Part 9 (1/2)

They had history-years together-not just a few moments over opposite sides of a cup of coffee, he wanted to shout. Instead he whispered, ”Don't you know me?”

”You're the man who came in the other day,” she repeated, as if clinging to that piece of information.

”Rose,” he began, reaching out to her.

She pulled back, but still blocked his way into her apartment. It was obvious she didn't want him to come in. ”My name is Claire,” she insisted. ”I don't know a Rose. Please go away.”

He'd waited too long to be sent away like this. ”Rose, I'm your husband. I've been looking for you for fifteen years.”

She swallowed, uncertain. Afraid. That old, haunting feeling was coming back. The one that stole into her dreams, making them nightmares. She tried vainly to block it. ”If you were my husband, something inside of me would know you. I'm sorry, but-”

Desperate, Andrew opened the alb.u.m and held it up in front of him. ”Look, this is you holding Callie. She's our first daughter. And here's Shaw, that's our oldest boy. And here-”

Shutting her eyes, she shook her head. ”I don't remember. I don't remember,” she repeated more loudly. ”I don't know who any of these people are.” He was frightening her now. Images were flas.h.i.+ng through her brain like sections of an electrical storm. It'd been like that when she'd first come to. Just before that man had picked her up on the side of the road. The one who'd tried to force himself on her. She'd thrown herself from the car just in time. The past frightened her. She'd given up trying to remember it. ”I'm sorry you can't find your wife, but she's not me.”

”What were your parents' names?”

She stared at him. ”I don't know.”

”Amy and Bill Gallagher,” he told her. Her parents were dead now. They'd died thinking their only child had drowned. Andrew fired another question at her, trying desperately to shake her, to get to her. ”Where were you born?”

”I don't know!” Her voice cracked.

He wanted to take her into his arms, to hold her, but he knew that would only frighten her more. ”Aurora, California. The same place where we lived. Where the kids and I still live. Aurora,” he repeated. There was no flicker of recognition in her eyes. She began to shut the door. He spoke more rapidly. ”Your name is Rose Gallagher Cavanaugh. We met in elementary school and got married before I graduated from the police academy. All of them followed, you know-the kids, they all work at the police department. And they miss you very, very much.”

She didn't want this, didn't want to make the nightmares come back. He had to leave. ”Look, I'm sorry you came up all this way for nothing, but I'm not the woman you're looking for.”

He put his hand up as she started to close the door. ”I matched your prints.” She stopped to look at him, confusion on her face. Andrew fished a spoon out of his pocket and held it up. ”I took this from the diner and matched the prints on it to the ones that were on your favorite book.” Handing the spoon to her, he showed her the novel. ”Gone with the Wind. Remember?” He peered at her face, but there was nothing to indicate that he'd broken through. ”You used to like to read it every night. I told you I felt like I was competing with Rhett Butler.”

When he offered her the book, she pushed it away. ”No, I don't remember. I don't remember anything. Please leave me alone.” This time, she managed to close the door on him.

Andrew stood staring at the door for several moments, waiting for her to open it again. Waiting for her to come out and tell him that she'd changed her mind, that she'd hear him out.

She didn't.

He took out a card from his pocket, one of the old ones that had his number at the precinct on it. He'd crossed out the number and written in his home number instead. Andrew stuck it inside the book beside the dedication.

Bending down, he placed Rose's book down on the doormat that cheerfully proclaimed Welcome and then walked away.

Chapter Eight.

S he was getting to him.

Hawk stopped looking over the files spread across his desk, stopped pretending he was reading them. Because he wasn't. He'd been stuck on the same d.a.m.n sentence for over ten minutes now. Stuck on it and it still hadn't registered.

He'd never thought it could be possible. It had taken nine months, but she was getting to him. Giving no warning, sounding no alarms. Odorless, tasteless, invisible, like carbon monoxide, Teri Cavanaugh had somehow managed to slip into his system.

He would have said that it had all started when his partner had been looped on painkillers and had kissed him in the car, but that, if anything, had just been the trigger. The process had begun a lot earlier than that, although for the life of him, Hawk couldn't pinpoint exactly when.

He was attracted to her.

Attracted physically and emotionally, although he would have been the last person to think the latter was possible for him. But if not, why else would he have told her about Jocko? Why else would he have allowed her even a glimpse into the life he'd once led? Why else had he opened up the smallest bit to her, he who conducted himself with the gregariousness of a clam?

There was no other explanation. Thoughts of Teri popped into his mind at random times, completely unrelated to whatever he was thinking.

Because she'd gotten to him.

Gotten to him with her nails-on-chalkboard-grating cheerfulness and her over-the-top optimism.

Cavanaugh was a cop, for Pete's sake. The daughter of a head cop. She knew about the kinds of people who had once populated his own world exclusively. And her mother had died when she was still a kid. How the h.e.l.l could Cavanaugh maintain her upbeat att.i.tude against those kinds of things?

And yet she did. And because she did, because she seemed to care about everything and everyone, she'd somehow managed to get to him. To burrow her way under his skin and take up residence.

He didn't want to be gotten.

He wanted to continue just as he was, being a dedicated detective working the cases he was a.s.signed. He didn't need a social life, didn't need anything at all beyond that. Just work, just the feeling that somehow, some way, he was making the slightest bit of difference by tilting the balance between good and evil to the plus side just a fraction.

That was all he needed.

But now, with this-this woman buzzing around in his life like an annoying hummingbird that wouldn't fly away, he needed more.

Wanted more.

Wanted her, he realized with a shock that coursed through his body.

She felt Hawk's gaze before she ever looked up from her desk. When she did, she couldn't read his expression.

So what else was new?

She straightened, pus.h.i.+ng her shoulders back just a little. Like a prisoner standing against a wall, facing execution without knowing the crime.

”What, am I wearing my lunch?” She ran a thumb quickly along either side of her mouth even as she asked. Lunch had been a sandwich grabbed from a popular fast-food restaurant.

Hawk shook his head. ”Just thinking.”

”You looked as if you were shooting darts in my direction. Anything I did? Lately,” she qualified before he could launch into a list of her shortcomings. Her sins in his eyes were many, at the top of which was probably breathing.

”Nothing you can help,” he muttered, looking back at his notes.

Okay, what did that mean? And why, in the middle of a growing investigation that was bringing more and more home invasions with similar M.O.'s to the fore, did she suddenly feel as if goose b.u.mps were forming up and down, all along her arms? Goose b.u.mps were connected to being cold, to fear and to feelings.

The last thing in the world she needed was to have feelings for her partner. That way always led to trouble, and when that partner was a monosyllabic, scowling man who'd rather cut her dead than talk to her, trouble suddenly took on a whole new meaning.

If he knew, if he suspected the growing attraction she felt for him, Hawkins would be out looking for a new partner before she could count to one.

She didn't want that. She was finally breaking him in to where he was, if not comfortably predictable-because with Hawk there was no comfort zone-at least to where they had some kind of a moderate rhythm worked out. She didn't want to lose it.