“You’d rather go to a safe house?”

Her mind rebelled at the notion of taking her son to some strange place, surrounded by people they didn’t know. But wasn’t that what she’d done anyway? Dalton Hale was little more than a stranger to them. And his house was like no place she or Logan had ever lived before.

But she felt safe there, she realized. She had no particular reason to feel that way, but she did, regardless.

“No,” she said, not intending to say so aloud but not really regretting it when she heard the word slip over her tongue.

She felt his gaze on her again, a caress of scrutiny that sent a little shiver of awareness darting down her spine. He released a soft breath, as if he’d been holding it.

“I don’t regret asking you to stay with me.”

“I don’t regret staying.” She slanted a quick look toward him. “We’ll have to take pains to keep it that way, won’t we?”

The Legend of Smuggler’s Cave

Paula Graves

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Alabama native PAULA GRAVES wrote her first book, a mystery starring herself and her neighborhood friends, at the age of six. A voracious reader, Paula loves books that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she works as a creative director for a Birmingham advertising agency and spends time with her family and friends. She is a member of Southern Magic Romance Writers, Heart of Dixie Romance Writers and Romance Writers of America.

Paula invites readers to visit her website, www.paulagraves.com.

For my niece Melissa, who has added unexpected joy to my life in some of the most surprising ways.

I love you, Missy.

Now go do your homework.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Excerpt

Chapter One

The front door was unlocked. Jenny never left it unlocked.

Hair rising on her neck and arms, Briar Blackwood took a careful step backward on the porch and drew her Glock 27. Not her weapon of choice; her Mossberg 835 shotgun was locked in the cabinet inside the cabin. But the Glock would do.

She stayed still for a breathless moment, listening for movement within the cabin. Was she overreacting? Maybe her aunt had fallen asleep on the sofa without locking up.

No. The break-in a month earlier had rattled Aunt Jenny’s nerves. She hadn’t been comfortable staying at Briar’s place with Logan alone at night since. She always locked all the doors and windows the second Briar left and wouldn’t even answer the door unless she knew the voice on the other side.

So why was the door unlocked now?

Everyone who mattered to Briar was behind that unlocked door. And she could stand here holding her breath, or she could go in there to see what was what.

But not through the front door.

Briar edged to the corner of the porch, making herself a harder target if someone inside started shooting. Tightening her grip on the Glock, she pulled her cell phone from her jacket pocket and dialed the cabin landline. She heard the phone ringing through the cabin walls.

No answer.

Now she knew for sure something was wrong. Aunt Jenny was a light sleeper. She never slept through a ringing phone.

Shoving her cell phone back in her pocket, Briar slid between the wood slabs of the porch railing and dropped three feet to the ground below. Stopping below the big kitchen window, she peered up at the jars of fruits and vegetables stacked in three tight rows in front of the window. The colorful jars took the place of curtains, both as a dash of brightness in the small kitchen and as a privacy screen, keeping out the unwanted gazes of strangers who might be lurking outside the mountain cabin.

They were still intact. Last time someone had broken in, they’d shattered the jars and left a huge mess in her kitchen.

What could they want? She was poor as a church mouse. Her new job as a Bitterwood police officer would do little more than pay the bills and allow her to put aside a little bit for her son Logan’s college fund.

Could it be her job that had drawn the intruders to her door?

She edged her way around to the root cellar door and eased it open, wincing at the low creaks of the hinges. Six concrete steps took her down into the tightly packed cellar, where shelves full of canned goods filled one side of the room, and bins of root vegetables filled the other. She used the flashlight app on her cell phone to illuminate the narrow path between shelves and bins, but she still managed to stumble into the shelves near the stairs. With a muttered curse, she barely caught a jar of tomatoes as it started to topple off the shelf above.

Setting it right, she shined the cell-phone light up the stairs. The door to the cabin was closed. She crept up the stairs and tried the doorknob. Locked, as expected. She eased her keys from her pocket and inserted the right one. The doorknob turned smoothly, and she carefully slipped into the hallway, shutting off the phone light.

She went very still, just listening. There was no sound at all, she realized. Not even the hum of the refrigerator or the whir of heated air blowing from the wall heater nearby.

The power must be out. Had someone cut it?

Glad for the rubber soles of her work shoes, she went silently into the living room and took a quick scan of the situation. Her eyes had begun to adjust to the low light, allowing her to see that the living room was a mess. Sofa cushions had been pulled from the sofa and ripped open, the stuffing lying all over everything. The intruders may have spared her jars of fruits and vegetables this time, but most of the contents of her refrigerator lay scattered across the floor and counters of the tiny kitchen, going to ruin.

She stepped back into the hallway, her heart pounding with equal parts adrenaline and dread.

Please, God, let Logan and Jenny be okay. Please, please, please....

The door to her own bedroom was closest. That was where Jenny slept when Briar was working a night shift, as she’d done during her stint as a dispatcher, and as she’d be doing for the first few months on the job as a police officer. But when Briar tried to push the door open, something was blocking it. She peered through the narrow space between the door and the frame and saw a pale white hand outstretched.

Jenny!

A noise in the next room down made her freeze. That was Logan’s room.

Someone was moving within.

She reached through the narrow crack in the door and touched her fingertips to Jenny’s wrist. Relief rattled through her when she found a strong, steady pulse.

Pulling back, she pushed to her feet and fell back on her police-academy training, so recently finished. She led with her pistol, moving as quietly and quickly as she could. The thumping sound she’d heard earlier repeated. A drawer closing, she recognized.

She touched the door and found that it wasn’t latched. It swung open slowly and silently—thank God she’d oiled the hinges recently. It used to creak like crazy.

A tall dark-clad figure stood silhouetted by the faint moonlight coming through Logan’s window. He had his back to her, allowing her to spare a quick glance toward the bed to reassure herself that Logan was still there, his face turned toward his pillow and his little chest rising slowly and steadily.

“Freeze—police!”

The dark silhouette whirled not toward her but toward Logan’s bed.

She couldn’t fire at him, not with her son so close, so she shoved the gun in her jacket pocket and ran, hitting the intruder solidly. They both bounced off the bed and hit the floor.

“Mama!” Logan’s soft, frightened wail tore at Briar’s heart, but she couldn’t let go of the man punching and kicking at her in an attempt to escape.

He eluded her grasp and started toward the door. She scrambled up after him, tackling him as he darted into the hall.

Suddenly, strong, cruel fingers bit into her arm at the same time she was yanked back by her hair, allowing the man she’d brought down to scurry out of reach.

She grabbed the Glock from her jacket and twisted around, shoving the barrel at her captor. “Let me go!”

He dropped her with a hard shove, slamming her back into the floor. Her head hit the hardwood with a jarring thud, and for a second the whole world seemed to explode into colorful confetti.

Then her vision cleared, and she swung the Glock in a semicircle, looking for any sign of the intruders.

The front door was open, barely visible from her position on the hallway floor. She pushed to her feet, wincing at the pain in her shoulder, and edged her way into the living room.

She took a quick peek outside. There was no sound of a motor, but she thought she made out the rustle of leaves in the woods just beyond her property. Even with a three-quarter moon in the sky, she couldn’t detect any movement in the gloom of the woods, just the fading rustles of the two intruders running away.

She shoved the door closed and engaged the lock, her heart pounding and her head aching.

“Mama!” Logan’s wail drew her back to the hallway. Pocketing her weapon, she pulled out her cell phone and turned on the flashlight app, shining it into the darkness.

Logan stood in the middle of the hall, his blue T-shirt riding up his little round belly and his pajama pants sagging to reveal his big-boy underwear.

She ran and scooped him up, pressing her face against his little chest, breathing in the beautiful smell of sleepy little boy. “Mama’s right here,” she assured him, patting his back in soothing circles.

Mama’s got you.

* * *

HE SHOULD HAVE known Doyle Massey would be at the hospital. The Bitterwood chief of police seemed to show up everywhere Dalton Hale went these days, like a particularly hard-to-kill weed in a flower garden. And, as luck would have it, tonight the sister was there, as well, her auburn hair, green eyes and prominent cheekbones a persistent, visible reminder of what a mess his own life had become in the last month.

Dalton had finally reached the point, however, where the sight of Doyle and Dana Massey didn’t send him into a seething rage. At least, not on the outside. He was still boiling a little inside, but he set that emotion aside and entered the Maryville Mercy Hospital waiting room with his head high and his own green eyes clear and focused.

He bumped gazes with Laney Hanvey, who sat next to Massey. She was about to marry the chief, which had strained their formerly collegial relationship, but she was still the friendliest face in the room. She murmured something to her fiancé and crossed the room to meet him.

“Is something wrong?” she asked quietly.

He realized she didn’t know he was there for the same reason she was. “Not on my end of things. I’m here to talk to the victim.”

Her gaze narrowed. “Jenny Franklin is still undergoing tests.”

“I meant the widow. The Blackwood woman.” He realized, as Laney’s expression darkened, that he sounded cold and officious. Not the sort of man he’d ever been, not before now. He’d been the prosecutor who went the extra mile, tried to get to know the people for whom he sought justice. He still received Christmas cards from people he’d helped. He never used to call people things like victim or the widow.

He was doing a lot of things now that he’d never done before.

“Her name is Briar,” Laney said quietly. “Do you have to do this tonight?”

“Was she injured?”

“Just roughed up a little. Didn’t even let the paramedics check her.”

Dalton looked past Laney until his gaze snagged on the dark-haired woman sitting with a small boy sleeping in her arms. She sat apart from the others, though most of them threw concerned glances toward her now and then.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” He nodded toward the woman with the child.

Laney followed his gaze. “Yes. You know the police already have her statement, right? She’s a cop herself. She was thorough.”

That was news to him, actually. “I thought she was a dispatcher.”

“She graduated from the academy back in December, and a slot opened on the police force last week, so she finally got her badge.”

Laney was answering all his questions with details, he realized, because she wanted to keep him from bothering Briar Blackwood. And hell, maybe if he were in her position, he’d be doing the same. He hadn’t exactly covered himself with glory over the past few weeks as he’d dealt with finding out his whole bloody life had been a lie.

Matter of fact, he’d been a complete ass about it.

“I just want to ask her a few questions about the break-in.” He intentionally added a gentle tone to his voice, though he was feeling anything but gentle at the moment.

Laney’s eyes narrowed again, as if she saw through the pretense. But after a moment, her expression cleared. “I’ll introduce you.”

He’d have preferred to approach the woman alone, away from all her friends, but he couldn’t exactly make any demands, could he? It wasn’t as if she were the culprit here.

At least, not that he could prove.

He followed Laney across the waiting room floor, ignoring the watchful gazes of the others, though he did spare the slightest glance at Dana Massey, as if his eyes couldn’t resist one more quick look to make sure he hadn’t been mistaken about the resemblance.

No, still there, the faint but unmistakable traits that had convinced her, on the day of their first meeting, that he was the long-lost half brother she’d only recently learned about.

He dragged his gaze forward, grinding his teeth.

“Briar?”

The dark-haired woman looked up at Laney, then let her gaze slide slowly to Dalton’s face, her clear gray eyes darkening with recognition. So she already knew who he was. Probably not good news, given the tumble his reputation had taken around the Bitterwood Police Department in the past few weeks.

“Mrs. Blackwood, I’d like to ask you a few questions about the break-in this evening,” he said, not waiting for the unnecessary introduction.

Beside him, Laney released a soft sigh. “Briar, this is assistant county prosecutor Dalton Hale.”

“I know who he is,” she said quietly, still holding his gaze. “I’ve given a statement to the Bitterwood Police Department. Detective Nix is the lead detective.” She nodded toward the dark-haired man sitting next to Dana Massey. Walker Nix. Bitterwood detective and Dana’s significant other. Nix stared back at him, as if daring him to cause a ruckus.

In Briar’s lap the dark-haired little boy stirred and made a low mewling noise that sounded like a puppy whining. He tightened his little arms around his mother’s neck, clinging like a monkey as she rubbed his back and murmured soothing nonsense to him until he settled down.

A painful sensation wriggled in the pit of his stomach. He killed it with ruthless dispatch. “I understand that. But I have some questions about the incident that the detective may not have known to ask.”

Something shifted in those gunmetal eyes, a flicker of flame warming their wintry depths. “Such as?”

Ah, he thought, she’s curious. That was good. Curiosity was exactly the sort of trait he needed from this woman if he was going to get the answers he sought. “Such as, do you believe this most recent break-in could be related to the one that happened a few weeks ago?”

Her eyes went from molten steel to flinty ice in a split second. “What makes you think Nix wouldn’t have asked such an obvious question? Do you have such a low opinion of the police?”

Dalton gave himself a mental kick. Once more he was letting his anger at Massey taint everything and everyone connected to him. Of course Nix would have asked the obvious question. “Fair enough.”

Briar glanced up at Laney. Some communication moved silently between them, for Laney patted Briar’s arm and walked away, leaving him alone with her.

He sat in the empty chair beside her. “You like handling things on your own. Don’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

“You’re sitting off here by yourself, away from your friends. You sent Laney away so you could handle my questions alone.”

“You seem to know something, or think you know something, about the break-in. So spill it.” She kept her voice low, her hand still drawing soothing circles around her son’s back.

“I know your husband died seven months ago.”

“He was murdered seven months ago,” she corrected quietly. Her voice had an oddly detached tone, making him wonder about the state of the relationship at the time of Johnny Blackwood’s murder.

“You weren’t a suspect?”

Her gaze flicked toward him. “I had an alibi.”

“Work?” She’d still been the emergency services night-shift dispatcher at the time of Johnny’s death.

She nodded. “Plenty of security video to establish my whereabouts.”

“But you had a motive?”

She took a quick, sharp breath through her nose. “Is there a point to this line of questioning?”

He supposed there wasn’t, other than curiosity. He knew the basics about Johnny Blackwood’s goings and comings during the months leading up to his murder. It was how he’d latched on to Johnny in the first place—reading through the case notes and seeing signs of a potential connection to another case he was looking into. But the personal details in the case file were scarce, perhaps because Briar was part of the Bitterwood P.D. family. Personal matters not pertaining to the case would have been minimized and even left out to protect her privacy.

Like the state of the marriage at the time of his death. The cops would have wanted to know if there had been trouble in her relationship with her husband. And Dalton knew that on Johnny’s side, at least, there had been trouble to spare.

But did his wife know what Dalton knew?

As he puzzled through how best to ask her such a delicate question, a doctor in a white jacket over green scrubs entered the waiting room. “Mrs. Franklin’s family?”

Briar’s whole body seemed to snap to tautness at the sound of the doctor’s voice. She stood, clutching her small son more tightly to her, and crossed to meet the doctor halfway.

Dalton trailed behind her, catching up in time to hear the doctor say, “We’ll want to keep her until tomorrow because she lost consciousness, but she’s not showing any continuing mental confusion, which is a very good sign. She did sustain a fracture of both bones in her lower right arm, however. We’ve reset the bones and applied a fiberglass cast to just above the elbow. She’ll need to wear the cast for at least four weeks.”

“Can I see her?” Briar asked.

“Check with the nurse at the front desk in the E.R.—she’ll tell you what room she’ll be in.” The doctor smiled, gave Briar a comforting pat on her shoulder and left the waiting room, moving at a clip.

“Good news,” Dalton murmured.

Briar turned her gaze toward him, her eyes narrowing. “You’re still here.”

“Yes, I am,” he said, not taking offense. He knew he was making a nuisance of himself by coming here at this hour of night to bother her, but it couldn’t be helped. She might hold the key to his uncertain future without even realizing it.

“I have to go check on my aunt.” She turned away from him and crossed to where Laney sat, murmuring something before she handed off her son to the other woman.

Dalton watched her straighten her back and leave the waiting room with her shoulders squared and her chin up, like a soldier readied for battle. It struck him, in that brief glimpse of her steel core, that Briar Blackwood was a woman who thrived on challenges that made other people collapse.

Could that trait of hers be useful to him?

As Dalton started out the door after her, Doyle Massey rose from his chair and moved into his path. He was smiling as he did so, in that charming snake-oil salesman way of his, all teeth and beach tan and ulterior motives.

“Where are you going?” Doyle asked.

“That’s none of your business.” Dalton tried to take a step around him, but Doyle shifted, staying in his path.

“I don’t know what you’re up to or why you’ve suddenly taken an interest in my newest recruit, but don’t drag our bad blood into it.”

Dalton couldn’t help smiling at the chief’s choice of words. “Bad blood, huh?”

“Dana and I get that you don’t want to be part of our family, and you know, we can live with that. But don’t think that means we’ll let you screw with our lives and the lives of people around us.”

“Your faith in my integrity is touching.”

“I have no faith in you at all,” Doyle snapped back, dropping all pretense of friendly civility. “What brought you here tonight?”

“A case.” Dalton lifted his chin, daring the chief to start a fight.

“Which case is that?”

Dalton glanced to his right as Walker Nix rose from his seat and headed for the waiting room door. Off to see after the Blackwood widow and her aunt, he guessed. Maybe take the older woman’s statement.

He’d wanted to be there for that statement himself, but clearly the chief had other ideas.

“Why don’t you both try being straight with each other?” Laney rose from her chair and moved to turn their tense twosome into a threesome.

They both looked at her, and she lifted her eyebrows in response.

Doyle looked back at Dalton, his eyebrows mimicking his fiancée’s. “Well? What case are we talking about?”

Dalton was tempted to just leave without answering. But with so much on the line—not just his own ambitions but the safety of all the people he’d sworn justice for—he couldn’t afford to let his emotions muck up the works.

“I’ve been trying to piece together a conspiracy case against the people we suspect were involved in the Wayne Cortland crime network,” he said finally, lowering his voice by habit. “You know that Blake Culpepper has been fingered as one of the people involved.”

“And you come here in the middle of the night to a hospital waiting room to ask Blake’s distant cousin questions about his criminal activity?” Doyle sound unconvinced.

“Not about Culpepper.” Dalton tamped down a smile at the thought that he actually knew something his know-it-all half brother didn’t. “I came here to ask her questions about her late husband.”

“You have questions about Johnny? Why?”

“Because odds are good he was part of Cortland’s organization.”

Chapter Two

Briar had never liked hospitals, even before her mother’s death from breast cancer. The antiseptic smells, the dim artificial lights, the rhythms of machines that beat like the pulse of some giant predatory beast—they were alien to the life she knew, a life of fresh air, changing seasons, the loamy essence of earth and trees and the feel of wind in her hair.

In the white-sheeted hospital bed, her aunt looked like a thin, sickly child instead of a strong, wiry woman in her late fifties. Her shiny silver-streaked black hair looked dull and brittle beneath the single light shining over her bed, and when Jenny turned her tired gaze to Briar, she looked as if she’d aged a decade overnight.

The cast on her right arm was bulky and the color of old paper, not quite white, not quite yellow. “Does it hurt?” Briar asked, resting her hand on the rough-textured surface of the cast.

“Not at the moment.”

There was a knock on the door behind her. Then it inched open and Walker Nix’s face appeared in the opening. “Is it okay to come in?”

Briar looked at her aunt. “I think Walker wants to ask you some questions about what happened.”

“Of course.” Jenny flashed the detective a wan smile as he entered and came to stand at the foot of her bed.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked Jenny, briefly squeezing Briar’s shoulder before dropping his hand to his pocket to pull out a notebook.

“I’m not feeling much of anything at the moment,” Jenny admitted, making Briar smile. “I guess you want to know what I remember.”

“As much as you can.”

Briar’s aunt lifted her left hand to her brow. “I’d just put Logan to bed when there was a knock on the door.” Jenny’s gaze slanted to meet Briar’s. “I know you say never to answer the door at night, but the person on the other side said he was Doyle Massey, and you know that light on the porch went out night before last.”

Briar gave herself a mental kick. “I meant to put a new bulb in before I left tonight.”

“You can imagine what I was thinking.” Jenny reached out to Briar, clasping her hand when she offered it. “It was your second week on the police force, and here was the chief of police knocking at the door in the middle of the night....”

It had been a ruse guaranteed to get Jenny to open the door, which meant the intruders were familiar enough with her life to know it would work, Briar realized with a shudder of dismay.

“Did you get a good look at the intruders?” Nix asked.

“They wore face paint and dark camouflage. One of them had a skull cap kind of hat—black, I think. It was dark and it all happened so fast. His hair was up under the cap, so I couldn’t tell you what color it was. I think his eyes were dark—they didn’t really give me much time to look at them, to be honest. Just pushed me inside, turned out the lights and started throwing me around.”

Anger built like a fire in the pit of Briar’s gut. “Did you fight them?”

Jenny shook her head, looking stricken. “First blow, they broke my arm. Felt like they’d torn it clear off. Then I guess I hit my head on the hearth, because the next thing I remember is waking up when you came into the bedroom to check on me. I don’t even know how I got there.”

The intruders had probably dragged her there so they wouldn’t have to step over her body while they ransacked the place, Briar thought. “The hospital has her clothes. They’ve bagged them up for evidence,” she told Nix.

He nodded, his dark eyes reflecting the fire she felt roiling in her gut. “Miss Jenny, is there anything else you can remember? Did the men say anything when they were pushing you around?”

Jenny reached up and dashed away tears that had welled in her eyes. “I’m not sure—it was all such a blur....”

Briar squeezed her aunt’s hand. “You never know what might make sense to someone else.”

Jenny gave her hand a little squeeze back. “The other man said something about books.”

Nix and Briar exchanged glances. “What books?” Nix asked.

“I don’t know.” Jenny shook her head, wincing as the motion apparently made her headache flare up. “He just said something like ‘The books could be anywhere.’”

“What kind of books do you have?” Nix asked Briar curiously.

“Nothing valuable,” she assured him. “Some of Logan’s picture books, all my books from community college, some novels. Johnny didn’t do a lot of reading for pleasure, so I don’t even know if I have any of his books left. But none of them would be worth breaking into a cabin and beating up a woman for. Believe me.”

Jenny’s eyelids were drooping, Briar noticed, though she was trying not to show her weariness. Turning to Nix, Briar gave a little nod of her head toward the door.

“Miss Jenny, thank you for the information. I’m going to head out now and let you get some rest.” Nix closed up his notebook and put it back in his pocket. “You just let me know if you remember anything else.”

“I don’t know how much help I’ve been,” Jenny said with a sigh.

“You’ve been a big help,” Briar assured her. “Now I want you to concentrate on feeling better. Okay?”

“Who’s going to keep Logan for you while I’m all trussed up in this thing?” Jenny feebly lifted the heavy cast on her broken arm.

Briar hadn’t had time to think that far ahead. “I’ll figure it out, Aunt Jenny. You know I always do.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have opened the door.”

As Nix headed for the door, Briar bent and kissed her aunt’s furrowed brow. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t fret yourself about it, okay?”

She waited by her aunt’s bedside until the older woman had drifted back to sleep. Then she tiptoed out of the room.

Nix was waiting outside the door, leaning against the wall. “She’s lucky to be alive.”

“I know.” Briar pushed back the springy curls that had slipped the bonds of her ponytail holder to fall in her face. She’d already had a rougher night off duty than she’d had on patrol. “What are the odds this break-in isn’t related to the previous one?”

Nix fell into step with her as she started down the hallway toward the waiting room. “I don’t know. We thought the last break-in was related to Dana’s visit, remember?”

“The Cumberland curse,” she murmured. Shortly after Dana had made a visit to Briar’s cabin, someone had broken in and trashed the place. Briar had assumed the break-in might have been an act of malice, to punish her for letting Tallie Cumberland’s daughter into her home.

The people of her small community, Cherokee Cove, had come to blame the Cumberlands for almost everything that went wrong in their world. Dana Massey’s mother, Tallie Cumberland, had become the target of a ruthless wealthy family after she’d accused them of stealing her child.

Dalton Hale’s family, in fact.

It didn’t matter that Tallie had told the truth. Subtly but unmistakably, Sutherlands and Hales had let it be known that any friend of a Cumberland was an enemy. And their influence in Bitterwood was far and wide. Nobody defied them without consequences. Tallie had left Bitterwood before the age of twenty, driven from town along with her family.

When Dana Massey had come to Bitterwood a couple of months ago, looking so much like her mother, a new round of Cumberland-curse fever had commenced. At the time of the last break-in, Briar and Nix had assumed one of her Cherokee Cove neighbors had been leaving her a message about mixing with Cumberlands.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

“Is Dalton Hale still here?” she asked Nix.

“He was still in the waiting room when I left.”

Great, she thought. Just great.

What the hell did he want with her, anyway? Why had he been asking questions about Johnny’s murder? That mystery had been languishing in cold-case territory for months now.

Why was the Ridge County prosecutor’s office suddenly interested in the murder again?

* * *

DALTON HALE HAD never seen himself as an angry man. Passionate, yes. Forceful in the pursuit of justice. But not one who possessed the kind of bitter rage that destroyed the lives and families of those who passed through his world.

But he was angry now. Fury burned in his gut like acid, eating away at every vestige of the man he’d once believed himself to be. It had poisoned his relationship with his father and grandfather until he’d found himself struggling to speak to them with any semblance of civility. It had ripped holes in the solid foundation of his career, taking him overnight from golden boy to uncertain risk in the eyes of the men and women who could make or break his future.

And for what? For a lie told years ago and a truth buried for over three decades. The vindication of a woman long dead and the total destruction of a man whose name had once meant something, not just here in Tennessee but all the way to the steps of the United States Capitol.

In a world where very little in life was fair, Dalton had spent his own life trying to even the odds for people without power or privilege.

People like the woman who had given birth to him.

And now he was angry at her, too. For having existed. For having come back here nearly fifteen years ago for one last look at the son she’d left behind. For becoming, with her husband, a victim of his grandfather’s steely will and his father’s emotional weakness.

And for giving birth to another son and a daughter who had invaded his well-planned world and asked inconvenient questions about a truth that should have remained buried.

They had made him into a man he didn’t recognize anymore.

And he was angry at himself, most of all, for letting them.

Maybe if he’d been brought up by earthy, straight-talking mountain folk like his birth mother, he could have vented all this rage in one rip-roaring, glass-smashing, fist-flying explosion. Gone on a tear and let the fury have reign. Got it out of his system and been done with it.

But he’d been raised by Nina Hale, not Tallie Cumberland. And Hales didn’t throw angry fits. They kept their emotions under control, functioning on reason and behaving at all times with civility and good manners.

Except when they were killing inconvenient people, he reminded himself as he faced his half brother with clenched fists and fought the urge to take a swing.

“What evidence do you have to support your theory about Johnny Blackwood?” Doyle’s calm tone was deceptive. Dalton didn’t miss the dangerous gleam of anger in the chief’s green eyes, eyes so like his own that he’d all but given up hoping the past couple of months had all been one nightmarish mistake.

“I’m not prepared to try my case before you, chief.”

“In other words, you’re talking out your—”

Laney put her hand on Doyle’s arm, stopping him midsentence. “Dalton’s been looking into the Wayne Cortland case,” she told her fiancé. “He’s been trying to unravel the Tennessee side of the organization, see if he can build criminal cases against everyone involved.”

Doyle’s expression took on a slight grudging hint of admiration that caught Dalton by surprise. Even worse, he felt an answering flutter of something that might be satisfaction deep in the pit of his gut, as if the chief’s approval actually mattered. He beat back the sensation with ruthless determination.

“I have to confess, I don’t know a lot about Johnny Blackwood,” Doyle said in a less confrontational tone. “I know he was murdered several months ago, and the case went cold pretty quickly.”

“It’s not his murder that interests me,” Dalton answered before he remembered he didn’t want to share any information with the chief. He sighed, knowing what he’d said would only make Massey more, not less, interested in Johnny Blackwood’s possible connection to Cortland.

Fortunately, Briar Blackwood chose that moment to return to the waiting room. She looked tired and angry, her black curls spilling into her face from her untidy ponytail as she strode into the room. Her storm-cloud eyes locked with his, and she gave a curt backward nod of her head, a silent invitation to join her outside. She murmured something to Nix and then walked out of the waiting room again.

“I have to go,” Dalton murmured, already moving toward the door.

“Be careful. She’s tougher than she looks.” Doyle’s words sounded more like a taunt than a warning.

His back stiffening, Dalton left the waiting room and looked up and down the corridor for the Blackwood woman.

She stood at the window at the far end of the hall, her back to him. She had a neat, slim figure accentuated by snug jeans and a curve-hugging long-sleeved T-shirt. The messy ponytail had almost given up, gathering only a small clump of curls at the back of her neck while the rest of her hair spilled free across her shoulders. As he walked toward her, she reached back and pulled the elastic band free, letting the rest of her hair loose to tangle and coil around her neck.

An unexpected tug in his groin caught Dalton by surprise. His steps faltered before he caught himself.

Not an option, Hale. Not even close to an option.

Unfortunately, the more he tried not to think about Briar Blackwood as a woman, the more of her feminine features he noticed. Like the perfect size of her breasts, neither too large nor too small for her compact frame. Or the flare of her hips and curvy contours of her bottom.

She had a fine face, too—more interesting than conventionally pretty, with lightly tanned skin splashed with small cinnamon freckles and large black-fringed eyes currently the color of antique pewter.

Fire flashed in those gray eyes as she turned to look at him. “Mr. Hale, I don’t know what you think you know about my husband or his murder, but if you think it’s a way to get back at your brother and sister—”

“Don’t call them that.”

Her dark eyebrows notched slightly upward. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. I don’t sugarcoat the truth. You and the chief share a mother. You don’t have to like it. I don’t reckon he likes it much himself, but there you are anyway. And if you’re messing around in my life because you think it’ll piss off your brother, you can just move along and find somebody else to use. I won’t be party to it.”

He wanted to be angry at her for her bluntness, but in truth, he found it something of a relief. Everybody else he knew, friends and colleagues he’d known for years, seemed to walk around on eggshells around him, as if they feared speaking plainly about the train wreck his life had become. He might not like what Briar Blackwood had to say, but at least she was saying it aloud and without apology.

“Understood,” he said with similar bluntness. “But my interest in your husband’s murder has nothing to do with Massey.”

“Then why are you suddenly interested in what happened to Johnny?”

He studied her, wondering if her straightforward style and “call a spade a spade” philosophy extended to her own life. “Why aren’t you more interested, Mrs. Blackwood?”

His question hit the mark. He saw her eyes widen slightly, and her pink lips flattened with annoyance. “What makes you think I’m not?”

“Most people who lose a loved one to murder don’t move on with their lives so easily.”

The fire returned to those gunmetal eyes. “What would you have me do? Bury myself with him? Turn the cabin into a shrine and worship his memory? I have a small son. I have bills to pay and debts to honor. I don’t have time to haunt the police station begging them to solve his case. I was there for the whole thing. I knew how hard they tried to follow leads. But there weren’t any leads to follow. Not here in Ridge County.”

“Where, then, if not here in Ridge County?” he asked softly.

Up flickered those eyes again, changing tone with quicksilver speed. Now they were hard edged and cold as hoarfrost. “What made you come to Maryville at this time of night to ask me questions about my husband? Why tonight, smack in the middle of all this uproar?”

She wasn’t going to tell him what he needed to know, he saw, unless he gave her something in return. The chief was right—she was tougher than she looked. But how much could he tell her without driving her further away?

“I’m investigating the Wayne Cortland crime organization. I assume, as a police officer, you have at least a passing knowledge of the case.”

She nodded quickly. “I do.”

Much of the information he’d gathered over the past few months was highly confidential, but he had a feeling he wouldn’t get far with this woman if he didn’t cough up a little new information. But the newest revelation of his ongoing investigation, the lead that had brought him to Maryville Mercy Hospital in the middle of the night, was something he didn’t think Johnny Blackwood’s widow wanted to hear.

“I’m trying to connect the dots between Cortland and some of the Tennessee groups that may have been working for him.”

“I know. My cousin Blake is part of the Blue Ridge Infantry. Tennessee division.” She spoke in a dry, humorless drawl liberally spiced with disdain. Clearly not a fan of either her cousin or his pretense of patriotism. Good. That made his work here marginally less difficult.

But only marginally.

He paused a moment to size her up again, telling himself it wasn’t an excuse to appreciate once more her tempting curves. But his body’s heated reaction demolished that lie in a few accelerated heartbeats.

He forced his focus back to the problem of her husband’s potential involvement in Cortland’s organization. “How much did you know about your husband’s job?”

She hadn’t been expecting that question, he saw. Her brows furrowed and she cocked her head slightly to one side, countering with a question of her own. “What do you know about my husband’s job?”

“He was a driver with Davenport Trucking.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And because Wayne Cortland was trying to take control of Davenport Trucking through a proxy, you’re wondering if Johnny might have been on Cortland’s payroll.”

“Yes,” he answered, though it wasn’t the entire truth. He hadn’t made the connection between Johnny and Cortland because of Davenport Trucking, but if she bought that reason for his questions, he’d go with it.

“That’s thin gruel,” she said with a shake of her head. “There are dozens of people driving trucks for Davenport Trucking. You have another reason for targeting Johnny.”

“He was murdered.”

“And you think it’s connected to Cortland because...?”

She wasn’t going to be mollified by half truths, he saw with dismay. Not only was she tougher than she looked; she was smarter than he’d reckoned.

Still, he gave it one more shot, not so much out of concern for her feelings as from his own bone-deep weariness of scandal and acts of betrayal. “Can you accept that I have my reasons and I’m not inclined to share them?”

The look she gave him was uncomfortably penetrating. He felt himself closing up in defense, not ready to have her poking around in his brain.

She turned suddenly and started walking away.

“Wait.” He trailed after her.

She stopped and whirled around so quickly he almost barreled into her. “I want the truth. I don’t need you to protect my feelings or try to handle me. If you can’t play fair, you can count me out of your game.”

“It’s not a game.”

“What drew your attention to my late husband? What makes you think he’s connected to Wayne Cortland?”

There was steel in her voice but also a hint of a tremor, as if she knew whatever he had to say would be bad. So she hadn’t been naive about Johnny Blackwood’s personal failings, he thought. It wouldn’t make the truth any less sordid, but she might be less injured by the blow.

“I’ll make it easier for you,” she said quietly, her gaze dropping to the collar of his shirt. “The day Johnny’s body showed up on Smoky Ridge, I’d spoken to a lawyer about filing for divorce.”

The words were spoken flatly, but Dalton didn’t miss the tremble of vulnerability that underlay them. Not a broken heart, he assessed silently, but a deeply shattered pride.

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

She gave an impatient toss of her dark curls. “Just tell me why you think Johnny was involved with Cortland.”

“Because he was involved with Cortland’s secretary,” Dalton answered. “They were having an affair. And she thinks he was using her to get closer to Wayne Cortland.”

Chapter Three

Briar didn’t flinch. She didn’t tremble or cry or do anything that Dalton Hale was clearly bracing himself to deal with as he lowered the boom.

But inside she died a little, another tiny piece of herself ripping away to join the other little scraps of soul shrapnel that had come unmoored during the slow unraveling of her marriage.

“How long?” she asked, pleased at the uninflected tone of her voice.

“She says about three months.”

That was about right, she thought, remembering the growing distance between Johnny and her in the months before his murder. In fact, she’d long suspected he might have been unfaithful during her early pregnancy, when her normally sturdy body had betrayed her with dizzy spells and five months of near-constant nausea before she’d regained her strength for the last four months.

Johnny had liked the idea of having a baby, but the process had left him feeling peevish and neglected. As if the whole thing should have been about him and not the baby she was desperately trying to carry to a healthy birth.

In fact, he’d reacted like an overgrown baby himself. It had marked the beginning of the long, tortuous end of their twelve-year romance.

“Mrs. Blackwood?”

She realized she hadn’t responded to him, hadn’t even moved a muscle, her body and mind focused inward to her own unexpected pain. She gathered the tatters of her wits to ask, “What makes her think he was using her to get to Cortland?”

“Do you really want that much detail?” he asked, not unkindly.

She supposed not. At least, not right now, when she was still processing another ugly piece of truth about the only man she’d ever loved. “Did she offer any proof other than her own feelings?” The question came out with a hint of cold disdain. Not an attractive sound, but she couldn’t unsay it.

“I’m not at liberty—”

“Get back to me when you are.” She turned and started walking away once more, this time not stopping when he called her name.

She entered the waiting room, where only Nix and Logan remained. Logan lay curled up in the chair beside Nix, fast asleep.

“Everybody else had to go,” Nix said quietly, rising as he spotted her. “Work comes bright and early in the morning.”

“For you, too,” she said with a faint smile, hoping her inner turmoil wasn’t showing. Nix was the closest thing she had to a brother, and if he thought for a moment that Dalton Hale had upset her, he might go looking to mete out a little Smoky Mountain justice on her behalf.

“This is my work.”

He opened his arms and she slipped into his brotherly embrace, glad that his deepening relationship with the chief’s sister hadn’t changed the warmth of their own long-standing friendship. Right now she needed a friend in her corner, someone who’d back her up without asking any hard questions. “Aunt Jenny’s probably not going to be up for any more questions tonight. You can go home and get some sleep.”

He rubbed her back. “You and Logan are coming home with me.”

She looked up at him. “Dana’s okay with that?”

“She’s making up the sofa bed as we speak.”

“Don’t screw up and let that one go,” she said. “I like her.”

“Yeah, I kind of like her, too,” Nix murmured.

As she started to pull away from his embrace, movement in the doorway caught her eye. Dalton Hale stood there, watching her and Nix through narrowed eyes. She let go of Nix and turned to face him, lifting her chin. “Later, Mr. Hale.”

He gave a short nod and walked away.

“You sure he’s not giving you trouble?”

“No trouble,” she lied, turning to ease her sleeping son out of the chair and into her arms.

* * *

DALTON TRIED TO stretch his legs, but the cab of the Chevy S-10 pickup truck was too small to allow for much motion. He’d wanted to buy a big, spacious luxury car—he had money, damn it, and it wasn’t a sin to spend it on comfort sometimes. But his campaign manager, Bill Murphy, had pointed out that he was running for office in a county where many people still fed themselves and their families with wild game and the fruits of their homestead gardens. An American-made pickup truck said Dalton was one of them, just another homegrown Smoky Mountain boy. The smaller, more fuel-efficient S-10 said he was environmentally conscious and a protector of the land they all loved.

But the Infiniti M35 he’d wanted to buy instead of the S-10 would have said he was a tall man with a good income who could afford not to have cramps in his legs to appear as if he were something he wasn’t.

Serving the people of his county shouldn’t have been so damned hard. Whatever people like Doyle Massey and Briar Blackwood thought, his motives for wanting the job of head county prosecutor weren’t entirely self-serving. He supposed it might be seen as a stepping-stone to state office and maybe national office one day, but if that were his only reason for wanting the job, he would have given up a long time ago. He wasn’t a politician by nature. He supposed, in a sense, that trait was one he and Briar Blackwood shared in common.

Sugarcoating things had never come naturally to him.

Her house was dark and quiet. She wasn’t there, of course; she worked the five-to-midnight shift at the police station—rookie hours, his clerk had called it with a laugh when he’d asked the man to learn her work hours.

Her absence was why he had come here at night to keep watch over her cabin, to see if the people who’d broken in the night before were of a mind to give it another try. He wasn’t even sure she was staying here tonight; she’d stayed the previous night with Walker Nix at his Cherokee Cove cabin about a mile up the mountain. He assumed, though he couldn’t know for sure, that Dana Massey had stayed there, as well, marking her territory.

That’s unfair, a small voice in the back of his head admonished him. His mother’s voice, he recognized—not the troubled girl who’d apparently given birth to him but the sweet-natured, softhearted woman named Nina Hale who’d raised him from infancy. She was his mother. Tallie Cumberland was an inconvenient fact of biology.

He hadn’t talked to his mother in a couple of days. He needed to remedy that fact, because of all the people involved in the Tallie Cumberland scandal, she was the most fragile and innocent of all. She’d lost as much as Dalton had—her husband and father were in jail, looking at spending years behind bars, and she’d learned that the son she’d loved even before his birth had died in his hospital bassinet thirty-seven years ago.

He checked his watch. Only a little after nine. She’d probably be awake still, all alone in that big rambling house in Edgewood. He pulled out his cell phone and hit the speed dial for her number.

His mother answered on the second ring. “Dalton?”

“Hi, Mom.”

“I’ve been meaning to call you all day,” she said, her voice soft with badly veiled anxiety. “Your father’s lawyer called this morning. He wants me to talk to Paul about taking the plea deal. Your father doesn’t want to do it. You know how he can be when he sets his mind on something.”

Like covering up a fifteen-year-old murder and taking potshots at a woman asking inconvenient questions, he thought. He’d never speak those thoughts aloud, of course. He loved his mother dearly, but she was no Briar Blackwood, able to take emotional body blows without batting an eye.

“I know you want him out of prison as early as possible,” he said gently. “But I respect that he feels the need to pay for what he did.”

“He was just trying to protect us,” she said softly. “You know that’s all he cared about. Tell me you know that, Dalton.”

“I know that,” he said, and hoped she didn’t hear the doubt.

“Please talk to him. He won’t let me visit him at the jail, but he’ll talk to you. I know he really wants to talk to you.”

Guilt sliced another piece out of his conscience. He hadn’t gone to see his father or his grandfather in a month, ever since the truth about what they’d done had finally gotten past his denial. Outrage at Doyle and Dana Massey destroying his family hadn’t gone away; he’d just added fury at his father and grandfather to the toxic mix.

It wasn’t healthy, feeling so angry all the time. He just hadn’t yet figured out how to let go of the anger. He was beginning to wonder if he ever would.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, because he didn’t think he could sell a lie on that particular topic, not even to his mother, who wanted to believe they could somehow patch up their shattered lives and move forward as if none of it had ever happened.

“I wouldn’t mind seeing you soon, too,” she added softly.

“I’ll come by soon,” he promised. “We’ll have dinner.”

“I’ll make shrimp creole. Your favorite.”

It hadn’t been his favorite since he was eight years old and discovered the joy of Italian-sausage pizza, but he kept that fact to himself. “Can’t wait.”

“I love you, Dalton.”

He closed his eyes, swallowing the ache in his throat. “Love you, too, Mom. I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll figure out when I can make it for dinner.” He slid his phone back in his pocket and settled down to watch Briar Blackwood’s darkened cabin.

* * *

BY THE TIME her patrol shift ended at midnight, Briar had begun to wish she’d taken up the chief’s offer of a night off to recover from the previous evening’s excitement. Despite the recent rise in crime in the county, the Bitterwood P.D. night shift wasn’t exactly a date with danger.

She’d answered exactly two calls during her seven-hour shift, and one of them had been a false alarm. The other had been a car crash on Old Purgatory Road near the bridge, but even that had turned out to be more paperwork than a daring rescue. Two patrons at Smoky Joe’s Tavern had tried to turn out of the parking lot at the same time, crashing fenders. Neither had registered as high as .08 on the Breathalyzer, so she’d written up a report and left it to them to sort out the insurance issues.

When she dropped by Nix’s cabin to pick up her son and the bag of clothes she’d packed for the overnight stay, Nix was waiting up for her. “You can stay here another night,” he said when he opened the door for her.

“No, I can’t.” She squeezed his arm and smiled. “Got to get back on the horse again.”

“A cabin break-in isn’t exactly the same thing as getting tossed from a pony. Plus, you’ll have to wake up the little man.”

“Too late to worry about that,” she murmured as she heard her son calling her name from down the hall. She followed the sound to the spare room, where Nix had set up the sofa bed for Logan, piling pillows around him to keep him from rolling too close to the edge. Logan looked sleepy and cranky, but the watery smile he flashed when he caught sight of her face made her heart melt into a sticky little pool of motherly love in the center of her chest. “Mama.”

“You ready to sleep in your own bed tonight?” She plucked him from the tangle of sheets and buried her nose in his neck, reveling in the soft baby smell of him.

“Yep,” he answered with an exaggerated nod that banged his little forehead against her chin. “Ow!” He giggled as he rubbed his forehead.

“Watch where you put that noggin, mister,” she answered with a laugh of her own, pressing a kiss against his fingers. “Let’s go home, okay?”

“I’ll get his things.” Nix picked up the scattered toys she’d packed for Logan while she carried him out to the front room. Nix carried the two small backpacks for her and put them in the front seat of the Jeep while she strapped Logan into his car seat in the back.

“If you decide you’d rather come back here, no matter what time it is, you pack up the little fellow and come on back. I’ll keep the sofa bed ready.” Nix reached through the open back door and gave Logan a head ruffle. Logan grinned up at him and patted his curls back down.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, although nothing short of a full-on assault was going to drive her out of her own house. She wasn’t going to play the damsel in distress, not even for someone like Nix, who had only her best interests at heart.

She’d made too many decisions in her life already based on what other people wanted her to do. She wasn’t going to ignore her own instincts any longer.

Still, her steely resolve took a hit when Logan’s sleepy voice piped up from the backseat as she turned onto the winding road to her cabin. “Mama, are the mean men gonna be there tonight? I don’t like them.”

She put the brakes on, slowing the Jeep to a standstill in the middle of the deserted road. “I don’t like them either,” she admitted, beginning to question her motives for taking her son back to the cabin so soon after the break-in. Was she willfully putting him in danger just to bolster her own desire to stand on her own two feet?

But she couldn’t tuck her tail and run away from their home. It was one of the few things she could call her own in the whole world. Her great-grandfather had built the cabin over a hundred years ago with wood he’d chopped himself and the sweat of his own brow. Her grandfather had added to it over the years—indoor plumbing, extra rooms as the family had expanded. When he had died, he’d left the place to Briar’s mother, who’d deeded it to Briar as a wedding gift.

It was one of the few things she had left now of her mother. That cabin and twenty-four years of good memories.

She couldn’t let fear drive her away from that legacy. For her own sake and especially for Logan’s.

“I won’t let the bad men scare you anymore,” she said firmly, hoping she was telling the truth. Because as much as she’d tried to hide it the night before at the hospital, Dalton Hale’s words had weighed heavily on her. Not the thought of Johnny’s infidelity—she may have been dismayed by the information, but she hadn’t been surprised. But the idea that he might have gotten himself tangled up in Wayne Cortland’s criminal activities—that was the notion that had nagged her every waking hour since Hale first brought up the subject.

Johnny hadn’t turned out to be the strong, solid man of honor she’d thought he would be. They’d married too young, she supposed, right out of high school. They’d started trying to have a family before either of them had reached their twenties, and the lack of success for the first few years had been an unexpected strain on their bond.

She’d given up before Johnny had, figuring a child of her own just wasn’t going to happen, but he’d seen the failure as a personal affront, a challenge to his masculinity. His inability to get her pregnant had turned out to be one of those moments in life where adversity led to unpleasant revelations about a person’s character.

She hadn’t been happy with what she’d seen in Johnny during those months when he’d fought against the tide of reality. She hadn’t realized how much his sense of self had been tangled up with his notion of sexual virility, maybe because she’d made him wait until marriage before they slept together. She’d seen his patience and willingness to deny himself for her as a sign of his strength.

She’d begun to wonder, as he grew angrier and more resentful with each negative pregnancy test, if she’d read him right. What if he hadn’t denied himself at all? What if he’d been sleeping with other girls the whole time she was making him wait?

Then, almost as soon as they stopped trying, she’d gotten pregnant with Logan, and for a while Johnny had seemed to be his former self: happy, good-natured and loving. Until the nausea had started, and the doctor had started warning her about the possibility of not carrying the pregnancy to term.

“Mama?”

Logan’s voice held a hint of worry, making her realize how long she’d been sitting still in the middle of the road, trying to make a decision.

They were almost home. And it was home, after all. Two invasions of her sanctuary made her only that much more determined to reclaim its sense of peace and safety.

“We’re almost home,” she said firmly, shifting the rearview mirror until she could see her son’s sleepy face. He met her gaze in the mirror and grinned, melting her heart all over again.

She reached the cabin within a couple of minutes and parked in the gravel drive that ended at the utility shed at the side of the house. She paused for a moment, taking a thorough look around for any sign of intruders. But the night was dark, the moon fully obscured by lowering clouds that promised rain by morning. She still hadn’t changed the front-porch light bulb, she realized with dismay. The only light that pierced the gloom was from the Jeep’s headlights, their narrow beams ending in twin circles on the flat face of the shed wall.

Don’t borrow trouble, Briar Rose. The voice in her head was her mother’s, from back when she’d been as strong and immovable as the rocky face of Hangman’s Bald near the top of Smoky Ridge. Don’t borrow trouble—it’ll come in its own sweet time, and more than soon enough.

She cut the Jeep’s engine and walked around to the passenger side to get Logan out of his seat. He lifted his arms with eagerness, despite his sleepy yawn, and she unlatched him as quickly as she could, wanting to get inside the cabin before the Jeep’s headlight delay ran out.

She had just pulled him free of the car-seat belts when the headlights extinguished, plunging them into inky darkness.

Without the moon and the stars overhead, the darkness was nearly complete. The town center lay two miles to the south; her closest neighbor was a half mile up the mountain, invisible to her through the thicket of evergreens and hardwoods that grew between them.

Tucking Logan more firmly against her side, she reached in her pocket for her cell phone. Her fingers had just brushed against the smooth casing of the phone when she heard a crunch of gravel just behind her.

She let go of the phone and brought her hand up to the pancake holster she’d clipped behind her back before leaving work. But she didn’t reach it before hands clawed at her face, jerking her head back until it slammed against a solid wall of heat. She heard Logan’s cry and felt him being pulled from her grasp.

Clutching him more tightly, she tried to get her hand between the body that held her captive and the Glock nestled in the small of her back, but her captor’s grasp was brutally strong. His fingers dug into her throat, cutting off her air for a long, scary moment.

Then the air shattered with the unmistakable crack of rifle fire, and the world around her turned upside down.

Chapter Four

The rifle kicked in Dalton’s hands, nearly knocking him from his feet, but he tightened his grip and fired another warning shot into the ground, his pulse stuttering in his ears like a snare drum.

He’d had little hope that his desperate intervention would work, but to his relief, the two figures tugging at Briar Blackwood dived for cover at the second bark of the Remington.

The darkness of the night was near total, but he’d been dozing in the car for hours, his eyes adjusting to the gloom enough for him to make out the shadowy shapes of the two men escaping into the woods. Definitely both men—he had quickly discerned that fact as soon as he’d seen them gliding out of the woods in the wake of Briar’s arrival.

He’d had no time to warn her, only enough time to unstrap the Remington 700 rifle that hung on a rack in the back window of the S-10’s cab, another gift from his campaign manager. He knew enough about rifles to check that it was loaded and to point the barrel where it would make a loud noise but have no chance of causing injury, but in truth, he was damned lucky his ruse had worked, and he was praying like crazy as he raced toward Briar’s still figure on the ground by the Jeep that the men didn’t figure out he’d been bluffing.

She stirred as he came closer, putting her son between her body and the Jeep as she rose to her knees and turned a pistol toward him.

“Don’t shoot! It’s Dalton Hale.”

She held her shooting stance for a heart-stopping moment while he froze in place. Fear flooded him, roared in his ears like a storm-tossed sea and made his hands shake as he held the rifle away in a show of surrender.

“Cover me until we reach the cabin,” she rasped, shoving her weapon behind her back and turning to scoop up her son.

He hurried behind her, keeping his eyes on the woods, looking for any sign of the intruders returning, but the gloom was absolute. He heard no sounds of movement in the underbrush, however, as they hurried up the cabin steps. With a rattle of keys, Briar unlocked the door one-handed and shoved her way inside, growling for him to hurry and come in behind her.

Once he was inside, she turned the deadbolt and slumped hard against the front door, her chest rising and falling in quick, harsh gasps.

“Are you okay?” he asked, setting the rifle aside and reaching for the little boy, who was wobbling precariously in her faltering grasp.

She tried to pull her son away from him, but her knees buckled, and he grabbed the boy quickly, keeping him from falling. With alarm, he watched her slide to a sitting position in front of the door, her breath labored.

“Mama!” The child started crying, wriggling against Dalton’s grasp.

“It’s okay, little man. Your mama’s going to be okay.” He lowered the boy to the floor, and he raced away on stubby little legs, throwing himself at his mother.

She lifted her arms and hugged him close, her face buried in his neck. “Call 911,” she said, her voice muffled against her son’s body.

Pulling out his cell phone, he reached for the light switch on the wall by the door. Golden light flooded the front room, making him squint as he punched in the numbers and crouched in front of Briar. A female voice came through the phone speaker. “911. What’s your emergency?”

He summarized the situation quickly, putting his hand on Briar’s shoulder. “I can’t tell if she’s injured—”

“I’m okay.” Briar pulled her face away from her son’s neck and met Dalton’s gaze. She was pale, and her eyes were red-rimmed and damp, but her voice sounded a little less tortured, and color was coming back into her cheeks. “Tell her to call Walker Nix.”

Dalton gave the instruction. “Do you want paramedics?” he asked.

Briar held her crying son away from her, looking him over for injuries. “Logan, are you okay? Do you have any boo-boos?”

“Mama!” he wailed, tightening his grip on her neck like a baby monkey.

She hugged him close and looked up at Dalton. “I think we’re both okay. No paramedics.”

He wasn’t so sure. Dark bruises had begun to form along the curve of her throat. “You’re injured,” he murmured, reaching out to touch the purple spots before he realized what he was doing.

She stared up at him with wide stormy eyes, a dark flush spreading up her neck into her cheeks. “I’m fine,” she said again, forcing her gaze back to her son’s tearstained face. “Just get Nix here.”

“Just get the police here,” Dalton told the dispatcher. “I’m going to hang up now.” He pocketed the phone and tried not to tumble backward out of his crouch. His knees were starting to feel like jelly.

“Can you help me up?” She reached out one hand.

He took her hand and pushed to his feet. Her fingers tightened around his as he helped her up, and she didn’t let go right away, as if afraid that she might topple over again if she let go of his grasp. She had a warm, firm grip, even in her present distress, he noticed. She apparently came from what his grandfather would have called “hardy stock,” for already she looked close to full recovery, save for the mottled contusions on her throat.

“Did you hit either of them?” she asked, rocking slightly from side to side as she rubbed her whimpering son’s back.

He shook his head. “Didn’t aim for them. I’m not a great shot, and I wasn’t going to risk hitting you or the kid.”

“Logan,” she said with a hint of a smile. “His name is Logan.”

The little boy had settled down to a series of soft hitching sniffles. “Can I get something for him?” Dalton asked, trying to remember what he’d found comforting as a little boy. “A cookie or a toy or something?”

“There’s ice cream in the freezer. Strawberry—it’s his favorite.”

Dalton headed for the kitchen. He noticed, in passing, that she’d cleaned the place up sometime between the night before and now. Even the torn sofa cushions had been mended.

As he reached for the refrigerator’s freezer compartment, Briar said, “No, not that one. The one in the corner.”

He spotted a chest freezer nearby and pulled open the top. Inside, instead of the brand-name carton he was expecting, he found a large plastic tub labeled Strawberry Ice Cream in neat, clear handwriting. He pulled out the tub, uncovering what looked to be stacks and stacks of vacuum-packed cuts of some sort of meat. Looking closer, he saw that, like the ice cream, they were labeled in the same strong handwriting. Venison Shoulder, read one of the packages, with a date—December of the previous year—inscribed below. Another nearby contained pork—wild pig, to be exact—apparently put in the freezer only four weeks ago.

He closed the freezer and set the container of ice cream on the small kitchen table. “Hey, Logan, how about some ice cream?”

The little clinging monkey turned his tearstained face toward Dalton, his big gray eyes wide with a mixture of caution and curiosity.

Dalton tried again. “Ice cream, Logan. You want some?”

Logan looked up at his mother as if to seek her permission. She lowered him to the floor. “It’s okay,” she said. “You can have some.”

Logan crossed the distance to the kitchen with small cautious steps, still watching Dalton with a healthy dose of distrust.

But when Dalton plopped a hearty scoop of homemade strawberry ice cream into the bowl in front of his chair, he climbed up and grabbed the spoon, ready to dig in. By the time Dalton put away the ice-cream container and turned back to the kitchen, Logan was half-bathed in the sticky sweet stuff.

His mother stood at one of the front windows, peering out through a narrow gap in the curtains.

“Do you see anything?” Dalton asked, walking toward her.

She let the curtains fall closed and turned to look at him. “It’s dark out.”

Not quite the question he’d asked, but he let it go. “How’s your throat?”

“Why are you here?”

Yeah, he’d figured that question would occur to her sooner or later. “I don’t suppose you’d buy it if I said I was just driving by?”

Her dark eyebrows twitched in reply.

“I was staking out the place. In case the intruders returned.”

The tiniest hint of a smile curved one corner of her mouth. “And what did you plan to do if they did?”

“Call the cops.”

She nodded toward the Remington 700 propped by the door. “Where’d you get the rifle?”

“It’s mine.”

“You hunt a lot, do you?”

He took a stab at changing the subject. “Somebody around here does. Freezer’s full of game.”

“I bag as much as I can during the hunting seasons. We’ll live off that meat for the rest of the year.” She waved her hand toward the rifle. “May I?”

He nodded, and she picked up the weapon, first checking for ammunition. “I heard two rounds. Where did you aim?”

“At the ground.”

She looked up at him. “You have the rest of your ammo on you?”

He didn’t know if there was any other ammunition for the rifle at all, he realized. He’d been lucky it had been loaded—he wasn’t sure what he’d have done if he’d pulled the trigger and nothing had happened.

“Have you ever shot this rifle before?” She sounded as if she knew the answer.

“No.”

“Why do you have it, then?”

“Emergencies,” he answered, the truth too humiliating to admit.

From the look on her face, she saw through his answer anyway. She set the empty rifle against the wall. “If you’d like shooting lessons, I can help you out with that.”

“For a fee?”

Her gaze snapped up to meet his. “You saved us tonight. I reckon I could let you have a lesson for free.” Her voice tightened. “One, at least.”

Great. He’d insulted her. “I didn’t mean—”

“What do you think you’re going to find here?” She leaned her back against the front wall and crossed her arms, looking at him through narrowed eyes. “Or maybe you’re here because those men were working for you?”

He stared at her a moment, wondering if she was joking. The look on her face suggested otherwise. “You think I would put you and your son at risk? For what possible reason?”

“To play hero? To worm your way into my life so you could use me for whatever it is you’re up to.”

“What do you think I’m up to?”

She shrugged. “Hell if I know. Maybe you just want to punish your brother for existing.”

He wouldn’t mind knocking the smug smile off Doyle’s face now and then, but he wouldn’t use someone else to do it. He’d knock it off himself.

“I told you the truth last night at the hospital. I think your husband’s involvement with Wayne Cortland may have gone beyond sleeping with the man’s bookkeeper. I even think his murder wasn’t as random as the police believe.”

She was silent for a long moment, as if letting that thought sink in. Finally, she pushed herself away from the wall, rubbing her eyes with both hands. “What do you want from me? What do you think I can give you?”

It was a good question, and until just a few minutes ago, he’d have said all he wanted was a few minutes of her time, a chance to pick her brain for anything in her husband’s last few months of life that might offer a new lead in the Cortland case. But two attacks on the woman in a row went far beyond coincidence. Apparently he wasn’t the only person who thought Briar Blackwood could aid in the investigation, and unlike Dalton, the others didn’t care who got hurt in the process.

“I think the more pressing question is, why did someone break into your house last night? And why did someone attack you again tonight?”

The sound of a truck engine began to filter through from outside the cabin, and a moment later, headlights flashed through the window, bouncing off the walls. Briar turned to the window. “It’s Nix and Dana.”

Dalton’s heart sank. Dana. Of course she’d be with Nix. They were practically inseparable these days. Walker Nix was one of the reasons she’d decided to stick around Bitterwood instead of heading back to Atlanta.

“If you want to go without seeing your sister,” Briar said quietly, “you can always go out the back.”

Was his dismay so obvious? “I’m not sneaking out like a criminal.”

She shrugged and opened the door at the first sound of footsteps on the front porch. Dana Massey entered first, her eyes widening a notch at the sight of Dalton. Walker Nix followed on her heels, the look he shot at Dalton tinged less with surprise and more with suspicion.

“What are you doing here?” Nix asked.

“He came to my rescue,” Briar answered, locking the door behind them. “Don’t ask why. He doesn’t seem inclined to share his secrets.”

She made him sound like a foot-stomping adolescent, Dalton thought. Hell, maybe that’s what he’d been acting like for the past few months. He’d be the first to admit he hadn’t taken well the earthshaking change in his life history.

“I saw what transpired,” Dalton said. “I’ll tell you what I remember, though I’m afraid it was too dark for me to have seen anything I could testify to in a court of law.”

Nix looked him up and down once, then nodded toward the sofa. “Well, we’ll start with what you can tell us and worry about prosecution later. How about that?”

As Dalton followed the detective to the sofa, he spared one last look at Briar Blackwood standing by the door, her arms crossed defensively over her breasts, her thundercloud gaze following him relentlessly across the room.

* * *

“WHAT DO YOU think he wants with you?” Dana’s voice was little more than a whisper as she walked with Briar into the kitchen.

“He thinks Johnny was part of Cortland’s crew,” Briar answered just as quietly, moving past the now-sticky kitchen table to grab a clean dishcloth. She drenched the cloth with water from the tap and headed for the table to clean up the mess, starting with Logan’s hands and face.

He was grinning now, a strawberry-stained show of little-boy joy that made her heart swell with love. If he was traumatized by what had nearly happened outside only a short while ago, the ice cream had sent it into remission for the time being.

But she couldn’t forget as easily. The men who’d accosted her outside her Jeep had tried to pull Logan away from her. In fact, the more she went over events in her mind, the more convinced she was that this attack, at least, had been all about taking Logan.

But why? She wasn’t in the middle of a custody battle. Johnny’s family saw Logan as much as they cared to, which wasn’t that often, and none of them had shown any sign of wanting to change the custody situation. She certainly had no money or possessions to offer as ransom, and anyone who could sneak through the woods quietly enough that she hadn’t heard them coming would surely know that much about her financial situation.

Yet she couldn’t change the facts of what had happened outside tonight. She couldn’t forget the way one of the men had tugged so ferociously at Logan that she’d been terrified, for a heart-stopping moment before the shots rang out, that she would lose her grip on her son and he’d be spirited away, lost from her forever.

“Do you think Johnny could have been working for Cortland?” Dana asked.

Briar had been pondering that question ever since Dalton had raised it at the hospital. Was it possible? She knew Johnny’s truck route included Travisville, Virginia, where Cortland Lumber had been located before an explosion destroyed the place not long after Johnny’s murder. It was obviously how Johnny had met the woman Dalton Hale believed Johnny had been sleeping with.

But could the man she’d married, the man she’d loved since she was fifteen years old, have gotten involved in the kind of violence and murder Wayne Cortland and his crew of drug dealers, gunrunners and anarchists had spread through the hills for the past couple of years?

The last few years of their marriage had left Briar with few illusions about her childhood sweetheart. He was a better liar than she’d ever credited him to be, and, sadly, she suspected Dalton was probably right about the affair. There’d been other infidelities, as well.

But crossing the line into extortion and murder? Could she really picture Johnny doing such a thing?

She didn’t want to believe it. But something had driven a couple of ruthless intruders to her home for two nights in a row.

“I don’t know,” she answered finally. “But I mean to find out.”

* * *

“SO, WHY ARE you here, anyway?”

Dalton turned his gaze from the head-to-head huddle between Briar Blackwood and Walker Nix, meeting Dana Massey’s wary gaze. He shrugged. “Just passing by.”

“Convenient timing,” she murmured.

“Do you have something you want to say to me? Spit it out.”

Dana’s lips pressed to a tight line. “I know you hate me right now.”

“Hate is far too loaded a word,” he said quietly. “I don’t hate you. I don’t know you well enough to feel anything that strong for you.”

“And you don’t want to.”

He shrugged. “Biology isn’t destiny.”

“Clearly.” She pinned him with a long, cool look and moved away.

With a sigh, Dalton looked back at the two cops locked in low conversation on the sofa. From what little he’d overheard of their discussion, Nix seemed to be asking Briar most of the same questions he’d asked Dalton. He hoped Briar was able to fill in more blanks for the detective than he had.

The noise of Briar’s Jeep passing close by had jarred him from a doze, but it had taken him several seconds more to drag himself to full consciousness. Several seconds more to see the hulking shadows slinking into the clearing from the woods nearby, and more seconds still to realize that he was watching an ambush unfold. He’d looked away for several seconds to retrieve the rifle and set himself up to fire a warning shot.

In truth, he’d seen little of what had gone on between Briar and her assailants. The one thing he remembered, the one element of the attack that had stuck in his head after the rest had faded into chaos, was how desperately she’d held on to her little boy when one of the attackers had tried to wrest him away.

Clearly, Logan meant everything to her.

The boy was asleep on the sofa beside Briar, curled up under a crocheted throw. Dana had offered to take him to his bed, but Briar hadn’t wanted to let him out of her sight. Dalton wondered how she would handle it the next evening when she had to leave him with someone so she could work her patrol shift.

He could solve that problem for her, he realized, the solution weaving itself into place in his sleep-deprived mind. Staying here at this cabin, in the middle of nowhere, only made her and her son more vulnerable to further attacks. Attempts, he corrected himself silently. Tonight hadn’t been an attack so much as an attempt to steal Logan away from her.

The question was, why?

Chapter Five

The front door opened without a knock, and Doyle Massey walked in, his eyes widening as he spotted Dalton. Briar watched warily, prepared to jump in if crisis prevention was needed, but Doyle simply let his gaze slide past his half brother and crossed to where Nix and Briar sat. Dana moved from her standing position by the fireplace to join them.

“What’s he doing here?” Doyle asked quietly.

“He witnessed the attack,” Briar answered in a tone that didn’t invite further questions.

Doyle tipped her chin up with his forefinger to get a good look at the bruises on her throat. “Are you and Logan okay?”

“We’re fine.”

He gave a little wave of his hand toward her injury. “Anybody look at that?”

“I did. In the mirror,” she answered flatly. “Just bruises.”

Doyle glanced at Nix, as if seeking a second opinion. Nix gave a shrug. Doyle looked back at Briar, his eyes hooded in thought. Then he looked at Dalton Hale across the room and gestured with his head for Dalton to join them. He moved aside to make room for Dalton to join the circle.

Briar glanced up at the county prosecutor, curious to see his reaction to Doyle’s silent command. His gaze met hers briefly, then turned toward the chief, who had begun to speak.

“It’s too dark for a search party to do us any good.” Doyle’s voice lost its earlier gentleness. This was his police-business voice. “Neither of you recognized the two men. No soft ground to allow for footprints. Briar said both men wore gloves, so looking for prints is pointless.”

“Are you saying there’s nothing you can do to find those guys?” Dalton looked frustrated. “You don’t think for a second they’ll stop trying, do you?”

“What do you think they want?” Doyle asked him.

“I wasn’t here last night, so I can’t be sure about what motivated those particular intruders,” he answered, his tone measured. “But tonight what I saw was two men trying to take Mrs. Blackwood’s son out of her arms. They came here for the boy.”

Briar couldn’t stop a soft groan from escaping her sore throat at Dalton’s confirmation of her worst fear. She’d known the truth the second the man outside her Jeep tried to pull Logan from her arms.

They had come here tonight to take her son.

“I wish I could say I had enough officers available to post a twenty-four-hour guard here,” Doyle told her.

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