Cavanaugh's Surrender Read Free Page A

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 own investigation covertly until he found answers that satisfied him.
    Until he found the killer.
    He felt a budding respect as he looked at the woman for the first time, not assessing her comely features but taking measure of the person who existed beneath. Thinking of what she was feeling and taking stock of what had to be crossing her mind right now.
    Logan relented, backing off from his initial stand. “Look, what if I promise to keep you filled in? Will that be enough for you?”
    The moment the words emerged from his mouth, he knew they had come out wrong. He made it sound as if he was trying to dismiss her. He wasn’t doing anything of the kind.
    Destiny tossed her head, anger and sadness mingling with the very stubborn streak that had seen her through a less than typical childhood, one that would have conquered a lesser person. And she had been a child at the time.
    “No, sorry, not good enough,” she fired back.
    “He’s right, you