Smoky Ridge Curse

He’d been right, although it hadn’t taken long once he set eyes on her to realize she was nothing but trouble, and mostly to him.

“Just flurries,” he answered her question. “What’s the weatherman saying?”

“Snow in the hills again tonight.” She had showered and changed into a pair of jeans that did wonderful things for her legs and backside and a long-sleeved heather-gray T-shirt that did wonderful things to the rest of her. He couldn’t hold back a smile, drawing a quirk of her eyebrows.

“What?”

“Just remembering the first time I laid eyes on you in that cherry-red suit with the skirt about two inches shorter than every other woman’s in the bureau. You walked in there determined to make an impression, and you did. I had to slap every man on the task force upside the head to get their eyes back in their skulls.”

“You weren’t impressed.”

“I just didn’t show it.”

“I think I’d probably do things differently now.” She crossed to stand by him at the window, gazing out at the front yard. Flurries were beginning to linger on the fallen leaves in the yard, melting more slowly. She rubbed her arms briskly. “Temperature’s dropping. We may get some of that accumulation here as well.”

“Will it snow us in?” he asked, trying not to wish for it. He had so much to do and time was running out. The last thing he could let himself do was lose focus because of Delilah.

But that was the effect she’d always had on him, wasn’t it?

“No, the road surfaces are still too warm. But it’s coming.” She looked up at him. “Are you going to keep fighting me on this? Or are you going to let me help you?”

“You start a new job soon, don’t you?”

“On Monday.”

So, a week. How much could he get done in a week, even with her help? He and Liz had been looking into Cortland’s business, albeit unofficially, for over a month, and they’d gotten almost nowhere.

Almost.

But Liz, as sweet and smart as she’d been, wasn’t Delilah Hammond. Liz had been a city girl from Ohio trying to navigate a region that might as well have been another country.

Delilah had grown up in these hills. She knew their dark side, knew how to make her way through them, how to speak the language and carry herself so that she blended in rather than stuck out.

He was going to have to depend on those skills again. Like it or not.

“Okay. We’ll work on this for the next week. But if we get nowhere, I’ve got to get out of here and let you get on with your life. Agreed?”

Her eyes narrowed, but she finally nodded. “Agreed.”

He didn’t know whether he felt relief or dread. A week with Delilah seemed like an unearned gift in so many ways. But was he just setting himself up for another round of regrets?

He had a bad habit of wanting things he could never let himself have.

Chapter Five

When Brand returned from taking a shower, his face looked pinched and pale. Delilah winced as he crossed to where she sat at the kitchen table making notes. “You okay?”

He nodded. “The wound hurts like hell, but I’m not seeing signs of infection.” He turned his side to her for inspection.

He was right. The bullet groove seemed to be healing already, the ragged edges of flesh starting to look less angry and red. She took the digital temporal thermometer from the first-aid kit and handed it to him. “Take your temperature while I replace the bandage.”

“Ninety-nine point two,” he said a few seconds later as she placed a padded bandage over the bullet furrow.

“Not bad,” she said. “If it goes over a hundred, we’ll start worrying.”

He waited for her to tape down the bandage. “We need to discuss the matter of clothes.”

She looked up at him, her lips curving. “I don’t know, Brand. I kind of like you walkin’ around my house half-naked. Like I finally got that cabana boy I’ve always wanted.”

He made a face at her. “It’s a little chilly to play cabana boy. As fun as that sounds.”

She felt a blush rising up her neck, reminding her she was a lot better at talking a good game than actually playing it. After she’d left Bitterwood to go to college on a scholarship and what money she could make from part-time jobs, she’d learned that scared little girls from the sticks always ended up crushed and forgotten in the big city. So she’d put on the sassiest, brassiest persona she could come up with and discovered she could go anywhere she wanted and do anything she wanted and nobody gave her any trouble.

Of course, it hadn’t made her very popular with other women, and honest relationships with men had proved pretty damned hard to come by. But she couldn’t help what women thought, and she didn’t care what men thought, because the last thing she’d wanted, after growing up in the house with Delbert and Reesa Hammond, was a long-term relationship with a man.

Nobody was going to have that kind of control over her life, she’d vowed. She would never become what her mother had become.

Only Adam Brand had ever tempted her to think twice about happily ever after. And that hadn’t exactly turned out well.

“What did you do with the clothes you had with you?” she asked, patting down the last piece of surgical tape. “Or did you run away from home with just the clothes on your back?”

He sat in the chair next to her. “There are some things in a canvas duffel bag stashed near a big truss bridge that goes over a gorge. Close to some seedy little bar out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Purgatory Bridge,” she murmured, wondering if he knew how that bridge had figured into her brother’s life recently. Seth had saved Rachel Davenport’s life on that bridge less than a month ago, and now they were already talking rings and forever. “I can get it for you now if you can describe where you left it.”

“I’d probably have to be there.” He glanced at the papers spread out in front of her. “What’s all this?”

“My notes on the Davenport Trucking case,” she answered. “I was just adding the things we discussed about Wayne Cortland.”

He picked up the notes and glanced over them. “Thorough, Hammond. Guess I taught you a few things after all.”

“A few,” she conceded, dragging her gaze away from the muscular curve of his shoulder. “You sure you have to be there for me to fetch your clothes?”

“I hid the bag well. It would be easier for me to find it myself.”

“It’s cold out, and you’re half-naked.”

He shot her a grin. “Does that bother you?”

“That it’s cold out?”

“That I’m half-naked.”

“No,” she lied.

He just kept grinning.

“In this weather, it’ll be dark enough by five-thirty to risk it,” she said. “I can’t go out with a strange man in daylight around here. People would notice.”