A Cavanaugh Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

her.
    She liked to think that the one watching over her these days was Ronald Two Feathers.
    It only made sense. After all, he’d been nothing short of her guardian angel while he was alive, so why not really take over the role after he’d died?
    The elevator came to a stop on the first floor and she and the detective got out. She found that in order to keep up with Tom and his incredibly long stride, she had to lengthen and quicken her own just short of skipping along. She wasn’t a small woman, but neither was she six foot two the way he apparently was.
    It wasn’t until they’d gone down the ten steps from the front of the building to the parking lot situated in the back of the precinct that he turned toward her and said anything.
    “Mine or yours?” he asked.
    Caught off guard, she stared at him, trying to make sense of the question. “Excuse me?”
    “Do you want to use my car or your car?”
    Ordinarily, he would have just walked up to his own vehicle, an unmarked white Crown Victoria. But he had the feeling that when it came to this woman, presuming anything would irritate her.
    To be truthful, Kait hadn’t given something as trivial as mode of transportation any thought. Her mind was filled with the larger details, such as finding out the identity of the man or men who had abducted Megan Willows.
    Since he asked, she gave him the first answer that came into her head. “What’s wrong with my driving mine and you driving yours?”
    “Well, for one thing, it’s wasteful,” he replied. “Overkill,” he elaborated, then added, “I know the city, so it only makes sense that I drive.”
    Her eyes narrowed. He found himself intrigued rather than annoyed.
    Did he think she was directionally challenged? Or that she couldn’t read a map? She obviously could. She’d looked up the agency’s exact location as soon as she obtained the actual address during her initial search. And she’d obviously driven her car from Taos to Aurora. She hadn’t just stumbled onto the city through a stroke of dumb luck.
    He didn’t look like a Neanderthal, but looks could be deceiving. She had encountered enough men who dragged their knuckles and thought of her as being completely incapable and unsuitable for a law-enforcement career. She needed to set him straight right from the get-go.
    “I didn’t exactly wander into Aurora by accident. I do know how to find my way around.”
    There was just the slightest hint of humor in his eyes, even though he kept the smile from his lips as he nodded. “You’re a natural-born pathfinder. Okay, you drive,” he told her with no qualms. “I haven’t got a problem with that.”
    Privacy was a very large component in her life these days. She didn’t particularly like having to share a vehicle. At the very least, driving this man anywhere meant being responsible for driving the detective back to the precinct, and she preferred to be free to go wherever she needed to—whenever she wanted to. “I’d rather we went separately.”
    He eyed her for a moment, dissecting her words to get at her thought process. Rather than agree to drive separately, he took a guess at her motivation for isolation. “You have trust issues, don’t you?”
    The observation rankled her. Especially since it had come out of nowhere and was uncomfortably close to the truth. She nailed him with a pointed glare.
    Rather than deny his assumption, she went on the attack. “I have ‘issues’ with people who try to analyze me.”
    He raised his hands to chest level, fingers pointed toward the sky as if in surrender. “Not trying to analyze you,” he told her. “I’m just trying to find a way to get along with you.”
    She blew out an annoyed breath. “You have a very strange way of showing it.”
    Kait felt herself growing edgier. They didn’t really have the time to stand around out here like this and argue like two dogs trying to mark their territory. Every wasted moment was a moment less she had to find