Cover Copy
Harper Jane Evans is so over pro cheerleading but she’s not quite ready for prison. Good thing she’s got a badass ex-boyfriend ready to go to bat for her . . .
Sure, Harper made a few unsavory threats against her team’s manager—she’d had a few drinks and she despised the skimpy uniform he expected her to wear. That didn’t mean she wanted him dead. But when the sleazy dude is found murdered in his tighty whiteys, Harper is the number one suspect—and former FBI agent Noah Slade is the one man who can help. Too bad she once told Noah she never wanted to see him again . . .
Noah may have done a number on Harper’s heart all those years ago, but he’s determined to do right by her now. Yet the fiery beauty isn’t the only demon from his past, which makes hunting down a murderer by her side . . . complicated—never mind the powerful attraction still pulsing between them. Good thing he’s willing to do just about anything to keep from losing Harper again. And an old love just might bring her a new career—assuming she can stay out of jail . . .
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Books by Cheryl Ann Smith
Brash & Brazen
The Sweetheart Racket
The Sweetheart Game
The Sweetheart Kiss
The Sweetheart Mystery
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
The Sweetheart Mystery
Brash & Brazen
Cheryl Ann Smith
LYRICAL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
Copyright
Lyrical Press books are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2017 by Cheryl Ann Smith
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First Electronic Edition: November 2017
eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0483-3
eISBN-10: 1-5161-0483-8
First Print Edition: November 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0484-0
ISBN-10: 1-5161-0484-6
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
Readers often say that what first draws them to a book is a great cover. I’d like to thank the talented Cora Bignardi for my fantastic Brash & Brazen series covers. You’re the best!
Chapter 1
A cold flush of shock and panic caused Harper Jane Evans’s throat to close up and her blood to coagulate in her toes. Dizzy and unable to move, she just stared, gaped really, at the surreal sight at her feet.
“Gerald?” For a moment, nothing in her world made sense. Was this real or some early Halloween prank? “Gerald?”
No response. It wasn’t a prank. Her stomach sank.
She fished for her phone in her oversized bag.
Harper had known she was making a mistake the second she stepped into the hotel suite and smelled beer and sweat filling the confined space. Her boss was likely drunk off his butt and ready for a confrontation. The man was a surly drunk with none of the affability to make him amusing or easy to handle.
She should have backed out first thing, but curiosity moved her forward. If her boss was passed out on the bed, the good and bad sides of her would have warred with pulling a sheet over him and letting him sleep it off, or taking a quick unflattering pic with her phone and sharing it with her friends for a giggle.
She knew doing so would be immature, but he was such a colossal jerk. A candid pic on social media would serve him right, and produce a satisfying amount of revenge.
But not this. Never this. She pressed a hand to her head.
Where was that phone?
Her mind worked through the last few minutes. She was in the center of a crime scene. Had she seen something that could help the police?
Start from the beginning.
“Gerald,” she’d called softly as she’d stepped over the threshold. The room was still.
With squared shoulders, she’d moved farther into the room. Calling out to him again, she received no answer. Not making a run for it at that moment proved to be her second mistake of the day.
She’d come to Gerald’s hotel suite to protest the proposed new cheerleader uniforms, when her instincts told her she should have met him in the lobby. The door had been propped open with the room’s Bible and that had her instinct to flee up and running. After all, Gerald was a slimeball like his uncle Willard and couldn’t be trusted.
He could be naked for all she knew. Gross.
Still, onward she’d gone, forgetting all her mother’s lectures about trusting your gut.
Filled with righteous anger over the largely see-through fabric with only gold tassels for nipple coverage, she’d been spoiling for a confrontation, built up during the fourteen hours he’d been out of town boinking his mistress, Sharla. She didn’t want to wait another minute until he sobered up.
Rather than leave the argument for later, instead, she found Gerald, all three hundred plus pounds of him, lying on the carpet behind the suite’s desk, bare-bellied up, wearing nothing but a pair of tighty-whiteys, and staring blankly at the ceiling with a pair of filmy eyes.
Dead.
And she was alone.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered and all her confusion fled. A large knife protruded from his chest and excluded natural causes as the manner of death. She hadn’t seen anyone fleeing the room and she wasn’t helping by standing there staring at his lifeless body like a panicked raccoon in the headlights.
She knew enough about crime scene investigations from TV shows not to touch anything. After all, there was nothing she could do for Gerald anyway. That was obvious. There was no point searching him for a pulse.
Snapping into head cheerleader mode, she found the phone tucked under her wallet and backed away from the body. “I need the police.” Talking out loud kept her from freaking out and helped her think. “Lots of police.”
It took two tries for her shaking hands to swipe the