of him in the field office.
“You missed your target entirely,” she said quietly, struggling for a fragment of composure. She felt as if she was going to shatter into a million pieces if he so much as blew in her direction. “I think you’d better get back on the firing range.”
Warrick laughed then and ran his thumb along her bottom lip, wiping off the imprint of his lips. “Don’t worry about my ability to shoot straight. I can handle my own. See you tomorrow, Mommy.”
That term was reserved for her daughter when she learned to talk. C.J. loathed couples who referred to one another that way. “Don’t call me that.”
He paused. “‘Daddy’ doesn’t seem to fit, even if you do wear the pants most of the time.”
She didn’t want him thinking of her any differently. Not because of the baby. And not because of what had just accidentally happened here. “I’m still C.J.,” she insisted.
“Yeah,” he agreed. His eyes swept over her. “You’re still C.J. But as of two hours ago, you’re now a hell of a lot more.”
He winked at her and left.
Chapter 5
That old familiar feeling came over her. The one where she felt as if she was in the right place, where she was meant to be.
After completing three weeks of her maternity leave, C.J. absorbed her surroundings as she made her way from the elevator and down the hall. The last time she’d been here, she’d been done in by exhaustion, flat on her back and strapped to a gurney on the way to the hospital with a minutes-old baby in her arms.
God it felt good to be back.
She took a moment to gather herself together outside the office she shared with Rodriguez, Culpepper and Warrick, then pushed open the door.
Culpepper was the first to see her. Portly, with a layer of muscle beneath the fat, he rose to his feet and came forward.
“Hey, looks who’s here, Rodriguez. How’s it going, Mommy?”
Tossing her purse on her desk, she glanced toward her partner. “Warrick, did you warn these people about calling me that?”
“Hey, I can’t help it if they all have the attention spans of baby gnats.” Their desks butted up against each other. He rounded his and came to stand by hers. “Speaking of baby, why aren’t you with yours?”
She took a deep breath. Slightly stale air, lemon floor polish and Rodriguez’s ever-present jar of peanut butter. It even smelled good to be back here.
“The doctor gave me a clean bill of health, said I was fit to report back for duty.” C.J. had left the appropriate papers down at personnel on her way up here. “She actually thought I would be a nicer person if I went off to work every day.”
That was because even despite the work a new baby required, C.J. found herself going stir-crazy. The ability to multitask with speed was not always a good thing. It left her with too much time on her hands. She needed to fill that time with her job. Besides, ever since she’d become a mother herself, she had this overwhelming need to make the world around her a safer place to be for her daughter. She was doing it the only way she knew how.
“Besides,” C.J. continued, “My daughter’s actually got the semblance of a sleeping schedule down, and I’ve been kept in the dark long enough.”She looked at Warrick pointedly, then turned her attention to the other two men who were part of the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s task force. “Can either one of you two fill me in?” She nodded toward Warrick. “My partner here refused to say a word about the case to me. Every time I asked, he kept changing the subject so much, I began thinking that maybe Warrick was the Artful Dodger come to life.”
“Artful anything doesn’t sound like Warrick,” Ralph Culpepper hooted.
“Never mind that.” She sat down at the edge of her seat, as if poised to leap up at any second, Warrick noticed. Same old C.J. “I need input,” she told them. “Someone brief me.”
George Rodriguez raised and lowered his wide shoulders. At six-five, everything he did was big. “Nothing to brief, C.J., our boy’s laying low again. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll be another three-year reprieve.”
That wasn’t the way she saw it. “We’ll get lucky when we nail the son of a bitch.” As long as the serial killer wasn’t off the streets, he could always strike again. “So nothing’s been happening while I’ve been out of touch?” C.J. underscored the final word, sending an accusing glance Warrick’s way.
“Well, Rodriguez, here, got engaged.” Culpepper slapped his partner on the back. Sitting, Rodriguez was almost as tall as Culpepper was standing.
She hadn’t even known he was seeing anyone. “Is that true?” Squirming ever so slightly in his seat, Rodriguez nodded. “Who is she?”
Culpepper answered for him. A new grandfather, he looked upon his partner as a son. He was accustomed to doing most of the talking. “You know that cute little receptionist on the second floor?”
C.J. thought a minute. Her eyes widened as she realized who Culpepper was talking about. “You mean that little-bitty dark-haired one who looks like she wears size-one clothes?”
Culpepper grinned at Rodriguez, who was taking a considerable interest in the file he was holding open in his hands. “That’s the one.”
Talk about the long and the short of it. “What are you going to do, Rodriguez,” C.J. asked, “carry her around in your pocket?”
“For starters,” Culpepper laughed, nudging his partner and winking broadly.
Rodriguez had only been at the Bureau for three and a half years. She still thought of him as “the new guy.” “Well, I’m very happy for you, Rodriguez. Don’t forget to let me know when the wedding is.”
Culpepper sat down and leaned back in his chair. “Hey, talking about weddings, I hear there’s a rash of those going on. Any of you remember Tom Thorndyke, that tall dude who used to work down the hall?” He looked from Warrick to his partner and then at C.J. “You went out with him, didn’t you C.J.?”
Damn it, why did her heart just skip a beat? She thought she’d drummed that bastard out of her system. “Once or twice,” she allowed. She congratulated herself for keeping her smile in place. “What about him?”
Warrick slanted a look at C.J. There was no way he could prevent the conversation from continuing without alerting the other two men that something was wrong. No one else knew that the absent special agent was the father of C.J.’s baby.
Culpepper’s chair creaked. “Word is he’s getting married.”
“Married?” The word tasted like dried cardboard in her mouth. She struggled to sound only mildly interested. Anger mingled with surprise. “Really? To who?”
Culpepper scrubbed his hand over his face, thinking. He prided himself on always getting his facts right. “Somebody he met while on the job. One of the bean counters.” Every organization had them. Even the Bureau. “She moved out with him when he transferred. Got the story from the guy who used to be his partner.” He glanced at C.J. “All these weddings, must be something in the water, eh, C.J.?”
“Must be.”
She knew that Culpepper wasn’t trying to be insensitive. The oldest of them by twenty years, it was probably his fatherly way of suggesting that she herself find someone to marry, to give her baby a proper father. He had no way of knowing that he’d struck a bad chord.
Picking up her purse, she pretended to look through it. “I think I left something back in the car.” Dropping the purse, she rose to her feet, keys in hand. “I’ll be right back.”
“Pictures of the baby, I’ll bet,” Culpepper chuckled. He looked at Rodriguez. “They’ve always got pictures.”
Warrick