Cavanaugh Judgment by Marie Ferrarella

been searching through—using books had always been far more satisfying to him than searching for information on the Internet. Try as he might, he still couldn’t bring himself to trust something he couldn’t hold in his hand.
    Picking the fat tome up, he was about to place it back on the shelf behind his desk when he stopped. He’d leave it on his desk until tomorrow, he decided. With any luck, he’d be able to get his thoughts together then.
    With a little more luck than that, he’d be minus one houseguest.
    Not that, under a completely different set of circumstances, he wouldn’t have found her startlingly attractive. He would and, if he were being strictly honest with himself, he did. There were times when he felt that her incredibly light blue eyes saw right through him. She had the face of an angel, albeit a sexy angel, and a body made for sin.
    Detective Greer O’Brien was definitely not a run-of-the-mill, ordinary woman who he could easily come across any day of the week.
    He didn’t know of any women who were willing to take a bullet for him.
    But as noble as that might be, it also pointed to the fact that she was impulsive and impetuous. Which made her an unknown element in his life. He really didn’t need that. And the sooner she was gone, the sooner he could get on with his life—such as it was.
    Blake sighed. He found her presence in his house disturbing on so many levels. Until O’Brien had come crashing into him, landing on top as she brought him down, he’d thought that he’d completely shut down after Margaret’s death. Shut down as a man. If he had needs, they were on such a deep, faraway level that he was not aware of them.
    Or hadn’t been until this morning.
    Something else to hold against Detective O’Brien, he thought with another sigh.
    Getting up, Blake crossed to the den’s threshold and shut off the light. He could literally feel the tension. It was riding roughshod throughout his whole body, making his neck and shoulders ache as well as unsettling various other parts of him, physically and emotionally.
    He really didn’t need this.
    What he did need was a good night’s sleep. Maybe that would help him put some of this to rest. But as he started to go toward the stairs, he paused. He could hear the TV in the living room. It sounded like a Western.
    Was his father still up?
    Curiosity had Blake making his way into the living room. As he’d suspected, his father was still up. Or rather, propped up. The crusty old man had nodded off, as was his habit sometimes.
    And he’d been right about the TV program. There was some old, classic Western playing on the set. His father favored Westerns, complaining that the current crop of filmmakers didn’t have a clue how to make a decent one. For last Christmas, he’d gifted the old man with a complete DVD collection of John Wayne’s more famous Westerns. Alexander Kincannon knew the dialogue to every one of them.
    “You don’t have to keep watching that,” Blake told his unwanted houseguest as he walked up behind her. “My father’s asleep.”
    She smiled, looking at her dozing companion. There was a note of affection in her voice as she told Blake, “He lasted about fifteen minutes. It’s probably the food. Eating as much as he did tonight makes a person sleepy.”
    “So does being in his early seventies,” the judge pointed out. Right now, he mused, it was hard to believe that he was looking at a decorated war hero. His father seemed so docile. “I’ll take him up to bed,” he told her, stooping for a moment so that he could take one of his father’s arms and slip it over his shoulders for leverage. He rose slowly, bringing the man up with him. The channel on the set remained the same. Still asleep, his father grunted as Blake brought him to his feet. “I said you didn’t have to watch that,” he told Greer again.
    “I heard you, Judge.” She made no effort to reach for the remote. “I happen to like Westerns.”
    One