Cavanaugh’s Woman by Marie Ferrarella Read Free Book Online Page A

sensible.” Her father had admonished her for being too open. Don’t let people in, Moira. That’ll give them the upper hand and they can use it to hurt you. “I’ve got a feeling that you’re too much of a cop to hear any more.”
    Shaw thought of Hawk, Teri’s partner, and what he had recently learned about his sister’s fiancé’s late parents. “Your father a drug dealer?”
    Had she been drinking coffee, he would have been wearing it right now. As it was, Moira stared at him before she burst out laughing.
    “Drugs? Oh, God, no.” Her father was very strict about that. The only thing he had been strict about. “The only drug of choice my father believed in was wine—the more expensive, the better.” She sighed just before draining her cup. “That was the problem—he had very, very expensive tastes.”
    She’d managed to hook him. He wanted answers. “Then what? He’s a burglar?”
    Moira shook her head. “My father separated people from their money with his tongue.” A fond smile played on her lips. “He could charm the fur off a snow leopard.”
    Now he understood. Beneath her fancy description, her father was a common thief. “A con man.”
    “Artist,” Moira corrected. Getting up, she got the coffeepot and divided what was left between their two cups. They got approximately three swallows each. “A con artist. ” Retiring the pot to its burner, she sat down again, taking the cup between both hands. “I always thought that if he had devoted his considerable brain power and abilities to something a little more traditional, my father would have been king by now.”
    “We don’t have kings,” Shaw pointed out.
    Her smile just grew. “They would have made an exception for him.”
    He paused, studying her. Drawing his own conclusions. “But you didn’t approve.”
    She’d approved of her father, but once she was old enough to realize the dangers involved, divorcing them from the excitement that a successful score could generate, she’d no longer approved of the lifestyle he’d chosen. She didn’t want him spending his remaining years in prison, which was where he was heading once his luck ran out. And eventually, everyone’s luck ran out.
    “My nerves weren’t as steady as his,” she explained evasively. “I thought of consequences.” Her father never did. In a way, she supposed he was Peter Pan with a golden tongue. He’d never grown up. Fortunately, or unfortunately, she had. “I had a little more of my mother in me than my father.”
    Finished with his coffee, Shaw set down his cup. “Where is your mother?”
    “Dead.” She said the word crisply, refusing to unlock the pain that always emerged whenever she thought of her mother for more than a moment. “She died when I was seven. That’s about the time when we hit the road.” She smiled sadly to herself. “Up until the time Mama died, Daddy walked the straight and narrow. Had a nine-to-five job and everything.”
    She knew those times had been hard on him, but she would have given anything if things could have continued that way. It was the last time she’d felt secure. Safe. “I used to sit at the window, waiting for him to come home.” She could almost see it in her mind’s eye. “Every night, he’d come up that walk, looking like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. But the second he walked into the house, out came that thousand-watt smile. He really loved my mother a great deal, would have done anything for her.”
    Sorrow threatened to overpower her. Moira struggled to stay one step ahead of it, divorcing herself from her past, pretending it was only a character she was talking about, not her father, not someone who mattered the world to her.
    “Broke his heart when he lost her. He sold the house, sold everything that reminded him of her.”
    “How did you go to school?”
    The question only made her smile widen as memories returned to her. “For the most part, at the University of Daddy.” She