Читать книгу Smoky Ridge Curse - Пола Грейвс - Страница 9

Snow had fallen in the mountains overnight, Delilah discovered when she wiped away the condensation on the kitchen windows the next morning. Peeking through the fog that gave the Smoky Mountain range its name, the firs and spruces in the higher elevations looked as if they’d been dusted with powdered sugar. Even here in the valley, a crust of hoarfrost covered the ground outside.

What would have happened to Adam Brand if she hadn’t found him last night? Would he have survived the night at those temperatures? She tamped down a shudder at the thought and spooned coffee into the machine, making it extra strong, the way she liked it.

The way Brand liked it, too, she remembered. He was the one who’d taught her to like coffee in the first place. To this day, she still bought the brand of beans he liked, grinding them herself.

How much of who she was had been shaped by those years she’d worked at the FBI with Adam Brand?

Footfalls behind her made her jump. She turned to find Brand standing in the kitchen doorway, the blanket wrapped around his bare torso. His hair was mussed and there were dark circles of pain under his blue eyes, but there was no escaping the impact of his masculine presence. It tugged at her belly, impossible to ignore.

“I smelled coffee.”

“You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

“I’m feeling better. You were right. Sleep helped.”

She made herself look away from his bare chest, as broad and well toned as she remembered. Time hadn’t robbed him of one ounce of virility. If anything, the lines of age now evident in his face only added to his masculine appeal.

He’d seen the difference in their ages as an obstacle. He’d never understood that she’d found his maturity one of his most tempting assets.

“You still put that flavored stuff in your coffee?” he asked when she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of hazelnut-flavored liquid creamer.

She made a face. “Do you still eat sardines?”

“Keeps me young.”

She grabbed a couple of mugs from the cabinet next to the sink. “Black, no cream, no sugar?”

“Some things don’t change.”

She handed him a cup of steaming coffee. “Lots of things do, though.”

He eased into one of the two chairs at a small table in her kitchen nook. “More things than not, I guess.” He made a sound of satisfaction at the first sip of coffee. “None of the people who took your place could ever make coffee worth a damn.”

“Nice to know I was irreplaceable in one aspect.” She splashed creamer in her own coffee, added a packet of sweetener and carried the cup to the nook. She sat across from him, cocking her head to look him over. “You do look better this morning.”

“Must be the company.”

She stifled a smile. “Sweet talker.”

“I’m serious. This is the first time since I went off the grid that I’ve felt any hope.”

“How did this all happen?” she asked. “How did someone get close enough to frame you?”

Brand sighed, pushing his mug of coffee away from him. “That’s a long story. And, as these things do, it started with a woman.”

“HER NAME WAS Elizabeth Vaughn. U.S. Attorney out of Abingdon, Virginia. I met her at a University of Virginia alumni function, and it turned out we had a lot in common.” Brand watched Delilah’s face, trying to gauge her reaction. But her features were as inscrutable as a mask. “We started seeing each other whenever she was in D.C. on business. She’s how I came to learn the name Wayne Cortland.”

“It was one of her cases?”

“Peripherally. She’d been investigating militias in the Appalachians and discovered that most of them had connections to meth dealers in the area. And most of both groups—militia and drug dealers—had done business with Wayne Cortland at some point.”

“So you think Cortland’s part of the redneck mafia?”

“A little less redneck, a little more mafia. He actually runs a legitimate lumber mill in a town called Travisville, near the Virginia/Tennessee border.”

“I’ve heard of Travisville,” Delilah said. “They have a bluegrass festival. My father used to take us there. At least, that’s why we went. He went to score drugs until he figured out how to make his own.”

She always seemed so clinical when she talked about her father and his drug problems. Even when she’d described escaping the burning rubble of the house her father had blown up in a meth-cooking accident, she’d stuck to the facts, never talking about how she’d felt, at the tender age of seventeen, to lose her father and her home to his criminal stupidity.

How had she coped with her homelessness? With her injured brother and her drunk of a mother? How had she come through unscathed to earn a scholarship to a good college and forge a whole new life for herself?

Had she come through unscathed? He didn’t see how it was possible. There had always been dark places in Delilah he’d never been able to reach.

Or maybe he just hadn’t tried hard enough.

“Cortland’s lumber business is legit,” he said. “But Liz was sure he laundered drug money through it. She just hadn’t figured a way to prove it.”

“So she brought you in on it?”

“Peripherally. She suspected he might be funding some meth mechanics in the mountains who then funded the white-power militia groups that gave the meth dealers their own army. She wanted me to see if I could get the domestic-terrorism task force involved in trying to tie those militias—and the meth cookers—to Cortland and his business.”

“Is he running the meth labs or just laundering the money?”

“I think he’s running them. Liz and I were able to talk to a few people who’d defied Cortland. They live in terror because apparently Cortland’s built this network of cookers and militia, and he keeps them in line with lethal threats. He’s already shown he’s willing to kill anyone who tries to cross him. We just can’t come up with the proof, because even the people who dared to talk to us are too terrified to testify against him.”

“Why didn’t you go to Liz for help instead of coming here?”

“Liz is dead.”

His flat pronouncement elicited the first emotion he’d seen out of Delilah—a visible recoil. “I’m sorry. Was it Cortland?”

“The FBI thinks it was me.”

Her brow furrowed. “You? They think you killed someone you were involved with? Why?”

“We weren’t involved anymore. Not romantically.” He shook his head, closing his fingers around the coffee mug to warm them. “The relationship never got very far—we were better suited as friends than lovers. But that didn’t keep me from being the prime suspect when she was murdered. See, I was the one who found her.”

“Oh, no.”

“I was in Abingdon to meet with her about some new information she’d gotten from an informant. When I got to her house, I found the door unlocked. She wasn’t answering the door, so I let myself in.”

“And you found her?”

He nodded, trying to put the scene out of his head. So much blood—

“You didn’t have an alibi?”

“She was still alive. The shooting must have just happened. I tried to stop the bleeding—” He swallowed hard, remembering the desperate fight to keep Liz alive. “There was just too much damage. But see, it had just happened. The timeline was too close. How could I prove I wasn’t the one who’d done it?”

“Surely they checked you for gunshot residue. Checked your gun.”

“She was shot with her own gun. And the killer wore gloves—they were lying next to the gun. No way to prove they didn’t belong to me, although they can’t prove they did, either.”

“This is crazy.”

“Tell me about it.”

“All I heard was that you were suspected of espionage. Nobody talked about murder.”

“The police haven’t charged me with murder yet. Their focus was on what they’d found on Liz’s computer.”

Tension drew lines in Delilah’s brow. “Which was what?”

“Emails from me, detailing our plan to frame Wayne Cortland for theft of nuclear material from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.”

Delilah sat back in her chair with a thump. “Emails from you?”

“Well, clearly, not from me. But whoever faked them knew what he was doing. I’d suspect me, too.”

“Let me guess. Some of the militias had hooked up with anarchists?” Delilah didn’t sound surprised. Maybe she’d come across something similar in some of her work with Cooper Security.

“We’d suspected all along that might be the case. When you’re determined to bring down all civil government, you don’t always care about the motives of your fellow travelers.” Brand shook his head. “I thought I’d taken all the necessary precautions to protect myself from being targeted. I wasn’t even working this case with Liz in an official capacity. But somehow Cortland figured it out.”

“Liz must have known she was a target.”

“Of course she did. She trusted the wrong person.”

“You think someone betrayed her?”

“I know someone did. There was no sign of a struggle in her apartment. The alarm wasn’t engaged. No sign of a break-in.”

“So she let her killer into her apartment willingly.”

Brand’s side was beginning to ache. He tried to ignore the pain but he couldn’t stop a grimace.

“I need to take a look at your wound.” Delilah set her coffee to the side and stood up, holding her hand out to him.

He stared at her outstretched fingers, noting the short, neat nails and wondering if she still nibbled them when she was nervous. He put his hand in hers and it felt impossibly right. As always.

She helped him to his feet and looked at the bandage. “Not a lot of seepage through the bandage. That’s good, I think.”

“You hope,” he murmured, not missing the uncertainty in her tone.

Her brown eyes met his. “You probably should have gone in search of a doctor for help. Might’ve been a little more pragmatic.”

His fingers itched to touch her face, to trace the angular lines of her jaw and brush across her parted lips, but he balled his hands into fists and controlled the urge. “I just wish I hadn’t put you right in the middle of all of this. You don’t need the headache.”

“What’s one more headache?” Her lopsided half smile nearly shattered his control, and for a second he forgot the pain in his side, the trouble hanging over his head and the eight years that had passed since he’d last kissed Delilah Hammond’s soft, pink mouth.

He wanted her. He’d wanted her from the first moment she walked into his office, all long legs and brilliant brains, and he had a feeling he was going to want her for the rest of his life.

What would she do if he told her she was the reason he’d never been able to take things to the next level with Liz? Or with any other woman he’d met since she walked into his office eleven years ago?

But he wouldn’t tell her. Because one thing hadn’t changed. He was still too wed to his job to be any good for a woman. Look how desperate he was to prove his innocence and get reinstated.

He’d already made the mistake of trying to have it all, and that had been a spectacular disaster. He wasn’t going to make that mistake twice.

“There’s some ibuprofen in the cabinet by the fridge. I’ll go get the first-aid kit.” She left the kitchen, giving him a chance to get his desire for her under control for the moment, though he was beginning to wonder how long he could ignore the truth.

All the other excuses—the proximity to Oak Ridge, the Davenport Trucking connection, his suspicion that Cortland might have allies in the small mountain town of Bitterwood—were meaningless in the face of his real reason for coming here.

He’d come to Tennessee because it was where she was. Even if there wasn’t a damned thing he could offer her but more heartache.

She returned with the first-aid kit and the bucket of soapy water. “Want to do this here or in the living room?”

“Here is fine.” He lifted his arm to give her easier access to his bandage. “Be careful. You know I’m delicate.”

She slanted a look at him, as he’d intended. “Yeah, you’re a real hothouse flower.” Still, she was gentle as she tugged the tape away from the bandage she’d applied to his side the night before.

He sneaked a quick look at the furrow the bullet had torn in the skin just above his left hip. It appeared a bloody mess, but the margins of the wounds seemed less inflamed, as if healing had already begun. “What do you think?”

“It looks better. I wish I could get you some antibiotics, though.”

“We’ll keep an eye on my temperature and keep the wound clean. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Her gaze lifted to his. “I’m not a big fan of depending on luck.”

He smiled. “Not everything can be planned to death, Hammond.”

“Anything worth doing deserves the attempt to plan it to death,” she retorted, drenching a washcloth in the suds. She cleaned the wound as carefully as possible, wincing when he couldn’t hold back a gasp of pain. “Sorry!”

“You should call your mother,” he said as she patted the bullet wound dry and pulled out a tube of antibiotic cream. “So she doesn’t come looking for you. You left there pretty quickly last night.”

“I told her I had to help a friend in need.”

“You have a lot of friends around here?”

She slanted a look up at him as she closed the tube. “Some.”

“Any who’d be in enough trouble to drag you away from dinner with your mother?”

“Not really,” she admitted. “But my mother doesn’t know that.”

He arched his eyebrows. His own mother had always known everything, even things he’d tried to keep secret from her. She’d been the one who’d first realized his feelings for the new female agent under his supervision weren’t entirely professional. Even as she was fighting the cancer that finally took her, she’d seen past his casual remarks about his team and focused like a laser on his mentions of Delilah Hammond.

“You can’t see her and stay her supervisor, you know,” she’d told him. Brand was a third-generation FBI agent, so his mother knew the rules as well as he did, having been married to an agent for more than forty years. “You’ll have to make a choice, just like before.”

And he had, eventually. Just not the one Delilah might have wanted.

“Mothers know stuff,” he warned Delilah as she applied a clean bandage to his injury. “Call her before she decides to drop by.”

“I’ll call her soon.” Her fingers were warm and gentle, making the flesh of his side ripple with awareness. He tried not to imagine her hands tracing a fiery path up his body, tried not to remember just how talented those hands could be when she chose to let them wander.

“How’s she doing?”

Her answering look was wary. “She’s gone on the wagon again.”

“How long?”

“This is day four.” She released a soft sigh. “She seemed to be doing well when I saw her last night. You don’t think my leaving early would have set her off on a binge, do you?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. During the handful of years he and Delilah had worked together, he’d seen her go through the hopeful highs and crushing lows of her mother’s attempts at sobriety. “What do you think?”

“I think she’s failed eight times before now. The odds aren’t good.”

And yet she still wanted to believe her mother could change. Hope, battered but not yet dead, hovered behind her dark eyes.

He cradled her face between his palms and pressed his lips to her forehead, helpless to stop himself. She stepped closer to him, her body brushing his. He felt the rapid thud of her heart against his chest, an echo of his own galloping pulse.

A pounding sound from the front of the house sent her skittering away, her face turning toward the sound. She uttered a low curse.

“Your mom?” he asked in a whisper.

“I don’t know.” She waved her arm toward the doorway. “My bedroom is the first room down the hall. Go there and lock the door. And take this stuff with you.” She poured the water from the bucket into the sink, dropped the wet washcloth into it and shoved the bucket and the first-aid kit at him. While she grabbed the trash left over and threw it in the garbage can by the sink, he followed her directions and went to her bedroom, closing the door behind him and engaging the lock.

He put down the bucket and pressed his ear to the door, trying to hear what was going on at the front door. He heard the rattle of the dead bolt and the door swinging open with a creak.

“Oh. Hi.” Delilah’s voice, muffled by the closed bedroom door, sounded cautious. “What are you doing—?”

“Where is he, Delilah?” It was a male voice, hard and imperious.

Brand flattened his hand against the door, his heart suddenly in his throat. He looked around the room, at the lone, narrow window behind the bed, and felt like a trapped animal.

They knew he was here.

He’d done the one thing he’d most wanted to avoid, even though his instincts had driven him right to this little mountain town from the moment he’d first realized his life was in danger.

He’d brought that danger straight to Delilah Hammond’s doorstep.