Smoky Ridge Curse

“You have a lot of friends around here?”

She slanted a look up at him as she closed the tube. “Some.”

“Any who’d be in enough trouble to drag you away from dinner with your mother?”

“Not really,” she admitted. “But my mother doesn’t know that.”

He arched his eyebrows. His own mother had always known everything, even things he’d tried to keep secret from her. She’d been the one who’d first realized his feelings for the new female agent under his supervision weren’t entirely professional. Even as she was fighting the cancer that finally took her, she’d seen past his casual remarks about his team and focused like a laser on his mentions of Delilah Hammond.

“You can’t see her and stay her supervisor, you know,” she’d told him. Brand was a third-generation FBI agent, so his mother knew the rules as well as he did, having been married to an agent for more than forty years. “You’ll have to make a choice, just like before.”

And he had, eventually. Just not the one Delilah might have wanted.

“Mothers know stuff,” he warned Delilah as she applied a clean bandage to his injury. “Call her before she decides to drop by.”

“I’ll call her soon.” Her fingers were warm and gentle, making the flesh of his side ripple with awareness. He tried not to imagine her hands tracing a fiery path up his body, tried not to remember just how talented those hands could be when she chose to let them wander.

“How’s she doing?”

Her answering look was wary. “She’s gone on the wagon again.”

“How long?”

“This is day four.” She released a soft sigh. “She seemed to be doing well when I saw her last night. You don’t think my leaving early would have set her off on a binge, do you?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. During the handful of years he and Delilah had worked together, he’d seen her go through the hopeful highs and crushing lows of her mother’s attempts at sobriety. “What do you think?”

“I think she’s failed eight times before now. The odds aren’t good.”

And yet she still wanted to believe her mother could change. Hope, battered but not yet dead, hovered behind her dark eyes.

He cradled her face between his palms and pressed his lips to her forehead, helpless to stop himself. She stepped closer to him, her body brushing his. He felt the rapid thud of her heart against his chest, an echo of his own galloping pulse.

A pounding sound from the front of the house sent her skittering away, her face turning toward the sound. She uttered a low curse.

“Your mom?” he asked in a whisper.

“I don’t know.” She waved her arm toward the doorway. “My bedroom is the first room down the hall. Go there and lock the door. And take this stuff with you.” She poured the water from the bucket into the sink, dropped the wet washcloth into it and shoved the bucket and the first-aid kit at him. While she grabbed the trash left over and threw it in the garbage can by the sink, he followed her directions and went to her bedroom, closing the door behind him and engaging the lock.

He put down the bucket and pressed his ear to the door, trying to hear what was going on at the front door. He heard the rattle of the dead bolt and the door swinging open with a creak.

“Oh. Hi.” Delilah’s voice, muffled by the closed bedroom door, sounded cautious. “What are you doing—?”

“Where is he, Delilah?” It was a male voice, hard and imperious.

Brand flattened his hand against the door, his heart suddenly in his throat. He looked around the room, at the lone, narrow window behind the bed, and felt like a trapped animal.

They knew he was here.

He’d done the one thing he’d most wanted to avoid, even though his instincts had driven him right to this little mountain town from the moment he’d first realized his life was in danger.

He’d brought that danger straight to Delilah Hammond’s doorstep.

Chapter Four

“Hello to you, too, Antoine.” Delilah forced herself to smile at her soon-to-be colleague, Detective Antoine Parsons of the Bitterwood Police Department. He was a tall, lean man in his early thirties, with smooth brown skin and coffee-dark eyes that had always been able to see through a load of bull at twenty paces, even back during their school days.

But how on earth could he know that Adam Brand was here?

Antoine met her smile with an arched eyebrow. “Where is Seth, Dee? I went by the Davenport place and it was locked up tight. Tried Cleve’s old place and it’s locked up, too.”

She hid her relief. “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him in a couple of days. I could call my mother and see if she’s heard from him.”

“We’re trying to keep an eye on Rachel Davenport, damn it! Your brother is always pulling some stupid stunt that makes our jobs harder.” Antoine sighed and looked at her disheveled state. “Did I wake you?”

“No, I’ve been up awhile.” She pulled her robe more tightly around her, even though the thermal tee and sweats underneath weren’t exactly revealing. “But I’m not interested in heating the outdoors this morning, so if you don’t mind—”

She’d meant for him to leave, but he took her words as an invitation to enter, crowding past her into the living room. If he’d been anyone else, she might have stood her ground and made him go, but Antoine was soon to be her colleague. She couldn’t afford to alienate a potential ally before she’d even started her job.

“You don’t think they’ve bugged out for good, do you?” Settling on the sofa, Antoine looked up at her, frustration shining in his eyes. “I’m getting all sorts of pressure from above as it is about not closing this case, and if he’s just hightailed it off—”

“You’re getting pressure to close the case?”

He grimaced. “It’s subtle, but yeah. Upper management would like to see it go away, now that the killer and the man who hired him are both dead.”

“Somebody was twisting Bailey’s arm to put out that hit,” Delilah said flatly. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Try proving it.”

“A new lead would be nice.” She sat in the armchair across from the sofa, trying not to think about the pillow she’d thrown hastily behind the sofa out of sight from the doorway. If Antoine decided he wanted a cup of coffee or something—

“The TBI says they’re trying to track down the source of Bailey’s gambling debts, but—”

But the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had much bigger fish to fry than investigating a theory that someone had been pulling Paul Bailey’s strings when he tried to drive his stepsister out of her role as CEO of Davenport Trucking. Rather than trying to figure out why control of the company might be worth killing people to get, the authorities seemed willing to write it off as one man’s insane ambition.

Tension stretched through her body like a giant rubber band. She needed Antoine to go away. Now. “Well, I can tell you this. Wherever Seth is, he’s with Rachel, and he’ll take a bullet for her before he lets anything happen to her.” She let her gaze drop, not wanting Antoine’s sharp eyes to catch the fact that she was on edge.

That was when she spotted the torn gauze package.

Her nerve endings clanged as if someone had snapped that rubber band of tension. Balling her fists by her sides, she tried not to react, even though her pulse had jumped about twenty beats a minute.

The package must have fallen beneath the coffee table the night before when she was cleaning Brand’s wound. It lay a few inches from Antoine’s foot, just under the edge of the table, and it had a rusty splotch of dried blood on it. If he looked down at his feet—

She rose immediately. “Antoine, I don’t mean to be rude, but I have some errands to run before lunchtime, and if I don’t get to it—”

“Of course. Sorry.” Antoine stood and shot her an apologetic smile. “If you hear from Seth or Rachel, will you let them know I’m trying to keep them, you know, alive?”

“Of course.” She walked him to the door, keeping her body carefully between him and the coffee table.