Marie Ferrarella - The Strong Silent Type

Gotten to him with her nails-on-chalkboard-grating cheerfulness and her over-the-top optimism. Because Cavanaugh 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 assigned. He didn’t need a social life. 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 woman—his partner—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.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Jessi and Nik, who grew up much too fast.

Love, Mom

This RITA ®Award-winning author has written over one hundred and twenty books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide.

Detective Teri Cavanaugh loves a good conversation, but she loves a challenge even more. Can she get her gruff partner, Jack Hawkins, to warm up to her? Or will this sexy and oh-so-serious man show her a thing or two about his philosophy of less talk and more action?

Retired police chief Andrew Cavanaugh loves his children and hides from them his secret quest to find his long-lost love. Fifteen years ago his wife disappeared, and Andrew won’t give up hope that she’ll come home….

Rose “Claire” Cavanaugh went out for a drive fifteen years ago and found herself with a new identity and no recollection of her past. Can a kindly, handsome man who claims to be her husband bring her back to the fold?

Let’s not forget other members of the Cavanaugh brood:

Callie (Racing Against Time, IM#1249),

Clay (Crime and Passion, IM#1256),

Patrick (Internal Affair, Silhouette Books)

and Rayne (Dangerous Games, IM#1274).

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

There was no recognition in the woman’s eyes.

Try as he might to will it there, Andrew Cavanaugh didn’t see even the slightest hint of acknowledgment that he and she had grown up together, that the teasing and name-calling of two shy adolescents had masked the growing attraction they shared for one another.

There was no indication on her face that she remembered they had gotten married straight out of high school and that soon afterward, while he struggled to make his way up through the ranks of the Aurora police force, they’d been blessed with children. Five in total.

No indication that she even knew who he was or that he’d spent the past fifteen years of his life searching for her, praying that she’d somehow managed to escape the watery grave that had claimed the vehicle she’d been driving that day.

She was Rose, his Rose, he was sure of it, even though the name tag on her uniform proclaimed her name to be Claire. She didn’t belong in this diner. She belonged home.

With him.

With her family.

She was his Rose, even though her hair was a little less blond now than he remembered. Her eyes were still as blue and her shape as supple as the day he first made her his wife.

He could feel his heart aching as the woman walked by him again, then paused and retrace her steps.

“What will it be, mister?” the woman called Claire asked in Rose’s voice.

He desperately wanted to answer, “You,” then demand to know how she could look at him and not feel what he was feeling, not throw her arms around him the way he wanted to throw them around her. All his training as a policeman, as a detective and then as the chief of Aurora’s police force strained to hold him in check. To keep his hands from grasping her shoulders and shaking her until the clouds lifted from her eyes.

“Just a cup of coffee,” he told her.

He watched as “Claire” placed a cup and saucer before him.

She smiled, wrenching his heart further, and asked, “Cream?”

He took his coffee black—he always had. Why didn’t she remember that?

Patient, damn it. You’ve got to be patient, Andrew silently insisted.

He watched her slender fingers spread out on the counter as she waited for his reply. And then he knew what he needed to do.

“Yes, please.”

With a nod of her head, sending her soft dark blond hair bobbing, the waitress placed a small metal container filled with cream beside his full cup. Then, reaching into the freshly cleaned utensils, she plucked out a teaspoon and placed it next to the container.

Leaving him with his coffee and his memories, she went to wait on the family of five who had just taken the booth beside the entrance.

Andrew left forty minutes later, having nursed his coffee and his memories for as long as he could. The coffee was poor to fair, the memories almost too agonizingly sweet to bear. He’d remained because he couldn’t tear himself away.

And because he kept praying he’d see the light of recognition in her eyes.

But he didn’t. He was going to have to arrive at his goal by other, less quick means.

The spoon “Claire” had handled was carefully wrapped up in a paper napkin and tucked into his pocket.

At bottom, Andrew Cavanaugh was an emotional man and unashamed of it. But he’d spent too many years as a cop not to recognize the need for hard evidence.

He had her fingerprints.

Detective Teri Cavanaugh stole a glance at her partner’s heroic-in-a-superhero-sort-of-way profile as they came out of a hairpin turn.

Nothing.

No change of expression, no comment that the car he was driving had all but taken the turn on two wheels and probably come close to turning over. Nothing. It was like being partnered with a sphinx. A very sexy, sensual-looking sphinx, but a sphinx nonetheless.

It had been nine months since they had first been teamed up by some ironic whimsy of fate and her uncle Brian Cavanaugh, the chief of detectives. Nine months and Detective First Class Jack Hawkins had uttered maybe three dozen sentences on his own without having had the words pried out of him with a crowbar.

She sighed and shook her head. You’d think that after spending her childhood in the never-ending company of four brothers and sisters and six cousins, she would have welcomed these quiet moments of respite with the Aurora Police Department’s version of a mannequin.

But noise was her element—it always had been. She thrived on chaos and confusion, found herself thinking better that way. Detective Jack Hawkins, however, seemed to thrive on silence. The very same atmosphere that was guaranteed to drive her crazy.

Just as it was now.

Silence made her itchy, restless. She would have had trouble sitting still even if he wasn’t racing to a call dispatch had just taken.