exceedingly attractive and compelling about her. “Are you new to the team?”

      She didn’t bother answering his last question. At another time and place, she might have been more than mildly interested in his attention. Destiny wasn’t averse to having an occasional good time, as long as no promises were exchanged or expected. She was married to her work, and most of the men she’d encountered felt that they should come first in a woman’s life, not second.

      Right now, all her energy was focused on not breaking down and, more important than that, on finding who had done this to her sister.

      “It’s not a suicide,” Destiny informed the detective firmly.

      About to walk to where he could view the deceased’s body, Logan turned instead and focused on the intense crime scene investigator. She sounded as if there was no room for argument.

      “Why?” he asked, the detective in him pushing the playboy far into the background. “Did you find something that would indicate that the woman was murdered?”

      “Not yet,” Destiny answered between clenched teeth. “But I will.”

      Okay, he was officially confused, Logan thought. Was there some sort of an agenda he was missing? Exactly what did this woman mean by “not yet”? What did she know that he didn’t? He didn’t like playing catch-up.

      “If there are no indications that it’s not a suicide, what makes you think that it isn’t?” he asked the shapely blonde.

      “Because she wouldn’t commit suicide,” Destiny informed him heatedly.

      Really curious now, Logan looked at the young woman who, he realized, had more going on, even without the aid of painted-on clothing, than Stacy ever did. She didn’t reek of raw sex, but there was a subtle promise there that intrigued him. A lot.

      Since the department paid him to solve cases, not ruminate on beautiful women who said baseless things, Logan forced himself to focus on the wild claim the crime scene investigator had just made and not the fact that the words had come out of nearly perfect lips.

      “And you know this because …?”

      A very tempting chin shot up like a silent challenge. “Because she’s my sister.”

      It took him a second to absorb that. “You weren’t called in, were you?” Logan guessed.

      No, she hadn’t been. She’d come here looking for answers and had wound up face-to-face with a dreadful question: Who killed Paula?

      “I did the calling,” she told him.

      As if in a bad dream, once she knew that Paula was beyond resuscitating and she’d stopped crying, she’d pulled herself together and called her boss, even though protocol would have had her calling 911 first.

      The sound of Sean Cavanaugh’s voice had almost made her lose it again, but Destiny had managed to hold herself together enough to describe what she’d found when she’d walked into her sister’s apartment. Sean in turn had set everything else in motion, promising to be there as soon as he possibly could. He told her not to leave.

      As if she could.

      With no knowledge of what had taken place between his father and the crime scene investigator, Logan had a different take on things.

      “You can’t be here,” he told her, transforming from a devil-may-care man who enjoyed his share of the nightlife to a homicide detective who was considered to be damn good at his job.

      Logan saw the woman’s slender shoulders stiffen as if she’d been jabbed with a hot poker. She reminded him of a soldier, galvanized in order to withstand whatever came her way.

      The flash of anger in her eyes was almost mesmerizing to him.

      “The hell I can’t,” she snapped. “She’s my baby sister and the only family I have left. Had left,” Destiny amended, trying hard not to allow the words to choke off her air supply. “Somebody killed her, and I intend to find out who.”

      Having brothers and sisters of his own, Logan could easily relate to the way she felt. But she still needed to go. “I get it, but leave it up to—”

      “To who?” Destiny demanded. “To you? To the professionals?” She guessed at the word he was about to use. “I am one of the professionals.”

      That might be true, but there was another, bigger factor that she was apparently missing—or deliberately ignoring. “You’re also personally involved—”

      “You bet I am,” Destiny snapped, her eyes flashing again, “and no rules and regulations are going to make me stand on the sidelines like some clueless civilian, waiting for someone to find something that would point to my sister’s killer—especially when they’re not even going to be looking.”

      “Now wait a minute—”

      No, she wasn’t going to “wait a minute.” And she certainly wasn’t going to allow him to snow her with rhetoric.

      “A minute ago, you were all ready to write this off as a suicide. You were willing to go with what you saw—or thought you saw.”

      Only up to a point. Where did she get off, criticizing his work if she hadn’t seen him in action? Gorgeous or not, she needed to be told a few things and put in her place.

      “Not if the autopsy contradicts the idea of a suicide.”

      Autopsy.

      The very word brought up a chilling scenario with it. Someone cutting up her little sister, reducing Paula to a mass of body organs examined, weighed, catalogued and then impersonally stuffed back into her body like wrinkled tissue paper that has served its purpose.

      Suddenly, Destiny could hardly bear the wave of pain she felt.

      Logan saw the horror that washed over the woman’s fine-boned features before she apparently got herself under control again. Observing her, he had to admit he felt really sorry for the woman. He knew how he would have reacted if that was Bridget, or Kendra, or Kari in the next room.

      No rules or orders would have kept him on the sidelines. If he couldn’t have been part of the investigation outright, he would have found a way to conduct his

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