by Beverly Bird
She looked amused. “What if you had to burp?”
“We didn’t.”
“Everyone burps.”
“Not Hadleys. Never Hadleys.”
She actually laughed again. And, impossibly, she relaxed even more.
The food was just as wonderful as the wine. She tried to eat with some restraint, but could barely keep herself from smacking her lips. At his suggestion, she ordered a leek and shrimp salad with carrot vinaigrette, a combination she never would have otherwise contemplated. It was delicious. They shared pasta with lobster and tomatoes for the main course, and as he had promised, it was rich and filling. If there was something intimate about sharing, something very warm and soothing about the low hum of their own conversation, then she chose not to think about it too closely.
They did not talk of Lisette.
“The owner here—and chef—is from Porquerolles,” he said when the plate was empty of everything but the garnish. Angela picked up a curly leaf of escarole and popped that into her mouth, too. His eyes widened only marginally. “I suppose I should have expected that,” he said after a moment.
“Hmm. Waste not, want not.” She chewed. “Porquerolles?”
“It’s the largest of the Îles d’Hyères just off the French coast southeast of Toulon.”
“I knew that.”
And he guessed from her tone that he had finally told her something she didn’t know. He grinned.
And then he ruined it. “What did my uncle do to you?” He hadn’t meant to ask, but the question slid out of him almost with a will of its own.
Angela felt the pleasure drain out of her. It left a cold void. “What makes you think he did anything?” she hedged.
“Gunner said so.”
She would kill him. She wasn’t sure if she was angrier that Gunner had betrayed her, or that she had found out about it now, spoiling the evening. But then, she had known that the spoiling was inevitable. Somehow. If not in this way, then he would touch her.
And then he would know.
“Nothing,” she said shortly. Then, because it was pointless to lie, she added, “It’s really not important.”
“Your eyes say otherwise.” He had begun it, he realized, however unintentionally. Now he wanted to know. “I could find out.”
“I’m sure you could.” She took her napkin from her lap and laid it neatly beside her plate.
“So why won’t you just tell me?”
“Because I don’t like to talk about it.”
“My uncle doesn’t remember you.”
She felt something painful settle into her chest. “Never once,” she answered slowly, “have I ever believed he would.”
“What does that mean?”
“I want to go home now.”
“Fine. But leave the silver.”
Her eyes widened. He wasn’t sure if she was going to laugh or take offense. He watched, fascinated, as she ducked her head to collect herself. When she looked up again, her beautiful eyes were more or less unreadable.
“Too fancy for my taste,” she said simply, and rose to her feet.
He hadn’t intended to laugh, either, but he did.
He paid the bill then took her elbow as they left the restaurant. He more than half expected that she would pull away from him, but she didn’t, although he did feel her stiffen beneath his touch.
“I’m not my uncle,” he said when they were back in the car.
“Maybe not.”
“But?”
“You’re close enough.” She had to keep believing that, or she was in very deep trouble indeed.
“You didn’t have to join me for dinner.”
Her head snapped around and her eyes found his. The color was deep again, and there was turmoil there. He could see it even in the dim light of the moon shining through the windshield.
“I wanted to,” she said, and her tone told him that she was both startled and upset by that.
“I’m glad.”
“Why?” she asked helplessly. “Why me?”
What was it? Jesse wondered. Because she was a challenge in subtle ways, and what man alive didn’t enjoy one? Something about her shouted, “Stay away!” even as she wore clothing that demanded attention. He’d told her that she intrigued him, and that was certainly true.
More than once tonight, he’d imagined peeling that shimmering dress off her. He thought again of what might lie beneath and something inside him clenched. She was beautiful, almost innocently provocative, and he was a perfectly normal warm-blooded male.
She made him...feel things, he realized. Until that very moment, he had never admitted how rarely he allowed himself to feel. He wondered if he was afraid that if he let the internal barriers down, if he looked into his own heart too closely or let it loose, he would be appalled at how utterly lacking his life really was.
He reached over and caught one of her long blond curls around his finger, as though that could give him the answer. It twined there like a serpent, seemingly winding around his flesh of its own accord, as though to ensnare him.
“I want you,” he said quietly.
She paled. And then the fear, the terrible fear, came back.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t say that. This isn’t a date.”
He scowled. “I don’t care what we call it. We’re both well past the age of consent.”
She laughed hoarsely. “So it would seem.”
She wanted to think he was only talking about a quick coupling, mutually gratifying sex, no strings. That was bad enough, but for some untold reason, she didn’t entirely believe it. And any more than that would never, ever work because he was a Hadley.
She was clinging to that beyond all reason—tike a weapon with which to ward him off. Because she had spent fifteen years avoiding men, and now, more and more, somehow she kept forgetting to keep her guard up with this one. Because the only thing she could really find wrong with him was his last name.
She realized that her pulse was skittering erratically, and she recognized its tempo intimately—it was all confusion and panic.
Jesse opened his mouth to say something more. The valet tapped on his window, motioning that there was another car behind him. Reluctantly, he released her hair and drove.
They spoke very little on the drive back to South Philadelphia. He wondered what she was thinking. Don’t, she had said. Don’t say that. Why? He knew, suddenly, that he had not even begun to figure her out yet.
But he would. Oh, he would. He could no more turn around and walk away from this woman now than he could change who and what he was. Unfortunately, those two things—her and who he was—were apparently at odds. Because of his uncle.
He turned onto Oregon Avenue and heard her startled cry at the same time his own breath rushed out of him. Now what? Her street was alive with flashing color—blue and red lights winking off windows and concrete.
Four P.P.D. cruisers were parked in front of her house.
Chapter 7
Jesse poked the Cobra’s nose into a small area near the curb left by two of the squad cars, turned off the ignition and was out before Angela could say a word.
“What?” she cried finally, scrambling from the car behind him. “What?” It seemed the only response she was capable of.
He jogged up the sidewalk to the stoop. A cop stood just outside her opened door. Light spilled out into the night—the kind of abundant light that Jesse would forever associate with late-night places where something had gone wrong. The cop’s gun was drawn, but he held it loosely at his side. Jesse didn’t think he could be more than twenty-one.
“What’s happening here?” he demanded, then he heard Angela’s footsteps hurrying up behind him.
He turned to look at her. Her eyes were wild. She was breathing hard. She looked as though an unexpected noise would make her fly apart.
“What are you doing?” she yelled at the cop. “What are you doing in my house?”
The cop looked as bemused as Jess
e felt. “Well, your alarm went off, ma’am.”
She shook her head frantically, in denial.
A sense of invasion swept through her, making her shake even more. It left her with a raw, violated feeling that she was all too familiar with.
Jesse watched her closely. She seemed more upset than the situation warranted, he observed, at least now that they knew what it was.
He looked back at the cop. “So did you catch this trespasser?”
“Uh...Jergens and Manilla are inside now.”
“What does that mean?” Angela cried.
“Well, we got here and your front door was open,” the young cop answered nervously. “Me and my partner, Joe Perriman, caught the call. I called for backup.”
“Three cars’ worth?” Jesse demanded.
“Well, she’s Code One.”
Angela couldn’t stop trembling. None of this was making any sense.
Oh, she understood the Code One. That meant the police force, or any chief city official. Code Two was for her deputies and, she imagined, the investigators in Jesse’s office. But she still had no idea as to who had been in her house or why.
“Doctor?” Another cop had come out the front door. “We need you to have a look-see and tell us if anything is missing.”
“But who did it? Who was here?” she asked irrationally.
“We’re still investigating, Doctor.”
Which meant, she thought helplessly, that they didn’t have a clue.
She went inside. Jesse took her elbow, but she shook him off absently. “I have to see.”
She had to look. She had to know. She could find no words to tell him what it felt like to have someone force their way into something that was hers.
He watched her drift from room to room, almost in a daze now. He finally left her and found the cop named Manilla—an older man with a good bit of gray in his hair. His chiseled face wore a haggard, I’ve-seen-it-all expression, but his eyes reacted when he recognized Jesse.
“I wasn’t able to get anything out of the kid outside,” Jesse began.
Manilla scowled. “That’s mostly because there’s nothing to tell. Dr. Byerly’s alarm went off. He and his partner got here and the door was open. No sign of forced entry. He called for backup anyway because of the code. Any chance she forgot to lock up on her way out?”
Jesse shook his head. “No.” In fact, he had been vaguely startled by the sheer number of locks on her door. And she had meticulously turned every one of them.
“Well, then, I can’t figure it,” Manilla went on. “By the time we got here, whoever it was had taken off. And we got here pretty quick. I was only four blocks away when the request for backup came in.”
Jesse nodded, frowning at all the locks.
“Nothing seems to be out of place or disturbed,” Manilla said. “But I guess we won’t know for sure until she tells us so.”
Jesse stepped into her living room, off to the left of the foyer. He hadn’t gotten this far inside earlier.
There was a lot of clutter. That seemed characteristic. Yet for all the disarray, there was also something warm and comfortable about the place. Unlike his own favored parlor, this was a room where he could take his shoes off and put his feet up on the table. And he wasn’t entirely convinced that the disarray wasn’t intentional, at least in part—maybe another obscure attempt at defiance, the way her clothing seemed to be.
There was a butter yellow sectional sofa littered with a lot of pillows. Red pillows. Blue pillows. Gray and green ones. Bookshelves and an entertainment center lined one wall. Paperbacks and hardbacks were shoved between textbooks and periodicals. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it.
There was a half-finished glass of cola on a coffee table, whose top looked to be antique marble. Even as Jesse glanced around, a grandfather clock in the hall chimed the hour. Good sound, he thought, then he jumped a little, turning to it and staring as a porcelain bird erupted from the top of it.
There was nothing proper, predictable or bland about anything. Jesse actually smiled, relaxing again. He started up the stairs to find her.
Angela moved through rooms that were as familiar to her as her own skin, and something in the pit of her stomach clenched painfully. She had no tolerance for invasion of her personal spaces. She knew that about herself and accepted it. She did not allow strangers to touch her. She rarely allowed anyone she did not know into her home. If once she had been merely shy, a little self-conscious about herself because she was too thin, too tall, a bookworm, then when Charlie Price had gotten through with her, she’d become self-protective to a fault.
This house was hers. The things in it were hers. And someone had walked through here as she was doing now, perhaps touching things, and she had not allowed them to do so. Her will. her desire, had not mattered to them at all.
Somehow worse was the fact that nothing seemed to have been moved or taken. She would almost have preferred a robbery, she thought a little hysterically. But this act was stealthy, and it somehow felt evil.
Nothing had been out of place downstairs. Nothing was missing. The television and the stereo and the VCR were all where they were supposed to be, in the living room. The antique grandfather clock in the downstairs hall had appeared untouched. Her jewelry was in her jewelry box in perfect order—which was to say. no appreciable order at all. The little wad of cash she kept for emergencies had been pulled out of the toe of a sock in her dresser drawer. But the money was lying atop the clutter, all three hundred dollars, as though someone had dismissed it as not being worth taking. Logic told her that whoever had been here had gone through fast, because of the alarm. Still, it felt like a mockery.
She left her bedroom, her skin crawling. and rubbed her hands briskly over her bare arms as she crossed the hall. She opened the door to the spare bedroom she used as a home office and peered inside. At first glance, everything seemed normal here, too. The dark computer monitor stared back at her, revealing no secrets. She started to back out of the room again, then something caught her eye.
She was almost glad to have found something.
The deep, wide drawer where the printer was kept was slightly ajar. Angela crossed to it and eased it open a little farther. The printer was there. And so was something else, something that was not hers. jammed onto the shelf right beneath it.
Angela crouched down to look at it and cried out.
She heard footsteps on the stairs almost immediately. She shot to her feet again, slammed the drawer shut with her hip and hurried back to the door.
“What happened?” Jesse demanded.
“Nothing.”
“You screamed.”
“I didn’t scream.”
“Damn it, you yelped like a kicked puppy!”
One of the cops came upstairs and stood behind him, concerned. Angela tried to meet the man’s gaze and failed miserably.
“Everything’s fine,” she said, and wondered if anyone else seemed to think her voice sounded strained. “Nothing’s missing.”
To his credit, Jesse kept silent.
“Well, then,” the cop said, “I guess there’s nothing more we can do here. Whoever it was is long gone. Probably the alarm scared him off. But I’ll write up a report. You can stop in at your convenience and sign it.”
It semed an interminably long time before they all left. Angela finally pushed away from the door frame where she had been leaning, hugging herself. She stepped into the hall.
“I need a drink,” she said shakily.
“Not so fast.”
Jesse caught her elbow and watched something happen to her eyes. Again. It was the same sort of panic, tangled with anger, that showed in them whenever he touched her.
This time, he wouldn’t back off. It was an improvement over the wounded-animal look that had lingered there since they had found the squad cars outside.
“This is my home, Jesse,” she said tightly. “I don’t need permission here, certainly not from you.”
&nb
sp; “What did you find?”
“Nothing,” she croaked.
Before she could stop him, he turned and went back into the office.
Angela cried out again and went after him. A voice inside her head screamed in panic. It reminded her that his signature had shown up on the Shokonnet release—and then he had insisted upon dancing with her at the wedding. That he’d paid her a visit at the morgue, had taken her to dinner—and now this...this thing showed up in her printer drawer while she was conveniently out of the house. The closer he got to her, the more treacherous, crazy things seemed to be happening.
A sense of betrayal began to choke her. She caught up with him and clawed at his arm frantically, trying to hold him back.
Jesse shook her off and yanked open the desk drawers, one after another. Finally. he got to the one that contained the printer. He saw the sophisticated tape-splicing equipment jammed onto the bottom shelf. He crouched down as she had done. Angela let her hands fall helplessly to her sides.
For a moment—a second, definitely no more than a heartbeat—he accepted what he was seeing at face value. Some part of him said. Aha, guilty as charged Some part of him believed that what he was looking at was as simple as it appeared, that she was the one trying to frame him. She hadn’t wanted him to come in here, to find this, after all.
Then he looked up over his shoulder at her.
Her face was too pale, and a fine sheen of perspiration had broken out on her brow. She was shaking her head back and forth. back and forth, hard enough to make her blond curls swirl. She staggered away from him in real horror as he stood again.
His stomach rolled.
“Change your clothes,” he ordered hoarsely.
“What?” She was blinking hard and fast, trying not to cry. The sight wrenched at something inside him.
“You’re not staying here tonight.”
“This is my home!” she cried for what seemed to her like the hundredth time. And not one of those times had anyone listened.
“Someone has been in here as conveniently as if they had a key,” Jesse snapped. Or a dozen keys. he thought. “Sorry. Doctor, but I’m pulling rank on this one. This particular investigation is not yet closed, and I won’t let you stay here at what is effectively a crime scene.”