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“Why weren’t you surprised?” He sounded weaker than he expected, his voice thready and strained.
“By you showing up in the woods behind my mama’s house?”
He nodded.
“I’ve been waiting for you to show up here in Bitterwood ever since I heard you went AWOL.”
“How’d you know I’d come here?”
“The last case you were working started here. Where else would you go?” She shrugged as if the answer was too obvious to require explanation. “I am a little curious about why you went to my mama’s house, though.”
“That was the number the receptionist at Cooper Security gave me. She said you didn’t have a home phone yet, but you’d given them that number if anyone needed to contact you. I got the address through the phone number.”
“I see.” A fleeting emotion glimmered in her eyes.
“You knew I’d call looking for you. Didn’t you?”
She looked down at the bucket. “I’d better go get this cleaned up. You still hungry?”
The thought of food made him queasy. “I’m good for now. But you didn’t get to eat, so you go ahead.”
She disappeared from the living room for a few minutes, returning with a blanket and a pillow. “I have just the one bedroom, so it’s up to you. You want to stay here on the sofa or try getting up and going to the bedroom?”
He was tempted to come back with a little teasing innuendo but quelled the urge. “I’m good here. Not in the mood for moving around at the moment.”
“You didn’t get a look at the person who shot you?”
“Blind ambush. I was too busy running for my life.”
“So it might not have been this Cortland person.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t do his own dirty work. That’s not his style.”
She sat on the coffee table and leaned toward him, her elbows resting on her knees. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup, and she smelled like soapy water and disinfectant, but if he hadn’t been laid up with a gunshot wound, he’d have done his damnedest to get back into her bed. Because she was still the most beautiful, exciting, interesting woman he knew.
Time apart hadn’t done a damned thing to change that fact.
“Where did the shooting happen?” she asked.
“In Virginia. I’d stopped for coffee at a doughnut shop in Bristol. I came out of the shop heading for my car and got hit out of nowhere.”
“You were in a car? Where is it now?”
“Parked it in a junkyard near Maryville. I’ve been on foot ever since.”
She winced. “That’s a long walk for an injured man.”
“Tell me about it.” Grimacing, he shifted on the sofa, trying to find a less painful position. She reached across and helped him fluff up the pillow under his head, her cool hand brushing across his face.
“You need antibiotics. We should get you to a real doctor.”
“You know I can’t go to a doctor.”
“You were running around the woods with an open wound—”
“Guess we have to hope you cleaned it out sufficiently.”
She fell silent for a moment. Then her gaze rose to meet his, her dark eyes troubled. “Why does the FBI think you’re a traitor?”
“Because they have all sorts of damning evidence that suggests I am.”
“Are you?”
Her flatly stated question felt like a punch in the gut. “I thought you said you already knew the answer to that question.”
“Eight years is a long time. I’m not the same person. Maybe you’re not, either.”
He sat up to face her, ignoring the fire in his side. He caught her face between his palms, finding fierce satisfaction in the way her eyes dilated and her lips trembled apart. “You know me, Delilah. Better than anyone else in the world. That hasn’t changed. It never will.”
Her eyes fluttered closed, as if she couldn’t bear what she saw in his gaze. He let her go, slumping back against the sofa cushions.
She stood and picked up the blanket she’d laid on the coffee table beside her. “Why don’t you get some sleep? That’ll do more to help you heal than anything.”
He stretched out on his good side, watching her unfold the blanket with quick, efficient hands. “I’m sorry.”
She shot him an exasperated look.
“I didn’t know who else to come to.”
Placing the blanket over him, she shook her head. “I needed a spot of trouble in my life again,” she murmured. “Things were threatening to get a little too tame around here, and you know how I hate that.”
He closed his fingers over her wrist, holding her in place as she started to straighten. “I’m sorry about more than landing on your doorstep.”
Her eyes darkened. “Yeah, me, too.”
He let her go, and she gave the blanket a tug at the bottom, covering his feet.
“Hey, Brand?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“You could really use a bath and some deodorant.”
He grinned at her as she started out of the room. “Duly noted.”
She stopped in the doorway, turning back to face him. “Do you think Cortland knows where you are now?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “There’s a lot I don’t know.”
She nodded, her jaw squaring, making her look more like the woman he remembered. “We’ll have to assume he does.”
“Then maybe I should go.”
A familiar look of determination came over her face, sending a thrill through his aching body. Here was the Delilah Hammond he knew, he thought. Here was the woman who’d made his life an endless adventure. He hadn’t realized until that very moment just how bloody empty his life had been without her.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she said firmly.
“He’s not going to stop looking for me,” Brand warned her.
Her chin lifted. “Let him come. We’ll be ready.”
Chapter Three
Snow had fallen in the mountains overnight, Delilah discovered when she wiped away the condensation on the kitchen windows the next morning. Peeking through the fog that gave the Smoky Mountain range its name, the firs and spruces in the higher elevations looked as if they’d been dusted with powdered sugar. Even here in the valley, a crust of hoarfrost covered the ground outside.
What would have happened to Adam Brand if she hadn’t found him last night? Would he have survived the night at those temperatures? She tamped down a shudder at the thought and spooned coffee into the machine, making it extra strong, the way she liked it.
The way Brand liked it, too, she remembered. He was the one who’d taught her to like coffee in the first place. To this day, she still bought the brand of beans he liked, grinding them herself.
How much of who she was had been shaped by those years she’d worked at the FBI with Adam Brand?
Footfalls behind her made her jump. She turned to find Brand standing in the kitchen doorway, the blanket wrapped around his bare torso. His hair was mussed and there were dark circles of pain under his blue eyes, but there was no escaping the impact of his masculine presence. It tugged at her belly, impossible to ignore.
“I smelled coffee.”
“You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
“I’m feeling better. You were right. Sleep helped.”
She made herself look away from his bare chest, as broad and well toned as she remembered. Time hadn’t robbed him of one ounce of virility. If anything, the lines of age now evident in his face only added to his masculine appeal.
He’d seen the difference in their ages as an obstacle. He’d never understood that she’d found his maturity one of his most tempting assets.
“You still put that flavored stuff in your coffee?” he asked when she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of hazelnut-flavored liquid creamer.
She made a face. “Do you still eat sardines?”
“Keeps me young.”
She grabbed a couple of mugs from the cabinet next to the sink. “Black, no cream, no sugar?”
“Some things don’t change.”
She handed him a cup of steaming coffee. “Lots of things do, though.”
He eased into one of the two chairs at a small table in her kitchen nook. “More things than not, I guess.” He made a sound of satisfaction at the first sip of coffee. “None of the people who took your place could ever make coffee worth a damn.”
“Nice to know I was irreplaceable in one aspect.” She splashed creamer in her own coffee, added a packet of sweetener and carried the cup to the nook. She sat across from him, cocking her head to look him over. “You do look better this morning.”
“Must be the company.”
She stifled a smile. “Sweet talker.”
“I’m serious. This is the first time since I went off the grid that I’ve felt any hope.”
“How did this all happen?” she asked. “How did someone get close enough to frame you?”
Brand sighed, pushing his mug of coffee away from him. “That’s a long story. And, as these things do, it started with a woman.”
“HER NAME WAS Elizabeth Vaughn. U.S. Attorney out of Abingdon, Virginia. I met her at a University of Virginia alumni function, and it turned out we had a lot in common.” Brand watched Delilah’s face, trying to gauge her reaction. But her features were as inscrutable as a mask. “We started seeing each other whenever she was in D.C. on business. She’s how I came to learn the name Wayne Cortland.”
“It was one of her cases?”
“Peripherally. She’d been investigating militias in the Appalachians and discovered that most of them had connections to meth dealers in the area. And most of both groups—militia and drug dealers—had done business with Wayne Cortland at some point.”
“So you think Cortland’s part of the redneck mafia?”
“A little less redneck, a little more mafia. He actually runs a legitimate lumber mill in a town called Travisville, near the Virginia/Tennessee border.”
“I’ve heard of Travisville,” Delilah said. “They have a bluegrass festival. My father used to take us there. At least, that’s why we went. He went to score drugs until he figured out how to make his own.”
She always seemed so clinical when she talked about her father and his drug problems. Even when she’d described escaping the burning rubble of the house her father had blown up in a meth-cooking accident, she’d stuck to the facts, never talking about how she’d felt, at the tender age of seventeen, to lose her father and her home to his criminal stupidity.
How had she coped with her homelessness? With her injured brother and her drunk of a mother? How had she come through unscathed to earn a scholarship to a good college and forge a whole new life for herself?
Had she come through unscathed? He didn’t see how it was possible. There had always been dark places in Delilah he’d never been able to reach.
Or maybe he just hadn’t tried hard enough.
“Cortland’s lumber business is legit,” he said. “But Liz was sure he laundered drug money through it. She just hadn’t figured a way to prove it.”
“So she brought you in on it?”
“Peripherally. She suspected he might be funding some meth mechanics in the mountains who then funded the white-power militia groups that gave the meth dealers their own army. She wanted me to see if I could get the domestic-terrorism task force involved in trying to tie those militias—and the meth cookers—to Cortland and his business.”
“Is he running the meth labs or just laundering the money?”
“I think he’s running them. Liz and I were able to talk to a few people who’d defied Cortland. They live in terror because apparently Cortland’s built this network of cookers and militia, and he keeps them in line with lethal threats. He’s already shown he’s willing to kill anyone who tries to cross him. We just can’t come up with the proof, because even the people who dared to talk to us are too terrified to testify against him.”
“Why didn’t you go to Liz for help instead of coming here?”
“Liz is dead.”
His flat pronouncement elicited the first emotion he’d seen out of Delilah—a visible recoil. “I’m sorry. Was it Cortland?”
“The FBI thinks it was me.”
Her brow furrowed. “You? They think you killed someone you were involved with? Why?”
