Smoky Mountain Setup. Paula Graves
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I don’t know what to do next. And you were always my go-to.”
Her heart squeezed into a painful knot. “Even now?”
“Maybe especially now.” He eased his hand from her grasp. She made herself let go as he took a step past her, back toward the center of the room. “Maybe it’s better we’re more like strangers to each other these days. You can be objective about what I should do next.”
She couldn’t be objective about him, but she didn’t bother saying so. She needed to hear where he’d been and what he’d been doing for the past seven months.
“Look, why don’t you sit down in front of the fire? You still look cold.” She picked up the knit throw blanket draped over the back of the sofa and handed it to him. “Get warm. I’m going to heat you up a bowl of soup. You want a sandwich, too?”
He took the blanket but shook his head. “I didn’t come here for you to take care of me.” A look of frustration creased his face.
“Then why did you come here?” she asked softly when he didn’t continue.
“I needed to see you.” The words seemed to escape his mouth against his will. The look of consternation in his green eyes might have been comical under other circumstances.
But Olivia couldn’t laugh. She knew exactly what that raw ache of need felt like. She knew what it was like to wake in the middle of the night and feel compelled to reach out for someone who was no longer there beside her. For almost two years, she and Landry had been a unit. Inseparable.
She should have known it would never last. Forever was the exception in most relationships, not the rule. And with her family history, she should never have allowed herself to think she might be able to beat the odds.
“I wish you’d wanted to see me two years ago when I tried to reach you.”
Landry looked down, one hand circling his other wrist as if to soothe the scars that formed a circle there. “I should have listened to you when you tried to explain.”
“You were too angry.”
“I felt betrayed.”
Her heart ached at the pain in his voice, but she didn’t let herself fall into that morass again. She’d spent too much time blaming herself for Landry’s anger when there had been nothing else she could do but exactly what she’d done. “I’m sorry you felt betrayed. But short of lying about what I remembered, I couldn’t help you.”
His gaze snapped up. “I know. I expected too much.”
“You expected me to lie?”
He shook his head. “I expected you to believe me, without question. I thought you would know I was telling the truth, even if you didn’t remember.”
She stared back at him, guilt niggling at the back of her mind. “I do believe that you remember hearing an order to go into the warehouse instead of holding our position. But that’s not what you were asking me to say.”
He let out a gusty sigh. “I don’t know that I was really asking anything of you except your trust and belief in me. But you never could really give me that, could you? Not wholeheartedly.”
Guilt throbbed even harder, settling in the center of her chest. “You know blind trust is a problem for me. You knew that going in.” She looked up at him. “I warned you, Landry. And you said you could deal with it.”
“Because I thought you could.” He looked away from her, his gaze angling toward the window beside the fireplace. After a second she followed his gaze and saw that the snowfall was starting to reach blizzard proportion, whiting out everything around the cabin.
“The power probably won’t hold out much longer,” she warned him, moving toward the hall. “If you want something hot for dinner, we should heat it up while we still have electricity.”
He followed her down the short hallway to the kitchen at the back of the cabin. “I don’t want to put you out.”
“It’s soup from a can. I’ll heat it in the microwave. You’re not putting me out.” She pulled a large can of beef stew from the pantry and showed it to him. “How’s this?”
“It’s fine. Thank you. Can I help with anything?”
“Again, soup from a can, heated in the microwave.” She shot him a look of amusement. “Sit down, Landry. You look as if you rode a bicycle here all the way from Bitterwood.”
“Barrowville,” he corrected her with a wry grimace. “Which was a breeze compared to hoofing it here on foot from North Carolina.”
Olivia set the can on the counter and turned to look at him. “North Carolina?”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay?” As he met her gaze, waning daylight cast his face in light and shadows, emphasizing how much older he looked now than the last time she’d seen him. The past two years had been hard on him. Aged him, left fine lines around his eyes and mouth.
“Okay,” she said quietly and returned to the task of preparing soup for their dinner.
He ate as if he hadn’t eaten in days, though, as she’d noticed before, he didn’t appear thin enough to have skipped too many meals over the months he’d been missing. Without being asked, she opened another can of soup and heated it up for him.
“Thank you,” he told her after he’d finished the second can of soup. “I haven’t had anything but protein bars and water for the past two days.”
She wanted to ask him what had happened to him, but there was a warning light in his eyes when she leaned toward him, as if he’d read her mind.
She sat back and finished her own soup slowly as he took his bowl and spoon to the sink and washed them. When he was done, he walked past the table and went to stand by the kitchen window to watch it snow.
“How long is the snow supposed to last?” he asked.
“It should snow all night. We should get about six or seven inches, and the temperature isn’t going to get above freezing for a couple of days after that. There’s a slight chance for more snow day after tomorrow, but the weather guys aren’t as sure about that.” So he hadn’t been near a television or radio in the past few days, either, she noted silently.
Just where the hell had he been all this time?
* * *
OLIVIA’S CABIN WAS large and tastefully rustic, but Landry had a feeling the place had come fully furnished. Outside of her bedroom, there was little in the cabin that reminded him of her apartment back in Richmond, a small loft apartment that she’d decorated in cool colors and clean lines. Even her beloved quilts had been stitched together in straight patterns, using fabrics in blues, greens and whites. Uncluttered and organized—that had been the Olivia Sharp he’d known and loved.
But he could tell she’d changed, just as he had. She’d left the FBI first, left him and his anger behind. He’d been both furious and hurt at first, but after what he’d gone through over the past few months, hanging on to resentment seemed pointless.
“I don’t have a spare bed.”
He looked up to find her standing in the living room doorway, holding another thick quilt like the one he’d seen on her bed. “You have a sofa. That’ll do.”
She handed him the quilt. It was another of her creations; he could tell by the geometric precision of the pattern.
“Still quilting?” he asked as she started to leave the room.
She stopped and turned to face him. “When I have time. Which isn’t often these days.”
He set the quilt on the sofa next to him and waved toward one of the armchairs across from where he sat. “You like working at The Gates?”
She sat and folded her hands in