Marie Ferrarella - How to Seduce a Cavanaugh

“As for the rest of it, you want to sulk and behave like some dark and brooding character out of one of Byron’s poems, go right ahead. Be my guest. But you’ll be missing out on some pretty terrific conversations,” she predicted.

The look he spared her was nothing if not skeptical. “Meaning with you?”

If he was trying to get her to back down or to intimidate her, he was going to have to work at it a lot harder than that, she thought. “I don’t see anyone else in the car. So, yes, meaning me.”

Kane laughed shortly. “Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

She raised her chin ever so slightly, which was the only indication that she might have found the question combative.

“What I just said has nothing to do with whether or not I think a lot of myself. I just happen to know my strengths and my limits. That’s all.

“And if you’re wondering,” she continued, “I have inside knowledge—no pun intended—on the way the male mind works. I grew up with four brothers who were anything but docile. They supplied me with my education, and I diligently took notes,” she told him completely straight-faced.

Without her realizing it, they had arrived at Valhalla.

After Kane showed his badge, the man at the club’s entrance reluctantly opened the gates to allow them to drive on to the grounds.

“Let’s see if you can put those so-called notes you took to good use,” Kane challenged her as he headed to the clubhouse.

The route to the impressive structure was marked with a great many expensive, well-cared-for vehicles. The most conservatively priced of the lot turned out to be a silver Mercedes.

“Never understood it,” she murmured, taking in the sea of pricey automobiles. The comment was more to herself than her partner since she just assumed Durant wasn’t paying attention to a word she said, anyway.

Kane surprised her by asking, “Never understood what?”

She managed to recover without missing a beat. “Pouring so much money into something that could so easily be totaled in the blink of an eye. Whether a car’s a Ford or a Ferrari, they’re both just a heartbeat away from becoming a mangled heap.”

Kane shrugged. Expensive cars meant nothing to him. They’d never moved him, not even as a young boy. Life had been far too serious for him to be infatuated with an automobile.

“They’re status symbols, I suppose,” he said.

She took in the groups of golfers on the course just before they reached the clubhouse. “I know that, but this crowd doesn’t strike me as the type to be impressed by someone dropping a quarter of a million on a Lamborghini.”

Thoughts of his father suddenly popped up in his brain. On those rare occasions when his father hadn’t been taking out his frustrations on him or his mother, his father had told him that if he ever won the lottery—the one that he was always faithfully buying tickets for—the first thing he’d intended to do was buy a fancy car. The kind that would make everyone sit up and take notice.

“I’d get my due respect then,” he’d said. “Not like now.”

Usually right after that, the scenario would disintegrate into his father blaming everyone else for his misfortunes. And shortly after that, Kane would be on the receiving end of a particularly vicious beating. That had seemed to be the only way his father could cope with the events in his life, by taking out all his frustration on either his wife or his son. Or both.

Thinking of that now, Kane regarded the pricey vehicles. “You’d be surprised at what does the trick for some people. To some people, it’s all about the kind of vehicle they drive. The flashier, the better.”

Not him , Kelly thought. Durant wasn’t the type to go for flashy status symbols. She would bet on it.

But someone in his life, past or present, had valued flashy status symbols, she decided. She could tell by the way his tone had changed when he’d mentioned it.

Kelly waited half a beat before falling in step directly behind Kane. She meant for him to go first. To her surprise, he deliberately slowed his pace just enough to allow her to catch up.

She was about to thank him, then decided that Kane probably didn’t want her thanks. The less said on the subject, the better was probably the way he liked it. He was going to cause her to reevaluate her whole approach to partnerships, Kelly mused.

“Is there something I can do for you?” a very tanned, very polished looking man in his midforties asked politely as he walked up to them. His clean cut looks and the touch of silver at his temples, in addition to his manner of carrying himself, all pointed to him as being someone in charge.

And he was.

“Detectives Durant and Cavanaugh,” Kane said, taking out his wallet and holding it steady to allow the man to have a closer look at his identification. Kelly did the same. “We were wondering if you could tell us if one of your members—a Randolph Osborn—was friendlier with any one of your members than he might have been with some of the others.”

“Leon Edwards,” the man introduced himself. “I’m the director here.” He got back to the question that had been put to him. “Friendlier?” Edwards questioned, clearly amused. “You are asking me about Randolph Osborn, correct?”

“We are,” Kane confirmed, clearly waiting for a more precise answer.

The director seemed to gauge his words carefully. Memberships and high revenues in the form of donations were at stake here.

“Mr. Osborn, I’m afraid, wasn’t what you would call friendly with any of the members,” Edwards said stiffly. “He did associate with a few of our members, if that’s what you mean.”

Kelly stepped in, knowing her partner would take that as an affront. Kane, she was beginning to see, didn’t exactly have the gift of diplomacy. He favored the direct approach rather than attempting to sugarcoat his words. The man obviously never had subscribed to the old philosophy of catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.

“Could you give us a list of the members’ names?” Kelly requested.

Edwards looked at her and it was obvious to Kelly that he liked what he saw here better than he did when he was interacting with Kane. But there were still rules he obviously was obligated to follow.

Edwards’s gray eyes shifted from one detective to the other. “Just what’s this all about, detectives?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Osborn were the victims of a home invasion last night,” Kane informed the director matter-of-factly.

The man’s eyes widened from their customary slits. Edwards appeared genuinely surprised. “Was anyone hurt?” he asked.

Kelly could tell that her partner was going to give the director a flat “no” in response. It hurt nothing to give Edwards a crumb, feeding his obvious need to get something exclusive on the man, however minute.

“Only Mr. Osborn’s pride,” Kelly confided, lowering her voice as if she was sharing something that deserved to be labeled a secret.

“Well, I can understand that,” the man replied, bobbing his head up and down. And then, as if his brain was on some sort of ten-second delay, he looked up at the two detectives before him, clearly stunned. “And you two think that someone here is responsible for that home invasion?”

That was stating it too blatantly. Kelly decided to reframe her answer so that it sounded more as if they were working with a turn-of-the-last-century mystery. “We think someone here can possibly give us a clue or some sort of a lead as to who might have wanted to do this to the Osborns.”

“You mean break into their house and steal something from them?” Edwards asked. “I assure you that—”

“No, we mean someone who might have wanted to humiliate Mr. Osborn,” Kelly was quick to correct the director’s misimpression.