His hand slid up under the hem of Delilah’s jacket and crept beneath her thermal sweater until his cool fingers traced over the hot skin of her waist. “Kiss me.”

She lowered her mouth to his slowly, her heart pounding. His lips were warm and dry, soft at first, but hardening as her mouth met his. She threaded her fingers through his dark hair, slanting his head so that their mouths fit together more completely.

Kissing him still felt like sin and salvation, contradictory and irresistible. She knew she couldn’t let herself want him, but she was powerless to resist the pull of attraction. Nothing—not their present danger or their past betrayals—could stem the tide of her desire…

About the Author

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.

Smoky Ridge Curse

Paula Graves

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For my readers, who choose to read my stories when

there’s such a delightful array of great books out there

to be enjoyed. I’m forever grateful.

Chapter One

Winter had come to Bitterwood, Tennessee, roaring in on a cold, damp wind that poured down the mountain passes and shook the remnants of browning leaves from the sugar maples, sweet gums and dogwoods growing at the middle elevations. Delilah Hammond remembered well from childhood the sharp bite of an Appalachian November and dressed warmly when she headed up the winding mountain road to her mother’s place on Smoky Ridge.

Reesa Hammond was on day three of her latest hop on the sobriety wagon, and withdrawal had hit her hard, killing her appetite and leaving her shaking, angry and suffering from a persistent headache no amount of ibuprofen seemed to relieve. Frankly, Delilah was surprised her mother had bothered trying to stop drinking at all at this point, since her previous eight attempts at sobriety had all ended the same way, five fingers deep in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

Delilah didn’t kid herself that this time Reesa would win the battle with the bottle. But Reesa had taken a hell of a lot of abuse trying to protect Delilah and her brother, Seth, from their sick creep of a sperm donor, so a little barley soup and a few minutes of company wasn’t too much to offer, was it?

Her cell phone beeped as she turned her Camaro into a tight curve. She waited until the road straightened to answer, aware of how dangerous the mountain roads could be, especially at night with rain starting to mix with sleet. “Hammond.”

“Just checking to make sure you hadn’t changed your mind.” The gruff voice on the other end of the line belonged to a former leatherneck named Jesse Cooper, the man who’d been her boss for the past few years, until she’d given her notice two weeks earlier.

“I haven’t,” she answered, tamping down the doubts that had harassed her ever since she’d quit the best job she’d ever had.

“You’re overqualified.”

“I know.”

“You’re no good at small-town politics.”

“I know that, too.”

“You should have held out for chief of police, at least.”

She grinned at that. “Talk about small-town politics.”

“I can keep the job open for a month or two, but that’s it. Our caseload’s growing, and I can’t afford to work shorthanded.”

“I know. I appreciate the vote of confidence in me, but I’m ready for a change.” She tried not to dwell on just how drastic a change she’d made in the past two weeks. Going from a global security and threat assessment firm to a detective on one of Tennessee’s tiniest police forces was turning out to be a shock to the system even she hadn’t anticipated.

She still wasn’t sure why, exactly, she’d decided to stick around Bitterwood, Tennessee, after so many years away. She only knew that a few weeks ago, when the time had come to go back to work in Alabama after an extended assignment in her old hometown, her feet had planted firmly in the rocky Tennessee soil and refused to budge. She’d returned to Maybridge just long enough to work out her two-week notice, talk her landlord into letting her break her long-term lease and gather up her sparse belongings. Two days ago, she’d moved into a rental house off Vesper Road at the foot of Smoky Ridge. In a week, she’d start her new job with the Bitterwood Police Department.

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything else about Adam Brand?” she added as the silence between her and her former boss lingered past comfort.

“Nothing yet. We have feelers out. I know you’re worried.”

“Not worried,” she denied, though it was a lie. “More confused than anything. Going AWOL is not an Adam Brand kind of thing to do. And there’s no way in hell he’s a traitor to this country. It’s not in his DNA.”

“Your brother still won’t tell you anything more about the work he did for Brand?”

“I don’t think Seth knows anything more,” Delilah said. “He didn’t ask a lot of questions, and Brand’s not one to shoot off his mouth.” Even when a few well-chosen words might do him a world of good, she added silently.

“Isabel and Ben have both been trying to reach him, but they’re not having much luck. They didn’t keep in close touch with Brand after leaving the bureau.”

“It happens.” Delilah ignored the stinging pain in the center of her chest. “I’ve got to go. I’m taking soup and sympathy to my mom. She’s on the wagon again.”

“Oh.” She could tell by Jesse’s careful tone that he wanted to say something encouraging, but he’d been around for three or four of her mother’s last brief flirtations with sobriety and knew better than to dish out false hope. “I hope she makes it this time.”

“Yeah, me, too. Say hi to everyone. And call me if you get any news about Brand. I don’t think this Davenport case is really over yet, and he seems to know something about it.”

“Will do.” Jesse hung up.

The Davenport case was at least part of the reason she’d stuck around Bitterwood. Two months earlier, the murders had started—four women found stabbed to death in their beds, though they’d clearly been killed elsewhere. A Bitterwood P.D. detective named Ivy Hawkins had made the first clear connection between the murders—all four women had been friends with a woman named Rachel Davenport, whose dying father owned Davenport Trucking in Maryville, Tennessee, a town twenty minutes from Bitterwood.

When Ivy had caught the murderer, he’d admitted he’d been hired to kill the women. With his cryptic dying words, he’d hinted the killings had everything to do with Rachel Davenport, as Ivy had suspected. Someone had wanted to torment Rachel until she broke, and only after several close calls had the police discovered a struggle for control of Davenport Trucking was at the heart of the campaign of emotional torture.

If there was anything good to come out of the whole mess, it was that Delilah’s black sheep of a brother, Seth, had ended up a hero and even won the girl—he and Rachel Davenport were already talking rings and wedding dates, which seemed pretty quick to Delilah. Then again, she was thirty-four and single. Some might say she was a little too cautious about affairs of the heart.

Her mother’s house was a small cabin near the summit of Smoky Ridge, prone to power outages when the winter storms rolled in. But she had a large fireplace in the front room and a smaller woodstove to warm her bedroom, both of which seemed to be working based on the twin columns of smoke rising over the fir trees surrounding the small cabin.

A thin layer of sleet had started to form on the hard surface of the narrow driveway next to the cabin, crunching under Delilah’s boots as she crossed the tiny concrete patio to the kitchen entrance. She had to bend into the wind as it gusted past her, slapping the screen door against the wall of the cabin.

It swung back as she passed, crashing into her with an aluminum rattle.

She stopped short, skidding on the icy pellets underfoot, and stared at the offending screen door. It hung sideways, still flapping in the cold wind, as if someone had tried to rip it from its hinges.

Moving slowly, she stepped back and reached into her pocket for her keychain, where she kept a small flashlight attached to the ring. She snapped it on and ran the narrow beam across the patio beneath the door.

Dark red splotches, still wet and glistening beneath the thin layer of sleet, marred the concrete surface. Another streak of red stained the aluminum frame of the broken door.

Her first thought was that her mother had gone back on the bottle, taken a spill and was laid up inside somewhere, drunkenly trying to patch herself up. It was the most logical assumption.

But a lot of bad things had been happening in Bitterwood in the past couple of months. And between her FBI training and her years working for Cooper Security, Delilah always assumed the worst.

Setting the bag of take-out soup on the patio table, she pulled her Sig Sauer P229 from the pancake holster behind her back and tried the back doorknob. Unlocked.

She eased the door open. Heat blasted her, a welcome contrast to the icy breeze prickling the exposed skin of her neck. Somewhere in the house, a vacuum cleaner was running on high, its whine almost drowning out the whistle of the wind across the eaves.

She shut the door quietly. Keeping her eyes and ears open, she moved as silently as she could, checking each room as she went. If there had been blood splotches inside the house, they’d been cleaned up already. The rough wood floor beneath her feet was worn but spotless.

In the den at the front of the house, the sound of the vacuum cleaner roared with full force. Reesa Hammond was running an upright vacuum with cheerful energy, dancing to whatever tune she was singing beneath the noise of the cleaner.

She swirled the cleaner around in the opposite direction and jumped when she saw Delilah standing in the doorway, weapon in hand.

Reesa shut off the vacuum cleaner and put her hand over her chest. “Good Lord, Dee Dee, you scared me out of my wits!”

“Are you okay?”

Reesa’s brow furrowed. “I’m fine. Are you okay?”

After a pause, Delilah reholstered her Sig Sauer. “Did you know the screen door to the kitchen’s been nearly ripped off its hinges?”

“Really?” Reesa looked surprised. “It was fine when I got back from the mailbox this afternoon. I guess the wind’s stronger out there than I thought.”

“I don’t think it was the wind,” Delilah murmured, remembering the blood on the patio. “You didn’t hear anything?”

“I was in the shower for a little while, then running the hair dryer, and I’ve been vacuuming the place ever since. I reckon half the mountain could have come down out there and I wouldn’t have heard it.” She cocked her head. “You look tired.”

Delilah gazed back at her mother through narrowed eyes. “I thought you were feeling bad.”

Reesa looked sheepish. “I was, this morning. But when you called and said you were coming over, I didn’t want you to see what a mess the place was, so I started cleaning up. And before I knew it, my headache was gone, and I was feeling so much like my old self, I thought maybe I’d surprise you by having dinner ready for you when you got here.” She sighed. “But you’re early. I haven’t put the casserole in the oven yet.”

“I brought barley soup from Ledbetter’s Café.” And left it out in the cold, she realized, where it had probably reached refrigerator temperature by now.

“And I’ve ruined it for you by feeling better.” Reesa patted her cheek. “I’m sorry. I know I must seem such a mess to you.”

Unexpected tears burned Delilah’s eyes. She blinked them away. “I’m just glad you’re feeling better.”

Reesa’s smile faded. “This is the farthest I’ve gotten, you know? I’ve never reached the point where I actually feel better not drinking. It’s a surprise, I have to say!”

“Well, good.” Delilah couldn’t keep a hint of caution out of her voice. She could tell her mother didn’t miss the inflection, for Reesa’s green eyes darkened with shame for a moment.

But she lifted her chin and smiled at her daughter. “I think it’s havin’ my kids around me again. I’ve missed you both so much.”

“Seth’s been by?” Delilah asked as her mother unplugged the vacuum cleaner and started looping the cord around the hooks in the back.

“He stopped in with Rachel earlier today.” Reesa slanted a quick look at Delilah. “She’s good for him.”

“She’s great for him,” Delilah agreed. “She’s crazy about him, too. Go figure.”

“What about you?” Putting the vacuum cleaner away in the living room closet, Reesa paused to look over her shoulder. “Met anyone you like?”

“Not recently,” Delilah answered. Actually, she’d met her share of men over the course of working for Cooper Security, but none who’d interested her enough to keep seeing him long-term.

There was only one man she’d ever really wanted, and though he’d never be hers, she still seemed to measure every man she met against him.

“Maybe you’ll meet someone when you start work.”

“Maybe,” Delilah agreed in order to end this particular topic of conversation. She’d already met everyone in the Bitterwood Police Department without a single spark flying. Most were married, and of those who weren’t, only Antoine Parsons was remotely interesting. But he was seeing someone in Maryville, and Delilah had never been a poacher.

Even when the man she wanted was married to his career.

“I can put the casserole in the freezer and make it some other time, since you brought soup.” Reesa nudged Delilah down the hall to the kitchen.

“No, the soup will keep in the fridge. I’m curious to see this casserole you’ve cooked up.” Delilah spotted a foil-covered glass casserole dish sitting by the refrigerator. She sneaked a peek under the foil, recognizing green beans, carrots, chicken chunks and whole-kernel yellow corn, topped with cheese and fried onions. “You made pantry casserole!” She turned to her mother, a smile playing at her lips.

“I didn’t have much in the pantry, but I thought it would be nice to fix something for you.” Reesa’s smile held a hint of apology. “Maybe next time you come, I’ll go shopping first and make something from scratch instead of out of cans.”

Impulsively, Delilah hugged her mother. “Pantry casserole is my favorite. I make it at home all the time.”

Reesa’s thin arms tightened around Delilah’s back. “You do?”

“I do. Can’t go wrong—”

“—with a casserole,” Reesa finished in unison with her.

“I’ll go outside and get the soup. You get that in the oven and then we can talk while it’s cooking.” Delilah let go of her mother and opened the back door. “Mom, you need to start locking your door.”

“Nobody ever bothers me up here.”

“Famous last words,” Delilah muttered as she stepped out onto the sleet-pebbled patio to fetch the soup.

But the paper bag was gone.

Delilah froze, scanning the area behind the house for any sign of an intruder. Visibility wasn’t great, between the steady needling of sleet and the cold mist swallowing the top of the mountain. Seeing nothing out of place, she pulled out her flashlight and checked the ground around the patio table. No sign of the bag of take-out soup, but the layer of sleet on the patio had been disturbed.

She couldn’t say the streaks of bare patio were definitely footsteps—she supposed it was more likely that a hungry raccoon or opossum had grabbed himself a ready-made meal—but a thin film of blood on the edge of the table was troubling enough to send her reaching for her Sig again.

“Hello?” she called, loudly enough that a faint echo of her voice rang back to her from deep in the woods.

No answer.

The cabin door opened behind her, making her jump. “Dee Dee, is something wrong?”

“The soup is gone.”

“Oh.” Reesa looked nonplussed.

“Probably a raccoon or something.”

“Hope it’s not a bear.” Reesa shuddered. “Pam Colby said she saw a black bear in her backyard just last week, looking for a place to nest for the winter. She shooed it off by banging some pots together.”

“I don’t think it’s a bear.” Delilah’s gaze settled on the film of blood. “I’m going to take a look around, okay? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“It’s freezing out there. I’m sure it was just an animal, Dee. Why don’t you come back in here where it’s warm? Let the raccoon have the soup. He probably needs it more than we do.”

“I’m just going to walk the perimeter. There’s some blood on the table—maybe it’s injured and needs help.”

“Oh, poor thing. Okay, but hurry up. The temperature’s dropping like crazy out here. They’re talking about maybe our first snow of the season.” Reesa backed into the house, closing the door behind her.

Stamping her feet to get some of the feeling back into her cold toes, Delilah headed out into the yard, keeping the beam of the flashlight moving in a slow, thorough arc in front of her.

She discovered more blood, spattered on the grass in a weaving line toward the tree line. Following the trail, she spotted a white birch tree with a dark streak of red marring its papery bark about four feet up. The mark seemed to form a long fingerprint.

She paused and checked the magazine of her pistol, reassuring herself that the Sig was loaded, with a round already chambered. If her mother was right and their intruder was a bear, she didn’t want to face it unarmed.

Though she listened carefully for any sounds that might reveal an animal or other intruder nearby, all she heard was the moan of the icy wind through the trees. But she felt something else there. Something living and watching, waiting for her to turn around and leave.

What would happen if she did just that? Would the watcher let her go? Or would he pounce the second she turned her back? Not caring to find out, she backed toward the clearing with slow, steady steps. She kept her eyes on the woods, trying to see past the moonless blackness outside the narrow, weakening beam of her flashlight.

Only the faintest of snapping sounds behind her gave her any warning at all.

It wasn’t enough.

She hit a solid wall of heat. One large arm curled around her, pulling her flush against that heat, while a hand closed over her mouth.

“Don’t scream,” he growled.

She didn’t.

But he did.

Chapter Two

Pain gutted him, ripping its way around his wounded side and settling like liquid fire in the center of his stomach. He tried to keep his hold on her, tried to bite back the cry that tore from his throat as she slammed her elbow back into his side again.

“Delilah, stop.” Adam Brand stumbled backward, struggling to keep his feet as his body instinctively sought relief from her lethal limbs.

A second later, he was staring down the barrel of her Sig Sauer P229 backlit by the beam of a flashlight.

“Son of a bitch!” Delilah hit the last word hard and dropped the weapon and flashlight to her side, bending nearly double as if she’d been the one to take the blow to the gut. “You scared the hell out of me, Brand.”

“I think you reopened my wound,” Brand shot back, his voice hoarse with pain. He pressed his hand to his side and found that the wound, which had finally started to clot, was weeping blood again.

“Your wound?” Delilah straightened quickly, swinging the beam of her flashlight over him, searching for his injury.

He turned his side toward her helpfully. “I think it was a thirty-two. I got lucky.”

In the low light of the flashlight beam, her pretty face twisted with a grimace. “Lucky, huh?” She plucked at his shirt, making him wince as the cotton clung to the drying blood around the bullet furrow. “Where the hell have you been? The police are looking for you.”

“I know. That’s why I didn’t knock on the door.”

“What did you do with my soup?”

“Ate it,” Brand admitted. “I haven’t had anything to eat besides what I could forage for a couple of days.”

Delilah’s sharp brown eyes lifted to meet his. “The FBI says you’re a traitor.”

“You know better.” At least, he hoped she did. A lot of time had passed since they’d last seen each other.

People changed.

“What happened? How did it get to this point?” Her eyes narrowed. “Does it have anything to do with the Davenport case?”

“It’s connected,” he said. “But it’s a lot more complicated than that.” He tried to hold back a shiver, but the wind at his back was too damned icy for him to stop shaking.

Delilah’s brow furrowed. “We need to get you inside and warmed up.”

“I can’t go in there. Your mother’s there.”

“You don’t have a choice. If you stay out here much longer, you’ll go into hypothermia. Here.” She took off her jacket and handed it to him.

Brand looked at the thick denim jacket, built to hug her smaller frame. “That’s not going to fit me.”

She gave him an exasperated look, one he’d seen a thousand times before and had feared he might never see again. Cold, hungry and hurting, he still felt a crushing need to pull her close and say all the things he’d never said, to hell with his reasons for choosing the path he had. But now was no better time than the other times he’d stayed silent and let the moment pass.

“Wrap it around your neck to block the wind,” she said flatly. “I take it you don’t want to be found?”

The pragmatism of her question made him smile. It felt as if his face cracked into a million pieces at the effort. “That would be best.”

“I’ll make an excuse to my mother about why I have to go. Here.” She dug in the pocket of her jeans and handed him a set of keys. “Get in my car and lie down in the backseat. It should still be fairly warm. But don’t start the engine. I don’t want my mother suspicious.”

She started toward the small cabin with the cheery golden light in the windows and fragrant wood smoke wafting from the chimney, moving with long, kinetic strides that reminded him of those days, so many years ago, when she’d brought energy and life to his little section of the federal government.

He couldn’t say she hadn’t changed since that time—eight years of life had chiseled away the softness of her features, honing them to a mature, womanly beauty. And her eyes seemed, if anything, darker and more mysterious than he remembered, as if in leaving the FBI behind she’d also abandoned the openness of youth.

Brand trudged over the frozen ground to the low-slung black Camaro he’d seen her park just a little while earlier. At least she hadn’t lost her sense of style, he thought with a weak grin as he opened the car and bent to push up the bucket seat so he could crawl into the back. Stretching out on the narrow backseat, with its console hump in the middle, he changed his mind, wishing she’d grown staid enough to drive a roomy four-door sedan with a bench seat in the back.

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.

What would she do if he told her she was the reason he’d never been able to take things to the next level with Liz? Or with any other woman he’d met since she walked into his office eleven years ago?

But he wouldn’t tell her. Because one thing hadn’t changed. He was still too wed to his job to be any good for a woman. Look how desperate he was to prove his innocence and get reinstated.

He’d already made the mistake of trying to have it all, and that had been a spectacular disaster. He wasn’t going to make that mistake twice.

“There’s some ibuprofen in the cabinet by the fridge. I’ll go get the first-aid kit.” She left the kitchen, giving him a chance to get his desire for her under control for the moment, though he was beginning to wonder how long he could ignore the truth.

All the other excuses—the proximity to Oak Ridge, the Davenport Trucking connection, his suspicion that Cortland might have allies in the small mountain town of Bitterwood—were meaningless in the face of his real reason for coming here.

He’d come to Tennessee because it was where she was. Even if there wasn’t a damned thing he could offer her but more heartache.

She returned with the first-aid kit and the bucket of soapy water. “Want to do this here or in the living room?”

“Here is fine.” He lifted his arm to give her easier access to his bandage. “Be careful. You know I’m delicate.”

She slanted a look at him, as he’d intended. “Yeah, you’re a real hothouse flower.” Still, she was gentle as she tugged the tape away from the bandage she’d applied to his side the night before.

He sneaked a quick look at the furrow the bullet had torn in the skin just above his left hip. It appeared a bloody mess, but the margins of the wounds seemed less inflamed, as if healing had already begun. “What do you think?”

“It looks better. I wish I could get you some antibiotics, though.”

“We’ll keep an eye on my temperature and keep the wound clean. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Her gaze lifted to his. “I’m not a big fan of depending on luck.”

He smiled. “Not everything can be planned to death, Hammond.”

“Anything worth doing deserves the attempt to plan it to death,” she retorted, drenching a washcloth in the suds. She cleaned the wound as carefully as possible, wincing when he couldn’t hold back a gasp of pain. “Sorry!”

“You should call your mother,” he said as she patted the bullet wound dry and pulled out a tube of antibiotic cream. “So she doesn’t come looking for you. You left there pretty quickly last night.”

“I told her I had to help a friend in need.”

“You have a lot of friends around here?”

She slanted a look up at him as she closed the tube. “Some.”

“Any who’d be in enough trouble to drag you away from dinner with your mother?”

“Not really,” she admitted. “But my mother doesn’t know that.”

He arched his eyebrows. His own mother had always known everything, even things he’d tried to keep secret from her. She’d been the one who’d first realized his feelings for the new female agent under his supervision weren’t entirely professional. Even as she was fighting the cancer that finally took her, she’d seen past his casual remarks about his team and focused like a laser on his mentions of Delilah Hammond.

“You can’t see her and stay her supervisor, you know,” she’d told him. Brand was a third-generation FBI agent, so his mother knew the rules as well as he did, having been married to an agent for more than forty years. “You’ll have to make a choice, just like before.”

And he had, eventually. Just not the one Delilah might have wanted.

“Mothers know stuff,” he warned Delilah as she applied a clean bandage to his injury. “Call her before she decides to drop by.”

“I’ll call her soon.” Her fingers were warm and gentle, making the flesh of his side ripple with awareness. He tried not to imagine her hands tracing a fiery path up his body, tried not to remember just how talented those hands could be when she chose to let them wander.

“How’s she doing?”

Her answering look was wary. “She’s gone on the wagon again.”

“How long?”

“This is day four.” She released a soft sigh. “She seemed to be doing well when I saw her last night. You don’t think my leaving early would have set her off on a binge, do you?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. During the handful of years he and Delilah had worked together, he’d seen her go through the hopeful highs and crushing lows of her mother’s attempts at sobriety. “What do you think?”

“I think she’s failed eight times before now. The odds aren’t good.”

And yet she still wanted to believe her mother could change. Hope, battered but not yet dead, hovered behind her dark eyes.

He cradled her face between his palms and pressed his lips to her forehead, helpless to stop himself. She stepped closer to him, her body brushing his. He felt the rapid thud of her heart against his chest, an echo of his own galloping pulse.

A pounding sound from the front of the house sent her skittering away, her face turning toward the sound. She uttered a low curse.

“Your mom?” he asked in a whisper.

“I don’t know.” She waved her arm toward the doorway. “My bedroom is the first room down the hall. Go there and lock the door. And take this stuff with you.” She poured the water from the bucket into the sink, dropped the wet washcloth into it and shoved the bucket and the first-aid kit at him. While she grabbed the trash left over and threw it in the garbage can by the sink, he followed her directions and went to her bedroom, closing the door behind him and engaging the lock.

He put down the bucket and pressed his ear to the door, trying to hear what was going on at the front door. He heard the rattle of the dead bolt and the door swinging open with a creak.

“Oh. Hi.” Delilah’s voice, muffled by the closed bedroom door, sounded cautious. “What are you doing—?”

“Where is he, Delilah?” It was a male voice, hard and imperious.

Brand flattened his hand against the door, his heart suddenly in his throat. He looked around the room, at the lone, narrow window behind the bed, and felt like a trapped animal.

They knew he was here.

He’d done the one thing he’d most wanted to avoid, even though his instincts had driven him right to this little mountain town from the moment he’d first realized his life was in danger.

He’d brought that danger straight to Delilah Hammond’s doorstep.

Chapter Four

“Hello to you, too, Antoine.” Delilah forced herself to smile at her soon-to-be colleague, Detective Antoine Parsons of the Bitterwood Police Department. He was a tall, lean man in his early thirties, with smooth brown skin and coffee-dark eyes that had always been able to see through a load of bull at twenty paces, even back during their school days.

But how on earth could he know that Adam Brand was here?

Antoine met her smile with an arched eyebrow. “Where is Seth, Dee? I went by the Davenport place and it was locked up tight. Tried Cleve’s old place and it’s locked up, too.”

She hid her relief. “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him in a couple of days. I could call my mother and see if she’s heard from him.”

“We’re trying to keep an eye on Rachel Davenport, damn it! Your brother is always pulling some stupid stunt that makes our jobs harder.” Antoine sighed and looked at her disheveled state. “Did I wake you?”

“No, I’ve been up awhile.” She pulled her robe more tightly around her, even though the thermal tee and sweats underneath weren’t exactly revealing. “But I’m not interested in heating the outdoors this morning, so if you don’t mind—”

She’d meant for him to leave, but he took her words as an invitation to enter, crowding past her into the living room. If he’d been anyone else, she might have stood her ground and made him go, but Antoine was soon to be her colleague. She couldn’t afford to alienate a potential ally before she’d even started her job.

“You don’t think they’ve bugged out for good, do you?” Settling on the sofa, Antoine looked up at her, frustration shining in his eyes. “I’m getting all sorts of pressure from above as it is about not closing this case, and if he’s just hightailed it off—”

“You’re getting pressure to close the case?”

He grimaced. “It’s subtle, but yeah. Upper management would like to see it go away, now that the killer and the man who hired him are both dead.”

“Somebody was twisting Bailey’s arm to put out that hit,” Delilah said flatly. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Try proving it.”

“A new lead would be nice.” She sat in the armchair across from the sofa, trying not to think about the pillow she’d thrown hastily behind the sofa out of sight from the doorway. If Antoine decided he wanted a cup of coffee or something—

“The TBI says they’re trying to track down the source of Bailey’s gambling debts, but—”

But the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had much bigger fish to fry than investigating a theory that someone had been pulling Paul Bailey’s strings when he tried to drive his stepsister out of her role as CEO of Davenport Trucking. Rather than trying to figure out why control of the company might be worth killing people to get, the authorities seemed willing to write it off as one man’s insane ambition.

Tension stretched through her body like a giant rubber band. She needed Antoine to go away. Now. “Well, I can tell you this. Wherever Seth is, he’s with Rachel, and he’ll take a bullet for her before he lets anything happen to her.” She let her gaze drop, not wanting Antoine’s sharp eyes to catch the fact that she was on edge.

That was when she spotted the torn gauze package.

Her nerve endings clanged as if someone had snapped that rubber band of tension. Balling her fists by her sides, she tried not to react, even though her pulse had jumped about twenty beats a minute.

The package must have fallen beneath the coffee table the night before when she was cleaning Brand’s wound. It lay a few inches from Antoine’s foot, just under the edge of the table, and it had a rusty splotch of dried blood on it. If he looked down at his feet—

She rose immediately. “Antoine, I don’t mean to be rude, but I have some errands to run before lunchtime, and if I don’t get to it—”

“Of course. Sorry.” Antoine stood and shot her an apologetic smile. “If you hear from Seth or Rachel, will you let them know I’m trying to keep them, you know, alive?”

“Of course.” She walked him to the door, keeping her body carefully between him and the coffee table.

He paused in the doorway, jangling her nerves again with his slow retreat. “I’m not quite sure why you decided to throw in your lot with us hicks here in Bitterwood, but I’m glad to have you on board. I’ve heard great things about you over the years. Your mother is very proud.”

And very talkative when drunk, Delilah thought, immediately feeling disloyal. Her mother might not have a great track record at going off the booze, but last night she’d shown signs of really trying to get her life in order. Maybe she needed support, not more skepticism.

She’d give her a call just as soon as she got Antoine out of the way and Brand out of her bedroom.

“Thanks,” she said to Antoine. “I’m actually looking forward to it.” At least, she was looking forward to investigating a hunch she’d begun forming a few weeks earlier when she’d first come back to Bitterwood.

“Next Monday, right?”

She nodded. “That’s right. Save a desk for me.” She stood in the doorway until he drove away, then closed the door and sagged against it, her head pounding with delayed reaction.

“You can come out now,” she called.

She heard the bedroom door creak open, and Brand came back into the living room, his brow creased. “Who was that?”

“Antoine Parsons, one of the Bitterwood cops. He’s looking for Seth.”

“Seth is missing?”

“Missing may be a strong word. My guess is, he got Rachel out of town for a while.” She narrowed her eyes at Brand. “He didn’t know you were in town, did he?”

Brand shook his head. “Nobody knows but you.”

“We need to figure out what to do next.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.” He picked up the pillow she’d stashed behind the sofa and handed it to her, his expression somber. “I need to get out of here. All I’m doing is putting you in danger. Maybe it was just Antoine this time, but how long do you think it’ll take for someone to figure out my connection to you?”

“I haven’t worked for you in years.”

“But your brother has. The FBI knows about it—they sanctioned his paychecks and took advantage of his information. And they know you and I were once on the same team.”

She wondered, sometimes, if the FBI had ever suspected just how close she and Brand had come that one fateful night on an undercover assignment. She and Brand had barely spoken of it afterward, and within weeks she’d resigned from the FBI and left Washington behind.

Would his superiors think him likely to come here for help?

“I don’t think anyone will connect us any time soon.” She tossed the pillow back on the sofa. “But it’s probably a good idea if you take the bedroom from now on. Easier to hide evidence of your being here if you’re not stuck in the front room.”

“You’re not listening to me.” He put his hands on her arms, wincing a little as the movement apparently tugged his wound. “I have to go. I’m not going to put you in any more danger.”

“You’re not listening to me,” she snapped back. “I’m not your underling, and you don’t get to make this choice for me. You need help, and I intend to give it to you, at least until you’re strong enough and well enough to have a chance in hell of surviving out there.”

“If you’re caught helping me, you’ll be arrested.”

The thought made her stomach ache. She’d spent most of her life priding herself on being the only Hammond from Bitterwood, Tennessee, who’d never stepped foot on the wrong side of a jail cell’s bars.

“Yeah, think real hard about that, Hammond. I know what it would mean to you to be booked and incarcerated.” His voice lowered, his head moving closer. “I’m not worth it.”

Her gaze snapped up. “That’s for me to decide. You came here for a reason. If it wasn’t for me to help you, what was it?”

His eyes narrowed slightly, and he took a step back. “It wasn’t for your help. At least not intentionally.”

She felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. He’d always had a way of bursting her bubbles, hadn’t he? “Then why?”

“A week before Liz died, she called me and mentioned that one of the private investigators she’d hired to follow Wayne Cortland had trailed him as far as Maryville. He said Cortland met a man in a coffee shop about three blocks from Davenport Trucking. He sent her a picture he’d snapped on his camera phone, but it wasn’t the best resolution. He’d had to take it at a distance. But the photo seemed to show Cortland having coffee with Paul Bailey.”

Delilah raised her eyebrows. “Why haven’t we heard about this?”

“It was the last thing Liz heard from her P.I. The guy just disappeared off the map. Last I heard, nobody has a clue where he might be now.”

“You think Cortland killed him?”

“Or had it done. Either way, I don’t think the man’s still alive. There’s a whole lot of ways to disappear in these hills.”

“Is anyone looking into his disappearance?”

“The Abingdon cops opened a case, but there aren’t any leads to follow. Maryville can’t even find record the guy was in town, except for that photo he sent. There’s nowhere to look.”

“You think this is evidence Cortland was manipulating Bailey into driving Rachel out of Davenport Trucking’s CEO position?”

“If Cortland’s pulling the strings on an Appalachian drug organization, I’m sure he’d find it helpful to have a whole fleet of trucks at his disposal. What if the debt Bailey owed was to Cortland? It would give Cortland a lot of leverage.”

Delilah’s head was beginning to ache again. She put her hand on Brand’s arm, closing her fingers around the hard muscles when he flinched as if he was ready to pull away. “I know I can’t stop you if you want to leave. But I also can’t ignore the things you’ve told me. I’m starting work with the police department next week, and I’m going to want to follow these leads. If you’re right, a man’s been murdered right here in my neck of the woods. And there’s another man plotting God only knows what that could affect the people I’ll be paid to protect and serve. So if you think you’ll be sparing me any grief, you won’t. You’ll just be leaving me without backup and important information I’ll probably need to know.”

He clapped his hand over hers where it lay on his forearm. “I don’t want any of this to touch you.”

She pressed her lips into a thin line, both moved and frustrated by his inclination to shield her. “I’m not fragile and I’m not helpless. I need your trust and respect, not your protection.”

“You know you have that.” He sounded offended.

She shook her head. “If you trusted and respected me, you wouldn’t be trying to control what I do. You did this same thing before, Brand. You made decisions for me, to hell with what I thought or wanted. You always think you know what’s best for other people.”

He looked down at her hand. “Right now, I don’t know what’s best for anyone. Including myself. It’s all gone so wrong, and I don’t have a clue how to fix it.”

She loosened her grip on his arm, her frustration fading. For all his exasperating, control-freakish ways, he still had a good heart. She’d questioned his actions many times over the years they’d worked together, but never his motives.

“That’s what I’m for.” She let go of his arm and nodded her aching head toward the kitchen. “Let’s find something to eat. Problems always look a little less awful on a full stomach.”

He looked at her for a long moment, as if teetering on the edge of an important decision. Finally, he gave a nod and followed her into the kitchen.

She released a silent breath, relieved. She had a feeling if he was right about his theories—and so far they were meshing all too well with what she knew about the Davenport Trucking conspiracy case—he might be the key to breaking this whole thing open and flushing out the bad guys she knew were still hiding in the shadows, waiting for the investigation to die down.

She didn’t intend to let anyone get away with murder in her hometown.

LIGHT SNOW FLURRIES floated down from the glassy sky, swirling in the wind and melting as soon as they touched the ground. Not cold enough to stick, Brand thought as he gazed through the narrow gap in the front-room curtains.

“Still snowing?” Delilah’s warm drawl sent a flush of masculine awareness sizzling up his spine. Her voice had been his first introduction to her, with its sultry timbre wrapped around a faint mountain twang. She’d answered his call to the Baltimore field office and he’d realized in an instant that he needed her on his team.

He’d thought it would be a temporary assignment, as he and the domestic-terrorism task force were heading to the mountains of North Carolina on a manhunt. He could tell she was from the general area, and she probably knew more about getting in and out of the small mountain towns without raising alarms than anyone else on his task force did.

He’d been right, although it hadn’t taken long once he set eyes on her to realize she was nothing but trouble, and mostly to him.

“Just flurries,” he answered her question. “What’s the weatherman saying?”

“Snow in the hills again tonight.” She had showered and changed into a pair of jeans that did wonderful things for her legs and backside and a long-sleeved heather-gray T-shirt that did wonderful things to the rest of her. He couldn’t hold back a smile, drawing a quirk of her eyebrows.

“What?”

“Just remembering the first time I laid eyes on you in that cherry-red suit with the skirt about two inches shorter than every other woman’s in the bureau. You walked in there determined to make an impression, and you did. I had to slap every man on the task force upside the head to get their eyes back in their skulls.”

“You weren’t impressed.”

“I just didn’t show it.”

“I think I’d probably do things differently now.” She crossed to stand by him at the window, gazing out at the front yard. Flurries were beginning to linger on the fallen leaves in the yard, melting more slowly. She rubbed her arms briskly. “Temperature’s dropping. We may get some of that accumulation here as well.”

“Will it snow us in?” he asked, trying not to wish for it. He had so much to do and time was running out. The last thing he could let himself do was lose focus because of Delilah.

But that was the effect she’d always had on him, wasn’t it?

“No, the road surfaces are still too warm. But it’s coming.” She looked up at him. “Are you going to keep fighting me on this? Or are you going to let me help you?”

“You start a new job soon, don’t you?”

“On Monday.”

So, a week. How much could he get done in a week, even with her help? He and Liz had been looking into Cortland’s business, albeit unofficially, for over a month, and they’d gotten almost nowhere.

Almost.

But Liz, as sweet and smart as she’d been, wasn’t Delilah Hammond. Liz had been a city girl from Ohio trying to navigate a region that might as well have been another country.

Delilah had grown up in these hills. She knew their dark side, knew how to make her way through them, how to speak the language and carry herself so that she blended in rather than stuck out.

He was going to have to depend on those skills again. Like it or not.

“Okay. We’ll work on this for the next week. But if we get nowhere, I’ve got to get out of here and let you get on with your life. Agreed?”

Her eyes narrowed, but she finally nodded. “Agreed.”

He didn’t know whether he felt relief or dread. A week with Delilah seemed like an unearned gift in so many ways. But was he just setting himself up for another round of regrets?

He had a bad habit of wanting things he could never let himself have.

Chapter Five

When Brand returned from taking a shower, his face looked pinched and pale. Delilah winced as he crossed to where she sat at the kitchen table making notes. “You okay?”

He nodded. “The wound hurts like hell, but I’m not seeing signs of infection.” He turned his side to her for inspection.

He was right. The bullet groove seemed to be healing already, the ragged edges of flesh starting to look less angry and red. She took the digital temporal thermometer from the first-aid kit and handed it to him. “Take your temperature while I replace the bandage.”

“Ninety-nine point two,” he said a few seconds later as she placed a padded bandage over the bullet furrow.

“Not bad,” she said. “If it goes over a hundred, we’ll start worrying.”

He waited for her to tape down the bandage. “We need to discuss the matter of clothes.”

She looked up at him, her lips curving. “I don’t know, Brand. I kind of like you walkin’ around my house half-naked. Like I finally got that cabana boy I’ve always wanted.”

He made a face at her. “It’s a little chilly to play cabana boy. As fun as that sounds.”

She felt a blush rising up her neck, reminding her she was a lot better at talking a good game than actually playing it. After she’d left Bitterwood to go to college on a scholarship and what money she could make from part-time jobs, she’d learned that scared little girls from the sticks always ended up crushed and forgotten in the big city. So she’d put on the sassiest, brassiest persona she could come up with and discovered she could go anywhere she wanted and do anything she wanted and nobody gave her any trouble.

Of course, it hadn’t made her very popular with other women, and honest relationships with men had proved pretty damned hard to come by. But she couldn’t help what women thought, and she didn’t care what men thought, because the last thing she’d wanted, after growing up in the house with Delbert and Reesa Hammond, was a long-term relationship with a man.

Nobody was going to have that kind of control over her life, she’d vowed. She would never become what her mother had become.

Only Adam Brand had ever tempted her to think twice about happily ever after. And that hadn’t exactly turned out well.

“What did you do with the clothes you had with you?” she asked, patting down the last piece of surgical tape. “Or did you run away from home with just the clothes on your back?”

He sat in the chair next to her. “There are some things in a canvas duffel bag stashed near a big truss bridge that goes over a gorge. Close to some seedy little bar out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Purgatory Bridge,” she murmured, wondering if he knew how that bridge had figured into her brother’s life recently. Seth had saved Rachel Davenport’s life on that bridge less than a month ago, and now they were already talking rings and forever. “I can get it for you now if you can describe where you left it.”

“I’d probably have to be there.” He glanced at the papers spread out in front of her. “What’s all this?”

“My notes on the Davenport Trucking case,” she answered. “I was just adding the things we discussed about Wayne Cortland.”

He picked up the notes and glanced over them. “Thorough, Hammond. Guess I taught you a few things after all.”

“A few,” she conceded, dragging her gaze away from the muscular curve of his shoulder. “You sure you have to be there for me to fetch your clothes?”

“I hid the bag well. It would be easier for me to find it myself.”

“It’s cold out, and you’re half-naked.”

He shot her a grin. “Does that bother you?”

“That it’s cold out?”

“That I’m half-naked.”

“No,” she lied.

He just kept grinning.

“In this weather, it’ll be dark enough by five-thirty to risk it,” she said. “I can’t go out with a strange man in daylight around here. People would notice.”

“I never thought I’d see you back here. You used to talk about this place as if it was hell. What did you call it—the Smoky Ridge curse?”

“Yeah. The Smoky Ridge curse. People who made it off Smoky Ridge always brought a little bit of hell with them. You can ask Seth about that sometime.”

“I have. He agrees, and yet he’s back here again, too.”

She shrugged. “Can’t escape it, so you might as well come back and face it, I guess. Another old friend of ours from childhood came back here to stay recently, too.”

“Sutton Calhoun, right?”

She nodded. “His daddy’s the one who got Seth into the con game. I never figured Sutton would step foot in this town again, but here he is.”

“Seth says Calhoun’s involved with one of the local cops?”

“Right. Ivy Hawkins. I’ll be working with her at the police station.”

“Two female detectives on a force this size in a place this small?”

She shrugged. “Maybe they’re trying to meet a quota. I don’t care why. I know I can do the job, and I’m glad to have it.”

“I could get you back on the domestic-terrorism task force—” Brand stopped short, his smile fading. “Well, I could have.”

Impulsively, she reached across the table and covered his hand. “We’re going to get you back there again.”

He turned his hand over, palm up, and closed his fingers around hers. His hand was hot, the skin of his palm a little rough, reminding her that he’d always been a man who liked working with his hands, even when he was stuck behind a desk. He’d worked with wood, building things like cabinets, tables and, once, for her birthday, a remarkably intricate teakwood jewelry box. She still had it, sitting in a storage unit back in Maybridge, where she’d put most of the stuff from her apartment before moving into this rental house in Bitterwood.

She wondered if she’d left so many things back in Alabama as a safety net, in case coming back here to Bitterwood didn’t work out.

“What are you thinking?” he asked in a half whisper that sent a delicious shiver up her spine. She’d always liked his voice, the deep timbre and the leftover hint of coastal Georgia that his years in D.C. hadn’t been able to obliterate.

“Just wondering if you still do that woodworking you used to do.”

“Not at the moment,” he said with a lopsided quirk of his mouth. His voice lowered a notch. “But you don’t forget how to work with your hands.”

Another tremor of sexual awareness rocketed through her, transporting her mind back eight years to a night in a tiny mountain bed-and-breakfast in West Virginia. It had been snowy that night, too, and their case had ended that afternoon with a successful arrest. The storm had delayed their flight, forcing them to stay one more night at the inn.

What happened that night had changed her life in so many ways.

She pulled her hand from his and rose, pacing away from the table. “I need to call my mother, see how she’s getting on. Why don’t you go look through my closet? I may have some oversize sweatshirts in there.”

He stood, cocking his head thoughtfully. “Leftovers from old boyfriends?”

“Leftovers,” she said simply, leaving it at that.

He took a deep, sharp breath through his nose and walked past her out of the kitchen, his shoulder brushing against hers.

She let out a breath and pressed her head against the kitchen wall, hating how rattled and on edge she felt when he was around.

Hating it—and craving it.

PURGATORY BRIDGE, STANDING thirty feet above Bitterwood Creek, was one of the only remaining truss bridges in the county, and it had seen better days even when Delilah had been a child, crossing it daily on her walk from Smoky Ridge to school. She’d walked across the span more times than she could remember, but she still felt a little flutter in her belly as the Camaro hit the bridge, wondering if this would be the time the whole thing would come crashing down into the gorge.

But they made it safely across, and Brand said, “It’s just over there.” He waved his hand toward a narrow path leading into the woods from the road, and Delilah parked the Camaro well off the road, mindful of the bright neon lights of Smoky Joe’s Tavern about fifty yards down Old Purgatory Road. Even on a Monday night, the bar’s parking lot was nearly full, and anyone could drive by at any time, spot the Camaro and stop to see what was going on.

“We need to hurry,” she whispered as she followed him into the woods.

“It’s near a fallen tree.” His eyes narrowed as he peered into the gloom. “It was right over—” He pitched forward suddenly and fell to the ground.

“Brand!” Barely avoiding tripping over him, Delilah crouched beside him as he tried to regain his feet. He groaned as her hand brushed against his injured side. “Sorry!”

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