Smoky Ridge Curse. Paula Graves
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Would he have survived the night at those temperatures? She tamped down a shudder at the thought and spooned coffee into the machine, making it extra strong, the way she liked it.
The way Brand liked it, too, she remembered. He was the one who’d taught her to like coffee in the first place. To this day, she still bought the brand of beans he liked, grinding them herself.
How much of who she was had been shaped by those years she’d worked at the FBI with Adam Brand?
Footfalls behind her made her jump. She turned to find Brand standing in the kitchen doorway, the blanket wrapped around his bare torso. His hair was mussed and there were dark circles of pain under his blue eyes, but there was no escaping the impact of his masculine presence. It tugged at her belly, impossible to ignore.
“I smelled coffee.”
“You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
“I’m feeling better. You were right. Sleep helped.”
She made herself look away from his bare chest, as broad and well toned as she remembered. Time hadn’t robbed him of one ounce of virility. If anything, the lines of age now evident in his face only added to his masculine appeal.
He’d seen the difference in their ages as an obstacle. He’d never understood that she’d found his maturity one of his most tempting assets.
“You still put that flavored stuff in your coffee?” he asked when she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of hazelnut-flavored liquid creamer.
She made a face. “Do you still eat sardines?”
“Keeps me young.”
She grabbed a couple of mugs from the cabinet next to the sink. “Black, no cream, no sugar?”
“Some things don’t change.”
She handed him a cup of steaming coffee. “Lots of things do, though.”
He eased into one of the two chairs at a small table in her kitchen nook. “More things than not, I guess.” He made a sound of satisfaction at the first sip of coffee. “None of the people who took your place could ever make coffee worth a damn.”
“Nice to know I was irreplaceable in one aspect.” She splashed creamer in her own coffee, added a packet of sweetener and carried the cup to the nook. She sat across from him, cocking her head to look him over. “You do look better this morning.”
“Must be the company.”
She stifled a smile. “Sweet talker.”
“I’m serious. This is the first time since I went off the grid that I’ve felt any hope.”
“How did this all happen?” she asked. “How did someone get close enough to frame you?”
Brand sighed, pushing his mug of coffee away from him. “That’s a long story. And, as these things do, it started with a woman.”
“HER NAME WAS Elizabeth Vaughn. U.S. Attorney out of Abingdon, Virginia. I met her at a University of Virginia alumni function, and it turned out we had a lot in common.” Brand watched Delilah’s face, trying to gauge her reaction. But her features were as inscrutable as a mask. “We started seeing each other whenever she was in D.C. on business. She’s how I came to learn the name Wayne Cortland.”
“It was one of her cases?”
“Peripherally. She’d been investigating militias in the Appalachians and discovered that most of them had connections to meth dealers in the area. And most of both groups—militia and drug dealers—had done business with Wayne Cortland at some point.”
“So you think Cortland’s part of the redneck mafia?”
“A little less redneck, a little more mafia. He actually runs a legitimate lumber mill in a town called Travisville, near the Virginia/Tennessee border.”
“I’ve heard of Travisville,” Delilah said. “They have a bluegrass festival. My father used to take us there. At least, that’s why we went. He went to score drugs until he figured out how to make his own.”
She always seemed so clinical when she talked about her father and his drug problems. Even when she’d described escaping the burning rubble of the house her father had blown up in a meth-cooking accident, she’d stuck to the facts, never talking about how she’d felt, at the tender age of seventeen, to lose her father and her home to his criminal stupidity.
How had she coped with her homelessness? With her injured brother and her drunk of a mother? How had she come through unscathed to earn a scholarship to a good college and forge a whole new life for herself?
Had she come through unscathed? He didn’t see how it was possible. There had always been dark places in Delilah he’d never been able to reach.
Or maybe he just hadn’t tried hard enough.
“Cortland’s lumber business is legit,” he said. “But Liz was sure he laundered drug money through it. She just hadn’t figured a way to prove it.”
“So she brought you in on it?”
“Peripherally. She suspected he might be funding some meth mechanics in the mountains who then funded the white-power militia groups that gave the meth dealers their own army. She wanted me to see if I could get the domestic-terrorism task force involved in trying to tie those militias—and the meth cookers—to Cortland and his business.”
“Is he running the meth labs or just laundering the money?”
“I think he’s running them. Liz and I were able to talk to a few people who’d defied Cortland. They live in terror because apparently Cortland’s built this network of cookers and militia, and he keeps them in line with lethal threats. He’s already shown he’s willing to kill anyone who tries to cross him. We just can’t come up with the proof, because even the people who dared to talk to us are too terrified to testify against him.”
“Why didn’t you go to Liz for help instead of coming here?”
“Liz is dead.”
His flat pronouncement elicited the first emotion he’d seen out of Delilah—a visible recoil. “I’m sorry. Was it Cortland?”
“The FBI thinks it was me.”
Her brow furrowed. “You? They think you killed someone you were involved with? Why?”
“We weren’t involved anymore. Not romantically.” He shook his head, closing his fingers around the coffee mug to warm them. “The relationship never got very far—we were better suited as friends than lovers. But that didn’t keep me from being the prime suspect when she was murdered. See, I was the one who found her.”
“Oh, no.”
“I was in Abingdon to meet with her about some new information she’d gotten from an informant. When I got to her house, I found the door unlocked. She wasn’t answering the door, so I let myself in.”
“And you found her?”
He nodded, trying to put the scene out of his head. So much blood—
“You didn’t have an alibi?”
“She was still alive. The shooting must have just happened. I tried to stop the bleeding—” He swallowed hard, remembering the desperate fight to keep Liz alive. “There was just too much damage. But see, it had just happened. The timeline was too close. How could I prove I wasn’t the one who’d done it?”
“Surely they checked you for gunshot residue. Checked your gun.”
“She was shot with her own gun. And the killer wore gloves—they were lying next to the gun. No way to prove they didn’t belong to me, although they can’t prove they did, either.”
“This is crazy.”
“Tell me about