her eyes. “What was the matter?”
He caught himself thinking that her eyes were beautiful. So blue if you stared at them for any length of time, they could make your soul ache. For a second, he lost the thread of the conversation. “What?”
She wanted to distract herself. Papa Joe had been in a place like this. She was eighteen at the time, about to go off to college, to stand on the brink of new horizons, when he’d been in a car accident. She remembered how terrified she’d been, praying in the small chapel on the premise that he wouldn’t die and leave her alone. One moment he was this big, larger-than-life man, the next, she was facing the possibility of his being taken from her. The edifice of her confidence was never the same again because she’d discovered that the foundations were built on sand.
She’d spent the spring nursing him back to health and the summer arguing with him that she wasn’t going to college, that she couldn’t leave him alone. Eventually he prevailed upon her to go, that he was fine.
Being here brought it all back to her; the fear, the uncertainty. She needed something to get her mind off that. So she turned to the man beside her, hoping for some kind of respite. “Why did you need to go to the emergency room?”
Because my partner was shot buying drugs off a dealer we spent two months setting up. Two cops wandered in, thought we were junkies. Messed up the sting.
It wasn’t the kind of explanation he could give her. Jared thought for a moment, digging around in his past for something plausible that he would remember in case she asked about it later. “My sister had appendicitis.”
A family threat. Instantly she related to it. “Did you get her there in time?”
It had been his father who’d brought Janelle in, but he let that part go, nodding instead in response. “The appendix burst on the operating table. Doctor said it was touch and go at the time.”
So this wasn’t an isolated incident. Maren took new measure of the man beside her. “You’re pretty cool under fire, aren’t you?”
The smile he offered her was almost shy. Maren felt herself warming to him despite resolutions not to. “Don’t see much point in losing your head. Just makes things that much worse.”
She liked that. The man didn’t fold under pressure. So many people stood back, waiting for someone else to do something, never wanting to be the first. Maybe hiring him was not such a bad thing, after all. “Your sister, how old is she?”
He found it safest and easier to stick as close to the truth as possible. Lies had a way of tripping you up. He’d played so many people since he’d joined the force, the various names were hard to keep straight. If he’d added a different life for each, it would have been impossible. Besides, something told him that Maren Minnesota reacted well to tales of hearth and home. “Younger than me by a couple of years.”
“Just the two of you?”
He was right, he thought. There was more than just mild curiosity in her voice. It was as if she was hungry for information. Almost as hungry as he was, but for an entirely different reason. His job was to find out as much as he could about everyone there and to see how they figured into this tale of money laundering that had been brought to the department.
“Four,” he corrected. “I’ve got two more brothers.”
Her blue eyes became almost animated. “Younger? Older?”
He thought of Dax and Troy, both were detectives in the Aurora police department, although neither had ever gone under cover. “One of each.”
He watched in fascination as a smile literally lit up her face. “Must be nice.”
“It has its moments,” he allowed. It was no secret that they were close. All the Cavanaughs were now that they had reached adulthood. “But when we were growing up, my mother would have given us away to the first person with stamina who came to the door.”
She laughed and he found himself reacting to the sound. It was soft, like wind tiptoeing through rose petals. He pulled himself back. The important thing was that the ice between them had been broken. He couldn’t have done this any better than if he’d planned the scenario.
Shifting in his seat, he looked at her. “What about you?”
He could all but see the edge of the curtain as it began to come down again in her eyes. Maren’s smile remained, but it became a little more formal. She didn’t give her trust easily and he wondered if she had secrets. Was she involved in any part of the money laundering if those allegations turned out to be true?
“What do you mean?” Maren asked as she rose to her feet again.
“Do you have any siblings?” Jared watched as she began to move restlessly around the area.
“No.”
There was a note of longing in her voice. Which would explain the wistful look in her eyes when he’d mentioned his siblings. He turned as she drifted toward the TV mounted on the wall in the far corner. “You’re an only child, then.”
The shrug was casual, dismissive. “As far as I know.”
It was an odd thing to say. Unless she was an orphan, he realized suddenly. April had alluded to a relationship between Maren and Joe Collins. He knew the bookkeeper was a lot older. Was Maren looking for a father figure?
Rising to his feet, he crossed to her. She looked a little uneasy when he came up behind her. “Sorry, I tend to talk before I think.”
Maren relaxed a little. “Nothing to be sorry about. Not everyone comes from a large family.” A trace of a fond smile slipped over her full lips. “I have no complaints whatsoever. It wasn’t as if I ever really lacked for anything. Papa Joe saw to that.”
He cocked his head. Was she talking about the bookkeeper or was there someone else who shared the first name? Joe was about as common a name as you could get, other than John. “Papa Joe?”
Her mouth curved more generously. The phrase about someone lighting up a room occurred to him. “Joe Collins,” she clarified, then added, “He’s the bookkeeper at Rainbow’s End.”
“He’s your father?” There hadn’t been any mention of that in any of the notes. He was going to have to get his hands on a more detailed summary of the people at the restaurant.
She crossed her arms in front of her, as if to hold a chill at bay. Instead of looking at him, she’d looked away. “Only father I’ve ever known.”
Which meant that biology didn’t have anything to do with it. If it had, she would have said yes and left it at that. He went back to his revised theory and took a shot at it. “You were adopted?”
She was about to say yes, but caught herself. The antiseptic word didn’t begin to describe what had actually happened to her all those years ago in that Minneapolis back alley.
“I was found,” she corrected. And then she stopped abruptly. Her eyes narrowed like morning glories closing before the approaching dusk. “You always wheedle information out of people this way?”
He grinned, as if she’d discovered his secret. “I like finding things out about people, what makes
