Smoky Ridge Curse
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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.
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