by Beverly Bird
“That’s good. That’s better.”
“Damn you!” she spat.
He laughed quietly, then looked out the window again. “Right here,” he said to the driver. “This will be fine. Get lost now.” He pushed a wad of bills at him—incredible, Angela marveled. The man actually thought he could buy anything. He had forced the driver at gunpoint! What did he think he was buying? His silence?
He opened the door. He dragged painfully on her arm, pulling her out of the car. “Perfect, Angela, wouldn’t you say? Not a soul in sight. We’ll be alone. For old times’ sake.” Then he hit her.
The blow sent her reeling backward against the car. She almost fell inside again, but Charlie still had her arm. He twisted it hard behind her, and she bit back another cry of pain. Tires screamed and the cab took off.
Surely Jesse and the cops were following by now. Charlie couldn’t get away with this. He couldn’t. Except they had driven several miles. And she hadn’t seen any particular vehicle tailing them. Did anyone know where they’d gone?
Charlie still had her arm behind her back. He wrenched it higher until the pain was unbearable. She saw stars exploding in her vision.
“Goddamn you,” he grated, breathing hard, tearing at the hem of her dress. “What did you do? I warned you to keep your mouth shut! Did you think I was going to let you get away with it?”
“If you kill me,” she gasped, “they’ll know it was you! It serves no purpose!” But she remembered what Jesse had said about revenge.
He backhanded her even as he held her arm. Her head whipped with the force of the blow, but her body couldn’t go with it. “I’m going to make you pay for this, that’s what I’m going to do. Nobody’s going to get me for this. You owe me.”
He was crazy. He was out of his mind.
He had her skirt up to her hips. She didn’t care if her arm came out of its socket. She couldn’t help feeling now. All her protective defenses were gone. His hands were on her thighs, then all over, grabbing, groping, all the places that Jesse had made her feel clean again. She couldn’t stand it. She would die before she allowed it.
She screamed and heaved all her weight backward. The pressure on her arm became excruciating. The stars at the edge of her vision turned into white streaks. But her weight took him down.
They fell together onto the gravel at the edge of the parking lot. She felt his hand in her hair. He grabbed handfuls of it, enraged. He had gone over the edge. He slammed her head against the asphalt. The stars streaked whitely across her vision and pain exploded behind her eyes.
Jesse, John, please, somebody. And then she heard a voice roar out of the night. Jesse. An answer to her prayers. Again.
That was when she finally began to sob. The jail doors were gone and too much emotion came rushing through for her to bear.
There was the simultaneous sound of tires squealing. She tried to look up and Charlie got his hands in her hair again. Then there were pounding footsteps, and his weight miraculously lifted off her before the next blow came. She thought she heard a woman shouting. It was Tessa’s voice. Angela managed to get up as far as her knees.
Jesse had Charlie by the front of his shirt. His right fist slammed into the man’s face. Again. And again. Charlie’s nose broke, and blood sprayed.
“He has a gun.” Angela gasped just as Charlie managed to bring it up.
No more. He would not take anything more from her. He’d had her life, her soul, her world, for fifteen years. Everything she had done, every move she had made, had been prompted in some measure by this man.
No more. She had never known hatred could feel like this. So blazing. So white-hot that it had an odd purity. He had nearly destroyed her. He had committed murder. He would not kill Jesse, too.
She was on her feet before she realized it. She wobbled a moment, dizzy, and then she realized, incredibly, that she still held her purse. Her fingernails had dug so deeply into it that they had punctured the fabric.
She let it fly.
She was afraid it was going to hit Jesse. But it sailed over his left shoulder as he was shifting his weight to punch Charlie again. It caught Charlie in the face, just enough to startle him. Just enough to keep him from shooting right away.
“He has a gun!” She screamed the warning as the weapon went off.
The bullet was wild, digging up the gravel near her feet, making her cry out. She staggered back and fell again. Jesse chopped the weapon out of the man’s hand and drove him down, falling on top of him, still pummeling him.
The gun skittered to the edge of the parking lot before coming to rest. Angela crawled over to it and cradled it on her lap.
“Don’t kill him, Jesse,” she sobbed. “Please don’t kill him. Don’t do it to yourself.” Not for me, she thought helplessly. Oh, God, not for me. She wasn’t worth it.
Or maybe she was. They had caught him. She had stopped him. As long as they all came out of this alive.
Jesse wasn’t punching him anymore. Tessa had finally reached him. She was pulling at the back of her brother’s shirt with one hand, but with her right hand she trained her own gun on Charlie.
“Don’t move,” she gasped. “Just...don’t move.”
Angela heard sirens. The adrenaline rushed out of her. Her vision blurred. She dropped the gun and covered her face. A moment later, she felt Jesse’s strong arms come around her as he knelt beside her.
“Stop,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t cry. I didn’t kill him.”
But he would have, she realized. Oh, God, he would have. She looked up at him, and only hoped the feelings in her heart were reflected in her eyes. She couldn’t speak.
Squad cars were spilling into the lot now. Gunner jumped out of one of them and raced toward them. His face was white. He came to a stop over Charlie’s prone form. Slowly, dazedly, his eyes moved over all of them.
He looked at his wife, standing over the man, holding a gun on him.
He looked at Angela’s tear-streaked face, her eyes wild and too dark, her face pale. But her spine was straight.
And then he looked at Jesse. The man was staring back at him levelly, almost expressionlessly, but fury crackled in his eyes.
Gunner grinned and gave Angela, then him, a hand up. “Well, hell, you weren’t supposed to start without me.”
Chapter 21
It was dawn before they left the hospital. Jesse had broken a finger. Angela’s arm was sprained and she had a mild concussion. But she’d refused to stay overnight for observation, not with Charlie right upstairs, under police watch in a room on the sixth floor. And Jesse hadn’t argued with her.
He didn’t speak as they waited for a cab, and Angela didn’t breathe until he gave the driver her own address. Not the hotel. Her breath caught in her throat. She wondered if he was simply going to drop her off. There was nothing to protect her against any longer. It was over.
Say something, she pleaded silently, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. When he didn’t, she cleared her throat. “You’re angry.”
His gaze moved away from the window, toward her, and she was relieved to see that he looked genuinely surprised. “I don’t know what I am. There’s too much inside me to name.”
The cab stopped at her house. She waited, her pulse thrumming. “Well, it’s been quite a night.”
“Can I come in?” he asked almost neutrally. “Or would you rather be alone?”
“No.” she blurted, relieved. “Oh, no.”
But when he followed her up the steps and inside, he still felt like a stranger to her. Distant. Stiff. She almost convinced herself that she knew what had happened—the whole attraction between them really had been a matter of circumstances throwing them together. And without all those circumstances, he felt awkward.
She just hadn’t expected the change to come quite so soon.
Then he made a growling sound deep in his throat and paced to the window. In the light spilling in from outside, she was finally, clearly able to see his face.
It was haggard, tortured.
“I have never in my life done that to another human being,” he said finally, hoarsely. “I never thought I was capable of it.”
Her heart kicked. “Is that what has you so upset? That you punched him?”
He looked back at her. “Punched him?” He held up his hand. The skin over his knuckles was cracked, torn. “I damned near killed him.”
“If you hadn’t pulled him off me, he would have killed me.”
“Which is why I did it.”
She hugged herself, her eyes tearing. “Your actions were justified. Haven’t you ever declined to try a case because of mitigating circumstances?”
“Often enough. I just never knew I had those mitigating circumstances in me.”
He went wearily to the sofa. She followed him cautiously and he reached for her, pulling her into his lap the way he had that night in the hotel. He grimaced, and she remembered the injury to his hand.
She touched a finger to it. “Oh, Jesse.”
“Look at me,” he said, his voice raw.
She did, meeting his eyes. Something was beginning to tremble inside her.
“I was an animal. If I had been alone with him, if Tessa hadn’t somehow pulled me off—and I don’t know how she did it—then I would have killed him. And knowing that is something I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I’m not civilized. I’ve always thought I was civilized. But I was...wild.”
“Jesse—”
He put a finger to her lips. “And I was wild because he had harmed you. It was as much what he did all those years ago as what he was threatening to do right then. I was thinking about you. And I saw nothing but red.
“At some point while my fist was connecting, it occurred to me that I’ve never felt anything like that—good. bad, or otherwise—before in my life. I’ve always been in this damned cocoon. A Hadley. A male Hadley, required to walk the line on the perfect side of normal.” He laughed, the sound raw. “Always wondering what people could do for my career, always thinking about image, or gratuitous satisfaction, but not feeling. Until Gunner made me jealous. Until you trusted me and made me feel awe and relief. Until someone hurt you and made me feel rage.” He almost smiled. “I don’t know what it is about you. I don’t know how you do it. But from the start, you’ve opened up the floodgates, angel.”
“I’m not all that complicated,” she managed to respond.
“Oh, yes.” Jesse said, “you are.”
“Maybe I’m just normal, and you’ve spent your whole life with dull people,” she ventured.
He made a snort of laughter. “Could be.” He thought of the hat he still had. “I doubt it.”
“Does it matter?” she asked cautiously.
He thought about it. He nodded. “Because I need to know where to go from here.” He made another hoarse, almost disbelieving sound. “I promised John.”
“To hell with John.” Angela took a deep breath. “Upstairs comes to mind.”
His brows rose. “You’re hurt.”
“My body’s a little broken. I don’t feel it. My heart’s back and willing.”
His hands caught hers. “Just like that,” he said a little harshly.
“No. It’s all going to take some getting used to, I think. That you believed me about him. And that together, we did something to stop him.”
“Angela,” he said roughly. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t even want you to do the press conference.”
Her mouth curved. “I know. And that was why I could—because you were scared of him, too. Jesse, no one ever believed me about him before, that he was so dangerous.” She had trouble with her next words. Her throat was tightening. “Stay with me tonight. Let me start over.”
Start, he thought. Start. He liked the sound of that word.
Angela protested. It took almost more than he had in him to hold his ground. But in the end, they only slept in her big, brass bed as the sun came up vividly over the Delaware River. Angela realized that she was too exhausted now to argue, and Jesse told himself that it would be the last time he’d have to exercise such painful control.
When Angela woke shortly after noon, she was alone again. The shower wasn’t running this time. Her heart slammed and she scrambled from the bed—and almost fell over the suitcase sitting on the floor beside it. She circled it warily, as though it might bite her, and went downstairs.
She found Jesse in the kitchen, his jaw shadowed by the day-old beard she was really starting to think looked incredible on him.
“What’s going on?” she asked, puzzled.
“I figured if I let you pack, we wouldn’t leave until Sunday.” He watched her over the rim of a coffee mug. “So I did it for you.”
“Leave?” she echoed blankly.
“Go take a shower. Get dressed. I’m going home for a bit, but even you should be ready by the time I get back here. Do you realize you were an entire hour late for my sister’s wedding?”
“You didn’t even see me come in.” She knew. Her eyes had found him the moment she’d stepped into the church.
“Tessa noticed.”
She wondered what Tessa had been doing watching the crowd. Then her brain cleared.
“Ready for what?” she demanded. “What am I getting ready for?”
His eyes found hers. “To do this right. I’ve thought about it. All morning. And I know what it is about all this that’s been bothering me.”
Bothering him. Her heart clenched again. She stared at him mutely.
“I want to do this the way I would have if you had stormed into my office that day for any other reason than that release form I want to do this as though I had met you for the first time at my sister’s wedding...and no one was killing people and trying to ruin us.”
Her heart was beating so hard she could scarcely speak. “Oh.”
“Call your office,” he said. “Tell them you won’t be in today. Or Monday, either, for that matter.”
“You’re giving orders again,” she chided. “You’re sounding like a Hadley.”
He smiled, and it stole her breath away. “I know. Sometimes it has its advantages.” He held up the mug. “I’ll return this.”
She laughed. Actually laughed. “I won’t hold my breath. You still have the last one.”
“I know that, too, it was a keepsake. Like your hat.” And a single golden hair that he’d tucked safely away.
She sobered quickly, bemused. He always managed to surprise her.
It took her a long moment after he had gone to look down at the open newspaper on the breakfast bar. The story about Charlie Price was front-page news. The Republicans were scrambling, bloodied, probably beaten, although it was still early enough for them to nominate someone else.
Then another, smaller headline underneath that coverage caught her eye. Hadley Clan Closes Ranks Around Medical Examiner. Angela read the piece fast, then again aloud in a disbelieving whisper.
“‘In an interview given prior to the explosive conclusion of the evidence piling up against Dr. Angela Byerly, Ryan Hadley made it clear Wednesday that his law firm stood ready to represent Dr. Byerly in any proceedings brought against her.’”
Angela put the paper down and gaped at it. Then she saw Jesse’s handwriting in the margin. “Don’t let it go to your head,” he’d written. “They just want to keep me happy so I’ll run for mayor. Here’s your first lesson in Hadleyese. They—not me—always have an ulterior motive.” There was a little cartoon figure next to the words, with lecherously lowered brows.
She laughed aloud. And for the first time in her life, she knew what it was to feel lighthearted.
When Jesse came back later, she was ready.
They caught a flight to Martha’s Vineyard. Angela settled back in her first-class seat with a glass of champagne. “Actually, you’ve disappointed me,” she said with deliberate reserve.
One of his brows shot up. She couldn’t believe it, but she thought she actually saw panic in his e
yes. “How so?” he asked.
“This isn’t that Cristal stuff.”
“There’s some on ice at the cottage.”
She pretended to think about that. “Still, I would have taken you for the Monte Carlo type, or—what was that place—the Îles d’Hyères?”
“I’ll have the pilot turn the plane around.”
“It’s not a private plane. The pilot won’t listen to you.”
“Sure he will. I’m a Hadley.”
She laughed happily. And it felt good.
By nightfall, they were in a cabin he had rented, the sea rushing outside, low clouds coming in and turning the twilight purple. Angela watched the sun fall through the living-room window, and she felt him come up behind her.
“It’s perfect.” She hesitated. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“And you didn’t have to stand up to Charlie Price. Obligation has very little to do with some matters. Thank God.”
He turned her to look at him. She expected him to kiss her And he did, but not on the mouth. His lips roamed, over each of her eyes, to her ear, to her jaw. And that easily, that simply, she began trembling, and this time it was with everything good.
“This morning,” he said, “in Philadelphia, it would have been part of the nightmare. I needed to draw a line.”
“Yes,” she whispered. And she knew then that she had needed it desperately, as well.
“Even that morning in the shower was part of the nightmare A way to push him away. This is for us.”
His hands were in her hair. She reached for his wrists and held on to them. “You’re so perfect.”
His mouth crooked into half a grin. “And I keep telling you why.”
“I couldn’t have fallen in love with anyone less kind, less patient, less wise.” She thought about it. “Less arrogant and de termined.”
His hands went still. Love. “Is that what this is?” But of course it was, he realized. It was what had been in her eyes in his office yesterday afternoon. It was what had been in his own heart whe he had turned back out of that unmarked car, unable to lose her and unable to save her, and unable not to die inside. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It is. I love you, angel.”