Blue Ridge Ricochet

“Are you sure?” Not that she wanted to contact authorities any more than he did, but his reluctance didn’t exactly fit the picture of a man wrongly accused, did it?

Maybe that was good, though, considering the dangerous game she was playing herself. Dealing with bad guys was less complicated than dealing with good ones, she’d discovered. Their motives were easier to glean and usually involved one sin or another. Greed, gluttony, lust, hate—oh, yeah, she definitely knew how to deal with sinners.

Saints, on the other hand, were a cipher.

“Let’s get you out of the cold, Dallas.” She pushed aside questions of his particular motives. There’d be time to figure him out once she got him back to her cabin, where she could provide the basic comforts anyone in his condition needed, whether sinner or saint.

Avoiding his bad shoulder, she pulled his right arm around her shoulder and helped him to his feet. He stumbled a little as they made their way across the slickening blacktop to the Jeep, but she settled him in the passenger seat with little fuss and watched with bemusement as he fumbled the seat belt into place. Sinner or not, he apparently took seat belt safety seriously.

She circled around, slid behind the Jeep’s steering wheel and cranked the engine. Next to her, Dallas sighed audibly as heat blasted from the Jeep’s vents.

“Good?” she asked, easing back onto the road.

“Heaven,” he murmured through chattering teeth.

He couldn’t have been out in the elements for long, she realized as his shivering began to ease before they’d gone more than a mile down the road. So where the hell had he come from?

“Should I be worrying about pursuit?” she asked.

His gaze slanted toward her. “Pursuit?”

“Anybody after you?”

He didn’t answer at first. She didn’t push, too busy dealing with the steady buildup of icy precipitation forming on the mountain road. Thank God she didn’t have much farther to travel. The little cabin she called home was only a quarter mile down the road. They’d be there before the snow started.

“There might be,” he answered finally as she slowed into the turn down the gravel road that ended at her cabin.

“Are they nearby?”

“Probably,” he answered.

Great. Just great.

“What did you do?” She glanced his way.

His mouth crooked in the corner. “Because people in trouble usually got there under their own steam?”

She shrugged. “Usually.”

“I broke a rule. I thought it was for a good reason, but as usual, the rules are there for a reason.”

He was beginning to sound more like a saint than a sinner. “What kind of rule?”

“I skipped steps I should have taken,” he said obliquely.

But she knew enough about his situation to know exactly what he was talking about, even if she didn’t let on. “That’s cryptic.”

He smiled. “Yes.”

So. He didn’t trust her any more than she trusted him. Fair enough. She was in no position to quibble.

“Well, how about we don’t worry about rules and secrets, and just get you somewhere warm and dry. Think you could handle something to eat?”

“Yes,” he said with an eagerness that made her glance his way again. He met her gaze with a quick glance, his lips quirking again. “Sorry. I’ve missed a meal or three.”

When he smiled, he was almost good-looking even with his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, something she hadn’t expected. The only photo she’d seen of him had been his driver’s license photo. Nobody ever looked good in their driver’s license photos.

Dallas Cole, she suspected, would clean up nicely.

Down, girl. He’s not date material, and you’ve sworn off men, remember? Saints or sinners, they’re nothing but trouble.

She pulled the Jeep under the carport connected to her cabin and cut the engine. “Sure you don’t want me to call paramedics?”

His eyes were closed, his head resting against the back of the seat. When he turned his face toward her, his eyes opened slowly to meet hers in the gloom. “I just need to rest a little while. Then I’ll get out of your hair.”

The full impact of what she was doing hit her as she got out of the Jeep and locked the door behind her. Had she lost her mind, taking in a stranger wanted by the FBI? Even Alexander Quinn, a man who prided himself on his ability to read people, wasn’t sure what side Dallas Cole had chosen. For all she knew, this might be a test of her loyalty to the Blue Ridge Infantry.

She had to tread carefully. Everything she’d worked for over the past few months was at stake.

Dallas stumbled on his way to the door, flashing her a grimace of a smile as she grabbed his arm and kept him from face-planting in the gravel between the Jeep and her kitchen door. “I’m usually steadier on my feet.”

“How long has it been since you ate anything?”

“Not counting roots and berries?” he asked with a lopsided smile, leaning against the side of her house while she unlocked the door.

“Yeah, not counting those.” She opened the door and helped him up the two shallow steps into the kitchen.

Inside, the cabin was blessedly warm and familiar, driving away some of Nicki’s tension. Dallas Cole didn’t seem to be faking his weakness, and she was finally back in her own comfort zone. She knew where the knives were kept and where to find her Remington 870 pump-action shotgun and ammo.

And there was the satellite phone hidden under the mattress of her bed that would get Alexander Quinn on the line in a second. He might be two and a half hours away in Purgatory, Tennessee, but he had eyes and ears all over the hills. She knew from experience.

“How much snow do you think we’ll get?” Dallas asked as she flicked the switch on the wall, flooding the kitchen with light. He squinted at her, as if it had been a while since his eyes had been accustomed to so much light.

“I guess you haven’t heard a forecast in a few days?” She crossed to the stove and grabbed one of the saucepans hanging over the range. “We’ll get an inch or two, maybe. It’ll probably be melted off by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Glad to be out of it.” He nodded toward the small kitchen nook table. “May I?”

Polite, she thought. Though she’d met a few well-mannered devils in her day who’d give you the shaft and thank you for it. “Sit. I’ll see what’s in the pantry.”

He groaned a little as he sat, and she wondered how many injuries he had hidden beneath his grimy clothes. “Thank you. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to repay you for your kindness.”

His accent was subtle but there, the hint of a mountain twang not unlike her own Tennessee accent. She’d done little more than glance over the information Quinn’s mystery operative had left for her at the dead drop a few weeks earlier before she’d destroyed it, not exactly expecting Dallas Cole to show up in the middle of River’s End. But there’d been something about a hometown in eastern Kentucky—

“No repayment necessary.” She looked through the cans in her pantry. “Chicken and vegetable sound okay?”

“Sounds like heaven.”

As she heated the soup, she searched her brain for any other details she could remember from the dossier on Dallas Cole. His job at the FBI wasn’t exactly what she might have expected—that much she remembered. She wasn’t dealing with a special agent or a forensic science whiz.