Patricia Potter - Cassidy and the Princess

He felt something else altogether. And as he did, a knot of apprehension twisted his stomach. He didn’t need this. Any personal feelings interfered with what he needed to do: protect her and catch a killer.

He steeled himself against her appeal. She already treated him like a friend. She was that way with Manny, too. And that touch had been like a hot electrical wire, snaking across his body, sparking reactions he didn’t want to feel.

Cassidy knew he was glowering. Manny told him he did it better than anyone. But when he looked at Marise, he saw that she was unimpressed. Instead, she regarded him with bemusement.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For putting your life in danger?”

“For letting me do something about it.”

Something shifted inside him. She’d said the words with such simplicity. Even gratitude. He felt like a fraud. He was using her. Nothing more than that. And he wondered why she seemed to cater so much to her mother, and even to Paul, when there was so much strength and substance to her.

“Has your mother always been your manager?” he asked to dissipate the expectancy that was radiating between them.

She tensed slightly, then seemed to forcibly relax. “Yes,” she said. “She was a skater herself. She knows the business. She’s wonderful with the costumes.” Then she turned and looked out the window. “Are we really going to your house?”

“Don’t expect much,” he warned her. “I bought it at a bargain price because it needed so much work.”

“Are there really a lot of policemen in the neighborhood?”

“Manny lives half a block away. A captain in another division lives three houses down. Two other members of the Atlanta P.D. live within two blocks. A lieutenant in the sheriff’s department and a highway patrol major also live nearby. That’s how I found my house. It had been an eyesore, and Manny knew I like to work with my hands.”

She gazed up at him with those magnificent eyes. “You’re doing the work?”

“Some of it,” he said.

“All of it,” Manny interrupted. “My wife calls him when she needs something done. It’s humiliating.”

They traveled the rest of the way in silence. He didn’t see any other cars keeping pace with them, but then, they were not trying to hide. In fact, he was going to make sure her whereabouts were leaked.

They wanted the assailant to come after her. If all went according to plan, she wouldn’t be there then. A policewoman would be.

But there was something he’d learned long ago. Whatever could go wrong, would.

“What do we do next?” she asked.

“After you get settled, we’ll go back to the hospital and start going over personnel photos. He doesn’t know how little you really did see. We’re going to make him wonder a little more.”

“If he’s with the hospital.”

“My guess is he’s connected in some way.”

“What if he doesn’t find out I’m…helping to find him?”

“Then, I’ll leak a story to the media that we have a witness who can identify the killer and is going through personnel files. I’d rather he found out another way. It wouldn’t be as obvious.”

“If he’s as smart as you think he is, why would he walk into a trap?’

“Because doing nothing would be more dangerous. And serial killers usually think they are smarter than anyone else. He’ll know I’m protecting you. He won’t know about the others.”

She nodded, apparently satisfied.

As they drove into his driveway his stomach tightened. He’d tried to tidy up, but it was a man’s place. Still, it was probably the safest place for Marise. What neighbors were not law enforcement officers were sympathetic to them. All were friends. Manny planned to visit each house and ask that they keep an eye out for strangers.

It would be strange to have a woman in the house again. He’d dated since his marriage, but he’d never brought any of them home. Not since Laine left.

He’d not gotten around yet to painting the trim, and the house looked a little like an aging dowager without makeup. The exterior was a bungalow in an older neighborhood, a community where prices were spiraling because of their in-town location. After he and Laine had bought it, he’d spent the next two years fixing it up.

While he had thought the house would help the marriage, it hadn’t. He’d spent every waking moment away from the police department working on it. He hadn’t noticed her growing distance.

Marise was looking at the house with interest.

He sure as hell wasn’t going to apologize for it. Yet he knew she was used to much better. She probably had a large home somewhere.

Manny drove into the garage, which was one of the first things Cassidy had added. It was only a one-car garage—there wasn’t room for more—but he’d built it with a direct entrance into the house. Now he was grateful that he had; it made the place safer.

The exterior was brick with a screened front porch. There once had been a back porch but he’d closed that in and made a sunroom. For Laine. Now he seldom used it. He was seldom here, in fact.

He opened the car door and started to go around to the other side, but Marise let herself out. She didn’t act like a princess, but then, princesses didn’t agree to be bait. She didn’t say anything, but followed him toward the entrance to the house as the garage door closed behind the three of them. He opened the door leading to the kitchen.

It had undergone a frantic face-lift. Dishes in the sink had gone into the dishwasher, a five-day-old pizza had gone from the refrigerator into the garbage. There was nothing to brighten the room, however, but the yellow daisy curtains Laine had selected.

He led the way into the living room, which was furnished with what his male friends called “early bachelor.” Dark overstuffed sofa and chair, a large-screen television and bookcases. He’d put clothes away, but books and magazines, and even several newspapers, lay haphazardly on tables.

He saw Marise’s gaze go to the sunroom just beyond the living area. It had cheap patio furniture. But her eyes lit.

“What a wonderful room,” she said.

“Cass built it,” Manny said. “Cass can build anything. He’s building a sailboat up at his sister’s place.”

Cassidy noted that Manny did not call him Hoppy. Perversely, he was annoyed. Manny was obviously trying to play match-maker.

As if he and the princess had anything in common.

He was very aware of that as she stood awkwardly in the house of which he was so proud, the house he had remodeled, first with love and then with resignation. He was no longer building for the future. He was finished with that part of his life.

“You have my room,” he said. “We have detectives in the second. I’ll sleep in my office.”

“I’ll take the office,” she said.

“You haven’t seen it,” he said. “No one but me could find a way through it.”

She cocked her head. “That bad?”

“That bad,” he confirmed.

“All right, I’ll take the bedroom,” she agreed.

He took her suitcase into a bedroom and laid it down on a chair he’d brought in from the dining room. “There’s a bathroom right outside the room. It’s yours. We’ll use the one off the living room.”

“I feel like I’m dispossessing you,” she said with a hint of a smile.

“Believe me, as a stakeout, this is pure luxury,” he said.

“This is a stakeout?”

Her blue eyes were intense. He realized his error immediately. To him and the others, it might be a stakeout. To her, it was her life. But he wasn’t good at niceties. Never had been. He changed the subject. “Have you had any breakfast?”

“No.”

“What about some frozen waffles.”