Smoky Ridge Curse

At least inside the car he was sheltered from the biting wind and sleet, and the stinging numbness in his fingers and toes eased. For the first time in days, he closed his eyes and relaxed, enjoying the relative comfort of civilization while he could.

Sometime later, the crunch of footsteps on the ground outside jerked him out of a light doze. He tensed until the driver’s-side door opened and Delilah slid into the car. “Still alive?” she drawled as she buckled her seat belt. Her Appalachian accent had gotten stronger during her time away, he noticed.

“Barely.”

“You’re not bleedin’ on my seat, are you?”

Brand grinned. “No.”

“Who shot you?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

She was silent for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to believe him. “Okay, who ordered you shot?”

Not much got past her. “I can’t prove it, but the only person I’ve made an enemy of lately is a man named Wayne Cortland.”

“Cortland.” She rolled the name around in her mouth the way only a mountain girl could do. “Never heard of him.”

“Believe me, that’s by design.”

She cranked the car and set the heat up to high. Warm air wafted almost immediately into the back, and he sighed with relief.

“I’m renting a place just down the mountain,” she told him. “It’s a nice place, but it’s not far from the home of one of Bitterwood P.D.’s finest.”

“Aren’t you one of Bitterwood P.D.’s finest?” He winced as she started down the winding mountain road, seeming to hit every bump and pothole along the way. The car fishtailed for a moment on the slick road, flinging him off the narrow seat onto the floorboard. He growled a couple of heartfelt profanities as pain knifed through his injured side.

“Damn, we got really close to a drop-off that time.” Delilah’s voice had a jittery, amped-up quality he remembered well. Brushes with death had always left her a little giddy, as if the mere act of surviving was a wellspring of joy. He’d wondered, more than once, if she carried that same reckless abandon with her into the bedroom.

And then, one snowy night in West Virginia, he’d learned the answer.

“How did you know I joined the Bitterwood P.D.?” she asked curiously. “I just made the decision a couple of weeks ago.”

He didn’t try to lie on the seat again, settling for a low slump against the back of the bucket seat on the driver’s side. “Called Cooper Security and asked for you. Got a talkative receptionist.”

“I’ll have to mention that to Jesse,” she murmured drily. But she didn’t sound angry that he’d found her.

“Why’d you leave? I thought you were happy there.”

Her eyes met his in the rearview mirror. “How would you know?”

“I assume you know by now that I’ve been in touch with Seth.”

“Yeah, I know.” In the mirror, her eyes narrowed. “Why’s that?”

Because I wanted a connection to you, he thought. Aloud, he said, “I thought he’d be useful to the bureau. He had connections we could exploit. And when he went straight, he turned out to be a valuable asset.”

“He said you put him in some dangerous situations, like in Bolen’s Bluff. The Swains could have killed him if they’d ever found out he was working for the FBI.”

“I didn’t expect them to kidnap Isabel Cooper and put the whole damned mountain on red alert when she got away.” Brand grimaced as they hit another pothole. “I haven’t talked to him since I had to run. Did he figure out who was targeting Rachel Davenport?”

“It was her stepbrother,” Delilah answered after a long pause. “The police arrested him a couple of weeks ago, but he died in his cell. The autopsy was inconclusive.”

“Cortland got to him.”

“You make him sound like the bogeyman.”

“He is, in all the ways that matter.” Brand shifted position and regretted it immediately. “How much farther?”

“Almost there.” Was that a hint of sympathy in her tone? He was beginning to wonder if she had any left for him. So far she’d seemed more cautious than worried.

“I didn’t want to drag you into this mess.”

“I was already in it.”

They were off the mountain now, and the sleet had turned to rain, angling down from the sky in silver streaks reflecting the Camaro’s headlights. The steady swish of the windshield wipers and the comforting warmth of the car’s heater conspired to lull him to sleep, but he struggled to keep his eyes open.

They weren’t safe yet.

She parked the Camaro in front of a small bungalow nestled in the woods on a dead-end road. The houses they’d passed moments earlier were no longer in view, leaving her house isolated from the rest of the world, surrounded by woods and mountains as far as the eye could see.

“Long way from Georgetown,” he murmured.

She turned in the seat to look at him. “You have no idea.”

He let her help him out of the car, forced to lean on her more than he’d anticipated. She wrapped her arm around his waist, careful not to touch his gunshot wound, and eased him up the shallow set of stairs to the wraparound porch.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured when she settled him on a brown leather sofa in the front room.

“Don’t apologize unless you draw blood,” she muttered, parroting back a saying he’d taught her a long time ago. She grimaced as she took a closer look at his bullet wound. “Gonna have an ugly scar.”

“Won’t be my first.” He gritted his teeth as she plucked the fabric of his shirt away from the wound. “Got any painkillers?”

“Just the over-the-counter type. Want a bullet to bite?”

“I see your bedside manner hasn’t changed.”

Her dark brows arched, and he realized with dismay the double-edged nature of his quip.

“This is going to hurt like hell.” After digging in a nearby drawer, she returned with a soft-sided first-aid kit. “Be right back—I need more supplies.”

She detoured long enough to lock the front door and disappeared into another room. Brand let his gaze drift across the front room, curious whether he’d be able to find anything he recognized of the woman he’d once believed could rise all the way to the top of the FBI.

There were few decorations—an empty umbrella stand near the door, an old Smoky Mountains tourist poster in a cheap metal frame hanging over the fireplace mantel. The sofa and a pair of matching leather armchairs looked comfortably broken in, but the plain oak coffee table between them looked new, chosen for utility over beauty. The floors were hardwood, softened by a brown woven rug that matched the sofas. The built-in bookcases on either side of the fireplace were only half-filled, mostly with thrillers, classics and nonfiction.

Delilah came back into the living room carrying a bucket full of soapy water and a handful of washcloths. “Sure you don’t want that bullet to bite?”

“How long have you been living here?”

“Counting today? Two days.”

That explained the scarcity of personal effects, he supposed. At least he hoped it did. Because right now, if he had to profile her based on her home environment, he’d be leaning toward a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. And that definitely wasn’t the Delilah Hammond he remembered.

“You look good,” he ventured as she sat on the coffee table and dipped one of the washcloths into the bucket of suds.

One side of her mouth quirked. “Flattery won’t make me hurt you any less.”

“I was just commenting.”

She slanted a look at him. “You look like hell.”

He laughed, stopping immediately when his injured muscles protested. “I still clean up pretty well, I promise.”

Ten minutes of agony later, she smoothed down the last strip of tape over his fresh bandage and sat back, looking at him with dark, unfathomable eyes. “I hate to tell you this, but I’ll have to change that bandage first thing in the morning. But it won’t take as long or hurt as much, I don’t think.”

“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?”

“We weren’t involved anymore. Not romantically.” He shook his head, closing his fingers around the coffee mug to warm them. “The relationship never got very far—we were better suited as friends than lovers. But that didn’t keep me from being the prime suspect when she was murdered. See, I was the one who found her.”

“Oh, no.”

“I was in Abingdon to meet with her about some new information she’d gotten from an informant. When I got to her house, I found the door unlocked. She wasn’t answering the door, so I let myself in.”

“And you found her?”

He nodded, trying to put the scene out of his head. So much blood—

“You didn’t have an alibi?”

“She was still alive. The shooting must have just happened. I tried to stop the bleeding—” He swallowed hard, remembering the desperate fight to keep Liz alive. “There was just too much damage. But see, it had just happened. The timeline was too close. How could I prove I wasn’t the one who’d done it?”

“Surely they checked you for gunshot residue. Checked your gun.”

“She was shot with her own gun. And the killer wore gloves—they were lying next to the gun. No way to prove they didn’t belong to me, although they can’t prove they did, either.”

“This is crazy.”

“Tell me about it.”

“All I heard was that you were suspected of espionage. Nobody talked about murder.”

“The police haven’t charged me with murder yet. Their focus was on what they’d found on Liz’s computer.”

Tension drew lines in Delilah’s brow. “Which was what?”

“Emails from me, detailing our plan to frame Wayne Cortland for theft of nuclear material from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.”

Delilah sat back in her chair with a thump. “Emails from you?”

“Well, clearly, not from me. But whoever faked them knew what he was doing. I’d suspect me, too.”

“Let me guess. Some of the militias had hooked up with anarchists?” Delilah didn’t sound surprised. Maybe she’d come across something similar in some of her work with Cooper Security.

“We’d suspected all along that might be the case. When you’re determined to bring down all civil government, you don’t always care about the motives of your fellow travelers.” Brand shook his head. “I thought I’d taken all the necessary precautions to protect myself from being targeted. I wasn’t even working this case with Liz in an official capacity. But somehow Cortland figured it out.”

“Liz must have known she was a target.”

“Of course she did. She trusted the wrong person.”

“You think someone betrayed her?”

“I know someone did. There was no sign of a struggle in her apartment. The alarm wasn’t engaged. No sign of a break-in.”

“So she let her killer into her apartment willingly.”

Brand’s side was beginning to ache. He tried to ignore the pain but he couldn’t stop a grimace.

“I need to take a look at your wound.” Delilah set her coffee to the side and stood up, holding her hand out to him.

He stared at her outstretched fingers, noting the short, neat nails and wondering if she still nibbled them when she was nervous. He put his hand in hers and it felt impossibly right. As always.

She helped him to his feet and looked at the bandage. “Not a lot of seepage through the bandage. That’s good, I think.”

“You hope,” he murmured, not missing the uncertainty in her tone.

Her brown eyes met his. “You probably should have gone in search of a doctor for help. Might’ve been a little more pragmatic.”

His fingers itched to touch her face, to trace the angular lines of her jaw and brush across her parted lips, but he balled his hands into fists and controlled the urge. “I just wish I hadn’t put you right in the middle of all of this. You don’t need the headache.”

“What’s one more headache?” Her lopsided half smile nearly shattered his control, and for a second he forgot the pain in his side, the trouble hanging over his head and the eight years that had passed since he’d last kissed Delilah Hammond’s soft, pink mouth.

He wanted her. He’d wanted her from the first moment she walked into his office, all long legs and brilliant brains, and he had a feeling he was going to want her for the rest of his life.