by Paula Graves
“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 go
es 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!”
“I’m okay.” He didn’t sound okay, his voice reedy with pain. “Foot caught on a tree root.”
She helped him dust off, looking around in the dark woods for the fallen tree he’d mentioned. A little moonlight would have helped her see through the dark, but the weatherman was promising another chance of snow, this time in the lower elevations as well, and a thick layer of heavy clouds blotted out any light from the heavens. Only the garish reflected glow of the bar down the road gave them any illumination at all.
“There,” Brand said, waving his arm toward a black mass barely distinguishable from the rest of the shadows in the thick woods. He bent at his waist, still trying to catch the breath his fall had knocked from him, so she moved toward the dark shape, relieved when her eyes adjusted enough to recognize that it was, indeed, a fallen tree.
She found the duffel bag tucked up under the tree trunk where the snapped section was still connected to the rooted stump. It was water-resistant vinyl and seemed to have come through the previous night’s storm without much damage.
They hurried back to the edge of the woods, waiting for headlights to pass before risking a quick dash to the Camaro. Delilah threw the duffel into the backseat and cranked the car, a bubble of laughter escaping her throat. “Just like old times.”
She felt Brand’s gaze like a touch, but she didn’t let herself turn to look at him, easing the Camaro back onto Old Purgatory Road, headed toward Smoky Ridge.
“When you talked to your mother this afternoon, did you ask if she’d heard anything from Seth
?” Brand asked a few minutes later, after Delilah had begun to relax, certain no one was following them.
“He and Rachel spent the night in Bryson City, North Carolina. Rachel’s uncle has a music hall there. Mama said they’re probably driving back tonight.”
“Was she curious about why you left so suddenly last night?”
“A little. I think I reassured her nothing’s wrong.”
His next question came out in a careful tone. “How was she?”
“You mean, was she drunk?”
He didn’t answer.
“She was sober when I talked to her.”
“Maybe it’ll last this time.” He didn’t sound hopeful, she noticed.
Couldn’t really blame him for that. He’d been by Delilah’s side through a couple of her mother’s attempts at sobriety several years ago. He’d seen her hopes dashed both times.
“Maybe it will,” she agreed. She didn’t sound very hopeful, either.
They built a fire in the fireplace when they got back to her house, pulling the leather armchairs close enough to warm themselves against the descending chill of night. Outside, snow flurries had begun to fall, fluttering against the windows in a hushed whisper.
Delilah noticed he was favoring his side as he sat. She crouched in front of him, looking up into his pain-lined face. “Did you reinjure yourself when you fell?”
He grimaced as she reached for the hem of his sweatshirt. “Probably just a bruise.”
She pulled up his shirt and examined the area around his bandage. She didn’t see any blood peeking through the gauze, but there was an area of skin around the bottom of his rib cage that was beginning to grow purple. “Yeah, a nasty bruise. Does it hurt when you take a breath?”
He tested his ribs with a deep breath. “Not particularly.”
She pressed her fingertips against the bruised area, checking for any sign of instability in the rib cage. It felt normal enough. “Probably didn’t crack a rib, then.”