A Cavanaugh Christmas Read Free Page A

event for the first year and a half, until the men she worked with began to take her seriously. Began to see that she intended to stay whether they approved of her or not.
    Eventually, they had come around. Not all of them, but enough. Enough to make her life just the slightest bit easier if she chose to take that route.
    For her part, Kait wanted no favors. She just wanted not to be harassed so that she could do her job the way she was meant to. Eventually, by the very nature of her dedication and her character, she won the respect she wanted.
    But she took none of it for granted, knowing that each day would have challenges. Challenges she intended to meet and win.
    “Your nameplate says Thomas Cavelli,” she pointed out, nodding at it.
    “Yeah, it does,” Tom acknowledged.
    His eyes drifted over the length of her. She was lean, but no pushover. He’d bet a large sum of money that beneath that fitted gray jacket and straight skirt was a muscular body. She didn’t do it to look good, he decided. She did it to be fit. To be ready.
    But ready for what?
    And what was a woman who looked like that doing here? She certainly wasn’t someone who’d recently had a child go missing. She bore none of the telltale signs of a woman who’d been suddenly stamped with tragedy. Nor did she appear distraught and holding it together for the sake of the child who had been lost or abducted.
    She smelled of something fresh and herbal, not of rampant fear.
    So who was she and why had the chief of detectives sent her here—if he actually had?
    Tom cast a skeptical side glance at his partner. But LaGuardia struggled not to visibly salivate as he hung on every syllable that passed over the woman’s perfectly shaped lips. If Angelo had put the mystery woman up to this, he would have taken more of a backseat to what was being played out before him.
    “So which is it?” Kait asked. A hint of impatience wove through her voice. “Cavanaugh or Cavelli?”
    It occurred to her that no matter which name it wound up being, someone as handsome as this man was undoubtedly far too consumed with his own appearance to be very good at anything else. He was probably someone’s son and had risen through the ranks because of that rather than any actual merit.
    “That is the question,” Tom responded, the corners of his mouth curving ever so slightly.
    And that, indeed, was the question. The question each of them had to tackle on their own. He and his siblings each had to make up their minds how to handle this new earthquake in their lives. Did they continue life beneath the moniker they’d always responded to? Did they stay Cavellis? Or did they switch over to the new name which, according to sworn testimony from the hospital administrator, was the right one?
    Cavelli or Cavanaugh, which would it be?
    Obviously, the chief of detectives had already made up his own mind about the matter.
    “That’s a boring story for a rainy afternoon over a bracing glass of bourbon,” Tom told her easily, his eyes never leaving her face. “The more important one is what brought you here?”
    He got down to business quickly, Kait thought. She could appreciate that.
    Taking a small, almost imperceptible bracing breath, Kait dug into her jacket pocket and took out her wallet. It contained exactly one credit card, her license, a few bills totaling eight dollars—and her official police identification.
    She flipped her wallet open and held up her ID for the quiet, scrutinizing detective to see. “I’m Detective Kaitlyn Two Feathers—”
    She got no further than that.
    “Two Feathers?” LaGuardia echoed. He stared at the torrent of red hair which seemed in direct contradiction to the Native American surname on her identification.
    “Yes,” she replied. There was just the slightest hint of humor in her eyes. The detective wasn’t the first person to react this way upon first hearing her last name. “Two Feathers.”
    Tom took a less brash approach. “Husband?”