Smoky Ridge Curse

“It’s freezing out there. I’m sure it was just an animal, Dee. Why don’t you come back in here where it’s warm? Let the raccoon have the soup. He probably needs it more than we do.”

“I’m just going to walk the perimeter. There’s some blood on the table—maybe it’s injured and needs help.”

“Oh, poor thing. Okay, but hurry up. The temperature’s dropping like crazy out here. They’re talking about maybe our first snow of the season.” Reesa backed into the house, closing the door behind her.

Stamping her feet to get some of the feeling back into her cold toes, Delilah headed out into the yard, keeping the beam of the flashlight moving in a slow, thorough arc in front of her.

She discovered more blood, spattered on the grass in a weaving line toward the tree line. Following the trail, she spotted a white birch tree with a dark streak of red marring its papery bark about four feet up. The mark seemed to form a long fingerprint.

She paused and checked the magazine of her pistol, reassuring herself that the Sig was loaded, with a round already chambered. If her mother was right and their intruder was a bear, she didn’t want to face it unarmed.

Though she listened carefully for any sounds that might reveal an animal or other intruder nearby, all she heard was the moan of the icy wind through the trees. But she felt something else there. Something living and watching, waiting for her to turn around and leave.

What would happen if she did just that? Would the watcher let her go? Or would he pounce the second she turned her back? Not caring to find out, she backed toward the clearing with slow, steady steps. She kept her eyes on the woods, trying to see past the moonless blackness outside the narrow, weakening beam of her flashlight.

Only the faintest of snapping sounds behind her gave her any warning at all.

It wasn’t enough.

She hit a solid wall of heat. One large arm curled around her, pulling her flush against that heat, while a hand closed over her mouth.

“Don’t scream,” he growled.

She didn’t.

But he did.

Chapter Two

Pain gutted him, ripping its way around his wounded side and settling like liquid fire in the center of his stomach. He tried to keep his hold on her, tried to bite back the cry that tore from his throat as she slammed her elbow back into his side again.

“Delilah, stop.” Adam Brand stumbled backward, struggling to keep his feet as his body instinctively sought relief from her lethal limbs.

A second later, he was staring down the barrel of her Sig Sauer P229 backlit by the beam of a flashlight.

“Son of a bitch!” Delilah hit the last word hard and dropped the weapon and flashlight to her side, bending nearly double as if she’d been the one to take the blow to the gut. “You scared the hell out of me, Brand.”

“I think you reopened my wound,” Brand shot back, his voice hoarse with pain. He pressed his hand to his side and found that the wound, which had finally started to clot, was weeping blood again.

“Your wound?” Delilah straightened quickly, swinging the beam of her flashlight over him, searching for his injury.

He turned his side toward her helpfully. “I think it was a thirty-two. I got lucky.”

In the low light of the flashlight beam, her pretty face twisted with a grimace. “Lucky, huh?” She plucked at his shirt, making him wince as the cotton clung to the drying blood around the bullet furrow. “Where the hell have you been? The police are looking for you.”

“I know. That’s why I didn’t knock on the door.”

“What did you do with my soup?”

“Ate it,” Brand admitted. “I haven’t had anything to eat besides what I could forage for a couple of days.”

Delilah’s sharp brown eyes lifted to meet his. “The FBI says you’re a traitor.”

“You know better.” At least, he hoped she did. A lot of time had passed since they’d last seen each other.

People changed.

“What happened? How did it get to this point?” Her eyes narrowed. “Does it have anything to do with the Davenport case?”

“It’s connected,” he said. “But it’s a lot more complicated than that.” He tried to hold back a shiver, but the wind at his back was too damned icy for him to stop shaking.

Delilah’s brow furrowed. “We need to get you inside and warmed up.”

“I can’t go in there. Your mother’s there.”

“You don’t have a choice. If you stay out here much longer, you’ll go into hypothermia. Here.” She took off her jacket and handed it to him.

Brand looked at the thick denim jacket, built to hug her smaller frame. “That’s not going to fit me.”

She gave him an exasperated look, one he’d seen a thousand times before and had feared he might never see again. Cold, hungry and hurting, he still felt a crushing need to pull her close and say all the things he’d never said, to hell with his reasons for choosing the path he had. But now was no better time than the other times he’d stayed silent and let the moment pass.

“Wrap it around your neck to block the wind,” she said flatly. “I take it you don’t want to be found?”

The pragmatism of her question made him smile. It felt as if his face cracked into a million pieces at the effort. “That would be best.”

“I’ll make an excuse to my mother about why I have to go. Here.” She dug in the pocket of her jeans and handed him a set of keys. “Get in my car and lie down in the backseat. It should still be fairly warm. But don’t start the engine. I don’t want my mother suspicious.”

She started toward the small cabin with the cheery golden light in the windows and fragrant wood smoke wafting from the chimney, moving with long, kinetic strides that reminded him of those days, so many years ago, when she’d brought energy and life to his little section of the federal government.

He couldn’t say she hadn’t changed since that time—eight years of life had chiseled away the softness of her features, honing them to a mature, womanly beauty. And her eyes seemed, if anything, darker and more mysterious than he remembered, as if in leaving the FBI behind she’d also abandoned the openness of youth.

Brand trudged over the frozen ground to the low-slung black Camaro he’d seen her park just a little while earlier. At least she hadn’t lost her sense of style, he thought with a weak grin as he opened the car and bent to push up the bucket seat so he could crawl into the back. Stretching out on the narrow backseat, with its console hump in the middle, he changed his mind, wishing she’d grown staid enough to drive a roomy four-door sedan with a bench seat in the back.

At least inside the car he was sheltered from the biting wind and sleet, and the stinging numbness in his fingers and toes eased. For the first time in days, he closed his eyes and relaxed, enjoying the relative comfort of civilization while he could.

Sometime later, the crunch of footsteps on the ground outside jerked him out of a light doze. He tensed until the driver’s-side door opened and Delilah slid into the car. “Still alive?” she drawled as she buckled her seat belt. Her Appalachian accent had gotten stronger during her time away, he noticed.

“Barely.”

“You’re not bleedin’ on my seat, are you?”

Brand grinned. “No.”

“Who shot you?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

She was silent for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to believe him. “Okay, who ordered you shot?”