Compromising Positions
Page 1
Angela was about to bare her very soul.
Letter to Reader
Title Page
Books by Beverly Bird
About the Author
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Copyright
Angela was about to bare her very soul.
“I need so desperately for you to believe me....”
Jesse watched her, unable to say anything. His heart was beating hard. He knew that she was asking for something immense—at least to her. It was somehow a thousand times more intimate than if they had tumbled together onto that sofa and made love.
“You asked me to trust you,” she went on, her voice shaking again. “And now you know why it can’t come easily to me. But I’m trying. I’m giving this to you, Jesse. I’m asking you to believe in me. Help me. Stand by me. Please....”
Dear Reader,
By now you’ve undoubtedly come to realize how special our Intimate Moments Extra titles are, and Maura Seger’s The Perfect Couple is no exception. The unique narrative structure of this book only highlights the fact that this is indeed a perfect couple—if only they can find their way back together again.
Alicia Scott begins a new miniseries, MAXIMILLIAN’S CHILDREN, with Maggie’s Man, a genuine page-turner. Beverly Bird’s Compromising Positions is a twisty story of love and danger. And welcome Carla Cassidy back after a too-long absence, with Behind Closed Doors, a book as steamy as its title implies. Margaret Watson offers The Dark Side of the Moon, while new author Karen Anders checks in with Jennifer’s Outlaw.
You won’t want to miss a single one. And don’t forget to come back next month for more of the best romantic reading around—only from Silhouette Intimate Moments.
Leslie Wainger
Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator
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* * *
COMPROMISING POSITIONS
BEVERLY BIRD
Books by Beverly Bird
Silhouette Intimate Moments
Emeralds in the Dark #3
The Fires of Winter #23
Ride the Wind #139
A Solitary Man #172
*A Man Without Love #630
*A Man Without a Haven #641
*A Man Without a Wife #652
Undercover Cowboy #711
The Marrying Kind #732
Compromising Positions #777
Silhouette Desire
The Best Reasons #190
Fool’s Gold #209
All the Marbles #227
To Love a Stranger #411
*Wounded Warriors
BEVERLY BIRD
has lived in several places in the United States, but she is currently back where her roots began on an island in New Jersey. Her time is devoted to her family and her writing. She is the author of numerous romance novels, both contemporary and historical. Beverly loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 350, Brigantine, NJ 08203.
For my doctor friend, Gwyn A. Nethaway,
blond curls and all.
Chapter 1
She shot into his office like a stray bullet. Jesse Hadley looked up from his desk, surprised, and a sudden, vivid memory hit him out of nowhere.
He’d been seven, maybe eight. It had been one of those autumn weekends his family spent at the country house in Lords Valley, everyone dressed in perfectly creased attire, pretending to be relaxed. There’d been a sparrow sitting on the back porch rail, and because he was a boy, because it was there, he’d made an impulsive grab for it.
He’d caught it.
For an incredible, amazed moment, he had only stared at it. He’d felt its heartbeat explode against his palm. It was one of those things that should never have happened and that he would never forget. He realized that something about this woman reminded him of that sparrow.
It wasn’t in his voice.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a mild tone.
She crossed her arms over her chest and seemed to hug herself, as though she was cold. Or scared. Like a bird that blinked and somehow ended up in a kid’s palm.
Actually, Angela Byerly was mostly stunned.
She’d always thought Jesse Hadley to be devilishly attractive—from his pictures in the papers, from the distant, wary glimpses she’d gotten of him over the months. In court, he was king of the jungle. He moved with dangerous, confident grace, with a sort of tense laziness, like a cat. He was powerful, and he knew it. He was unconscionably wealthy; and he didn’t apologize for it. He was arrogant, and he would take without asking. It was in his eyes.
Still, she hadn’t anticipated the sheer impact of this man up close.
She didn’t know how to handle it. He wasn’t just good-looking; he was drop-dead gorgeous, and there was not a doubt in her mind that he knew it. He had black hair, and his eyes were green, a very deep green that reminded her of emeralds. And they were expressive, shadowing in one moment, then clearing sharply in the next, even as his face revealed nothing. He had dimples, which theoretically should have made him look cherubic, cute, even gentle. But his face was too chiseled for that, and the end result was that he looked aristocratic and uncompromising and hard.
Aristocratic or not, he’d made a big mistake.
“How dare you?” she finally whispered. She was so angry, she didn’t trust her voice.
Jesse dropped his pen, steepled his fingers and leaned back in his chair. He was a man well schooled in hiding his reactions. “You do have the right office?” he asked.
Color bloomed high on her cheeks, a delicious, almost dewy, pink. That was when he realized that however frightened and nervous she might be, she was also beautiful. She whipped around, giving him her back. She had a lot of hair. Blond, long, falling well below her shoulders, it was a mass of curls and ringlets. Caught at the moment by a leather thong at her nape, it was too loosely gathered to be called a ponytail.
Jesse’s eyes coasted downward. She wore a white lab coat that stopped at midthigh, right above the hem of a vivid floral dress. The dress captured every hue in the rainbow. It was tight, and very short.
She had incredible legs.
He had just reached the startling turquoise pumps on her feet when she jerked about to face him again.
“Okay,” she said with great control. “My problem here is your lack of consideration. Of cooperation.”
She advanced on his desk, still hugging herself. He noticed that her hands were fisted now, and a piece of paper was crumpled in her left one. He’d thought that her eyes were brown, but when she stepped into a shaft of light from the window, he realized that they weren’t, not really. At this angle, they looked more golden.
The sight of her was fascinating, and he continued to stare without realizing it. The crisp white lab coat over the attention-demanding dress, the mass of long blond curls gathered at her neck, those shoes in a color he had never seen on a woman’s feet before...all in all, he was intrigued.
“Who are you and what�
��s that?’ He motioned to the paper.
Her eyes slid away form him. Skittishly. “I’m Dr. Byerly. Angela Byerly. The chief medical examiner.”
Jesse felt surprise hit him in a one-two punch. “Odd that we haven’t met before this.”
She shrugged one shoulder with unstudied grace. She wouldn’t quite look at him, he realized. “Not really. Philadelphia is a big city.”
“Not that big.”
“I work. I go home.”
“Apparently.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Her eyes finally came back to him, a deep, turbulent brown now. And they were defensive.
This was unbelievable, Jesse thought.
He knew of her, of course. He had heard all the rumors—that she was thirty-six years old and had never been married. That she was one of those incredibly brainy types. That she had a medical degree and a law degree, and that she had earned them almost concurrently, give or take a few years. Which told him that the vast bulk of her twenties had been eaten up by her studies. She’d come to Philadelphia by way of Quantico, Virginia. She’d worked for the FBI in some kind of specialized capacity, but at the moment he couldn’t remember what. He did remember that the city had had to offer the moon and the stars to get her.
Why hadn’t he ever wondered about her before? He answered himself almost immediately. Because brainy, studious types had never really been a source of curiosity for him.
“It wasn’t intended as a personal affront,” he said slowly. “Our offices work together in the natural course of upholding the law. It just seems strange that I’ve never run into you before.”
“I’ve never been this angry with you before now,” she snapped, and it seemed to him that the retort had more or less slipped out before she could harness it. It also sounded as though not running into him had been a deliberate choice.
“You’ve always sent memos,” he reminded her, fishing. “E-mail. That sort of thing.”
“And they’ve always accomplished the job, haven’t they?”
He sat back and hooked his hands behind his head. “Nine months,” he mused aloud. “You were hired nine months ago.”
“Not quite eight, actually,” she corrected, biting down on the words.
He shrugged. “Okay. So for eight months—give or take a week or two—I’ve gotten a flood of memos, but no personal appearance until now.”
“Was I supposed to present myself and genuflect or something?”
His mouth quirked. “The latter wouldn’t have been necessary, but the first might have been a nice touch.”
“We’ve spoken on the phone,” she argued. Then she scowled. “Why are you making such a big deal of this?”
Jesse wondered. “Nature of the beast, I guess. It’s ingrained habit to question what I don’t understand. And I’m curious. You never testify, either. You always send Ed Thackery to court.”
“Or Brigid Cross,” she corrected stiffly. “They’re both better at that sort of thing than I am.”
He wondered about that, too. “Ed thought he was going to get your job eight months ago.”
She only shrugged. “What’s your point, Mr. Hadley?”
“My point is, I’ve never seen you.”
“Why would you?” she demanded, exasperated.
Why indeed? Philadelphia was a big city, he conceded. It had a volatile, almost overwhelming crime rate. She worked at it from an evidentiary angle, at crime scenes in the dead of night, or under fluorescent lighting in the bowels of a building down the street. He, on the other hand, was the district attorney, a public face, the man the citizens had elected to put their bad guys away.
“Well,” he said finally, then realized that he had absolutely no idea what to say next.
“Let me explain something to you,” she said tightly. “I’m the youngest chief M.E. this city has ever had. I’m also the first woman to ever hold the post. You mentioned Ed Thackery yourself—and he’s not the only one waiting for me to fall flat on my face. There are a lot of people out there outraged by my salary, my perks, people who vocally wonder whom I slept with to get all that. Well, I didn’t. I’ve earned everything I’ve gotten. And I’m not going to screw up. With or without your help, with or without your efforts to undermine me, I’m here to stay.”
Jesse felt surprise hit him again. She looked just as taken aback by the torrent of words that had escaped her, boiling up from somewhere deep like a volcanic eruption. He guessed that it didn’t happen often.
“Undermine you?” he repeated incredulously. “Why the hell would I do that? I never laid eyes on you until five minutes ago, and I don’t give a damn what they pay you.”
She thrust the paper at him, the one he had noticed earlier.
He kept one wary eye on her as he took it and smoothed it out on his desk. He glanced down at it quickly. It was a release form. Actually, it was a copy of a release form. He scanned it.
“Apparently the remains of one Lacie Shokonnet were released to her next of kin,” he observed. “Her parents. So?”
“So you signed it.”
He glanced down again. Something dull and painful moved in his chest. It was his name. It looked like his writing. But he hadn’t signed it.
He had never seen the thing before in his life.
Something warned him to keep that to himself for the time being. Maybe it was the Hadley in him, the from-the-cradle training to be perfect, above reproach. Or maybe it was ego. If there was an unsightly crack in his office, he instinctively did not want this woman to see it.
“I wasn’t finished with her,” Dr. Byerly said when he didn’t answer.
“No?” he answered vaguely.
“You could have at least checked with me first.”
“Hmmm.”
“The mother claims she went to get her out of her crib yesterday, and the child was dead. Sudden infant death syndrome. But she was fifteen months old, and SIDS rarely befalls children over one year. So I called the Division of Family Services and checked our old records. I found out that she had an older sister who apparently died of the same thing. SIDS also occurs infrequently among siblings. And DFS says they’ve received seven calls over the years stating that the kids have turned up at the baby-sitter’s and at the welfare agency with bruises, and the parents always seem to have an explanation. It all stinks.”
Another long speech. Jesse thought. And she was still agitated.
“Something’s wrong here,” she went on. “If those little girls died of SIDS, then I’m the Queen of England.”
“No tiara,” he muttered. She didn’t even crack a smile.
“I noticed what could have been blunt force trauma,” she continued, “to her seventh cervical vertebra—”
“English,” he snapped, losing his sense of humor, as well. “Give it to me in English.”
“Right here.” Angela Byerly pointed to the back of her neck.
“Blunt force trauma,” he repeated. “And that indicates... what?”
“She was hit with something. If it affected her spinal cord, that in turn could have caused brain swelling. I wasn’t done with her yet,” she repeated, then she began to pace again. “Too damned many deaths are blamed on this quirky thing—”
“SIDS,” he clarified.
“Yes.” She flashed golden brown eyes at him.
He wondered if she was a natural blonde. He’d never met a woman with such fair hair and such dark, depthless eyes. He had to drag his mind back to what she was saying.
“I really think we need to be more attuned to the possibility that some of these so-called SIDS cases might stern from abuse or other causes.”
She was an idealist, he realized, a woman wishing hard for a perfect world. “I won’t argue that.”
“SIDS could so easily become a convenient catchall for parents losing their tempers, what with all the press it’s gotten lately. We have to keep an eye on the situation.”
“I agree.”
“God help us, in many cases,
it’s a bona fide tragedy. But—”
“Dr. Byerly, what do you want from me here?” he interrupted.
She let her breath out and stopped pacing. For a moment, she looked confused. “Some admission of culpability.” she said finally. “You screwed up big time, Counselor.”
Jesse stiffened.
“She only came in yesterday morning!” she rushed on. “The cops who caught the call had her sent to my office because SIDS is still considered an unexplained death. I did a preliminary on her—X rays and whatnot—and found the neck injury. I went to pull her out this afternoon to do the rest of the autopsy, and she was gone because you’d released her without even consulting me!”
Jesse fought off his own need to pace. That would reveal far too much agitation.
But, oh, he was agitated. He hadn’t released Lacie Shokonnet.
“I’ll look into it.” he said shortly.
“It’s too late for that.” Dr. Angela Byerly threw her hands up in a volatile gesture. “We’ve lost this one, Counselor, thank you so much. Harry and Melissa Shokonnet are going to walk. I just wanted to make damned sure you knew how I felt about it.”
“Calm down.” he snapped, and this time there was something dangerous in his face. “I said I’ll look into it.”
She turned away from him in disgust.
“Who took the body?” he demanded.
She stopped with one pretty, fine-boned hand on the door. For the life of him, he couldn’t picture those hands doing what he knew they did for a living.
“Coral-Beachem Funeral Home,” she answered. “They cremated her twenty-five minutes before I was able to track her down. At her parents’ request. Convenient.”
Jesse swore. “The older sibling? Any possibility we can exhume her?”
“No. Same thing. She was cremated.”
His stomach rolled a little at the images that brought to mind. Jesse rarely visited crime scenes personally. He had never set foot in the morgue. For all his outward confidence, he was cowed by death, blood and bodies.