Deadly Exposure Read online

  “You need to be in bed,” Tony growled, and surprised them both when he swung Lily up in his arms.

  “Tony, what are you doing?”

  Cradling her as if she weighed no more than a feather, he asked himself the same thing. They were alone together in his apartment in the middle of the night, and he wanted her so badly he physically ached.

  The only problem was she was a guest in his home—only there because she needed his protection. But how could he release her when she felt so right in his arms?

  “I’m carrying you to bed, if that’s okay with you.”

  When she hesitated, he thought she was going to say no. Then she looped her arms around his neck and looked him right in the eye. “That depends,” she said quietly.

  Surprised, he arched a dark brow at her. “On what?”

  “Whether you’re taking me to my bed or yours.”

  Dear Reader,

  The weather’s hot, and so are all six of this month’s Silhouette Intimate Moments books. We have a real focus on miniseries this time around, starting with the last in Ruth Langan’s DEVIL’S COVE quartet, Retribution. Mix a hero looking to heal his battered soul, a heroine who gives him a reason to smile again and a whole lot of danger, and you’ve got a recipe for irresistible reading.

  Linda Turner’s back—after way too long—with the first of her new miniseries, TURNING POINTS. A beautiful photographer who caught the wrong person in her lens has no choice but to ask the cops—make that one particular cop—for help, and now both her life and her heart are in danger of being lost. FAMILY SECRETS: THE NEXT GENERATION continues with Marie Ferrarella’s Immovable Objects, featuring a heroine who walks the line between legal, illegal—and love. Dangerous Deception from Kylie Brant continues THE TREMAINE TRADITION of mixing suspense and romance—not to mention sensuality—in doses no reader will want to resist. And don’t miss our stand-alone titles, either. Cindy Dees introduces you to A Gentleman and A Soldier in a military reunion romance that will have your heart pounding and your fingers turning the pages as fast as they can. Finally, welcome Mary Buckham, whose debut novel, The Makeover Mission, takes a plain Jane and turns her into a princess—literally. Problem is, this princess is in danger, and now so is Jane.

  Enjoy them all—and come back next month for the best in romantic excitement, only from Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Executive Edit

  LINDA TURNER

  Deadly Exposure

  Books by Linda Turner

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  The Echo of Thunder #238

  Crosscurrents #263

  An Unsuspecting Heart #298

  Flirting with Danger #316

  Moonlight and Lace #354

  The Love of Dugan Magee #448

  *Gable’s Lady #523

  *Cooper #553

  *Flynn #572

  *Kat #590

  Who’s the Boss? #649

  The Loner #673

  Maddy Lawrence’s Big Adventure #709

  The Lady in Red #763

  †I’m Having Your Baby?! #799

  †A Marriage-Minded Man? #829

  †The Proposal #847

  †Christmas Lone-Star Style #895

  **The Lady’s Man #931

  **A Ranching Man #992

  **The Best Man #1010

  **Never Been Kissed #1051

  The Enemy’s Daughter #1064

  The Manho Would Be King #1124

  **Always a McBride #1231

  ††Deadly Exposure #1304

  Silhouette Desire

  A Glimpse of Heaven #220

  Wild Texas Rose #653

  Philly and the Playboy #701

  The Seducer #802

  Heaven Can’t Wait #929

  Silhouette Special Edition

  Shadows in the Night #350

  Silhouette Books

  Fortune’s Children

  The Wolf and the Dove

  Montana Mavericks: Wed in Whitehorn

  Nighthawk’s Child

  The Coltons

  The Virgin Mistress

  Silhouette Christmas Kisses 1996

  “A Wild West Christmas”

  A Fortune’s Children Christmas 1998

  “The Christmas Child”

  Crowned Hearts 2002

  “Royally Pregnant”

  A Colton Family Christmas 2002

  “Take No Prisoners”

  Under Western Skies 2002

  “Marriage on the Menu”

  LINDA TURNER

  began reading romances in high school and began writing them one night when she had nothing else to read. She’s been writing ever since. Single, and living in Texas, she travels every chance she gets, scouting locales for her books.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Prologue

  Hesitating in the doorway of the Liberty Hill High School cafeteria, Lily Fitzgerald seriously considered slipping outside and leaving before anyone saw her. She shouldn’t have come. She’d long since lost touch with the few friends she’d made in school, and she didn’t really care for reunions. All everyone ever talked about was how many children they had and how successful they were, and that left her with little to say. She’d never married, let alone had children, and she didn’t measure success in dollars and cents. So what if she had a healthy back account? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been happy.

  “Lily! You came! I didn’t think you would.”

  Glancing up from her thoughts to find Natalie Bailey sitting by herself at the table closest to the door, Lily had to smile. She and Natalie had been in biology together their junior year and shared a frog in lab. She wouldn’t have said they were close friends exactly, but they’d enjoyed working together, and today, she appreciated a friendly face in the crowd.

  “I almost didn’t,” she admitted honestly, joining her at the table.

  “Me, neither,” Natalie replied. “Then I felt guilty for not wanting to come, which is ridiculous. I’m thirty-three years old, for heaven’s sake! I shouldn’t let guilt control my life.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it,” Lily advised. “We all do it.”

  Her tone was casual enough, but she didn’t fool Natalie. Her blue eyes narrowing sharply, she said, “I thought that out of all of us, you’d be the one who did your own thing and found happiness. You were always so together.”

  Lily almost laughed out loud at the idea of her ever being together. For as long as she could remember, she’d never felt as if she’d had any control over anything, least of all her life. “It was a ,” she said honestly. “I was just doing what my father and teachers wanted me to do, being who they wanted me to be. I figured if I played the game the way they wanted me to play, one day I’d be old enough to live my life the way I wanted.”

  “So has that day come?” Natalie asked, arching an eyebrow at her. “Are you doing what you’ve always wanted?”

  She almost said yes because that was what was expected of her. All her life, she’d always done what was expected of her. But she wasn’t a little girl anymore, and she was just so tired of telling people what they wanted to hear. “No,” she said quietly, “I’m not.”

  “Neither are we,” Rachel Martin said, blatantly eavesdropping from a nearby table with Abby Saunders and making no apology for it. Joining them, she frowned. “So what’s wrong with us? How come we’re no
t married to a wonderful man and raising little angels like Susan Phillips? We’re all as smart and pretty as she is. So why didn’t we land butter side up in suburbia? Where did we go wrong?”

  “I always let my father influence the decisions I made, and he never wanted what I wanted,” Lily said grimly. “Making him happy seemed more important than making me happy.”

  “I didn’t think I was pretty enough to get a good man,” Abby said quietly. “Which is why I’m dating Dennis. No one else seems to be interested.”

  “What?” Rachel exclaimed, shocked. “Of course they’re interested! You just have to have more confidence in yourself. At least you’re not stupid like I am. All I ever wanted was a baby, and what did I do? Waste years on a man who had a vasectomy without telling me. How dumb is that?”

  “Stop that!” Natalie scolded. “You’re not stupid. He’s the bad guy, not you. You just believed the man you loved. I did the same thing. I worked six years to put Derek through college and law school because he told me I’d get my chance to go to school when he graduated and opened his own firm. Of course, he also told me he loved me, and all the time, he was playing around on me with his paralegal. So much for love. Now he’s living on a Caribbean island with his new wife, and I’m raising our eight-year-old daughter by myself. And there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”

  “Yes, there is,” Lily told her. “It’s not too late for you to go to school yourself. Get your degree and laugh in the jerk’s face.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” she retorted. “When are you going to stop letting your father control your life? And when is Abby going to have the confidence to go out and find herself a good man?”

  “And what about me?” Rachel chimed in. “I want a baby and the clock is ticking. How am I going to get pregnant without a man?”

  For the first time since she’d walked in the door, Lily smiled. “You don’t need a man, Rachel…just his sperm.”

  “Oh, no!” she said quickly. “I’m not going there. If I’m going to have a baby, I’m going to do it the traditional way, with a man I love, a wedding ring, the whole nine yards.”

  “at’s the problem,” Natalie said quietly. “We all wish our lives were different, but we’re not willing to do what it takes to find happiness. Maybe that’s the difference between us and them,” she added, nodding toward the dance floor, where their happier classmates were dancing the night away. “They went after what they wanted. We didn’t.”

  “Because we were afraid to take a chance and step outside our comfort zone,” Abby said quietly.

  Her expression grim, Rachel said, “It’s been fifteen years since we graduated from high school, and we’re still afraid! How long are we going to live like this?”

  Somber, they all just looked at each other. That was a question no one had an answer for.

  Chapter 1

  The newspaper ad had simply read, One-Bedroom Upstairs Apartment for Lease in Georgetown. But it was so much more than that, Lily thought with a grin as she grabbed a stack of boxes from the back seat of her SUV. It was hardwood floors and tall ceilings and narrow cobblestone streets. It was the smell of lasagna in the air from the Italian restaurant that occupied the space below her apartment, and the big hug that Angelo Giovanni, her new landlord, neighbor, and the owner of the restaurant, gave her when she signed the lease. It was the old-fashioned gas lights that lined the street, and quaint shops and restaurants and the used bookstore on the corner that looked as if it had been there since Lincoln occupied the White House.

  But best of all, it was freedom! Freedom from the past, from her father, from a life that belonged to the woman she’d never wanted to be. An accountant…just thinking about the years she’d spent doing a job she’d hated made her cringe. All she’d ever wanted to be was a photographer, but her father wouldn’t hear of it. From the time she was old enough to talk, he’d drilled it into her head that she had to get a real job, one that paid well and allowed her to have a home of her own and money in the bank. She could never have that with a career in the arts.

  So she’d done as he’d advised to keep the peace and win his approval and gotten a job with the IRS in Washington, D.C., but she’d never given up her dream. She’d spent the last fifteen years after graduating high school secretly taking classes, studying, learning everything she could about photography, while she waited for the magical day when she would have the guts to do what she wanted, not what her father wanted. That day might have never come if she hadn’t gone to her high-school reunion….

  Making the decision to take a leave of absence from her job and follow her dream was one thing, sticking with it, another. Her father hadn’t talked to her since she’d told him what she planned to do, and she didn’t fool herself into thinking that he would forgive her any time soon. After all these years, she knew him well. As long as she continued to live her life in a way he disapproved of, he would keep his distance.

  And then there was Neil, her…former…fiancé. He’d lectured her as if she were a child for disappointing him and her father, and in the process, he’d sounded so much like her father that it was frightening. She’d realized then that he was never going to support what she wanted to do with her life. How could he? He didn’t have a single dream in his head and never had. He would do nothing but try to drag her down, back to her old life, and she couldn’t allow that. So she’d ended their relationship.

  She was on her own, completely alone, and she didn’t regret it. She felt as if she’d just been released from prison. Lifting her face to the steady rain that fell from the gray sky above, she wondered if her father was some kind of warlock who’d summoned up the storm to rain on her parade. If he had, he’d wasted his time. Let it rain. She felt like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain. All she wanted to do was laugh out loud and jump in a puddle.

  It was all working out, she thought happily as she danced across the rear parking lot behind the building. She had a new apartment, she’d bought a new 35mm camera and lenses and started taking advanced black-and-white photography classes at the local community college. With time, she hoped to buy an enlarger and set up a darkroom in the apartment’s laundry room. She’d never developed her own pictures before. She couldn’t wait.

  Her eyes sparkling at the thought, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so happy. And despite her father’s silent treatment she’d done the right thing and left her new address and phone number on his answering machine. He hadn’t called her back, but she refused to feel badly about it. She was finally living the life she’d always wanted, and he was just going to have to accept that.

  Overhead, thunder rumbled, reminding her of the worsening weather. Shaking off thoughts of her father, she pulled open the back door to the stairwell and hurried inside. She was halfway up the stairs when she started to lose control of the boxes she carried.

  “Oh, no!” she exclaimed.

  “You look like you could use some help.”

  Struggling to catch the top box before it fell and her underwear ended up all over the stairs, Lily didn’t see the man coming down the stairs until he was just a few steps above her. Surprised, she glanced up and had a quick impression of coal-black hair, green eyes and a chiseled jaw, then the boxes in her arms gave up their fight with gravity. With a muttered curse, she tried to juggle them, but it was too late. They went flying, and so did her sheets, towels and clothes, tumbling all over her and the man above her on the stairs.

  “I’m so sorry!” she cried, hot color firing her cheeks as she hurried to snatch up her things. “I shouldn’t have tried to carry everything at once. Here, let me get that.”

  “It’s okay,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s my fault. I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you heard me.” Pulling a washcloth from where it had landed on his shoulder, he held it out to her, his green eyes twinkling. “I believe this is yours.”

  Lily looked from the washcloth to his face and felt her breath catch in her throat. She wasn’
t the type of woman who generally lost her head over a handsome man, but in the dim light of the stairwell, shadows carved his face in chiseled angles, fascinating her. Where was her camera when she needed it? she thought, dazed.

  She’d always been intrigued with light, with darkness and shadows a mood, and he had the kind of face the camera would love. His green eyes glistened with wicked humor and were surrounded by the kind of beautiful thick lashes a woman would kill for. With a will of their own, her eyes dropped to his mouth and the smile that lurked there, waiting for just the right moment to appear. Even as she watched, his smile broadened into a crooked grin, framed by dimples, and she couldn’t look away. With nothing more than that grin, he stole her breath right out of her lungs.

  “Hello?” he teased, waving his hand in front of her face when she just looked at him. “Is it something I said?”

  His words registered then, and with a soft gasp she glanced up to find his dancing eyes waiting for hers. Heat tinged her cheeks, and too late, she realized she was blushing like a teenager who’d never had a boy smile at her before.

  Mortified, she wanted to sink right through the floor. She couldn’t remember the name of the last man who had struck her dumb. She hadn’t even done that with Neil the first time she’d met him, and she’d eventually fallen in love with him. What in the world was wrong with her?

  Hurriedly turning away, she quickly snatched up the rest of her things. “Of course not,” she retorted. “I was just distracted. You surprised me.”

  “Pleasantly, I hope.”

  When she glanced back over her shoulder at him and lifted a delicately arched eyebrow, he laughed. “You’re good, lady. I’ve never had anyone shoot me down without saying a word. I like that.” Grinning, he held out his hand to her. “I’m Anthony Giovanni, Angelo’s nephew. I live in 201. You must be the new tenant in 202. Angelo said you’d be moving in today.”

  Somehow her hand ended up in his, and in the time it took to draw in a quick breath, the spicy scent of his aftershave licked at her senses. Irritated with herself, she gave his hand a perfunctory shake and quickly released it. “I’m Lily Fitzgerald. Angelo said you had the apartment across the hall from me.” What he hadn’t said was that Brad Pitt didn’t hold a candle to his nephew. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to get these things upstairs.”