Smoky Ridge Curse

by Paula Graves

  “And whatever other crimes they’re up to over there in Travisville.” Delilah rolled off the mattress and circled around to the tablet computer Brand had left lying on the table next to the bed.

  “What are you doing?” Brand asked.

  “Banking on the idea that Nolan Cavanaugh is a night owl.”

  With a weary groan, Brand sat up, grimacing against the stab of pain in his side. Over Delilah’s shoulder, he saw she had opened a chat-room window, similar to the one they’d used earlier with Evie Cooper and Shannon Stone. There was one name in the chat participants list: friendofleatherbrat. “Is that you?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Last year, Evie got in touch with Nolan Cavanaugh using this chat room. It was one they’d used in the past, years ago. Apparently Cavanaugh was still monitoring the chat room and knew when she entered it to talk to him, even though they hadn’t used the room in years.”

  Brand looked at the chat list. Delilah’s handle remained alone. “Looks like he’s not biting this time.”

  Almost before he’d finished the sentence, another name popped up on the chat list—“Phreakwrld.”

  “Hmm,” Delilah said.

  “Not who you were expecting?”

  “Maybe he’s using an alias.”

  “They’re all aliases.”

  “You know what I mean.” Delilah typed a message into the chat window. “Did you almost blow up in a gas explosion last fall?”

  Brand swallowed a snort of laughter. “Not much for conversational foreplay, huh? Just get right down to business.”

  She shot him a glare that sent an electric shock of desire straight through to his sex.

  “Who are you?” Phreakwrld asked.

  “A friend of Leatherbrat. Used to work with her. I’m looking for her friend pwnst4r.”

  There was a long pause before the other chatter answered, “You don’t know pwnst4r.”

  “Leatherbrat does. And if you’re who I think you are, we’ve actually met before. In a Birmingham hospital. You called me Legs.”

  Phreakwrld’s next answer was a profanity.

  “Legs?” Brand asked.

  “I was wearing a pair of skinny jeans. Made my legs look damned good, if I do say so myself.” She typed in a new question. “So, can we cut the crap? Are you now pwnst4r? Because if you are, I need your help.”

  After a pause, Phreakwrld disappeared.

  “Well, hell,” Brand said.

  “Wait a minute,” Delilah murmured, bending closer to the tablet as if she could will Phreakwrld into reappearing. After a long, tense moment, another name appeared in the chat list.

  Pwnst4r.

  Brand muttered a profanity.

  “I hear you left the company,” pwnst4r typed.

  “What did he do, call Evie while he was out of the chat?” Brand asked.

  “Maybe.” Delilah typed her answer. “I did. But I need help, and I think you and I might be after the same thing.”

  “What’s that?” pwnst4r asked.

  “Stopping Wayne Cortland,” Delilah answered.

  There was another long pause that made Brand’s heart beat a little faster. “Do you think there’s a chance he’s working for Cortland and not the feds?”

  “I can only tell you he put his life at risk to stop some very bad men last year. I can’t see him switching sides easily, and there’s nothing you’ve told me about Wayne Cortland that would inspire any loyalty from a man like Nolan Cavanaugh.”

  A new message popped into the chat window. “DoS attack on SCADA, ORNL. Trust no one. Not even the NRC.”

  Then pwnst4r disappeared from the chat room. And though Brand and Delilah waited almost ten minutes, he didn’t reappear.

  “I don’t think he’s going to tell us anything more than that,” Delilah said with a frown, closing the chat-room window.

  Brand reached around her and picked up the tablet. “To be safe, let’s purge the cache and the history.” He set about doing so while Delilah stretched in the chair, giving him a far-too-tempting view of her slender curves on display beneath the Virginia Tech T-shirt and soft cotton exercise pants she wore as pajamas.

  “‘Not even the NRC,’” she quoted. “Nuclear Research Council?”

  “Probably,” Brand agreed.

  “Which means what? He thinks someone in the NRC is in Cortland’s pocket?”

  “Last year, the Secretary of Energy and the president’s chief of staff were busted for helping Espera Group plot against its opponents. You really think someone in the NRC is any less vulnerable to corruption than those two?”

  She sighed. “I guess not.”

  Brand put his hands on her shoulders, gently kneading the knots of tension he felt there. She flinched at his touch, then relaxed, actually leaning back toward him as he gave her muscles a light massage. “There’s not a damned thing we can do about any of this before morning, Hammond. Try to let it go. Get in bed and let’s get some sleep.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got to find out what SCADA is.”

  “Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition,” he answered.

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “Nerd.”

  He grinned. “It’s basically how big plants, such as power companies or gas companies—or nuclear reactors—monitor and control all functions of the plant from one central location.”

  “I know what a DoS attack is—denial of service. I presume a DoS attack on the SCADA at Oak Ridge would be a very bad thing.”

  “If they throw enough external communication requests at the SCADA system, it could cause an overload and disrupt the normal communications necessary to make the systems work properly. That could be disastrous. But Oak Ridge and other nuclear plants have been hardening their systems against those kinds of attacks for a while now.”

  “But stuff gets through,” Delilah said with a grimace. “We hear about failures all the time—hackers stealing thousands and thousands of credit-card numbers, or taking over government websites—”

  “I think that’s what Nolan Cavanaugh may be doing in the middle of this. He knows how hackers work. He lives in that same world, even if it’s in the more legitimate part.”

  “Takes a hacker to stop a hacker?”

  “The FBI has hired many a reformed hacker over the years.”

  “You think Cavanaugh’s working for the FBI?”

  “Probably. If not the FBI, then some other alphabet agency.”

  Delilah turned around in the chair, facing him. She looked sleepy and frustrated. “It feels like time is running out for us, doesn’t it?”

  He couldn’t stop himself from touching her face, letting his fingers slide lightly across the curve of her jaw. “Not yet. We’re not through fighting, are we?”

  Her dark eyes softened as they met his. “We. It’s been a long time since you and I have been a we, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He smiled at the thought. “We were always a pretty good we, though, weren’t we?”

  She laughed. “We may be a pretty good we, but we do terrible things to the English language when we’re exhausted.” She reached her hands out to him. He caught them and she pulled herself to her feet.

  But she didn’t let go of his hands, standing over him with a half smile curving her lips. “When I joined the FBI, I told myself I was going to be there until retirement. I had this whole big plan for how I’d rise in the ranks and eventually become the director. I figured I could learn to schmooze with the political class and make myself indispensable to some future president.”

  “You’d have had some future president eating out of your hand,” he agreed, smiling up at her.

  Her own smile faded slowly. “Water under the bridge.” She gave a little tug of her hands, but he held on.

  �
�Why did you leave? Was it because of me?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “That was a catalyst, but it wasn’t the reason.”

  “I never meant for you to leave. I believed in you as an agent. I wanted you to have every opportunity to go as far in the bureau as you wanted to go.” He caressed the back of her hand with his thumb. “I didn’t want to be the reason you didn’t.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And you didn’t want me to be the reason you didn’t go as far as you could.”

  He felt a flutter of conviction. She was right. He had thought of his own career as much as hers. Maybe more. And look where it had gotten him. He was on the run, risking everything to prove to an ever-skeptical bureaucracy that he was a truthful, honorable man.

  The FBI didn’t believe him.

  But Delilah had. Without question. Eight years of separation and unspoken hurt hadn’t changed her faith in him, in the kind of man he was.

  He didn’t deserve her. But God help him, he was beginning to think he’d never be happy without her. “I handled everything so badly.”

  “I don’t know that there was a way to handle it well,” she murmured, her eyelashes dropping to hide her dark eyes. “I knew when we locked the bedroom door that night in West Virginia that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending for us. I guess I just thought we could make it last a little longer than it did.”

  “You don’t believe in happy endings.”

  She looked up at him then, her dark eyes blazing with old pain. “Do you? Really?”

  “I do. I just don’t think everyone gets to find them.”

  “Less bleak than my worldview, I suppose.” Her lips quirked. “I’ve learned not to have any illusions. It makes the world more palatable.”

  He released her hands, expecting her to walk away. But she remained in front of him, gazing at him from beneath the fall of dark hair spilling across her cheeks.

  She touched his face, her fingers rasping against his thickening beard. “So scruffy. Not at all like the Adam Brand I knew.”

  “I’m different from that man in a lot of ways,” he said, realizing with a rush of emotion that he was telling the truth. He’d spent eight years without her, trying to pretend his life was on its proper track and that nothing had really changed with her absence. But it had taken just a few days having her back in his life to know that the previous years had been a farce.

  He wasn’t the same man. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to be that man anymore. Not if it meant watching her walk out of his life again.

  But she was different, too. Less hopeful. Less naive.

  So much more desirable, if that was possible. But even less attainable than before, though there were no professional obstacles standing in the way.

  “I want you,” she whispered, bending to touch her mouth to his.

  An electric shock zapped through him at that light, simple brush of her lips, zigzagging its way through his chest into his groin. He trembled, trying to be still, to let her lead, afraid to do or say anything that might drive her away from him again, this time for good.

  She drew away an inch, just enough to speak with a whisper of breath against his cheek. “I have no expectations.”

  “You should.” He lifted his hands to her waist, his fingers sliding beneath the hem of her T-shirt until they brushed against the silken heat of her skin. “You should expect adoration. Slavish worship.”

  She laughed softly. “I’d settle for slavish foot rubs.”

  He tightened his grip on her waist and tugged her on the bed next to him, eliciting a little bark of surprised laughter from her. He caught her legs and pulled them into his lap. “Your wish is my command.”

  He plucked off her thick cotton socks, baring her long, narrow feet. Her toenails, he noted with a smile, were painted a bright, shocking blue. “You rebel,” he murmured, pressing his thumb into the pad of her foot.

  She groaned with pleasure. “If I’d known you were so good at this, I might have stuck around a little longer eight years ago.”

  He ran his hand up her ankle and beneath the cotton trousers to stroke her calf. “If only I’d known it was a selling point.”

  Her back arched a little as he reached a sensitive area behind her knee. “Brand, I know I started this—”

  “But you’re having second thoughts?”

  “Well, I don’t have any protection, for one thing.” She looked at him, regret in her dark eyes.

  “I do.”

  One of her dark eyebrows rose. “You normally bring condoms on the run with you?”

  He smiled. “No. But when I saw a box hanging near the cash register at that last place we stopped for gas, I bought some.”

  “Should I find that flattering?”

  “You should.” He tickled the back of her knee, making her squirm a little. “I’m not being presumptuous, mind you.”

  “But, being the Boy Scout that you are, you like to be prepared?”

  He grinned. “Exactly.”

  She pulled her legs out of his lap and launched herself at him, driving him back into the bed pillows. Twining her fingers with his, she pinned his arms above his head and straddled his hips. “Weren’t prepared for that, were you?”

  “No, but I can’t complain.” He shifted beneath her so that his growing hardness pressed firmly against the softness of her sex. “Nope, no complaints.”

  She bent to nip the underside of his jaw. “You are a wicked, wicked man, Agent Brand.”

  He turned his face until he captured her mouth with his. Her lips parted, her warm breath spilling into his mouth as her tongue sought his. Desire coursing through his blood like fire, he flipped her onto her back, pinning her beneath him as he kissed her deeply, thoroughly, desperate to brand her with his passion before fate found another way to rip her from him.

  He forced himself to draw away, to look into her dark eyes and ask the question he dreaded to ask but knew he must. “I can’t promise you anything. I don’t know how any of this will end. So are you sure you really want this?”

  Her eyes blazed up at him, full of heat and intent. “No expectations, remember?”

  “None?” he asked, his tone teasing as he lowered his mouth to the fluttering vein in her neck. He nipped the skin, then soothed it with his tongue. “No expectations at all?”

  “Well,” she said, the word ending in a gasp, “maybe one or two.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, lowering his mouth to hers again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Their first tie together had been early January, just a few weeks after Christmas, in a bed-and-breakfast in Bluefield, West Virginia. Delilah would normally have been on the undercover assignment with one of the younger agents, her usual partner in most assignments that required a man and a woman to present themselves as lovers. His name had been Jim Fielding, and he’d been her first real friend in Washington, D.C., taking her under his wing when she joined the task force.

  “Have you heard from Ella recently?” she murmured aloud in the dark, quiet aftermath of their lovemaking.

  “Not in a couple of years.” Brand’s voice rumbled beneath her ear. “She sent a picture of Jim Junior at his first baseball game. He looks so much like his dad.”

  Old grief stabbed her in the heart. “It’s so wrong that he’s not there to see it.”

  “I know.”

  Jim Fielding had died a week before the assignment was supposed to start, gunned down outside a convenience store in Arlington where he’d stopped to pick up diapers on his way home to his wife and new baby. Brand had postponed the sting operation, meant to draw out a serial arsonist who’d been targeting bed-and-breakfasts in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and the southeastern corner of Virginia—finding Jim’s murderer had taken precedence.

  In th
e end, it had been nothing but a case of Jim Fielding being in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting out of his car to go into the store just as the robbers were coming out after killing the clerk. He hadn’t even had time to pull his weapon before they shot him three times in the chest and head. He’d been dead before he hit the ground.

  “Why did you take Jim’s place on that sting?” she asked, letting her fingers play along the path of dark hair that grew down the center of his abdomen. “You could have assigned one of the other men on the task force.”

  “I knew you were still grieving Jim. We all were, but I knew you’d felt it the hardest.”

  “Because I’m a woman?” She looked up at him, wondering how much her sex had played into his decision. Had he seen her as weaker because she was female? He’d never seemed to try to protect her from dangerous situations just because she was a woman, but he also never went on undercover assignments for the task force, preferring to stick to the supervisory role, the man behind the curtain pulling all the strings.

  “Because you and Jim were best friends, and I knew losing him hit you like a freight train.”

  True, she thought. It had. She’d grieved for him as deeply as if he’d been family. Maybe, in a way, she’d allowed Jim to take the place of Seth, the brother she’d loved but couldn’t save from the life he’d chosen.

  “You wanted to make sure I didn’t let my sadness show?” She’d worked hard during the assignment to hide her lingering pain, to show the world only a vibrant, passionate woman in love with the man who shared her bed in the honeymoon suite. She’d even kept up appearances with Brand when they were alone, desperate to prove herself as a competent agent who could work through the grief.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let it show.” There was warmth in his voice, and she looked up to find him smiling. “You would’ve died before you let it show on the job.”

  “I did let it show, though.”

  “Not on the clock.” He stroked her hair, dropping a kiss on her temple. “When the snowstorm hit and we couldn’t get any transportation out, we weren’t on the clock anymore. What happened that night was the two of us letting go, releasing all that pent-up emotion.”