The Secret of Cherokee Cove

“You look fine.” He actually sounded as if he believed what he was saying.

“You’re a better diplomat than you look,” she murmured with a smile.

He left the coffee percolating and pulled up the stool beside hers, resting one arm on the bar and turning to face her. “I want you to forget what I told you last night about your mother. I have no proof that any of it happened, and what passes as truth, in these hills, can be as flexible as taffy.”

“I know it didn’t happen the way you heard it,” she said with confidence. “But something happened to my mother when she was living here in Bitterwood. There’s no other reason why she would’ve hidden her past so thoroughly from us for all these years.”

“You didn’t even know she was from here?”

“I knew she was from the Smoky Mountains. That she was born in Tennessee and didn’t meet my father until she was nearly twenty and working at a bait shop in Terrebonne. She told us she didn’t have any family left, and no reason to go back to Tennessee for visits. That’s why we were sort of surprised when she and my dad decided to drive to Tennessee for their vacation.”

“Do you think your father knew about your mother’s past?”

She thought about the question for a moment. “I think so. They were best friends as well as spouses. They didn’t keep secrets from each other.”

“But they never told you or your brother anything about it?”

“No.” She hadn’t thought much about why her mother’s past was a blank. It had simply always been that way, for as long as she remembered. “I think Dad guarded her secret because that’s what she wanted. But he must have known.”

“She didn’t leave you anything, a written journal or something that might have explained the blanks in her past?”

“No. Nothing. She wasn’t expecting to die, so she hadn’t prepared.”

“My mother got real sick when I was sixteen,” Nix said after a moment of silence. “Breast cancer. She just wanted to live at least long enough to get me and my brother out of high school.” Nix’s smile was tinged with a hint of exasperation. “Lavelle had to be pushed through that final semester, kicking and screaming.”

“Younger brothers,” Dana murmured, biting back the urge to cry.

“The good news is, she beat the cancer. Twenty-year survivor as of January.”

She felt a flutter of relief. “That’s wonderful.”

He nodded. “The chief says you’re the oldest.”

“He likes to remind people of that a lot. Lucky me.”

“If it makes you feel any better, you look younger.”

“Ten years ago, I might have smacked you for saying that,” she said with a grin. “But now I’ll just say ‘thanks.’ And suggest you might want to get your eyes checked.”

He looked at her for a long moment, his scrutiny straightforward and a little unnerving. “You have to know you’re a very attractive woman.”

She supposed she knew it, although the deeper into her thirties she went, the more she had a sense of time ticking past her at a quicker rate. She’d put her career first, her personal life a distant second, and she’d been okay with that order of things, because she’d always figured there’d be time, before her youth was spent, to change her priorities.

But she was two months shy of her thirty-fifth birthday, no longer the youngest, prettiest woman in any given room, and her expectations had changed.

“Thank you, again.” She cocked her head, smiling slightly. “You’re brave, Detective Nix. Flirting with the chief’s sister.”

“Oh, sugar, this ain’t flirting,” he said in a drawl so low and sexy her cheeks started burning.

“Just as well,” she murmured, retreating to the counter, where the coffee had finished burbling. She poured the hot black liquid into a mug and crossed to the refrigerator for milk. She spotted some hazelnut liquid creamer—had to be there for Laney, she figured, since Doyle didn’t care for sweet coffee—and poured a dollop from the container into her cup.

“You’re involved with someone back in Atlanta?” Nix asked. He’d moved to the counter to pour his own cup of coffee. Like Doyle, he drank it black, no cream, no sugar.

“Not at the moment.”

He glanced up from his coffee cup, a flame flickering in his dark eyes. She felt a responding flood of heat deep in her abdomen and forced her gaze back to her own coffee.

“Not in the market?”

“I don’t consider myself a commodity,” she answered a little more tartly than she’d intended.

Nix’s eyebrows twitched slightly, but he didn’t seem particularly offended by her response. “I’ll take that as a no.”

Still, she felt bad about snapping at him just for showing mild interest in her availability. She should feel flattered. Hell, she was flattered; Walker Nix was an attractive man. It wasn’t his fault that she didn’t care to involve herself in a short-term, dead-end fling.

She pushed her hair back from her face, meeting his gaze. “Sorry. I’ve spent a long time trying to get my fellow marshals to treat me like one of the guys. I forget my social graces sometimes.”

“I’d rather you just say what you’re thinking, straight out. Honesty goes a long way.”

“Okay. Then, honestly, I’m here in Bitterwood for two weeks. I’m not sticking around after that.”

“And you’re not interested in a short-term fling?” The corner of his mouth twitched as he cut to the chase.

“Not that you were offering?”

“No,” he said, the twitch becoming a whisper of a smile. “I wasn’t offering. For pretty much the same reason.”

She let out a long, slow breath. “Well, then.”

He walked slowly across the narrow space between them, reaching past her to put his mug of coffee on the breakfast bar. The move brought him so close she felt his heat pour over her, igniting another blaze of heat in her center. He bent his head, his breath hot against her ear. “Not that it ain’t mighty damn tempting.”

He stepped back, flashed her a smile that she felt right down to the tips of her toes and headed out of the kitchen toward the front door.

“You’re leaving already?” she asked, her voice embarrassingly hoarse.

He turned in the open doorway. “You may be on vacation, Marshal. But I’m not.” He lifted his hand in a brief, stationary wave, then pulled the door shut behind him.

She forced herself to stay where she was rather than trail him to the door and watch him leave. She might be feeling like a giddy schoolgirl right down to her tingling toes, but she had her pride.

And more important, she reminded herself sternly, she had a mystery to unravel. She just had to figure out where to start.

As she was walking back to the bedroom, the house phone started ringing. She picked up the bedroom extension, bracing herself to explain to the caller that her brother wasn’t available.

But it was Nix. “Sorry—I meant to mention this before I left. I don’t know how much truth there is to that story about your mother, but there’s a way you can find out.”

“Yeah?”

“In the story I’ve always heard, your mother was penniless, a charity case. And the couple whose baby boy she tried to take were well-off and reputable, which made what she did that much more scandalous.”