Book excerpt: The time is turn-of-the-century New York City. Society's elite host glittering balls inside sprawling mansions while outside, the teeming streets harbor secrets of their own. New York City's Police Commissioner Rick Bragg has been called upon to investigate a shocking crime. Reluctant to pull Francesca Cahill into a case that could be very dangerous, Rick also knows the beautiful and brilliant heiress has a natural ability for sleuthing that could aid him--even it if means working side by side with a woman who tempts him like no other. And so Franscesca and Rick begin a harrowing journey through the squalid underworld of the city that plunges them deeper and deeper in a peril neither could have imagined--and a desire that only continues to grow... Brenda Joyce's Deadly Desire is a sizzling hot historical romance.