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He paused in the doorway, jangling her nerves again with his slow retreat. “I’m not quite sure why you decided to throw in your lot with us hicks here in Bitterwood, but I’m glad to have you on board. I’ve heard great things about you over the years. Your mother is very proud.”
And very talkative when drunk, Delilah thought, immediately feeling disloyal. Her mother might not have a great track record at going off the booze, but last night she’d shown signs of really trying to get her life in order. Maybe she needed support, not more skepticism.
She’d give her a call just as soon as she got Antoine out of the way and Brand out of her bedroom.
“Thanks,” she said to Antoine. “I’m actually looking forward to it.” At least, she was looking forward to investigating a hunch she’d begun forming a few weeks earlier when she’d first come back to Bitterwood.
“Next Monday, right?”
She nodded. “That’s right. Save a desk for me.” She stood in the doorway until he drove away, then closed the door and sagged against it, her head pounding with delayed reaction.
“You can come out now,” she called.
She heard the bedroom door creak open, and Brand came back into the living room, his brow creased. “Who was that?”
“Antoine Parsons, one of the Bitterwood cops. He’s looking for Seth.”
“Seth is missing?”
“Missing may be a strong word. My guess is, he got Rachel out of town for a while.” She narrowed her eyes at Brand. “He didn’t know you were in town, did he?”
Brand shook his head. “Nobody knows but you.”
“We need to figure out what to do next.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.” He picked up the pillow she’d stashed behind the sofa and handed it to her, his expression somber. “I need to get out of here. All I’m doing is putting you in danger. Maybe it was just Antoine this time, but how long do you think it’ll take for someone to figure out my connection to you?”
“I haven’t worked for you in years.”
“But your brother has. The FBI knows about it—they sanctioned his paychecks and took advantage of his information. And they know you and I were once on the same team.”
She wondered, sometimes, if the FBI had ever suspected just how close she and Brand had come that one fateful night on an undercover assignment. She and Brand had barely spoken of it afterward, and within weeks she’d resigned from the FBI and left Washington behind.
Would his superiors think him likely to come here for help?
“I don’t think anyone will connect us any time soon.” She tossed the pillow back on the sofa. “But it’s probably a good idea if you take the bedroom from now on. Easier to hide evidence of your being here if you’re not stuck in the front room.”
“You’re not listening to me.” He put his hands on her arms, wincing a little as the movement apparently tugged his wound. “I have to go. I’m not going to put you in any more danger.”
“You’re not listening to me,” she snapped back. “I’m not your underling, and you don’t get to make this choice for me. You need help, and I intend to give it to you, at least until you’re strong enough and well enough to have a chance in hell of surviving out there.”
“If you’re caught helping me, you’ll be arrested.”
The thought made her stomach ache. She’d spent most of her life priding herself on being the only Hammond from Bitterwood, Tennessee, who’d never stepped foot on the wrong side of a jail cell’s bars.
“Yeah, think real hard about that, Hammond. I know what it would mean to you to be booked and incarcerated.” His voice lowered, his head moving closer. “I’m not worth it.”
Her gaze snapped up. “That’s for me to decide. You came here for a reason. If it wasn’t for me to help you, what was it?”
His eyes narrowed slightly, and he took a step back. “It wasn’t for your help. At least not intentionally.”
She felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. He’d always had a way of bursting her bubbles, hadn’t he? “Then why?”
“A week before Liz died, she called me and mentioned that one of the private investigators she’d hired to follow Wayne Cortland had trailed him as far as Maryville. He said Cortland met a man in a coffee shop about three blocks from Davenport Trucking. He sent her a picture he’d snapped on his camera phone, but it wasn’t the best resolution. He’d had to take it at a distance. But the photo seemed to show Cortland having coffee with Paul Bailey.”
Delilah raised her eyebrows. “Why haven’t we heard about this?”
“It was the last thing Liz heard from her P.I. The guy just disappeared off the map. Last I heard, nobody has a clue where he might be now.”
“You think Cortland killed him?”
“Or had it done. Either way, I don’t think the man’s still alive. There’s a whole lot of ways to disappear in these hills.”
“Is anyone looking into his disappearance?”
“The Abingdon cops opened a case, but there aren’t any leads to follow. Maryville can’t even find record the guy was in town, except for that photo he sent. There’s nowhere to look.”
“You think this is evidence Cortland was manipulating Bailey into driving Rachel out of Davenport Trucking’s CEO position?”
“If Cortland’s pulling the strings on an Appalachian drug organization, I’m sure he’d find it helpful to have a whole fleet of trucks at his disposal. What if the debt Bailey owed was to Cortland? It would give Cortland a lot of leverage.”
Delilah’s head was beginning to ache again. She put her hand on Brand’s arm, closing her fingers around the hard muscles when he flinched as if he was ready to pull away. “I know I can’t stop you if you want to leave. But I also can’t ignore the things you’ve told me. I’m starting work with the police department next week, and I’m going to want to follow these leads. If you’re right, a man’s been murdered right here in my neck of the woods. And there’s another man plotting God only knows what that could affect the people I’ll be paid to protect and serve. So if you think you’ll be sparing me any grief, you won’t. You’ll just be leaving me without backup and important information I’ll probably need to know.”
He clapped his hand over hers where it lay on his forearm. “I don’t want any of this to touch you.”
She pressed her lips into a thin line, both moved and frustrated by his inclination to shield her. “I’m not fragile and I’m not helpless. I need your trust and respect, not your protection.”
“You know you have that.” He sounded offended.
She shook her head. “If you trusted and respected me, you wouldn’t be trying to control what I do. You did this same thing before, Brand. You made decisions for me, to hell with what I thought or wanted. You always think you know what’s best for other people.”
He looked down at her hand. “Right now, I don’t know what’s best for anyone. Including myself. It’s all gone so wrong, and I don’t have a clue how to fix it.”
She loosened her grip on his arm, her frustration fading. For all his exasperating, control-freakish ways, he still had a good heart. She’d questioned his actions many times over the years they’d worked together, but never his motives.
“That’s what I’m for.” She let go of his arm and nodded her aching head toward the kitchen. “Let’s find something to eat. Problems always look a little less awful on a full stomach.”
He looked at her for a long moment, as if teetering on the edge of an important decision. Finally, he gave a nod and followed her into the kitchen.
She released a silent breath, relieved. She had a feeling if he was right about his theories—and so far they were meshing all too well with what she knew about the Davenport Trucking conspiracy case—he might be the key to breaking this whole thing open and flushing out the bad guys she knew were still hiding in the shadows, waiting for the investigation to die down.
She didn’t intend to let anyone get away with murder in her hometown.
LIGHT SNOW FLURRIES floated down from the glassy sky, swirling in the wind and melting as soon as they touched the ground. Not cold enough to stick, Brand thought as he gazed through the narrow gap in the front-room curtains.
“Still snowing?” Delilah’s warm drawl sent a flush of masculine awareness sizzling up his spine. Her voice had been his first introduction to her, with its sultry timbre wrapped around a faint mountain twang. She’d answered his call to the Baltimore field office and he’d realized in an instant that he needed her on his team.
He’d thought it would be a temporary assignment, as he and the domestic-terrorism task force were heading to the mountains of North Carolina on a manhunt. He could tell she was from the general area, and she probably knew more about getting in and out of the small mountain towns without raising alarms than anyone else on his task force did.
He’d been right, although it hadn’t taken long once he set eyes on her to realize she was nothing but trouble, and mostly to him.
“Just flurries,” he answered her question. “What’s the weatherman saying?”
“Snow in the hills again tonight.” She had showered and changed into a pair of jeans that did wonderful things for her legs and backside and a long-sleeved heather-gray T-shirt that did wonderful things to the rest of her. He couldn’t hold back a smile, drawing a quirk of her eyebrows.
“What?”
“Just remembering the first time I laid eyes on you in that cherry-red suit with the skirt about two inches shorter than every other woman’s in the bureau. You walked in there determined to make an impression, and you did. I had to slap every man on the task force upside the head to get their eyes back in their skulls.”
“You weren’t impressed.”
“I just didn’t show it.”
“I think I’d probably do things differently now.” She crossed to stand by him at the window, gazing out at the front yard. Flurries were beginning to linger on the fallen leaves in the yard, melting more slowly. She rubbed her arms briskly. “Temperature’s dropping. We may get some of that accumulation here as well.”
“Will it snow us in?” he asked, trying not to wish for it. He had so much to do and time was running out. The last thing he could let himself do was lose focus because of Delilah.
But that was the effect she’d always had on him, wasn’t it?
“No, the road surfaces are still too warm. But it’s coming.” She looked up at him. “Are you going to keep fighting me on this? Or are you going to let me help you?”
“You start a new job soon, don’t you?”
“On Monday.”
So, a week. How much could he get done in a week, even with her help? He and Liz had been looking into Cortland’s business, albeit unofficially, for over a month, and they’d gotten almost nowhere.
Almost.
But Liz, as sweet and smart as she’d been, wasn’t Delilah Hammond. Liz had been a city girl from Ohio trying to navigate a region that might as well have been another country.
Delilah had grown up in these hills. She knew their dark side, knew how to make her way through them, how to speak the language and carry herself so that she blended in rather than stuck out.
He was going to have to depend on those skills again. Like it or not.
“Okay. We’ll work on this for the next week. But if we get nowhere, I’ve got to get out of here and let you get on with your life. Agreed?”
Her eyes narrowed, but she finally nodded. “Agreed.”
He didn’t know whether he felt relief or dread. A week with Delilah seemed like an unearned gift in so many ways. But was he just setting himself up for another round of regrets?
He had a bad habit of wanting things he could never let himself have.
Chapter Five
When Brand returned from taking a shower, his face looked pinched and pale. Delilah winced as he crossed to where she sat at the kitchen table making notes. “You okay?”
He nodded. “The wound hurts like hell, but I’m not seeing signs of infection.” He turned his side to her for inspection.
He was right. The bullet groove seemed to be healing already, the ragged edges of flesh starting to look less angry and red. She took the digital temporal thermometer from the first-aid kit and handed it to him. “Take your temperature while I replace the bandage.”
“Ninety-nine point two,” he said a few seconds later as she placed a padded bandage over the bullet furrow.
“Not bad,” she said. “If it goes over a hundred, we’ll start worrying.”
He waited for her to tape down the bandage. “We need to discuss the matter of clothes.”
She looked up at him, her lips curving. “I don’t know, Brand. I kind of like you walkin’ around my house half-naked. Like I finally got that cabana boy I’ve always wanted.”
He made a face at her. “It’s a little chilly to play cabana boy. As fun as that sounds.”
She felt a blush rising up her neck, reminding her she was a lot better at talking a good game than actually playing it. After she’d left Bitterwood to go to college on a scholarship and what money she could make from part-time jobs, she’d learned that scared little girls from the sticks always ended up crushed and forgotten in the big city. So she’d put on the sassiest, brassiest persona she could come up with and discovered she could go anywhere she wanted and do anything she wanted and nobody gave her any trouble.
Of course, it hadn’t made her very popular with other women, and honest relationships with men had proved pretty damned hard to come by. But she couldn’t help what women thought, and she didn’t care what men thought, because the last thing she’d wanted, after growing up in the house with Delbert and Reesa Hammond, was a long-term relationship with a man.
Nobody was going to have that kind of control over her life, she’d vowed. She would never become what her mother had become.
Only Adam Brand had ever tempted her to think twice about happily ever after. And that hadn’t exactly turned out well.
“What did you do with the clothes you had with you?” she asked, patting down the last piece of surgical tape. “Or did you run away from home with just the clothes on your back?”
He sat in the chair next to her. “There are some things in a canvas duffel bag stashed near a big truss bridge that goes over a gorge. Close to some seedy little bar out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Purgatory Bridge,” she murmured, wondering if he knew how that bridge had figured into her brother’s life recently. Seth had saved Rachel Davenport’s life on that bridge less than a month ago, and now they were already talking rings and forever. “I can get it for you now if you can describe where you left it.”
“I’d probably have to be there.” He glanced at the papers spread out in front of her. “What’s all this?”
“My notes on the Davenport Trucking case,” she answered. “I was just adding the things we discussed about Wayne Cortland.”
He picked up the notes and glanced over them. “Thorough, Hammond. Guess I taught you a few things after all.”
“A few,” she conceded, dragging her gaze away from the muscular curve of his shoulder. “You sure you have to be there for me to fetch your clothes?”
“I hid the bag well. It would be easier for me to find it myself.”
“It’s cold out, and you’re half-naked.”
He shot her a grin. “Does that bother you?”
“That it’s cold out?”
“That I’m half-naked.”
“No,” she lied.
He just kept grinning.
“In this weather, it’ll be dark enough by five-thirty to risk it,” she said. “I can’t go out with a strange man in daylight around here. People would notice.”
