The Legend of Smuggler's Cave

Briar hadn’t had time to think that far ahead. “I’ll figure it out, Aunt Jenny. You know I always do.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have opened the door.”

As Nix headed for the door, Briar bent and kissed her aunt’s furrowed brow. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t fret yourself about it, okay?”

She waited by her aunt’s bedside until the older woman had drifted back to sleep. Then she tiptoed out of the room.

Nix was waiting outside the door, leaning against the wall. “She’s lucky to be alive.”

“I know.” Briar pushed back the springy curls that had slipped the bonds of her ponytail holder to fall in her face. She’d already had a rougher night off duty than she’d had on patrol. “What are the odds this break-in isn’t related to the previous one?”

Nix fell into step with her as she started down the hallway toward the waiting room. “I don’t know. We thought the last break-in was related to Dana’s visit, remember?”

“The Cumberland curse,” she murmured. Shortly after Dana had made a visit to Briar’s cabin, someone had broken in and trashed the place. Briar had assumed the break-in might have been an act of malice, to punish her for letting Tallie Cumberland’s daughter into her home.

The people of her small community, Cherokee Cove, had come to blame the Cumberlands for almost everything that went wrong in their world. Dana Massey’s mother, Tallie Cumberland, had become the target of a ruthless wealthy family after she’d accused them of stealing her child.

Dalton Hale’s family, in fact.

It didn’t matter that Tallie had told the truth. Subtly but unmistakably, Sutherlands and Hales had let it be known that any friend of a Cumberland was an enemy. And their influence in Bitterwood was far and wide. Nobody defied them without consequences. Tallie had left Bitterwood before the age of twenty, driven from town along with her family.

When Dana Massey had come to Bitterwood a couple of months ago, looking so much like her mother, a new round of Cumberland-curse fever had commenced. At the time of the last break-in, Briar and Nix had assumed one of her Cherokee Cove neighbors had been leaving her a message about mixing with Cumberlands.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

“Is Dalton Hale still here?” she asked Nix.

“He was still in the waiting room when I left.”

Great, she thought. Just great.

What the hell did he want with her, anyway? Why had he been asking questions about Johnny’s murder? That mystery had been languishing in cold-case territory for months now.

Why was the Ridge County prosecutor’s office suddenly interested in the murder again?

* * *

DALTON HALE HAD never seen himself as an angry man. Passionate, yes. Forceful in the pursuit of justice. But not one who possessed the kind of bitter rage that destroyed the lives and families of those who passed through his world.

But he was angry now. Fury burned in his gut like acid, eating away at every vestige of the man he’d once believed himself to be. It had poisoned his relationship with his father and grandfather until he’d found himself struggling to speak to them with any semblance of civility. It had ripped holes in the solid foundation of his career, taking him overnight from golden boy to uncertain risk in the eyes of the men and women who could make or break his future.

And for what? For a lie told years ago and a truth buried for over three decades. The vindication of a woman long dead and the total destruction of a man whose name had once meant something, not just here in Tennessee but all the way to the steps of the United States Capitol.

In a world where very little in life was fair, Dalton had spent his own life trying to even the odds for people without power or privilege.

People like the woman who had given birth to him.

And now he was angry at her, too. For having existed. For having come back here nearly fifteen years ago for one last look at the son she’d left behind. For becoming, with her husband, a victim of his grandfather’s steely will and his father’s emotional weakness.

And for giving birth to another son and a daughter who had invaded his well-planned world and asked inconvenient questions about a truth that should have remained buried.

They had made him into a man he didn’t recognize anymore.

And he was angry at himself, most of all, for letting them.

Maybe if he’d been brought up by earthy, straight-talking mountain folk like his birth mother, he could have vented all this rage in one rip-roaring, glass-smashing, fist-flying explosion. Gone on a tear and let the fury have reign. Got it out of his system and been done with it.

But he’d been raised by Nina Hale, not Tallie Cumberland. And Hales didn’t throw angry fits. They kept their emotions under control, functioning on reason and behaving at all times with civility and good manners.

Except when they were killing inconvenient people, he reminded himself as he faced his half brother with clenched fists and fought the urge to take a swing.

“What evidence do you have to support your theory about Johnny Blackwood?” Doyle’s calm tone was deceptive. Dalton didn’t miss the dangerous gleam of anger in the chief’s green eyes, eyes so like his own that he’d all but given up hoping the past couple of months had all been one nightmarish mistake.

“I’m not prepared to try my case before you, chief.”

“In other words, you’re talking out your—”

Laney put her hand on Doyle’s arm, stopping him midsentence. “Dalton’s been looking into the Wayne Cortland case,” she told her fiancé. “He’s been trying to unravel the Tennessee side of the organization, see if he can build criminal cases against everyone involved.”

Doyle’s expression took on a slight grudging hint of admiration that caught Dalton by surprise. Even worse, he felt an answering flutter of something that might be satisfaction deep in the pit of his gut, as if the chief’s approval actually mattered. He beat back the sensation with ruthless determination.

“I have to confess, I don’t know a lot about Johnny Blackwood,” Doyle said in a less confrontational tone. “I know he was murdered several months ago, and the case went cold pretty quickly.”

“It’s not his murder that interests me,” Dalton answered before he remembered he didn’t want to share any information with the chief. He sighed, knowing what he’d said would only make Massey more, not less, interested in Johnny Blackwood’s possible connection to Cortland.

Fortunately, Briar Blackwood chose that moment to return to the waiting room. She looked tired and angry, her black curls spilling into her face from her untidy ponytail as she strode into the room. Her storm-cloud eyes locked with his, and she gave a curt backward nod of her head, a silent invitation to join her outside. She murmured something to Nix and then walked out of the waiting room again.

“I have to go,” Dalton murmured, already moving toward the door.

“Be careful. She’s tougher than she looks.” Doyle’s words sounded more like a taunt than a warning.

His back stiffening, Dalton left the waiting room and looked up and down the corridor for the Blackwood woman.

She stood at the window at the far end of the hall, her back to him. She had a neat, slim figure accentuated by snug jeans and a curve-hugging long-sleeved T-shirt. The messy ponytail had almost given up, gathering only a small clump of curls at the back of her neck while the rest of her hair spilled free across her shoulders. As he walked toward her, she reached back and pulled the elastic band free, letting the rest of her hair loose to tangle and coil around her neck.

An unexpected tug in his groin caught Dalton by surprise. His steps faltered before he caught himself.

Not an option, Hale. Not even close to an option.

Unfortunately, the more he tried not to think about Briar Blackwood as a woman, the more of her feminine features he noticed. Like the perfect size of her breasts, neither too large nor too small for her compact frame. Or the flare of her hips and curvy contours of her bottom.

She had a fine face, too—more interesting than conventionally pretty, with lightly tanned skin splashed with small cinnamon freckles and large black-fringed eyes currently the color of antique pewter.

Fire flashed in those gray eyes as she turned to look at him. “Mr. Hale, I don’t know what you think you know about my husband or his murder, but if you think it’s a way to get back at your brother and sister—”

“Don’t call them that.”

Her dark eyebrows notched slightly upward. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. I don’t sugarcoat the truth. You and the chief share a mother. You don’t have to like it. I don’t reckon he likes it much himself, but there you are anyway. And if you’re messing around in my life because you think it’ll piss off your brother, you can just move along and find somebody else to use. I won’t be party to it.”