Nine-Month Protector

An appreciative wolf whistle at seeing Sarah Cartwright in a dress for the first time had been enough for Seth to jump his case.

“If you weren’t my partner, my best friend…If my life wasn’t still in your hands for the next few days, I’d lay you flat out.”

Coop raised his hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m just being an observant detective. So what if your twin sister puts on a little lipstick? I still think of her as the left-fielder who ran down that final out in our co-ed softball game against the fire department last summer. Hitting on your sister is a no-no. I get that.”

“That’s nonnegotiable, Coop.”

“Understood.”

Sure. Yeah. His brain understood. He understood even better than Seth himself that he wasn’t the man for Sarah. Not in his wildest dreams could he make something work with a sweet, wholesome girl like her. Not for long. She’d want kids, roots, picket fences…He couldn’t give her that. She deserved a better man. A whole man.

But sometimes the eye…the hormones…other things deep inside him…didn’t always follow the logic.

So he could look. Maybe he could even lust a little. But he couldn’t do anything about it. And he damn straight couldn’t tell his partner what a hottie his sister was.

He had to be her big brother, too.

Coop checked his clip, holstered his gun and hooked his badge over his belt before heading to the front door. On the way out, he picked up his blue KCPD ball cap and pulled it on over his clean-shaven head. “Is she at home?”

“That’s the million-dollar question. I can’t find her. She’s turned off her cell, and all I get at her apartment is the damn answering machine.”

“Sarah’s a big girl, Seth,” Coop tried to reason, climbing into his truck. He started the engine, not particularly thrilled by one obvious possibility. “Maybe she’s on a date.”

“At three in the morning?”

Um, earth to Seth. Big green eyes? Gorgeous smile? Just because Sarah was pint-sized and favored running shoes over stiletto heels didn’t mean any man worth his salt wouldn’t notice her. “You’ve never stayed up late when you were out with a woman you liked?”

“This isn’t about me. You know Sarah and I are cut from different cloth. I’m the evil twin. She’s the reliable one. She doesn’t do wild and crazy and stay out all night.”

Coop shook his head at the self-deprecating comment. He didn’t know whether to remind Seth that he had proven himself one of the good guys time and again, or explain that reliable didn’t necessarily mean stick-in-the-mud. If Sarah wanted to go out and party all night, she had the right. She was on summer vacation, after all. It wasn’t as though she had to get up and teach in the morning.

Instead of arguing either point, Coop turned on the AC and adjusted the truck cab’s interior to combat the muggy summer night outside. His job was to take care of Seth’s needs outside of his assignment, not beat some sense into his stubborn head. It was time he went to work. “Has Sarah been seeing anyone? Can you give me the names of some friends I can call?”

“You know I haven’t been able to keep in touch with her like I should. Hell, I don’t even know if Mom and Eli are back from their honeymoon yet.” He could hear Seth’s frustration. “Mom” was KCPD Commissioner Shauna Cartwright-Masterson, and Eli Masterson was her new husband—an investigator with the D.A.’s office. “All I know is I’ve seen Sarah at the casino on and off the past couple of weeks. Now tonight, I can’t find her. I can’t find my dad, either. But I figure whatever trouble he’s gotten into, he deserves it.”

Growing up in the Cartwright household couldn’t have been easy with an absent father whose gambling addiction seemed to cause trouble whenever he did try to be a part of his family’s lives. Coop knew all about stepping in to fill a father’s place. He’d lost his own dad, a Marine Corps captain, during the first Gulf War, and had helped his mom raise his three younger siblings. Though Austin Cartwright was still alive and kicking, Seth had assumed a similar role. He might be only twelve minutes older than his sister, but Seth took his big-brother role very seriously.

But if Seth was 27, then so was Sarah. One of these days, he was going to have to accept that. “Like I said, she’s a big girl.”

“I just need to know she’s all right,” Seth insisted. He recited the address, and Coop jotted down the directions. “Just check on her for me, okay? Everything’s about to blow here. It’s too dangerous. And if Wolfe finds out I’m still workin’ for KCPD…”

He didn’t have to finish how deadly those repercussions could be to anyone Seth cared about.

Coop backed into the street and headed across town toward Sarah’s apartment, feeling an increased sense of urgency. “Talk to me, buddy. Tell me exactly what the situation is.”

Seth gave Cooper a concise rundown of the night’s events at the Riverboat Casino—the suspected front for Wolfe International’s money-laundering activities. There’d been a big poker tournament there that night, and Seth believed he had proof of how Teddy Wolfe was filtering drug money through the tournament records and payouts. More than that, a Wolfe enforcer that they knew was good for at least one murder had attacked two women—one of them a leggy reporter named Rebecca Page. She was running some kind of investigation on her own, and she had Seth’s focus and libido all twisted up into knots. Coop suspected his partner’s feelings for the reporter ran a lot deeper than even Seth would admit.

And somehow, while Seth was focused on protecting Rebecca and making his case against the Wolfes, Sarah Cartwright had wandered into the mess. She’d been paying several visits to the casino over the past couple of weeks. Seth had monitored her comings and goings as best he could without drawing attention to the personal connection between them. But tonight, with evidence falling into place, a killer to subdue and a crime scene to secure, Seth had lost track of his sister.

“It could be nothing,” Seth continued. “But I don’t want to take any chances. I have to get to the hospital.”

“You hurt?”

“Nah.”

“Rebecca?”

“Not as badly as the other woman. But I want to make sure Bec has a doctor look at her injuries. You should have seen her, Coop. You should have heard her telling him where to stick it. Remind me never to pick a fight with her.” There was an uncharacteristic catch in his voice. It was part admiration, part fear. “I just need to know she’s okay.”

As much as he needed to know his sister was okay, too.

“Go.” Coop wasn’t about to fail him now. “You take care of Rebecca. I’ll track down Sarah for you.”

“Keep her safe.”

“I’ll keep her safe,” Coop promised.

He hung up and merged into the light traffic on I-70 that would take him into the heart of downtown Kansas City, just a few blocks south of Sarah’s restored loft in the City Market district. It was the most sensible place to start. If he discovered anything more sinister than Sarah’s phone being left off the hook so she could get a good night’s sleep, then he’d be at the starting point to retrace her steps for the night.

Cooper Bellamy’s job was to ghost his partner. If that backup meant standing in as big brother while Seth dealt with trouble at the casino, then so be it.

He made it to Sarah’s neighborhood in twenty minutes. It took him another five to locate the converted warehouse and connected parking garage Seth had described. Coop circled the garage until he found her car, then pulled up beside it and got out. He laid a hand on the hood of her sporty Ford Focus. Still warm. So the prodigal sister had been out on the town until the wee hours of the morning.

“Good for you, kid.” She deserved to have a little fun without reporting every move to Seth. Chances were she’d gone straight to bed, and checking on her now would only wake her. Still, a promise was a promise. For Seth’s peace of mind—and, therefore, his own—Coop needed to see Sarah Cartwright with his own eyes so he could report that she was okay. He crossed through the glassed-in walkway over the street to the former warehouse-turned-apartment building.

The lobby here on the second floor was just as empty and quiet as the closed architectural firm on the first floor below him. Bypassing the noise of the 1930s-era elevator, Coop hit the stairs and climbed the two flights to Sarah’s floor.

By the time he reached the tomblike silence of the fourth floor, Coop felt the first measure of suspicion. Why was it so quiet in Sarah’s building? There were plenty of vehicles in the parking garage to account for several of the apartments in this block. Shouldn’t he at least hear boards settling? A loud snore from a neighbor? Water running through the pipes or central air kicking on and off? Or was the top floor so well-insulated—so isolated—that sound didn’t carry up here?

Coop scraped his palm over the late-night stubble shading his jaw. What was a single woman doing, living alone in this big empty place where there were no neighbors to run to for help, no one to hear her in the middle of a night like this, even if she screamed?

Hurrying his pace, Coop quickly reached the single, sliding steel door marked “400.” He raised his fist and knocked. “Sarah?” He pushed the buzzer, then knocked a little harder, hating how his random observations about the building had spooked him into this wary state. Why the hell wasn’t she answering the door? Maybe Seth had been right to be concerned. Despite the apartment’s fortresslike design, he wouldn’t want one of his own sisters to be so cut off from the rest of the world. He pounded. “Sarah!”

The door slid open beneath his fist.

“Coop? What are you doing here?”

Dropping his hand to his side, he swept his gaze over all five feet and not much more of Sarah Cartwright.

Ah, hell. The summery scents of peaches and mango drifted up to his nose, igniting a decidedly nonbrotherly awareness of the woman standing in the doorway. She wore a modest pair of pajamas, with one of those strappy knit tops, and plaid pants that were rolled up at the ankle.

But it was the damp spots clinging to the tops of her small breasts and the flat of her stomach that made the whole package so unexpectedly sexy. She’d come straight from the shower, looking fresh-scrubbed and fragile and utterly feminine—from the damp, darkened strands of her towel-dried hair to the pink painted nails on her tiny bare feet.

For a couple of heartbeats, Cooper forgot why he was standing at this door in the shadows before dawn. It was always like this for him, and it always took him a second to come up with the right teasing line to remind him that this was his partner’s sister he was lusting after.

“Coop?” Sarah brushed past him, looking up and down the empty hallway before tilting those pretty green eyes all the way up to his following gaze. “I thought they’d send a uniformed officer.”

That’s when the frown between the eyes registered, along with the antsy way she rubbed her palms and tapped her fingers together.