Читать книгу Smoky Mountain Setup - Paula Graves - Страница 8

Chapter Two

Hearing Cade Landry admit what she’d spent the past year trying not to believe shouldn’t have felt like a kick in the teeth. But somehow, it did. It hit her hard enough that she took an involuntary step backward, her foot catching on the braided rug in the cabin’s entry.

As she started to lose her balance, Landry lurched forward and caught her before she could fall, his arms wrapping around her waist. His hands were cold—she could feel the chill through her sweater—but his touch sent fire singing through her blood.

He’d always had that effect on her. Even when he shouldn’t.

She pulled free of his grasp, steadying herself by clutching the edge of the desk. “How long?”

He stared at her, a puzzled expression on his face.

“How long did you work for the Blue Ridge Infantry?” When he didn’t answer right away, she added, “Are you still working for them? Is that why you came here?”

He took a deep breath and let it out in a soft whoosh. “I was never working for them.”

She shook her head, shock starting to give way to a fury that burned like acid in her gut. “Don’t play semantics games with me, Landry.”

His dark eyebrows arched, creasing his forehead. “Are you going to listen to what I have to say or should we just cut to the part where you call the cops to come haul my ass out of here?”

“The latter, I think.” She went for her shotgun.

He beat her there, jerking it out of her grasp. “Don’t,” he said sharply as she changed course, going for the P-11 she’d just emptied.

She froze in place, turning slowly to look at him. Something hot and painful throbbed just under her breastbone as she met his hard gaze. “Just get it over with.”

“I’m not what you think I am,” he said, lowering the Mossberg to his side. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

“You’ll forgive me if I have a little trouble believing you.”

His lips pressed to a thin line. “I was really hoping you, of all people, would look beyond the obvious.”

She pushed down a sudden flutter of guilt. “You don’t get to play the victim card. You’re the one who disappeared almost a year ago without telling anyone where you were going.”

“I did tell someone,” he said quietly, lowering the shotgun to the floor, still within his reach. “I told my SAC at the Johnson City RA that I had information the FBI needed to know about the Blue Ridge Infantry. And the next thing I knew, I was being bludgeoned and hauled to some backwoods hellhole and beaten to within an inch of my life.”

For a second she pictured what he was saying, imagined him tied up and pummeled by the vicious hillbillies who comprised the mountain militia known as the Blue Ridge Infantry, and nausea burned in her gut. She knew from her own investigations that the hard-eyed men who ran the so-called militia as a criminal organization were capable of great cruelty. If they’d ever lived by a code of honor, those days were long past.

Money and power drove them. In these hills these days, money and power too often came from drugs, guns and extortion.

“You told your SAC?” She repeated his earlier statement, trying to remember the name of the Johnson City resident agency’s Special Agent in Charge. “Pete Chang, right?”

He nodded. “I didn’t think he was corrupt. He’s a brownnoser, yeah, so maybe he told the wrong person the wrong thing. I don’t know.”

“You’ve been a prisoner all this time?” she asked, looking him over with a critical eye. “Take off your coat.”

He looked down at the heavy wool coat he was still wearing, a frown carving lines in his cheeks. “I wasn’t a prisoner the whole time,” he said gruffly as he unbuttoned the coat and shrugged it off. Beneath, he still wore a couple of layers of clothes—a long-sleeved shirt beneath a thick sweater—but while he looked leaner than she remembered, he definitely didn’t look as if he’d been starved for nearly a year.

“Then why didn’t you go to the FBI once you were free?”

“I just told you that the last time I told anyone with the FBI what I was doing, I ended up a prisoner of the Blue Ridge Infantry.” He pushed the sleeves of his shirt and sweater up to his elbows, revealing what they’d hidden until now—white ligature scars around both wrists.

Olivia swallowed a gasp. It was stupid to react so sharply to the scars—in the pantheon of injuries she’d seen inflicted in this ongoing war between the Blue Ridge Infantry and the good guys, the marks on Landry’s wrists barely registered.

It was what they represented—the loss of freedom, the indignity of captivity—that made her heart pound with sudden dread.

Or they could be a trick, she reminded herself sternly as she felt her resistance begin to falter. He could have inflicted the marks on himself to fool people into believing his story.

The fact remained, he’d just stood here minutes ago and admitted he’d been working with the Blue Ridge Infantry. And nobody who worked with the Blue Ridge Infantry was ever up to any good.

“What are you thinking?” Landry spoke in a low, silky voice so familiar it seemed to burrow into her head and take up residence, like a traveler finally reaching home after a long absence.

She fought against that sensation and gripped the edge of the desk more tightly. “That’s really none of your business.”

“You’re not curious?” he asked, his eyes narrowing as he took a step closer to her. “You don’t want to hear all the details?”

She held his gaze but didn’t speak.

“Or maybe you really don’t give a damn anymore.” He spoke the words casually, but she’d known him long enough to recognize the thread of hurt that underlay his comment.

“You’re the one who left,” she said.

“Are you sure I was the one?” He took another step toward her, and she tried to back away. But the wall stopped her.

“You packed your things and left.”

“You’d already left. Maybe not your body, but the rest of you—the part of you that really mattered—” He stopped his forward advancement, looking down at the rough planks of the cabin floor beneath his damp boots. “Doesn’t change the outcome, does it? We both walked away and didn’t look back, right?”

“Why did you come here?” she asked again, not because she believed he’d answer her any more truthfully than before, but because it was better than thinking about just how many times over the past two years, with how much regret, she’d looked back on the life she and Landry had once shared.

“Because I thought—” He looked up at her, pinning her to the wall with the intensity of his green-eyed gaze. “It doesn’t matter what I thought, does it? You’ve made up your mind about me. I get it.” He turned away, heading for the door.

She hurried forward and picked up the shotgun. “I didn’t say you could leave.”

He turned to look at her. “You’re going to shoot me to stop me?”

“If I have to.” She sounded sincere enough, even to her own skeptical ears. But her heart wasn’t nearly as sure.

She’d loved him once, as much as she’d ever loved anyone in her whole life. Hell, maybe she still did.

If he tried to leave, would she really pull the trigger to stop him from fleeing?

“You won’t shoot me,” he said softly. “At least, that’s what I want to keep believing. So I won’t put you in that position.”

“You’ll turn yourself in?”

He frowned. “I’d rather not. At least, not yet. There’s a lot I still need to tell you before you’ll understand exactly what we’re up against and why.”

“What we’re up against?”

He nodded. “I have to assume someone at that bank in Barrowville will remember the name Cade Landry. And why it’s so memorable. They’ll call the authorities to report my visit to the bank. And like you said, it won’t take long for them to connect us. We were partners, Olivia.” He moved toward her, walking with slow, sure deliberation. “Lovers.”

His voice lowered to a sensual rumble, bringing back a flood of memories she’d spent two years trying to excise from her brain. “Don’t.”

“It’s too late to undo it, Livvie. I took a risk coming here, and maybe I shouldn’t have.” He came to a stop just a few inches from where she stood, and she made herself remain in place, though the pounding pulse in her ears seemed to plead for her to run as far and as fast as she could.

Losing him once had nearly unraveled her. If she let him back into her heart—into her bed—again...

“I said I was working with the Blue Ridge Infantry, and that’s the truth. But it’s only part of it.” His hand came up slowly until his fingertips brushed her jawline, sending a shiver of sexual awareness jolting through her. “Did you know they were targeting The Gates?”

She swallowed with difficulty. “Of course. We’ve been trying to bring them down since Quinn first opened the doors of The Gates.”

“I’m not on their side, Olivia. That’s not what I meant by working with them—” He stopped midsentence, his head coming up suddenly. It took a moment for Olivia to hear what he’d obviously heard—a car engine moving up the road toward her cabin.

Landry moved away from her and crossed to her front window, sliding the curtains open an inch.

“Could be a neighbor,” she said quietly, suddenly afraid he was going to bolt, even though a few minutes earlier, she’d been hoping he’d leave and not look back.

It was just curiosity, she told herself, the need to know what he’d been starting to tell her about his connection to the BRI. It certainly had nothing to do with the way her jaw still tingled where he’d touched her or the quickened pace of her heart whenever she looked his way.

“They’re stopping here,” he said bluntly, turning back to look at her. She saw fear in his eyes, raw and wild, and realized she had only a few seconds to keep him from doing something reckless.

She pushed past him and looked through the curtains. The truck that had stopped outside her house was a familiar but, under the circumstances, not exactly welcome sight. “It’s Alexander Quinn.”

Landry groaned. “Your boss.”

She looked at him, wondering how much he knew about Quinn. “You said you’re not on the BRI’s side. Neither is Quinn. If you know anything about The Gates, you have to know that.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s going to turn a blind eye to the warrants out for my arrest.”

“You might be surprised.”

He shook his head and picked up his duffel bag. “I’m going out the back. Just give me a head start.”

She caught his arm as he started past her, not letting go even when he tried to tug free of her grasp. “Don’t run. Not yet. My bedroom is through that doorway. First room on the right. Let me find out what Quinn wants.”

Landry stared at her as if he were trying to read all the way through to her soul. Finally, the sound of footsteps on the front porch spurred him into action. He went through the doorway and veered right into her bedroom, closing the door behind him with a soft click.

Olivia took a deep breath just as Quinn knocked.

Showtime.

* * *

HER ROOM SMELLED like Olivia, that half-sweet, half-tart scent he’d never been able to identify as anything other than her own unique essence. For a few seconds all he could do was breathe, fill his lungs with that scent, store it away for another drought like the two years they’d been apart since he’d left Richmond—and Olivia—behind.

The bedroom was small and sparsely furnished—a bed, a chest of drawers and a small trunk at the foot of the bed. The bedding was simple and neat—two pillows in pale blue cotton cases, sheets that matched and a thick quilt that looked handmade.

Despite the tension running through him like currents of electricity, despite the muted sound of the door knock just a room away, Landry couldn’t stop himself from smiling. It faded quickly, but the flicker of sentiment remained—she hadn’t really changed in the past two years if she was still decorating with handmade quilts.

She made the quilts herself, a secret she’d kept from her fellow FBI agents with the ferocity of a mother bear guarding her den. “If you ever tell anyone about this,” she’d sworn when she’d finally let him in on her secret, “I will hunt you down and kill you.”

The sound of voices drifted down the hallway. The rumble of a male voice, barely discernible, followed by Olivia’s alto drawl.

“New bike?” the male voice asked.

“Picked it up at a yard sale,” Olivia answered.

Landry pressed his ear to the door, trying to hear the conversation more clearly.

“It’s a man’s bike,” Quinn said in a tone that was deliberately nonchalant.

“I bought it from a man,” she answered, a shrug in her voice. “Women’s bikes are usually too small for a woman my height.”

Good save, Landry thought.

“I got a call from Daughtry,” Quinn said, still sounding like someone making small talk. “He said you got a hit on some bank account you’d asked him to monitor.”

“That man doesn’t know the meaning of honeymoon, does he?” Olivia laughed softly, but Landry heard the faint strain of tension behind her words.

Did Quinn hear it, too?

“One of the reasons I hired him,” Quinn answered. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“You didn’t ask a question.”

Still as smart-mouthed as ever, Landry thought.

“Whose account did you ask him to monitor?”

“Mine,” she replied. “I’ve been noticing some discrepancies in my bank statement, so I thought maybe someone had hacked my password for that account. It’s not a lot of money, but still.”

“So there’s someone tapping into your account? Why didn’t you just change the password?”

“That would only stop them from accessing the account. I wanted to catch someone in the act.”

“Did you?”

“Maybe. I have some feelers out.”

Landry didn’t hear anything else for several long seconds, not even an unintelligible murmur that would suggest they’d merely lowered their voices. The silence was unnerving. If he couldn’t hear them, he had no way of knowing where they were.

Or how close they were getting to his hiding place.

Come on, he thought. Start talking again.

“As much as I relish the screwball comedy potential of being snowed in with you, Quinn, you’re not going to be able to get that truck back down the mountain if you don’t make tracks in the next few minutes.”

“Now you’re just tempting me, Olivia.” There was a warmth to Quinn’s voice that made Landry’s gut tighten.

What the hell?

“Funny,” Olivia said, but there was no censure in her voice, only a soft amusement that made Landry want to kick down the door.

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay here alone? A few of the agents are bunking down at the office for the duration. It’s a little college dorm for my tastes, but I think you can handle the frat-boy atmosphere if you’d rather tough it out in a crowd.”

“No, thanks,” she said with a laugh that was too friendly for Landry’s peace of mind. “I’ll be fine here. I have a load of résumés to go through and some housework I’ve put off for the past couple of months. But thanks for the concern.”

“Are you sure everything’s okay?” Quinn asked in a tone so quiet and intimate Landry had to strain to make out the words.

“Everything’s fine.”

“Olivia, I know you’re blaming yourself for how close Daughtry and Ginny came to losing their lives, but you’re not infallible. Nobody in this business is. We all make mistakes.”

Olivia’s response was spoken too quietly for Landry to hear. But Quinn’s next words gave him a pretty good idea what she’d said.

“There are a lot of ways to pay for mistakes. Sometimes your own conscience is the harshest judge of all. I think you’ve already given yourself more penance than I’d have ever suggested. That’s why I let you come up with your own punishment.”

“I would have fired me.”

“That’s why you’re not the boss.”

There was another long silence. Landry clenched his fists to keep from reaching for the door handle.

“Call if you need anything. I might know how to get my hands on a snowmobile.” Quinn’s voice, tinged with amusement, broke the silence, and Landry started breathing again.

He heard the door close and waited until he heard Olivia’s footsteps outside the door.

“Still in there?” she asked quietly.

He opened the door to face her. “I was contemplating escape.”

“He’s gone.”

“I heard.”

One sandy eyebrow arched over a sky blue eye. “You were eavesdropping?”

“Was there something you didn’t want me to hear?”

The other eyebrow joined the first, creasing her forehead. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He meant to change the subject, talk about what a bad idea it was for him to stick around the cabin with her in case her boss decided to come back to check on her in that snowmobile he’d mentioned. But those weren’t the words that came out of his mouth.

Instead, to his dismay, he asked, “What the hell is going on between you and your boss?”