socializing, but he would have noticed her.
Something didn’t feel right, though. “How long have you been a detective?” Patrick asked.
“Three months.”
Three months. A novice. What the hell was the captain thinking? Even a man as photo-op oriented as Reynolds had to know this was a bad idea. This woman needed training, aging, and that just wasn’t his line.
Patrick waved her away. “Tell Captain Reynolds I don’t do baby-sitting.”
“I don’t think that’ll matter to him,” she told him crisply. “He doesn’t have any school-aged children.” She indicated the vehicle next to her. “Now, why don’t we just make the best of this and get back to work?”
Patrick looked at her sharply, about to make his rejection plainer since she seemed to have trouble assimilating it, when her words echoed in his brain. “We?”
“We,” she repeated. There was more than ten inches difference between them in height. Maggi drew herself up as far as she could, refusing to appear cowed. “You’ve got to know that working with you isn’t exactly my idea of being on a picnic.”
His eyes were flat as he regarded her. “Then why do it?”
Halliday had told her to blend in, to stay quiet and gather as much information as possible about Cavanaugh and his dealings. The less attention drawn to herself, the better. But from what she’d managed to piece together about him, a man like Cavanaugh didn’t respect sheep. He sheared them and went on. What he respected was someone who’d stand up to him, who’d go toe-to-toe without flinching. That kind of a person stood a chance of finding out something useful. Someone who blended in didn’t.
Maggi had her battle plan laid out. “Because I go where they send me and I always follow orders.”
His eyes pinned her to the spot. “Always?”
She met his stare head-on, his blue eyes against her own green. “Always.”
Well, knowing Reynolds, that didn’t exactly surprise him. He wondered if she was someone’s daughter, someone’s niece. Someone Reynolds owed a favor to. You never knew when you had to call a favor in, especially when you had your eye on the political arena, the way Reynolds did.
“Terrific.” He looked at her without attempting to hide his disgust. “A by-the-book, wet-behind-the-ears rookie.”
She was far from a rookie, but this wasn’t the time to get into that. For now, she left him with his assumptions. “Guess that’s just your cross to bear,” she quipped, turning her attention back to the victim.
He was accustomed to people withdrawing from him, to avoiding him whenever possible. This was something a little different. He wondered if stupidity guided her, or if she had some kind of different agenda. “You’ve got a smart mouth.”
“Goes with my smart brain.” Deciding that the corpse wasn’t going anywhere, Maggi looked at the man whose soul she was going to have to crawl into. “I graduated top of my class from the academy.”
If that was meant to impress him, she’d fallen short of her mark, he thought. He couldn’t stomach newly minted detectives, spouting rhetoric and theories they’d picked up out of the safe pages of some textbook. “There’s a whole world of difference between a classroom and what you find outside of it.”
“I know.” It was going to be slow going, finding his good side. From what she’d gleaned, he might not even have one. But she felt he’d be less antagonistic if he felt she had some sort of experience. “I was in Vice in San Francisco.”
His eyes slid over her, taking full measure, seeing beneath the jacket and matching trousers. It took more than fabric to disguise her shape. She’d probably made one hell of a decoy. “Stopping it or starting it?”
Her grin was quick, lethal. “Now who’s got the smart mouth?”
He looked away. “Difference being, I don’t shoot mine off.”
The wind kept insisting on playing with her hair. She pushed it away from her face, only to have it revisit less than a beat later. “I’ll remember that. See? Learning already.”
Annoyed, Patrick knew there was nothing he could do about the situation right now. If he ordered her away, he had a feeling she wouldn’t retreat. He didn’t want to go into a power struggle in front of the patrolmen. No one had to tell him that behind the sexy, engaging smile was a woman who’d gotten her way most of her life. You only had to look at her to know that.
He could wait. All that mattered was the end result. He didn’t want a partner. He wanted to work alone. It required less effort, less coordination. And less would go wrong that way.
Patrick sighed. “Well, I need to learn something about you.”
His eyes were intense, a light shade of blue that seemed almost liquid. She wondered if they could be warm on occasion, or if they always looked as if they were dissecting you. “Fire away.”
“Your name. What is it?”
She realized that she’d skipped that small detail. She put her hand out now. “Margaret McKenna. My friends call me Maggi.”
He made no effort to take her hand and she dropped it at her side. “What do people who aren’t your friends call you?”
“The repeatable ones are McKenna, or 3M.”
Despite himself, he was drawn in. “3M? Like the tape?”
Her gaze was unwavering. “No, because my full name is Mary Margaret McKenna.”
He could see that the revelation pained her. She didn’t like her name. That was fair enough—it didn’t suit her. She didn’t look like a Mary Margaret. Mary Margarets were subdued, given to shy smiles. Unless he missed his guess, the last time this woman had been subdued had probably been shortly before birth.
He laughed, his expression remaining unaffected. “Sounds like you should be starring in an off-Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow.”
Surprise nudged at her. She wouldn’t have thought he’d know something like that. “You like musicals?”
“My sister does.” Patrick stopped abruptly, realizing he’d broken his own rule about getting personal with strangers. And he meant for this woman to be a stranger. He didn’t intend for her to remain in his company any longer than it took to get back to the station and confront Reynolds about his misguided, worse-than-usual choice of partners for him. “I work alone.”
“So I was told.” She’d also been told other things. Like the fact that he was a highly decorated cop who’d never been a team player. Now they were beginning to think that was because he was guarding secrets, secrets that had to do with lining his pockets. Rumors had been raised. Where there was smoke, there was usually fire and it was her job to put it out. “I won’t get in your way.”
“For that to be true, you’d have to leave.”
From any other man, that might have been the beginning of a come-on, or at the very least, a slight flirtation. From Cavanaugh, she knew it meant that
