Cavanaugh's Bodyguard. Marie Ferrarella

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СКАЧАТЬ with scanning the report submitted by the initial officer on the scene, Josh read that the policeman had found the body laid out in an alley behind a popular night club. Belatedly, Bridget’s words registered in his head.

      He glanced up and spared her an amused, knowing look. “I bet you were the little girl in elementary school who always got the most valentines dropped off at her desk on Valentine’s Day.” Bridget was the kind of woman the label “hot” had been coined for and there were times that he had to stop and remind himself that she was his partner and that he couldn’t cross the lines that he ordinarily stepped over without a second thought. There would be consequences and he liked working with her too much to risk them.

      “Then you would have lost that bet,” Bridget told him matter-of-factly. “I was the girl in elementary school who never got any.” She could vividly remember hating the approach of the holiday each year, her feelings of inadequacy ballooning to giant proportions every February fourteenth.

      Josh looked up from the folder, surprised. “None?” he questioned suspiciously.

      Bridget had to be pulling his leg for some strange reason of her own. Blond, with incredibly vivid blue eyes and a killer figure that not even a burlap sack could disguise, she had to have legions of guys drooling over her since she had first emerged out of her crib.

      And, he thought again, he would have been among them if fate hadn’t made them partners in the field.

      “None,” Bridget confirmed with a sharp nod of her head. It was still painful to recall those days and the way she’d felt. There were times now, when she looked into the mirror, that she felt as if that insecure little girl were still alive and well inside her. “I was a real ugly duckling as a kid,” she told him. “I absolutely hated Valentine’s Day back then. It always made me feel awkward, like everyone was looking at me and knew that I didn’t get a single card from anyone. I thought it was a horrible holiday.”

      “Maybe that’s it,” Josh said, closing the sparse report and watching her.

      Bridget looked at him, curious. She’d obviously missed something. “What’s ‘it’?”

      “Maybe the killer is some psycho getting even,” he suggested. As he spoke, it began to make more and more sense to him. “Our guy asked this redheaded goddess out on a date for Valentine’s Day and she turned him down, maybe even laughed at him for daring to ask her.” As he spoke, Josh’s voice grew louder and more resonant. “His pride wounded, he doesn’t step aside and lick his wounds like most guys, he gets even. Really gets even.

      “Now, every February, he’s relives that—or maybe relives what he wanted to do but didn’t at the time—and takes out his revenge on girls who look like the one who rejected him.”

      Bridget turned what Josh had just said over in her head, studying it. “So what are you telling me? That you think our killer is Charlie Brown?” she asked him, amused despite the gruesome details of the case.

      It seemed almost absurd—except for the fact that it did keep on happening. In the last two years, nine redheads, their hearts very neatly cut out, had been found in alleys throughout Aurora.

      Josh surprised her by explaining why her tongue-in-cheek theory didn’t hold. “No, Charlie Brown never got his nerve up to ask the little redheaded girl out, so she couldn’t reject him. She’s just his eternal dream.”

      His eternal dream. That was almost poetic, she thought.

      Bridget eyed her partner, amazed—and amused. Every time that she was about to write him off as being shallow, there’d be this glimmer of sensitivity that would just pull her back in.

      She supposed that was one of the reasons women always flocked to him. That, a small waist and a rock-solid body that showed off his active gym membership.

      “My God, Youngblood, I’m impressed,” she told him after a beat. “I had no idea that you were so sensitive.”

      Josh stared at her for a long moment. And then his smile, the one she’d dubbed his “bad boy” smile, which could melt the heart of a statue, curved the corners of his mouth. “There’re lot of things about me that you don’t know.”

      Now he was just trying to jockey for leverage and mess with her mind, Bridget thought. There was just one little flaw with his allegation.

      “I grew up with four brothers.” She loved all of them dearly, but at times, when she’d been growing up, the verbal fights had been brutal. “They’d more than held their own, but I really doubt that there’s very much about a living, breathing male that I can’t second-guess,” she told Josh with a smile.

      Before Josh could say anything in response, their acting lieutenant, Jack Howard, came out of his office, saw them and immediately came over. Howard, a rather self-centered man who enjoyed hearing the sound of his own voice, had been the one to hand Bridget the case this morning once he saw that she and Youngblood had worked on it a year ago.

      He looked from Bridget to Josh. “You two solve the case yet?” he asked in what appeared to be genuine seriousness.

      Bridget knew better than to think he was kidding when he asked the question, but she played along, uncertain where this was going. She had a gut feeling that wherever it was, neither she nor Josh were going to like it. There was something very pompous about the man. Added to that, she had a feeling that he resented the fact that she was related to the police department’s well-respected hierarchy.

      “No, sir, not yet,” she answered, allowing her voice to be neither submissive nor combative. She merely gave him the respect that his position was due. It had nothing to do with the man.

      She and Josh had originally heard about the case two years ago, after the second body had been discovered. None of the clues at the time had led the investigating detectives anywhere substantial. Four bodies had turned up and then the killer seemed to just vanish into thin air.

      Until last February when he surfaced again.

      This time, the case became theirs and the killer wound up leaving five women in his wake, five women who were all left in the same pose as this latest one. Hands neatly folded below where their hearts should have been. All in all, it made for a very gruesome picture.

      “Then why are you just sitting around?” Howard demanded, his voice no longer friendly. He turned on Bridget. “Just because you suddenly found out that your uncle’s the chief of detectives doesn’t give you any extra points in my book or cut you any extra slack. Do you understand Cavelli—Cavanaugh?” Flummoxed, he glared at her. “What the hell do you want me to call you?” Howard demanded.

      Bridget squared her shoulders like a soldier who had found herself under fire and was making the best of it. She didn’t like Howard, and his harping on her recent situation just underscored her negative feelings for the man.

      God, would this tempest in a teapot never be resolved? It was bad enough that Josh had teased her about it. But he at least didn’t seem jealous of this brand-new status she found herself struggling with, a status she’d never sought out or wanted in the first place.

      But here it was, anyway.

      Ever since the five-decades-old mix-up in the hospital had come to light, uncovering the fact that her father and some other infant male had accidentally been switched at birth and that СКАЧАТЬ