by Beverly Bird
“I just couldn’t quite admit it before now. Even to myself. It was too scary.” But she wasn’t scared anymore. She wasn’t scared at all.
He’d meant to do everything right this time. He’d meant to take her into the bedroom, where there was a fire in the hearth and the windows were open to the cooling sea air. The breeze just made the fire plausible, and he’d counted on that.
But there was something different about her, and he felt it as soon as he kissed her mouth. It was something both daring and tremulous. He thought she might be holding her breath. And this time, for the first time, she really kissed him back. He knew then that he was lost, that there was no way he was going to make it into the bedroom.
Her hand found his jaw and rested there as he lowered his mouth to hers, again and again. Kissing him, she discovered, was like no other experience she had ever known. It was safe, even as it made everything inside her tremble on the brink. And this time she knew that touching him was going to be richer, fuller, better than it had ever been before.
She was free. Her heart soared.
Still, his mouth played over hers cautiously. He touched his tongue to the corner of her lips and traced them as though not quite sure what he would find. And that gave her still another kind of freedom. She held herself very still for a moment, scarcely breathing, giving him a chance to pull away if he was not entirely sure about what he wanted.
He didn’t. The experience they’d shared had taught him something, he found. The best-laid plans, the most certain goals, could so easily go awry. Even the bedroom waiting for them was proof of that. No, they wouldn’t get there. He had learned that, in the blink of an eye, it could be too late for second chances.
Maybe, he decided, maybe it was best to grab what you could when it was offered. To revel in it, to feel it as she had finally aught him to feel.
His kiss hardened. Angela wrapped her arms around his neck, held him, held on. She groaned, and with the sound of her voice. everything changed.
A dam burst inside her. She’d thought she had healed, that she’d achieved some kind of closure at last. But she knew then that she hadn’t, not entirely. There was too much inside that still needled to get out. There were feelings and emotions and needs that had been held in check forever, waiting...for this moment, this man.
Need and hunger became paramount. Suddenly, only sensations existed, smells and tastes, a fleeting touch here, a skimming of his hard hand there. And then he was pulling her down to the carpet.
“Here,” he said. “Now.” And this time he didn’t ask her if it was okay, and that alone was exhilarating.
His weight came down on top of her and his teeth closed, not gently, over her collarbone. She was alive. She had lived past Charlie, and now she would celebrate. She moved her hips against him, hesitantly at first, then with more confidence. She took his mouth again and felt more than she heard the guttural sound in his throat.
He found the hem of her sweater and dragged it up over he head, growling again when he met with her bra. It had a center clasp, and he thrust a thumb beneath it, popping it, spreading th lace wide of her breasts. His hands covered her greedily, without hesitation.
He was different, too, she realized wildly. He was a man on the brink, with emotions raging, and no, he was not entirely civilized. It didn’t frighten her. It inflamed her. She felt the wet hea of his mouth tugging on her nipples, making something pull tight inside her. Touching him, being with him now, was as natural and elemental as breathing. She reached for a handful of his hair and dragged his mouth up to hers again, wondering how he could make her feel so brave.
He dragged her jeans down her hips, and she wriggled to help him. When he revealed bare skin, she was unabashed, unafraid.
Her breasts were the way he hadn’t allowed himself to remember, for fear it would drive him crazy. They were satin and smooth and full. Her nipples hardened, responding to his touch. So much of him wanted to take her now, fast and hard, right here, because he had held back for too long, with more willpower than he had ever known he possessed. It was almost an overpowering need but he took his time instead, sliding a hand over her breasts one more time, then again. He traced his fingers down her ribs, to the hollow inside her hip, then lower. He took the time to watch her shudder with anticipation—and she didn’t even really know what lay in store.
She’d said she had tried once, after Charlie, and couldn’t feel. In spite of himself, he thought of that again, and suddenly, fear that he, too, would fail her took his breath away.
She seemed to feel his hesitation. She began touching him frantically as though to memorize everything about him before she lost it. Her palms skimmed over his chest, the hair there so soft it startled her. She felt the hardness of him and closed her hand over him through his jeans.
She gave back everything he had given her. Her own skin felt flushed and warm with the heat that was growing inside her. She dragged at his shirt and at his jeans. She could not remember what she had ever been afraid of.
She swept a hand through his dark hair again, met the deep green of his eyes. “Please.” she whispered. “Please. Show me. I want to feel this.”
His eyes darkened. He kissed her again, as though to protract the pleasure, but something inside him threatened to explode. Restraint was gone.
She was tangled around him now, her arms and legs holding him, skin to heated skin, but he eased back from her a little so he could watch her face. He slid into her more gently than he needed to, and watched her body spasm. He watched pleasure melt through her. Then she moved to meet him, moved in perfect counterpoint against him, and he saw climax slam into her first. Even as she reeled from it, he kept on.
It was everything she had dreamed of, and nothing she could have anticipated. She’d fully believed there would be pain, in some measure. That he, too, would have to force his way inside, no matter how her heart yearned for him. But he filled her easily, and she felt more than his flesh inside her. She felt the essence of him.
He rolled, changing position, bringing her on top of him. She gasped and cried out, but this time it was a sound of need, still not thoroughly quenched. He caught her hips and held her as he pumped, craved, let himself go. And something shattered inside him.
He made a hoarse sound as he lost control, and the last thing he remembered thinking was that he was still feeling, truly feeling, and it was the most incredible experience of his life.
Sometime later, they roused and moved into the bedroom. The fire had died.
“The best-laid plans,” he murmured, kneeling to agitate it into embers again and to lay some new wood.
Angela watched him, her gaze moving over the lean, strong lines of his body. Something quickened inside her again. She felt she had a lot of time to make up for and she was going to enjoy every moment of doing so.
“We don’t really need it,” she murmured.
“Which is all the more reason to do it.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “I’m sick to death of doing things because I have to, angel.”
She sat down carefully on the edge of the bed. “Does that mean you’re not going to run for mayor?”
He straightened, then looked thoughtfully out the window “No,” he said firmly. “I’m not. I’m going to remain as D.A. and when that Shokonnet character hurts his child again, or his wife, I’m going to nail him.”
“What about Charlie?” She hesitated. “Are you going to ask for the death penalty?”
Something inside him tightened, then relaxed, because she un derstood. She was close enough to his world to understand. It was just one more thing he loved about her.
she had sensed all day that it had been bothering him, more and more as the evidence began pouring in. Gunner had caugh up with them before they’d left for the airport. A total of seven women—including the one who had backed off after pressin charges—had claimed that Charlie Price had raped them. Those were just the ones whose stories seemed especially credible Faced with the mounting
evidence against him, Charlie had confessed, in a weak, rattled moment, to trying to frame Angela, an in a roundabout way, to killing Lisette Chauncy. But he had finished with a sneer and the vow that he would have the best a tomey money could buy.
That attorney would not best Jesse Hadley. Angela had no doubts on that score.
She watched Jesse’s jaw harden.
“I’m going to give the death-penalty option to a jury and let them decide,” he told her flatly. “I’m going to let justice work the way it was designed to. It’s all I can do.”
“Yes,” she agreed. She nodded slowly, then closed her eyes. “It really is over.”
“Almost.”
Her eyes flew open again. “What’s left?”
“Us.” He crossed to the bed where she was sitting. “I’m going to marry you.”
He heard her gasp. He thought she recoiled. Pain clenched deeply inside him. “What? Too soon? I know a hell of a lot of craziness has been going on, but it doesn’t change the way I feel. You’ve opened everything up for me and I can’t let go of that again. I can’t go back to the way I was, without you.”
Angela shook her head fretfully.
“You said you loved me.” His voice was becoming strangled.
“Are you asking me or telling me?” she whispered.
He thought about it. And, as always, he told her the truth. “If you say no, I’ll keep trying to change your mind. So no, I’m not technically asking.”
She smiled slowly, shakily. “Well, at least your heart’s always been in the right place.”
“So?”
“I can’t be a Hadley,” she said quietly, looking sober.
“Why not?”
“I hate those stuffy, preppy clothes you guys always wear.”
He startled himself by laughing. “Try again.”
She looked up helplessly into his eyes. “I don’t know how to be a Hadley.”
He sighed and caught handfuls of her spilling, golden curls. Then he sat beside her and took her in his arms. “Don’t you get it yet, angel? I want you, just the way you are, crazy bright shoes and all.”
“I want my hat back.”
“Not a chance.”
She laughed. Then another shiver worked through her. “Can I think about it?”
He moved against the headboard and pulled her with him. “I keep telling you that, too. We’ve got all the time in the world.” His words were easy, but she felt his arm tense.
I took her only two short moments—one to think about losing him, the only man she’d ever felt connected to, and another to think of his family, the skinny woman who was his mother and all the other people he associated with.
“Let’s elope,” she suggested, and was rewarded with his laughter again.
“What, and miss you squirreling away hors d’oeuvres for the honeymoon?”
“I doubt if I’ll be hungry for hors d’oeuvres.”
He was quiet for a moment, then he found her mouth. “You’re on.”
ISBN : 978-1-4592-7219-4
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Copyright © 1997 by Beverly Bird
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Angela was about to bare her very soul.
Letter to Reader
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