Smoky Mountain Setup

But what about her spirit? The Olivia Sharp he’d known and loved had been a firecracker, full of explosive energy and a fierce inquisitiveness that had taken her very far very fast in the FBI.

But not this woman in front of him. She was quiet, contemplative and remarkably still.

She stirred as he watched her, turning her gaze to him. “I could heat up some milk over the fire for hot chocolate. Or even water for coffee, if you’d prefer that—”

“You’ve changed.” He hadn’t meant to blurt the words aloud, but he couldn’t take them back.

Her eyelids flickered and she looked away. “So have you.”

Now that he’d started down this conversational path, he decided, he might as well go all in. “Are you happy?”

“I’m...content.”

He felt an ache settle in his chest at the hint of melancholy in her tone. “Is contentment enough?”

“For now.”

“Do you anticipate finding more than contentment at some point in the future?”

She slanted a look his way. “Why don’t you just come out and ask whatever it is you want to know?”

“Do you miss me?” He clamped his mouth shut as soon as the words escaped his lips. He hadn’t intended to ask such a blunt, self-serving question.

“Yes.” Her answer, equally blunt, caught him by surprise.

They fell quiet, letting the crackle of the fire fill the lingering silence. Landry wasn’t sure how much time had passed before she spoke again, but the flames in the hearth had already begun to die down.

“I loved you. Like I’d never loved anyone in my life.” Her gaze remained directed forward, toward the fireplace, the flickering light from the flames bathing her face in a warm glow. “When things fell apart, I had to keep going. Keep working the job, not let the loss derail me. But I just couldn’t keep going, day in and day out, working alone when I’d gotten so used to you being there.”

The ache in his chest intensified. “I’m sorry.”

“You’d been transferred by then. It’s not like we’d have been working together anyway.”

“I was a mess,” he admitted. “It was hard to care about anything for a long time. I worked the job, but it just didn’t mean anything to me anymore.”

“I heard you’d started going through the motions.”

Guilt flooded him, hot and sour. “I did. Much to my shame. I don’t really have an excuse. I just knew I wasn’t ever going to get any further up the ladder than I already was, and any screwup would probably be the end of the line for me.”

“Easier to keep your nose clean if you’re not rocking the boat.”

“Yeah. I guess. I’m not sure I gave it that much thought. It’s just—nothing meant anything. Every time I cleared a case, three more would pop up to take their place. Bureaucratic crap kept creeping further and further down the line into the field offices. We were dealing with federal-level politics in the Johnson City RA, for Pete’s sake.”

“Why didn’t you just leave the FBI, then?”

“And do what? I spent over a decade solving crimes and protecting lives. It’s all I really know how to do at this point.”

“You could have come to work for Quinn at The Gates, for one thing.” She picked up the fire poker and gave the logs a nudge.

“I wasn’t ready.” He stopped short as she snapped her gaze up to meet his.

“You weren’t ready to work with me again.”

“That’s not it, exactly.”

She turned back to the fire. “Then what is it?”

“I know Ava Trent probably didn’t have anything good to say about me. Or McKenna Rigsby, either. But my job was to watch their backs, and I didn’t want to leave them in the lurch.”

“So you stayed for your partners?” She arched an eyebrow but still didn’t look at him.

“I wanted my job to mean something again. I thought if I stuck around, if I did what it took to get through the day, I’d feel that fire again.” He shook his head. “As if that fire came from outside of me.”

She remained silent for a long time, her singular focus on the flickering fire beginning to make him squirm inside. The Olivia Sharp who’d been his partner, in his work life and his personal life, had been a vibrant force of nature. Quiet contemplation had never been her style.

Maybe that woman really was gone. Maybe he’d lost her in the aftermath of the Richmond debacle just as surely as he’d lost himself.

“I never understood why you couldn’t forgive me for not remembering what happened.” Her low murmur seemed loud in the snowbound hush of the cabin, yet he was certain he’d misunderstood her.

“What?”

She slowly turned her gaze to meet his, her blue eyes blazing with a mixture of anger and pain. “I had a head injury. I couldn’t remember anything that happened right before or right after the explosion. But you seemed to think I should be able to pull those memories out of nothing to prove you weren’t lying. That wasn’t fair.”

“It wasn’t what you couldn’t remember that was the problem. It’s what you told the investigators.”

Her brow furrowed. “I didn’t tell them anything. I couldn’t. I didn’t remember anything.”

“Yet you somehow managed to remember me pushing you and the other team members to disobey the hold order.” His voice sharpened.

“I did no such thing.”

He shook his head. Why was she denying it? Did she think he hadn’t learned what she’d said in her official statement?

The agents who’d interrogated him had shown him a transcript of her testimony, signed off by Olivia, that had laid the whole mess on his shoulders.

Surely she remembered what she’d told the investigators. The words were certainly burned in his mind— “Agent Landry believed that waiting would allow the hostage-takers to escape, so he decided to countermand the official orders and go into the building.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing.” He was starting to feel sick, his dinner roiling in queasy waves in his gut. “It doesn’t matter.”

Her lips flattened with anger. “You’re right—it doesn’t. The real problem is that you never trusted me. Not really.”

How could he argue with her? His lack of faith—in anyone and anything—had long preceded Olivia’s presence in his life.

He closed his eyes. “You, of all people, know why I didn’t trust anyone easily.”

Her fingers closed around his jaw, tugging his face around, forcing him to open his eyes and look into her pain-filled gaze. “I am not her. I never was. I never will be.”