LITMIR.BIZ

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to skip the ma’am’s for once and just be a woman with a man? But she was more than that. And the suspicion in Eli Masterson’s eyes said he knew it, too. So she pulled rank. The way he expected. The way she was supposed to. “You got away with playing cowboy today, Masterson. But when I tell you to do something, I expect it to happen. The chain of command needs to be followed, no matter what the situation is.”

      “I’ll remember that next time.”

      “Please do.”

      “Is that all?”

      “I’ll expect a report from you tomorrow.”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      Shauna watched him turn and disappear into the crowd of officers, medics, CSI techs and curious thrill-seekers bustling about outside.

      “Damn,” she muttered, spotting the deputy commissioner, Michael Garner, breaking through the same crowd and flashing his ID to the scene commander. If the main office already knew she’d been involved in a shoot-out, that meant the reporters would be following shortly. Once the press got wind of this, her children would find out. They’d worry. But Seth and Sarah were adults now. She could handle them.

      What worried her was the possibility that he would find out. He seemed to know every secret about her life. Shauna shivered with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air or the scene around her.

      When Michael waved to her and hurried over with concern shining in his eyes, she wished she could disappear as easily as Eli Masterson had. Michael certainly was an efficient one. He’d wasted no time in getting here. She glanced down at her bloody hands and the stains on her cuffs and skirt. Her appearance should earn a few personal questions she was in no mood to answer. If she asked, Michael would organize the reports from this deadly fiasco and handle the press. She could go home and clean up, lock her doors and isolate herself from the death and destruction surrounding her.

      But she couldn’t ask.

      KCPD’s Commissioner of Police didn’t have that luxury.

      Chapter Two

      “Masterson.”

      Eli topped off the coffee in his plastic cup before acknowledging the unmistakable sound of authority behind him. “Captain Taylor.”

      “What brings you to my precinct?”

      Though he doubted running into each other in the break room was a coincidence, Eli took his time before stepping aside for the patriarch of the Fourth Precinct to fill a Kansas City Chiefs mug with the thick, steaming brew. “Routine follow-up on the shooting by your man, Banning.”

      No sense wasting pleasantries. There was no love lost between Internal Affairs and the Taylors since Eli and his former partner, Joe Niederhaus, had investigated the captain’s cousin, CSI Mac Taylor, four years ago. Especially since his old buddy Joe had done such a bang-up job of framing Mac and nearly getting Mac and his future wife killed. Turned out Joe was the one taking bribes, stealing evidence and blackmailing fellow cops.

      Eli had been a much younger detective then, naively blinded by loyalty to his veteran partner and unable to see the truth until it was too late. There was nothing naive left inside Eli anymore. And though he’d been the one to put the cuffs on Joe and had even, reluctantly, testified against him in court, several members of KCPD judged Eli guilty by association. He already triggered guarded suspicion whenever he entered a roomful of cops. He was Internal Affairs—the cop who policed other cops and held them accountable to the highest standards of their sworn duty. But there were some, like Captain Mitch Taylor, who seemed to take their distrust a little more personally.

      Polite and professional as the captain might be, he wasn’t here to make Eli feel welcome. “Will anything go into Banning’s permanent file?”

      “Everything points to a clean shoot.” Eli chucked an empty creamer into the trash, stalling for privacy while two younger plainclothes officers waltzed in and grabbed a snack and a seat at the table on the far side of the break room. After a friendly scuffle over ownership of the remote control, they turned on the television and debated the merits of each show as they scrolled through the channels. “But any detective who’s been involved in more than one previous incident deserves a thorough double check.”

      Captain Taylor watched and waited as well before adding, “I hear you’re nothing but thorough.”

      “I do my job. I do it well.” Except for the glaring error of not seeing his partner’s corruption, Eli’s reputation made it a fact, not a boast.

      Taylor sipped his coffee, but there was no nonchalance in the steely set of his shoulders. “Just make sure you do it right. Banning’s one of my best investigators. I don’t want him stuck behind a desk indefinitely.”

      “Barring any glitch in the paperwork, you can have him on the streets by lunchtime.”

      The teasing scuffle on the far side of the room grew louder.

      “Your mama’s on TV again, Cartwright.” The taller of the two young officers, a lanky smart-mouth with a shaved head, razzed his partner. “You know, if she wasn’t old enough to be our mother, and I wasn’t so damn handsome—”

      “She is my mother,” the shorter one articulated. “And you’re not that good-lookin’. So put your eyeballs back…”

      It wasn’t their friendly, ribald banter that caught Eli’s ear so much as recognition of the name. Cartwright.

      As in Shauna Cartwright, owner of the tempting backside pressed to his groin in the heat of gunfire, and the clean, subtle scent that had fueled some forbidden dreams last night. As in Commissioner Cartwright, the memory of whose laser-sharp tongue and official rank had rudely awakened him from his fitful sleep and sent him into the bathroom for a mind-clearing shower before dawn.

      The commish had a kid? A man she’d raised? The family resemblance was there in the blond hair and the green eyes. But mother and son? No way. This stocky guy was twenty-five if he was a day. And she was… Hell.

      Shauna Cartwright had to be a decade older than Eli. But the illicit beat of his pulse didn’t slow with the knowledge.

      Instead, it irritated him to discover he was attracted to a woman who was off limits for too many reasons to keep track of.

      “You’re not dating my sister, either,” the young Cartwright warned to his fellow officer. “I’ve seen how you operate.”

      “A sweet guy like me?” Baldy feigned offense and saluted the television with his last bite of bagel. “I’m just sayin’ she’s—”

      “Gentlemen.” Taylor subdued them with a single word.

      Eli’s gaze slid to the TV, where a stock photograph of the commissioner graced the corner of the screen while the commentator related highlights of yesterday’s robbery and double homicide at the Cattlemen’s Bank’s downtown office. Masking his interest behind a swallow of coffee, he listened for any mention of the other police officer who’d been on the scene and had taken down the alleged gunman with a shot to the knee.

      But the focus was all about Commissioner Cartwright and how KCPD’s top bureaucrat hadn’t been behind a desk so long that she’d forgotten how to protect and serve the citizens of Kansas City when danger struck.

      “Ah, c’mon, sir,” the bald one was protesting. “We’re on our fifteen.”

      “The morning briefing’s in ten.”

      “Then we’re on a ten-minute break?” Baldy tried to appease his boss.

      “Better make it nine and a half so you can get front-row seats.”

      The two young officers echoed a dutiful, “Yes, sir.”

      “Front and center,” Baldy added for good measure.

      “Just be there.” Taylor shook his head as though

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