The Marrying Kind Read online

  What in the world was she going to do about John Gunner? Tessa asked herself.

  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

  Copyright

  What in the world was she going to do about John Gunner? Tessa asked herself.

  She couldn’t be attracted to him...but she was, in an instantaneous, purely physical way. He was all simmering sex appeal, the kind that made young girls gush and old ladies blush. He didn’t mean any of it, of course. Not seriously. By his own admission, he wasn’t a committed sort of man. He was dangerous, one of life’s quintessential bad boys.

  But how could she, of all people, be attracted to his cocky animal magnetism? It had nothing to do with morals, with common sense, with all the rules she’d grown up believing in. It was elemental. Gunner’s laid-back charm was something that simply was. A mature, sensible, moral person acknowledged it and walked around it.

  At the moment she was wondering if she had a mature, sensible, moral bone in her body....

  Dear Reader,

  We’ve got six great books for you this month, and three of them are part of miniseries you’ve grown to love. Dallas Schulze continues A FAMILY CIRCLE with Addie and the Renegade. Dallas is known to readers worldwide as an author whose mastery of emotion is unparalleled, and this book will only enhance her well-deserved reputation. For Cole Walker, love seems like an impossibility—until he’s stranded with Addie Smith, and suddenly... Well, maybe I’d better let you read for yourself. In Leader of the Pack, Justine Davis keeps us located on TRINITY STREET WEST. You met Ryan Buckhart in Lover Under Cover; now meet Lacey Buckhart, the one woman—the one wife!—he’s never been able to forget. Then finish off Laura Parker’s ROGUES’ GALLERY with Found: One Marriage. Amnesia, exes who still share a love they’ve never been able to equal anywhere else...this one has it all.

  Of course, our other three books are equally special.

  Nikki Benjamin’s The Lady and Alex Payton is the follow-up to The Wedding Venture, and it features a kidnapped almost-bride. Barbara Faith brings you Long-Lost Wife? For Annabel the past is a mystery—and the appearance of a man claiming to be her husband doesn’t make things any clearer, irresistible though he may be. Finally, try Beverly Bird’s The Marrying Kind. Hero John Gunner thinks that’s just the kind of man he’s not, but meeting Tessa Hadley-Bryant proves to him just how wrong a man can be.

  And be sure to come back next month for more of the best romantic reading around—here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  * * *

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  * * *

  THE MARRYING KIND

  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

  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 The Dude—my reason for everything.

  Chapter 1

  Tessa Hadley-Bryant threw her pen onto the desk in frustration. It skidded to the edge and teetered there.

  If it stays on, I’ll win this. If it falls off, he’ll win.

  It fell off. She had been partnered with John Gunner for something like nine hours now, and already she wasn’t surprised.

  “You know what your problem is, Gunner?” she demanded.

  He was standing at the coffee machine directly behind her desk. Tessa didn’t turn around to look at him. She didn’t have to. She already knew that he would glance over his shoulder at her, and the left corner of his mouth would lift halfway into a grin that could melt the socks off a nun. And now one of his brows would go up. At any moment, he would chuckle.

  John Gunner was the sexiest, best-looking man she had ever laid eyes on. Sorry, Matt, she added silently, then she flinched. Matt Bryant had been dead for nearly a year now. But talking to him was an old, dear habit, one that was very hard to break. He had been her husband, and they had worked together. They had shared everything, and his loss was still a gnawing hole in her heart.

  Unfortunately it didn’t gnaw quite deeply enough anymore to keep her from shivering when Gunner’s laughter finally came. The sound reminded her of warm, callused hands moving slowly over her skiri.

  Tessa swiveled around in her chair hard and fast.

  “You have no imagination,” she went on accusingly.

  “Are we talking personally or professionally?” He settled one hip on their shared desk, still grinning. “Because if we’re talking personally, I guess I’d have to argue with you.”

  Tessa kept her eyes deliberately on his face, well above his thigh, which was now inches from her right hand.

  “Pardon me?” she managed to say, her mind suddenly blank.

  “Is my lack of imagination a personal liability or a professional one, in your esteemed estimation?” he repeated. Damn it, did he know the effect he had on her?

  Probably, Tessa answered herself. After all, he had the same effect on every woman in the department.

  “I wouldn’t touch your personal life with a ten-foot pole,” she said finally.

  Gunner’s grin widened. “Too bad.”

  She shot out of her chair to get her own cup of coffee. She could hear him sipping behind her, could feel his eyes following her with that speculative glint. She had noticed that look long before today. She had noticed it before Matt had died, when she had worked in the Homicide Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department side by side with Gunner and his then partner. She hadn’t seen a lot of Gunner back then, just enough to be able to recognize and anticipate that glint.

  Then again, Gunner tended to reserve that look for blondes, which she definitely was not, so maybe it was just her own imagination this time. Her hair was short and thick and nearly black. She raked a hand through it self-consciously and spilled her coffee.

  “Damn.” She grabbed a paper towel to try to blot the stain from her sleeve.

  “Professional then,” Gunner prompted. “Tessa, I’m a cop. I deal in facts, not speculation. And don’t go getting that stubborn look on your face. You look l
ike a mule getting ready to kick.”

  “Thank you very much,” she said stiffly.

  They faced off for easily the ninth or tenth time in as many hours.

  Actually it was a mighty intriguing look, Gunner thought. Her chin came up and her eyes got heated enough to sparkle. He had decided first thing this morning, upon being assigned to her, that he liked it. But he didn’t think she’d appreciate him telling her so. Tessa was...different. She didn’t seem to be the type a man could easily horse around with.

  Maybe it was those high-brow Hadley genes, Gunner thought. By his reckoning she was related to just about every politician in the city, past and present. Or maybe it was the fact that she had been widowed last year. Either way, she had a quiet class about her that he didn’t know quite how to handle. Yet.

  He took in her flawless skin, her short, black hair tucked behind seashell ears, the clear blue eyes. She was tall and trim, without that overly athletic hard look that so many female cops seemed prone to. Not, Gunner thought, that there weren’t a few very nice bodies among them. But this one was—

  “Huh?” He realized that she was still talking to him.

  “I said, don’t talk to me about being stubborn. Not when you won’t even entertain the possibility that Christian Benami might have killed his own wife.”

  It was the first file to land on their shared desk, the reason Tessa had finally been reassigned to Homicide. She shared the victim’s blue blood, was well acquainted with her social circle. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, she and Gunner had been at odds over the case all day.

  “I’ve entertained it plenty,” Gunner argued. “You’ve been yakking my ear off about it nonstop.”

  “Yakking?” Tessa fought hard not to sputter, and ended by clamping her jaw shut.

  “I just want some solid reasoning before I accept that he did it.”

  “He must have.”

  “Now there’s solid reasoning.” He grinned again. “Why? Because Daphne Benami was rich and Christian wasn’t? That’s not motive. And it would take a big stretch of imagination to put him in two places at one time, no matter how much of a social climber you seem to think he is.”

  “Not necessarily. I mean, maybe he wasn’t in two places at one time. Maybe he just manages his time exceptionally well.”

  Gunner moved away from their desk. When he paced that way, he reminded her of a caged animal—restless and dangerously unpredictable. She tried not to watch him and failed.

  He was a rugged-looking man, with a lopsided grin that made him appealing rather than intimidating. He had incredible shoulders—they could well be the sexiest thing about him. Other than his eyes. They were the color of smoke, and they usually seemed to hide a laugh. He had dark hair that was just shaggy enough to make a woman’s fingers itch to straighten it out. Tessa had never seen the back of his neck or his collar.

  She knew that their captain didn’t like that, and their chief inspector probably liked it even less, but somehow Gunner kept squeaking by without getting a haircut. Even if they had written him up, Tessa knew it would be his most mild infraction to date. In his six years with the department, Gunner had gone through three other partners, three unmarked cars, one service revolver, and—reportedly—every female employee the city had to offer. All things considered, Tessa figured that their superiors had decided they could live with his hair just fine.

  Also, she allowed, for all his eccentricities, Gunner was supposed to be good, very good at what he did. So what were a few shaggy locks as long as he kept getting his convictions?

  She finally managed to find something fascinating about the coffee in her cup, but then she looked up sharply again when she smelled smoke.

  “Do you have to do that?” she cried as he inhaled on the cigarette. “Why do you have to do that at my desk?”

  “It’s our desk.” He looked genuinely surprised.

  Point taken, Tessa thought. Philadelphia was a very big city with one Homicide Unit having jurisdiction over all of it. A big Homicide Unit, in keeping with the size of their turf. Many large cities had detectives assigned to each precinct or district, but in Philly, they were all squeezed in here, on a single floor of the Police Administration Building.

  Both space and funds were at a premium. Ergo, partners shared their desks, supplies, city cars. About all they had to call their own were their guns.

  That didn’t mean she had to give up without a fight.

  “If I die of lung cancer, I’m coming back to haunt you.”

  He flashed her another of those grins. She’d make one hell of a ghost, he thought, and couldn’t imagine that he’d mind having her keep him awake nights. But he went and sat on someone else’s desk, a respectable distance from her.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “here’s my problem. Christian Benami would need wings to get back and forth between the Four Seasons Hotel and his home fast enough to kill his wife without any one of fifty people noticing that he was missing from that party.”

  “One hundred people,” Tessa muttered. She was scrupulously honest, even when it wasn’t to her advantage. The district cops who had first caught the case had taken statements from close to a hundred people putting Christian Benami at the Heart Association Ball on the night of December 26, two nights ago now.

  Allegedly, Daphne had stayed home on the night of the Ball, complaining of a migraine. Christian had gone ahead to the charity function. When he’d gotten home shortly before one o’clock in the morning, he’d found his wife dangling from their dining room chandelier.

  The coroner’s report wasn’t in yet, but their captain, Roger Kennery, had a hunch that it was going to be interesting. The hunch was strong enough that he had finally called Tessa back from her exile on desk duty in the Fifth District to work on it.

  “He could have done it before he went to the party,” Tessa insisted. “He could have hung her from the chandelier, put on his tux and hightailed it a few blocks to the Four Seasons where he was fashionably late.”

  “It’s possible. Hell, anything’s possible in this business. But probable? I think you’re reaching, Princess.”

  Tessa stiffened instinctively at his lazy use of her nickname.

  Before Matt had died, nearly everyone in the Homicide Unit had called her that at one time or another. She understood it even as she hated it. She was certainly the only detective among them with a law degree, a multimillion dollar trust fund, a brother who was the D.A., an uncle who was a Superior Court judge and grandfather who had been the governor. It had taken her a long time to win over her co-workers, to get them to accept her for the woman she was and not for her name. And even then, some of them still spoke the nickname rather bitterly and disparagingly.

  Gunner didn’t say it that way. He said it in a... warm way. An intimate way that made her belly roll over.

  Gunner watched her with both brows up as she began to whip back and forth beside their desk. “You’re just being a snob,” he went on equably.

  “I am not!”

  “Sure you are. Your Hadley is showing. You’re bothered because Daphne Benami was a snooty little rich girl who married beneath her—”

  “Well, Christian never had a dime to his name! She met him in Paris and married him there before her family knew what was going on. And Daphne was always very wary about men wanting her for her money. You forget that I knew her.”

  “Nope, you haven’t let me forget it for a minute. That’s why I say you’re irrationally obsessed with this case.”

  “I am not.”

  He shrugged lazily, a gesture that she was already learning was pure Gunner.

  Tessa crossed her arms over her chest to face him.

  “Christian married her for her money,” she said obstinately. “Then he killed her so he could have it all to himself. There’s over a million dollars in insurance money at stake here, plus the rest of her estate. Gunner, her estate’s got to be worth—”

  “Oh, don’t be such a cynic.”


  “Damn it, Gunner—”

  She wasn’t so proper or blue-blooded when she got frustrated, he noticed. He watched a faint flush creep up her neck into her cheeks, ever so gently staining that ivory skin. He decided he liked the effect.

  “Look,” he said calmly. “We haven’t turned up anything, not one shred of evidence, not one single rumor, that their marriage was anything but blissful. So even if he did marry her for her money, then why not just stay married to her? There was no reason for him to kill the goose to get to the golden eggs—he had full access to them anyway. And let me tell you, given those pictures of Daphne we got in this morning, I’d have to say she’d be a lot more use to him alive than dead. I’d sure prefer to have her warm in my bed rather than cold and six feet under.”

  Incredibly Tessa felt her mouth dry out. It wasn’t that she was a prude. She had shared squad room humor with the best of them. She had survived the Police Academy. Anyone else could have made the same observation and she wouldn’t have thought twice about it.

  It was just...something about Gunner, she realized. It was something about the way he said it. She ran a manicured finger inside the neckline of her silk blouse. Suddenly it felt warm and very tight.

  “Well, I don’t think Christian agreed with you,” she said finally.

  “A hell of a lot of people say he was at that party, Tess,” Gunner said quietly.

  She sat down again and sighed. “I don’t like the way he looks, Gunner,” she admitted quietly. “Did you notice the way his eyes shifted when we went over there this morning? He wouldn’t quite meet mine dead-on. Because he knows who I am, and he knows that I’m not likely to believe his marriage was purely some kind of fairy tale. Daphne was a Carlson, Gunner. Do you know what that means?”

  He cocked a brow. “Nope, but I guess you’re going to tell me.”