Читать книгу Smoky Mountain Setup - Paula Graves - Страница 9

Chapter Three

“You were right,” Quinn said. “He’s there.”

Anson Daughtry’s voice over the phone picked up a little static as Quinn eased his Ford F-150 pickup around a mountain curve. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Right now? Nothing. She’s going to be snowed in with him for a couple of days, and maybe she’ll get some information out of him.”

“Did you bug the place?” Daughtry’s question was delivered bone dry, but Quinn knew his IT director’s unfavorable opinion about eavesdropping, especially on employees at The Gates.

“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” Quinn answered just as drily.

“So, you’re just leaving her alone with him, without any way of knowing whether or not she might be in trouble?”

“She knows how to call for help if she needs it.”

Daughtry made a sound of pure frustration. “Don’t you think he’s dangerous?”

“I’m sure he’s dangerous. To someone. The question is, to whom?”

“So you’re just letting Sharp find out for you? In a snowbound cabin?”

“If I can’t trust my agents to handle themselves in dangerous situations with dangerous people, what the hell am I doing running a security firm?” Quinn had hired Olivia Sharp because everything he’d ever heard about her told him she was perfectly capable of holding her own in a high-risk situation. She’d been a member of an elite FBI SWAT team for six years, and in every dangerous situation he’d put her in since hiring her, she’d proved her mettle. “Sharp is every bit as dangerous as Cade Landry ever thought of being, and she doesn’t have any illusions where he’s concerned.”

“She was involved with him before.”

“What makes you think that?” Quinn asked carefully.

“I hear things.”

“Then maybe you heard that they’re no longer together. And that it ended badly. Which means she’s not going to assume his motives for showing up at her cabin in the middle of a snowstorm are entirely pure.”

“Love’s not that straightforward,” Daughtry said bluntly, in the tone of a man on his honeymoon.

“Let me worry about my agents, Daughtry. You worry about your wife. I’m sure she’s shooting you glaring looks by now, considering how long we’ve been on this call.” He pressed the end-call button on his phone and stifled a smile. One of his still-single agents had recently groused that the marriage bug was spreading like a contagion at the office, and Quinn couldn’t really deny it.

Take a pair of single, physically fit, energetic and bright people, toss them in the middle of a high-risk, high-stakes situation and step back, because sparks were going to fly. A lot of the time, those sparks fizzled out to nothing once the danger was over, but in some cases, his agents had made real connections with each other, the kind that had a chance to last a lifetime.

Quinn was about as far as a man got from being a romantic, but he’d learned a long time ago not to interfere when a man and a woman wanted to be together.

Very bad things could happen.

* * *

OLIVIA STARED AT Cade Landry, certain she’d misunderstood his question. Because there was no way in the world he’d just stood there and asked her what was going on between her and Alexander Quinn, as if it was any business of his. He wasn’t a fool or an idiot, and only one of those would stand here in her bedroom doorway, two years after walking out of her life without even a goodbye, and question anything at all about her personal life. Especially in that particular tone of outrage.

But here he was, gazing at her with green eyes blazing with fury, his jaw muscles tight and his nostrils flaring.

“We’re going to pretend you didn’t just ask me that question,” she said in a deceptively soft voice. But she could tell from the troubled look in Landry’s eyes that he heard the undertones of danger.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m in no position to question anything about your life.” He looked down and started to move around her, heading toward the front room.

“Where are you going?” She caught up with him as he was reaching for the unloaded pistol still lying on her rolltop desk.

“I shouldn’t have come here.”

She caught his hand, stopping him as he started to pick up the pistol. “Why did you come here? Why now?”

He looked down at her hand covering his, and she felt the muscles in his wrist twitch as he slowly turned to look at her. “Because I don’t know what to do next. And you were always my go-to.”

Her heart squeezed into a painful knot. “Even now?”

“Maybe especially now.” He eased his hand from her grasp. She made herself let go as he took a step past her, back toward the center of the room. “Maybe it’s better we’re more like strangers to each other these days. You can be objective about what I should do next.”

She couldn’t be objective about him, but she didn’t bother saying so. She needed to hear where he’d been and what he’d been doing for the past seven months.

“Look, why don’t you sit down in front of the fire? You still look cold.” She picked up the knit throw blanket draped over the back of the sofa and handed it to him. “Get warm. I’m going to heat you up a bowl of soup. You want a sandwich, too?”

He took the blanket but shook his head. “I didn’t come here for you to take care of me.” A look of frustration creased his face.

“Then why did you come here?” she asked softly when he didn’t continue.

“I needed to see you.” The words seemed to escape his mouth against his will. The look of consternation in his green eyes might have been comical under other circumstances.

But Olivia couldn’t laugh. She knew exactly what that raw ache of need felt like. She knew what it was like to wake in the middle of the night and feel compelled to reach out for someone who was no longer there beside her. For almost two years, she and Landry had been a unit. Inseparable.

She should have known it would never last. Forever was the exception in most relationships, not the rule. And with her family history, she should never have allowed herself to think she might be able to beat the odds.

“I wish you’d wanted to see me two years ago when I tried to reach you.”

Landry looked down, one hand circling his other wrist as if to soothe the scars that formed a circle there. “I should have listened to you when you tried to explain.”

“You were too angry.”

“I felt betrayed.”

Her heart ached at the pain in his voice, but she didn’t let herself fall into that morass again. She’d spent too much time blaming herself for Landry’s anger when there had been nothing else she could do but exactly what she’d done. “I’m sorry you felt betrayed. But short of lying about what I remembered, I couldn’t help you.”

His gaze snapped up. “I know. I expected too much.”

“You expected me to lie?”

He shook his head. “I expected you to believe me, without question. I thought you would know I was telling the truth, even if you didn’t remember.”

She stared back at him, guilt niggling at the back of her mind. “I do believe that you remember hearing an order to go into the warehouse instead of holding our position. But that’s not what you were asking me to say.”

He let out a gusty sigh. “I don’t know that I was really asking anything of you except your trust and belief in me. But you never could really give me that, could you? Not wholeheartedly.”

Guilt throbbed even harder, settling in the center of her chest. “You know blind trust is a problem for me. You knew that going in.” She looked up at him. “I warned you, Landry. And you said you could deal with it.”

“Because I thought you could.” He looked away from her, his gaze angling toward the window beside the fireplace. After a second she followed his gaze and saw that the snowfall was starting to reach blizzard proportion, whiting out everything around the cabin.

“The power probably won’t hold out much longer,” she warned him, moving toward the hall. “If you want something hot for dinner, we should heat it up while we still have electricity.”

He followed her down the short hallway to the kitchen at the back of the cabin. “I don’t want to put you out.”

“It’s soup from a can. I’ll heat it in the microwave. You’re not putting me out.” She pulled a large can of beef stew from the pantry and showed it to him. “How’s this?”

“It’s fine. Thank you. Can I help with anything?”

“Again, soup from a can, heated in the microwave.” She shot him a look of amusement. “Sit down, Landry. You look as if you rode a bicycle here all the way from Bitterwood.”

“Barrowville,” he corrected her with a wry grimace. “Which was a breeze compared to hoofing it here on foot from North Carolina.”

Olivia set the can on the counter and turned to look at him. “North Carolina?”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay?” As he met her gaze, waning daylight cast his face in light and shadows, emphasizing how much older he looked now than the last time she’d seen him. The past two years had been hard on him. Aged him, left fine lines around his eyes and mouth.

“Okay,” she said quietly and returned to the task of preparing soup for their dinner.

He ate as if he hadn’t eaten in days, though, as she’d noticed before, he didn’t appear thin enough to have skipped too many meals over the months he’d been missing. Without being asked, she opened another can of soup and heated it up for him.

“Thank you,” he told her after he’d finished the second can of soup. “I haven’t had anything but protein bars and water for the past two days.”

She wanted to ask him what had happened to him, but there was a warning light in his eyes when she leaned toward him, as if he’d read her mind.

She sat back and finished her own soup slowly as he took his bowl and spoon to the sink and washed them. When he was done, he walked past the table and went to stand by the kitchen window to watch it snow.

“How long is the snow supposed to last?” he asked.

“It should snow all night. We should get about six or seven inches, and the temperature isn’t going to get above freezing for a couple of days after that. There’s a slight chance for more snow day after tomorrow, but the weather guys aren’t as sure about that.” So he hadn’t been near a television or radio in the past few days, either, she noted silently.

Just where the hell had he been all this time?

* * *

OLIVIA’S CABIN WAS large and tastefully rustic, but Landry had a feeling the place had come fully furnished. Outside of her bedroom, there was little in the cabin that reminded him of her apartment back in Richmond, a small loft apartment that she’d decorated in cool colors and clean lines. Even her beloved quilts had been stitched together in straight patterns, using fabrics in blues, greens and whites. Uncluttered and organized—that had been the Olivia Sharp he’d known and loved.

But he could tell she’d changed, just as he had. She’d left the FBI first, left him and his anger behind. He’d been both furious and hurt at first, but after what he’d gone through over the past few months, hanging on to resentment seemed pointless.

“I don’t have a spare bed.”

He looked up to find her standing in the living room doorway, holding another thick quilt like the one he’d seen on her bed. “You have a sofa. That’ll do.”

She handed him the quilt. It was another of her creations; he could tell by the geometric precision of the pattern.

“Still quilting?” he asked as she started to leave the room.

She stopped and turned to face him. “When I have time. Which isn’t often these days.”

He set the quilt on the sofa next to him and waved toward one of the armchairs across from where he sat. “You like working at The Gates?”

She sat and folded her hands in her lap. “I do.”

“Your boss seems very interested in your welfare.”

The look she sent slicing his way was sharp enough to cut.

“Sorry. Too soon?”

“Quinn takes an interest in all of his employees,” she said flatly.

“He’s trying to take down the Blue Ridge Infantry.”

She didn’t answer, her eyes narrowing.

“I’m not a traitor, Olivia.”

“You never told me how you got mixed up with the BRI.” She crossed her long legs and sat back, pinning him with a challenging stare. “I know you tried to help McKenna Rigsby when she was targeted by the Blue Ridge Infantry. You talked to one of our agents, tried to warn him about Darryl Boyle’s involvement with the BRI. But one question never really got answered, once you disappeared—”

“How did I know about Boyle?”

“Exactly.”

He tried to relax, as well, even though he suspected that some of Olivia’s placid composure was an act. He knew his unexpected arrival on her doorstep that afternoon had been a shock to her system, but as usual, she was trying not to let it show.

“I suspected, when Rigsby supposedly went rogue, that something very bad had driven her there. She struck me as a good agent. She sure as hell hadn’t joined the Blue Ridge Infantry—she hated them with a passion, hated everything they were doing and how they were twisting things like honor and patriotism for their own purposes.” He couldn’t hold back a smile remembering Rigsby’s tirades. “She vented to me. A lot. She was undercover, trying to get close to some of the female militia groupies, so she had to pretend she thought they hung the moon when she was with them.”

Olivia’s lips curved with amusement. “She’s so not groupie material.”

“So you know her.”

“I do.” She didn’t elaborate.

“Is she okay?”

Her smile faded. “She’s fine.”

“I didn’t get to find out what happened to her after she was taken.”

“Because you were grabbed by the BRI guys.”

God, he hated the skepticism in her voice, the hint of disbelief, as if he’d have disappeared for a year just for the hell of it. “You don’t believe me.”

“I never said that.”

He pushed to his feet. “You didn’t have to.”

She stood, as well, and caught his arm. “Don’t do this. I’m trying to understand what’s happened to you.”

“You’re looking at me as if I’m crazy. Is that what you think?”

“Of course not.” Her grip softened, her fingers sliding slowly down his arm to his wrist, where they settled against his scars. “I just need to know why you stayed away so long. Where have you been?”

“After I got away from the guys who took me, I headed east into North Carolina.” He gave a little tug of his arm and she let go of his wrist.

“Why east?” she asked.

“Because when I got out of that hovel where they were keeping me, that’s the way I was facing. So I ran and didn’t look back.” He looked down at his scarred wrists.

“Until now. Why did you come back now?”

He looked at her, saw the curiosity in those summer-sky eyes and blurted the truth. “Because you’re a target. And you needed to know.”