Cavanaugh's Bodyguard by Marie Ferrarella Read Free Book Online Page B

to pull himself together and save face. “No, I can call.” And then his voice broke again as he asked, “Did she suffer?”
    “ME said it was quick,” Bridget was fast to assure him. “Can you tell us where Karen worked? We’d like to ask her coworkers some questions.”
    He gave them the name and address of a firm that handled event planning for the rich and famous called The Times of Your Life. Thanking him, Bridget gave him one of her business cards and asked him to call if he could think of anything else.
    “The ME hasn’t seen her yet, remember?” Josh said as they left the apartment and walked back to the car. “You said so yourself.”
    “Yeah, I know,” she responded with a dismissive sigh. “But I didn’t see the point in burning the image of the killer carving out her heart while she was still alive into his head. Knowing the bloodthirsty media, King’ll find out about that soon enough.”
    Josh looked at her just before he got into the vehicle. “So you believe him?”
    She hedged for a moment, wanting to get his take on it first. “Don’t you?”
    “Actually, yeah, I do. But you’re usually the overly suspicious one,” Josh reminded her. He found that unusual. In his experience, the softer sex tended to be more trusting. But then, he’d come to learn that there were a lot of amazing, unique things about his partner. She was a woman of substance. “You should have been the one named Thomas in your family, not your brother. As in Doubting Thomas.”
    Bridget rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m familiar with that term, thank you,” she said briskly. “King looked genuinely broken up when I told him that his girlfriend was dead,” she explained as she got in on the passenger side.
    Josh didn’t know how King had actually felt about the victim in the long run, but he could see why the man had been initially overwhelmed. “It’s always harder when the last words you’ve had with someone were angry or deliberately hurtful.”
    “You sound like you speak from experience.”
    “Me?” Her comment caught him off guard. “No,” he said with feeling. “That’s why I believe in amiable breakups.” He started up the car. “Always leaving ’em smiling is my motto.”
    Leaving being the key word there. The man had trouble written all over him, she thought, not for the first time.
    Bridget noted the wide grin on his face as he told her his “motto.” Knowing Youngblood, there was only one way to read that. She tried not to dwell on the image of him that raised in her mind. “That’s a little bit too much information, Youngblood.”
    He laughed heartily. “Why, Detective, you have a dirty mind.”
    “Three years partnered with you will do that to a person,” she assured him.
    “Can’t plant a seed and have it grow where there is no dirt,” Josh countered glibly.
    “Dirt being the operative word here,” Bridget said pointedly.
    Josh glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was getting close to noon. “You want to pass through a drive-through and grab some lunch on the way to this events-planning place?” he asked.
    Looking at the dashboard clock herself, Bridget sighed. It was now or who knew when? “What I’d like is to stop someplace and eat lunch slowly at a table like a normal person, but, since that’s impossible and in the interest of time, your way’s probably better.”
    “My way’s always better,” Josh cracked. He gave Bridget a choice of several places that were close by and she picked one. Nodding amiably, he began to drive in that direction. “Why do you think he does it?” he asked as he merged into the left-hand lane. He needed to make a left turn at the next light.
    When he plucked conversations out of the air like that, he managed to completely lose her. She could feel her temper growing short.
    “Who?” she asked
    “The Lady Killer,” Josh elaborated. “What do you think his driving force is? Why February? Is he making some kind of a macabre statement