The Smoky Mountain Mist

Chapter Two

He wasn’t going to reach her in time.

A nightmare played out in his head as he threw himself toward her. His hands clawing at the air where she’d been a split second earlier. His body slamming into the rail that stopped him just short of throwing himself after her over the side of the bridge. He could see her plummeting, her slender body dancing like a feather in the cold October breeze until it shattered on the rocks below.

Then his fingers met flesh; his arms snaked around her hips, anchoring her to him. Though she was tall and thin, she was heavy enough to fill the next few seconds of Seth’s life with sheer terror as he struggled to keep her from tumbling into the gorge and taking him with her.

He finally brought her down to the ground and crushed her close, his heart pounding a thunderous rhythm in his ears. She pressed closer to him, her nose nuzzling against the side of his neck.

“This is nice,” she said, her fingers playing over the muscles of his chest. “You smell nice.”

His body’s reaction was quick and fierce. He struggled to regain control, but she wasn’t helping him a bit. Her exploring hands slid downward to rest against his hips. His heart gave a jolt as her mouth brushed over the tendon at the side of his neck, the tip of her tongue flicking against the flesh.

“Taste good, too.”

He dragged her away, holding her at arm’s length in a gentle but firm grip. “I need to get you home.”

She smiled at him, but he could see in the dim light that her eyes were glassy. Clearly she had no idea where she was or maybe even who she was. Whatever chemical had driven her up on the girder was still in control.

“Rachel, do you have the key to your car?” He didn’t want to leave her car there to be a hazard to other drivers trying to cross the bridge.

She shook her head drunkenly.

Keeping a grip on one of her arms, he crossed and checked the vehicle. The key was in the ignition. At least she hadn’t locked the door, so he could move it off the bridge. But did he dare let Rachel go long enough to do so?

“Rachel, let’s take a ride, okay?”

“’Kay.” She got into the passenger seat willingly enough when he directed her there, and she was fumbling with the radio dials when he slid in behind the steering wheel. “Where’s the music?”

“Just a minute, sugar.” He started the car. A second later, hard-edged bluegrass poured through the CD speak-ers—Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson. He had that album in his own car.

She started singing along with no-holds gusto, her voice a raspy alto, and complained when he parked the car off the road and cut the engine.

“Just a minute and we’ll make the music come back,” he promised, keeping an eye on the road. There had been no traffic so far, but his luck wouldn’t hold much longer. He needed to get her out of there before anyone else saw the condition she was in.

He almost laughed at himself as he realized what he was thinking. He’d been a cover-up artist from way back, trying to hide the ugly face of his home life from the people around them. He’d gotten good at telling lies.

Then he’d gotten good at running cons.

Still, he thought it was smart to protect Rachel Dav-enport from prying eyes until she was in some sort of condition to defend herself. He didn’t know what had happened to her tonight, or how big a part she’d played in her own troubles, but he didn’t care. Everybody made mistakes, and she’d been under a hell of a lot more pressure than most folks these past few weeks.

She could sort things out with her conscience when she was sober. He wasn’t going to add to her problems by parading her in front of other people.

He buckled her safely into the passenger seat of the Charger and slid behind the wheel, pulling the bluegrass CD from a holder attached to his sun visor. He put the CD in the player and punched the skip button until the song she’d been singing earlier came on. She picked up the tune happily, and he let her serenade him while he thought through what to do next.

Delivering her to her family was the most obvious answer, but Seth didn’t like that idea. Someone had gone to deadly lengths in the past few weeks to rip away her emotional underpinnings, and Seth didn’t know enough about her relationship with her stepmother and stepbrother to risk taking her home in this condition. She seemed friendly enough with them, but they didn’t appear particularly close. In fact, there was some speculation at work whether Paul Bailey was annoyed at being bypassed as acting CEO. He might not have Rachel’s best interests at heart.

The particulars of George Davenport’s will had become an open secret around the office ever since he’d changed it shortly after his terminal liver cancer diagnosis a year ago. Everybody at the trucking company knew he’d specified that his daughter, Rachel, should be the company’s CEO. It had been a bit of a scandal, since until that point in her life, Rachel Davenport had been happy working as a librarian in Maryville. What did she know about running a business?

She’d done okay, taking over more and more of her fa-ther’s duties until his death, but would Paul Bailey have seen it that way?

The song ended, and the next cut on the album began, a plaintive ballad that Rachel didn’t seem to know. She hummed along, swaying gently against the constraints of the seat belt. She was beginning to wind down, he noticed with a glance her way. Her eyes were starting to droop closed.

Maybe he should have taken her straight to the hospital in Maryville to get checked out, he realized. What if she’d overdosed on whatever she’d taken? What if she needed treatment?

He bypassed the turnoff that would take him to the Edgewood area, where Bitterwood’s small but influential moneyed class lived, and headed instead to Vesper Road. Delilah was housesitting there for Ivy Hawkins, a girl they’d grown up with on Smoky Ridge.

A detective with the Bitterwood Police Department, Ivy was on administrative leave following a shooting that had left a hired killer dead and a whole lot of questions unanswered. Ivy had taken advantage of the enforced time off to visit with her mother, who’d recently moved to Birmingham, and had offered Delilah a place to stay while she was in town.

“Rachel, you still with me?” he asked with alarm as he noticed her head lolling to one side.

She didn’t answer.

He drove faster than he should down twisty Vesper Road, hoping the deer, coyotes and black bears stayed in the woods where they belonged instead of straying into the path of his speeding car. He almost missed his turn and ended up whipping down Ivy Hawkins’s driveway with an impressive clatter of gravel that brought Deli-lah out to confront him before he even had a chance to cut the engine.

“What the hell?” she asked as she circled around to the passenger door.

“You did some medic training at that fancy place you work, right?”

Delilah’s eyebrows lifted at the sight of Rachel Davenport in the passenger seat. “What’s wrong with her?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.” He gave Rachel’s shoulder a light shake. She didn’t respond.

“What are you doing with her?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it inside.” He nodded toward the door she’d left wide-open.

Inside the house, he laid Rachel on the sofa and pressed his fingers against her slender wrist. Her pulse was slow but steady. She seemed to be breathing steadily.

She was asleep.

He stood up and turned to look at his sister. She stared back at him, her hands on her hips and a look of suspicion, liberally tinged with fear, creasing her pretty face.

“What the hell happened? Did you do something to her?”

Anger churned in his gut, tempered only by the bitter knowledge that Delilah had every reason to suspect him of doing something wrong. God knew she’d dug him out of a whole lot of holes of his own digging over the years until she’d finally tired of saving him from himself.

“I found her in this condition,” he explained as he pulled a crocheted throw from the back of the sofa and covered Rachel with it. “On Purgatory Bridge.”

“On the bridge?”

“On the bridge,” he answered. “Up on the girders, about to practice her high-dive routine.”

“My God. She was trying to kill herself?”

“No. She’s on something. I thought maybe you could take a look, see if you could tell from her condition—”

“Not without a tox screen.” Delilah crossed to the sofa and crouched beside Rachel. “How was she behaving when you found her?”

“Drunk, but I didn’t really smell any liquor on her.” The memory of her body, warm and soft against his, roared back with a vengeance. She’d smelled good, he remembered. Clean and sweet, as if she’d just stepped out of a bath. “She was out of it, though. I’m not sure she even knew who she was, much less who I was.”

“Was she hallucinating?” Delilah checked Rachel’s eyes.

“Not hallucinating exactly,” Seth answered, leaning over his sister’s shoulder.

She shot him a “back off” look, and he stepped away. “What, then, exactly?”

“She seemed really happy. As if she were having the time of her life.”

“Standing on a girder over a thirty-foot drop?”

“Technically, she was swaying on a girder over a thirty-foot drop.” Even the memory gave him a chill. “Scared the hell outta me.”

“You should’ve taken her to a hospital.”

Worry ate at his gut. “Should we call nine-one-one?”

Delilah sat back on her heels, her brow furrowed. “Her vitals look pretty good. I could call a doctor friend of mine back in Alabama and get his take on her condition.”

“You have a theory,” Seth said, reading his sister’s body language.

“It could be gamma hydroxybutyrate—GHB.”

Seth’s chest tightened with dread. “The date rape drug?”

“Well, it’s also a club drug—lower doses create a sense of euphoria. You said you found her near Smoky Joe’s, right? She might have taken the GHB to get high.”

He shook his head swiftly. “No. She wouldn’t do that.”

Delilah turned her head to look at him, her eyes narrowed. “And you would know this how?”

“We work in the same place. If she had any kind of track record with drugs, I’d have heard about it.”

Delilah cocked her head. “Really. You think you know all there is to know about Rachel Davenport?”

He could tell from his sister’s tone that he’d tweaked her suspicious side again. What would she think if he told her he was working for her old boss, Adam Brand?

As tempted as he was to know the answer, he looked back at Rachel. “If it’s GHB, would it have made her climb up on a bridge and try to fly?”

“It might, if she’s the fanciful sort. GHB loosens inhibitions.”

Which might explain her drunken attempt at seduction in the middle of Purgatory Bridge, he thought. “How can we be sure?”

“A urine test might tell us,” Delilah answered, rising to her feet and pulling her cell phone out of the pocket of her jeans. “But it’s expensive to test for it, and it’s almost impossible to detect after twenty-four hours.” She shot her brother a pointed look. “Do you really want it on record that she’s got an illegal drug in her system?”

Delilah might look soft and pretty, but she was sharper than a briar patch. “No, I don’t,” he conceded.

“We can’t assume someone did this to her,” she said, punching in a phone number. “After all, she just buried her father. That might make some folks want to forget the world for a while.”

As she started speaking to the person on the other end of the call, Seth turned back to the sofa and crouched next to Rachel. She looked as if she was sleeping peacefully, her lips slightly parted and her features soft and relaxed. The calm expression on her face struck him hard as he realized he had never seen her that way, her features unlined with worry. The past year had been hell for her, watching her father slowly die in front of her while she struggled to learn the ropes of running his business.

He smoothed the hair away from her forehead. Most of the time when he’d seen her at the office, she had looked like a pillar of steel, stiff-spined and regal as she went about the trucking business. But every once in a while, when she didn’t know anyone else was looking, she had shed the tough facade and revealed her vulnerability. At those times, she’d looked breakable, as if the slightest push would send her crumbling to pieces.

Had her father’s death been the blow to finally shatter her?

Behind him, Delilah hung up the phone. “Eric says we just have to keep an eye on her vitals, make sure she’s not going into shock or organ failure,” she said tonelessly.

“Piece of cake,” he murmured drily.

“We could take shifts,” she suggested.

He shook his head. “Go on to bed. I’ll watch after her.” He certainly wouldn’t be getting any sleep until she was awake and back to her normal self again.

There was a long pause before Delilah spoke. “What’s your angle here, Seth? Why do you give a damn what happens to her?”

“She’s my boss,” he said, his tone flippant.

“Tell me you’re not planning to scam her in some way.”

He slanted a look at his sister. “I’m not.”

Once again, he saw contradictory emotions cross his sister’s expressive face. Part hope, part fear. He tamped down frustration. He’d spent years losing the trust of the people who loved him. He couldn’t expect them to trust him again just like that.

However much he might want it to be so.

BLACKNESS MELTED INTO featureless gray. Gray into misty blobs of shape and muted colors and, finally, as her eyes began to focus, the shapes firmed into solid forms. Win-dows with green muslin curtains blocking all but a few fragments of watery light. A tall, narrow chest of drawers standing against a nearby wall, a bowl-shaped torchiere lamp in the corner, currently dark. And across from her, sprawling loose-limbed in a low-slung armchair, sat Seth Hammond, his green eyes watching her.

She’d seen him at her father’s funeral, she remembered, fresh grief hitting her with a sharp blow. She’d looked up and seen him watching her, felt an electric pulse of awareness that had caught her by surprise.

And then what? Why couldn’t she remember what had happened next?

Her head felt thick and heavy as she tried to lift it. In her chest, her heart beat a frantic cadence of panic.

Where was this place? How had she gotten here? Why couldn’t she remember anything beyond her fa-ther’s graveside funeral service?

She knew time must have passed. The light seeping into the small room was faint and rosy-hued, suggesting either sunrise or sunset. The funeral had taken place late in the morning.

How had she gotten here?

Why was he here?

“What is this?” she asked. Her voice sounded shaky, frightening her further. Why couldn’t she muster the energy to move?

She needed to get out of here. She needed to go home, find something familiar and grounding, to purge herself of the panic rising like floodwaters in her brain.

“Shh.” Seth spoke softly. “It’s okay, Ms. Davenport. You’re okay.”

She pushed past her strange lethargy and sat up, her head swimming. “What did you do to me?”

His expression shifted, as if a hardened mask covered his features. “What can you remember?”

She shoved at the crocheted throw tangled around her legs. “That’s not for me to answer!” she growled at him, flailing a little as the throw twisted itself further around her limbs, trapping her in place.

Seth unfolded himself slowly from the chair, rising to his full height. He wasn’t the tallest man she’d ever met, but he was tall enough and imposing without much effort. It was those eyes, she thought. Sharp and focused, as if nothing could ever slip past him without notice. Full of mystery, as well, as if he knew things no one else did or possibly could.

Her fear shifted into something just as dangerous.

Fascination.

Snake and bird, she thought as he walked closer, his pace unhurried and deceptively unthreatening.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” He plucked at the crocheted blanket until it slithered harmlessly away from her body. He never touched her once, but somehow she felt his hands on her anyway, strong and warm. A flush washed over her, heating her from deep inside until she thought she was going to spontaneously combust.

What the hell was wrong with her?

He asked you a question, the rational part of her brain reminded her. Answer the question. Maybe he knows something you need to know.

Instead, she tried to make a run for the door she spotted just beyond his broad shoulders. She made it a few steps before her wobbling legs gave out on her. She plunged forward, landing heavily against the man’s body.

His arms whipped around her, holding her upright and pinning her against his hard, lean body. The faint scent of aftershave filled her brain with a fragment of a memory—strong arms, a gentle masculine murmur in her ear, the salty-sweet taste of flesh beneath her tongue—

She tore herself out of his grasp and stumbled sideways until she came up hard against the wall. Her hair spilled into her face, blinding her. She shook it away. “What did you do to me?”

She had meant the question to be strong. Confronta-tional. But to her ears, it sounded weak and plaintive, like a brokenhearted child coming face-to-face with a world gone mad.

Or maybe it’s not the world that’s gone mad, a mean little voice in the back of her head taunted.

Maybe it’s you.

Chapter Three

Seth met Rachel Davenport’s terrified gaze and felt sick. It didn’t help that he knew he’d done nothing wrong. She clearly believed he had. And he would find few defenders if she made her accusation public.

Cleve Calhoun had always told him it never paid to help people. “They hate you for it.”

What if Cleve was right?

“You’re awake.” The sound of Delilah’s voice behind him, calm and emotionless, sent a jolt down his nervous system.

Rachel’s attention shifted toward Delilah in confusion. “Who are you?”

“Delilah Hammond,” Delilah answered. She took the crocheted throw Seth was still holding and started folding it as she walked past him toward the sofa. “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel admitted. Her wary gaze shifted back and forth from Delilah to Seth. “I don’t remember what happened.”

Delilah slanted a quick look at Seth. “That’s one of the symptoms.”

“Symptoms of what?” Rachel asked, looking more and more panicky.

“GHB use,” Delilah answered. “Apparently you did a little partying last night.”

“What?” Rachel’s panic elided straight into indignation. “What are you suggesting, that I did drugs or some-thing?”

“Considering my brother found you about to do a double gainer off Purgatory Bridge—”

“I don’t think you planned to jump off,” Seth said quickly, shooting his sister a hard look. “But you were not entirely in control of yourself.”

Delilah’s eyebrows arched delicately. Rachel just looked at him as if he’d grown a second head.

“I was not on Purgatory Bridge last night,” she said flatly. “I would never, ever…” She looked nauseated by the idea.

“You were on the bridge,” he said quietly. “Apparently whatever you took last night has affected your memory.”

“I don’t…take drugs.” Her anger faded again, and the fear returned, shining coldly in her blue eyes.

“Maybe someone gave something to you without your knowledge.”

Seth’s suggestion only made her look more afraid. “I don’t remember going anywhere last night. I don’t—” She stopped short, pressing her fingertips against her lips. “I don’t remember anything.”

“If you took GHB—”

Seth shot his sister a warning look.

She made a slight face at him and rephrased. “If someone slipped you GHB or something like it, it’s not uncommon for you to experience amnesia about the hours before and after the dosage.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Seth asked. Rachel stared at him. “I want to go home.”

“Okay,” he said. “I can take you home.”

She shook her head quickly. “Her. She can take me.”

Damn, that hurt more than he expected. “Okay. But what do you plan to tell your family?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“I didn’t know if you’d want people to ask uncomfortable questions.”

Her expression shifted again, and her gaze rose to Seth’s face. “My father would know what to do.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry he’s not here for you.”

Her eyes darkened with pain. “Did you know my father asked if I thought he should hire you?” she said slowly. “He told me your record. Admitted it would be a risk. I don’t know why he asked me. At the time, I didn’t have much to do with the company. I guess now I know why.”

“He trusted your instincts,” Seth said.

She looked down at her hands. “Maybe he shouldn’t have.”

“What did you tell him?” Delilah asked, her tone curious. “About Seth?”

Rachel’s gaze snapped up to meet Seth’s. “I told him to give the man a second chance.”

“Thank you,” Seth said.

“I’ve been known to be wrong.”

Ouch again.

Her eyes narrowed for a moment before she looked away, her profile cool and distant. To Delilah, she said, “I would appreciate a ride home. Do you think I should go to a doctor? To get tested for—” She stopped short, agony in her expression.

“Probably,” Delilah said. “I could drive you to Knox-ville if you don’t want to see anyone local.”

She shot Delilah a look of gratitude, the first positive expression Seth had seen from her since she’d awoken. “Yes. Please.”

As Delilah directed her out to the truck, she looked over her shoulder at her brother. “I’ll take care of her.” She followed Rachel out into the misty morning drizzle falling outside.

He nodded his gratitude and watched them from the open doorway until the truck disappeared around the bend, swallowed by the swirling fog. Then he grabbed his keys and headed out to the Charger, ignoring the urge to go back inside and catch some sleep.

He had to talk to a man about a girl.

NO SIGN OF recent sexual activity. The doctor’s words continued ringing in her ears long after he’d left her to dress for departure. He’d said other things as well—preliminary tox screen was negative, but if she’d consumed GHB or another similar drug, it might not be easily detectible on a standard test. And depending on how long it had been since the drug was administered, it might not show up on a more specific analysis. He’d seemed indifferent to her decision not to test for it.

She supposed he had patients who needed him more than she did.

“How are you doing?” Delilah Hammond looked around the closed curtain, her expression neutral. There was an uncanny stillness about the other woman, an ability to remain calm and focused despite having a drug-addled woman dumped in her lap to take care of. She had a vague memory that there had been a Hammond girl from the Bitterwood area who’d become an FBI agent.