The Legend of Smuggler's Cave

“Too late to worry about that,” she murmured as she heard her son calling her name from down the hall. She followed the sound to the spare room, where Nix had set up the sofa bed for Logan, piling pillows around him to keep him from rolling too close to the edge. Logan looked sleepy and cranky, but the watery smile he flashed when he caught sight of her face made her heart melt into a sticky little pool of motherly love in the center of her chest. “Mama.”

“You ready to sleep in your own bed tonight?” She plucked him from the tangle of sheets and buried her nose in his neck, reveling in the soft baby smell of him.

“Yep,” he answered with an exaggerated nod that banged his little forehead against her chin. “Ow!” He giggled as he rubbed his forehead.

“Watch where you put that noggin, mister,” she answered with a laugh of her own, pressing a kiss against his fingers. “Let’s go home, okay?”

“I’ll get his things.” Nix picked up the scattered toys she’d packed for Logan while she carried him out to the front room. Nix carried the two small backpacks for her and put them in the front seat of the Jeep while she strapped Logan into his car seat in the back.

“If you decide you’d rather come back here, no matter what time it is, you pack up the little fellow and come on back. I’ll keep the sofa bed ready.” Nix reached through the open back door and gave Logan a head ruffle. Logan grinned up at him and patted his curls back down.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, although nothing short of a full-on assault was going to drive her out of her own house. She wasn’t going to play the damsel in distress, not even for someone like Nix, who had only her best interests at heart.

She’d made too many decisions in her life already based on what other people wanted her to do. She wasn’t going to ignore her own instincts any longer.

Still, her steely resolve took a hit when Logan’s sleepy voice piped up from the backseat as she turned onto the winding road to her cabin. “Mama, are the mean men gonna be there tonight? I don’t like them.”

She put the brakes on, slowing the Jeep to a standstill in the middle of the deserted road. “I don’t like them either,” she admitted, beginning to question her motives for taking her son back to the cabin so soon after the break-in. Was she willfully putting him in danger just to bolster her own desire to stand on her own two feet?

But she couldn’t tuck her tail and run away from their home. It was one of the few things she could call her own in the whole world. Her great-grandfather had built the cabin over a hundred years ago with wood he’d chopped himself and the sweat of his own brow. Her grandfather had added to it over the years—indoor plumbing, extra rooms as the family had expanded. When he had died, he’d left the place to Briar’s mother, who’d deeded it to Briar as a wedding gift.

It was one of the few things she had left now of her mother. That cabin and twenty-four years of good memories.

She couldn’t let fear drive her away from that legacy. For her own sake and especially for Logan’s.

“I won’t let the bad men scare you anymore,” she said firmly, hoping she was telling the truth. Because as much as she’d tried to hide it the night before at the hospital, Dalton Hale’s words had weighed heavily on her. Not the thought of Johnny’s infidelity—she may have been dismayed by the information, but she hadn’t been surprised. But the idea that he might have gotten himself tangled up in Wayne Cortland’s criminal activities—that was the notion that had nagged her every waking hour since Hale first brought up the subject.

Johnny hadn’t turned out to be the strong, solid man of honor she’d thought he would be. They’d married too young, she supposed, right out of high school. They’d started trying to have a family before either of them had reached their twenties, and the lack of success for the first few years had been an unexpected strain on their bond.

She’d given up before Johnny had, figuring a child of her own just wasn’t going to happen, but he’d seen the failure as a personal affront, a challenge to his masculinity. His inability to get her pregnant had turned out to be one of those moments in life where adversity led to unpleasant revelations about a person’s character.

She hadn’t been happy with what she’d seen in Johnny during those months when he’d fought against the tide of reality. She hadn’t realized how much his sense of self had been tangled up with his notion of sexual virility, maybe because she’d made him wait until marriage before they slept together. She’d seen his patience and willingness to deny himself for her as a sign of his strength.

She’d begun to wonder, as he grew angrier and more resentful with each negative pregnancy test, if she’d read him right. What if he hadn’t denied himself at all? What if he’d been sleeping with other girls the whole time she was making him wait?

Then, almost as soon as they stopped trying, she’d gotten pregnant with Logan, and for a while Johnny had seemed to be his former self: happy, good-natured and loving. Until the nausea had started, and the doctor had started warning her about the possibility of not carrying the pregnancy to term.

“Mama?”

Logan’s voice held a hint of worry, making her realize how long she’d been sitting still in the middle of the road, trying to make a decision.

They were almost home. And it was home, after all. Two invasions of her sanctuary made her only that much more determined to reclaim its sense of peace and safety.

“We’re almost home,” she said firmly, shifting the rearview mirror until she could see her son’s sleepy face. He met her gaze in the mirror and grinned, melting her heart all over again.

She reached the cabin within a couple of minutes and parked in the gravel drive that ended at the utility shed at the side of the house. She paused for a moment, taking a thorough look around for any sign of intruders. But the night was dark, the moon fully obscured by lowering clouds that promised rain by morning. She still hadn’t changed the front-porch light bulb, she realized with dismay. The only light that pierced the gloom was from the Jeep’s headlights, their narrow beams ending in twin circles on the flat face of the shed wall.

Don’t borrow trouble, Briar Rose. The voice in her head was her mother’s, from back when she’d been as strong and immovable as the rocky face of Hangman’s Bald near the top of Smoky Ridge. Don’t borrow trouble—it’ll come in its own sweet time, and more than soon enough.

She cut the Jeep’s engine and walked around to the passenger side to get Logan out of his seat. He lifted his arms with eagerness, despite his sleepy yawn, and she unlatched him as quickly as she could, wanting to get inside the cabin before the Jeep’s headlight delay ran out.

She had just pulled him free of the car-seat belts when the headlights extinguished, plunging them into inky darkness.

Without the moon and the stars overhead, the darkness was nearly complete. The town center lay two miles to the south; her closest neighbor was a half mile up the mountain, invisible to her through the thicket of evergreens and hardwoods that grew between them.

Tucking Logan more firmly against her side, she reached in her pocket for her cell phone. Her fingers had just brushed against the smooth casing of the phone when she heard a crunch of gravel just behind her.

She let go of the phone and brought her hand up to the pancake holster she’d clipped behind her back before leaving work. But she didn’t reach it before hands clawed at her face, jerking her head back until it slammed against a solid wall of heat. She heard Logan’s cry and felt him being pulled from her grasp.

Clutching him more tightly, she tried to get her hand between the body that held her captive and the Glock nestled in the small of her back, but her captor’s grasp was brutally strong. His fingers dug into her throat, cutting off her air for a long, scary moment.

Then the air shattered with the unmistakable crack of rifle fire, and the world around her turned upside down.

Chapter Four

The rifle kicked in Dalton’s hands, nearly knocking him from his feet, but he tightened his grip and fired another warning shot into the ground, his pulse stuttering in his ears like a snare drum.

He’d had little hope that his desperate intervention would work, but to his relief, the two figures tugging at Briar Blackwood dived for cover at the second bark of the Remington.

The darkness of the night was near total, but he’d been dozing in the car for hours, his eyes adjusting to the gloom enough for him to make out the shadowy shapes of the two men escaping into the woods. Definitely both men—he had quickly discerned that fact as soon as he’d seen them gliding out of the woods in the wake of Briar’s arrival.

He’d had no time to warn her, only enough time to unstrap the Remington 700 rifle that hung on a rack in the back window of the S-10’s cab, another gift from his campaign manager. He knew enough about rifles to check that it was loaded and to point the barrel where it would make a loud noise but have no chance of causing injury, but in truth, he was damned lucky his ruse had worked, and he was praying like crazy as he raced toward Briar’s still figure on the ground by the Jeep that the men didn’t figure out he’d been bluffing.

She stirred as he came closer, putting her son between her body and the Jeep as she rose to her knees and turned a pistol toward him.

“Don’t shoot! It’s Dalton Hale.”

She held her shooting stance for a heart-stopping moment while he froze in place. Fear flooded him, roared in his ears like a storm-tossed sea and made his hands shake as he held the rifle away in a show of surrender.

“Cover me until we reach the cabin,” she rasped, shoving her weapon behind her back and turning to scoop up her son.

He hurried behind her, keeping his eyes on the woods, looking for any sign of the intruders returning, but the gloom was absolute. He heard no sounds of movement in the underbrush, however, as they hurried up the cabin steps. With a rattle of keys, Briar unlocked the door one-handed and shoved her way inside, growling for him to hurry and come in behind her.

Once he was inside, she turned the deadbolt and slumped hard against the front door, her chest rising and falling in quick, harsh gasps.

“Are you okay?” he asked, setting the rifle aside and reaching for the little boy, who was wobbling precariously in her faltering grasp.

She tried to pull her son away from him, but her knees buckled, and he grabbed the boy quickly, keeping him from falling. With alarm, he watched her slide to a sitting position in front of the door, her breath labored.

“Mama!” The child started crying, wriggling against Dalton’s grasp.

“It’s okay, little man. Your mama’s going to be okay.” He lowered the boy to the floor, and he raced away on stubby little legs, throwing himself at his mother.

She lifted her arms and hugged him close, her face buried in his neck. “Call 911,” she said, her voice muffled against her son’s body.

Pulling out his cell phone, he reached for the light switch on the wall by the door. Golden light flooded the front room, making him squint as he punched in the numbers and crouched in front of Briar. A female voice came through the phone speaker. “911. What’s your emergency?”

He summarized the situation quickly, putting his hand on Briar’s shoulder. “I can’t tell if she’s injured—”