Smoky Ridge Curse

by Paula Graves

  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, an
d 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.