Smoky Mountain Setup

“You told your SAC?” She repeated his earlier statement, trying to remember the name of the Johnson City resident agency’s Special Agent in Charge. “Pete Chang, right?”

He nodded. “I didn’t think he was corrupt. He’s a brownnoser, yeah, so maybe he told the wrong person the wrong thing. I don’t know.”

“You’ve been a prisoner all this time?” she asked, looking him over with a critical eye. “Take off your coat.”

He looked down at the heavy wool coat he was still wearing, a frown carving lines in his cheeks. “I wasn’t a prisoner the whole time,” he said gruffly as he unbuttoned the coat and shrugged it off. Beneath, he still wore a couple of layers of clothes—a long-sleeved shirt beneath a thick sweater—but while he looked leaner than she remembered, he definitely didn’t look as if he’d been starved for nearly a year.

“Then why didn’t you go to the FBI once you were free?”

“I just told you that the last time I told anyone with the FBI what I was doing, I ended up a prisoner of the Blue Ridge Infantry.” He pushed the sleeves of his shirt and sweater up to his elbows, revealing what they’d hidden until now—white ligature scars around both wrists.

Olivia swallowed a gasp. It was stupid to react so sharply to the scars—in the pantheon of injuries she’d seen inflicted in this ongoing war between the Blue Ridge Infantry and the good guys, the marks on Landry’s wrists barely registered.

It was what they represented—the loss of freedom, the indignity of captivity—that made her heart pound with sudden dread.

Or they could be a trick, she reminded herself sternly as she felt her resistance begin to falter. He could have inflicted the marks on himself to fool people into believing his story.

The fact remained, he’d just stood here minutes ago and admitted he’d been working with the Blue Ridge Infantry. And nobody who worked with the Blue Ridge Infantry was ever up to any good.

“What are you thinking?” Landry spoke in a low, silky voice so familiar it seemed to burrow into her head and take up residence, like a traveler finally reaching home after a long absence.

She fought against that sensation and gripped the edge of the desk more tightly. “That’s really none of your business.”

“You’re not curious?” he asked, his eyes narrowing as he took a step closer to her. “You don’t want to hear all the details?”

She held his gaze but didn’t speak.

“Or maybe you really don’t give a damn anymore.” He spoke the words casually, but she’d known him long enough to recognize the thread of hurt that underlay his comment.

“You’re the one who left,” she said.

“Are you sure I was the one?” He took another step toward her, and she tried to back away. But the wall stopped her.

“You packed your things and left.”

“You’d already left. Maybe not your body, but the rest of you—the part of you that really mattered—” He stopped his forward advancement, looking down at the rough planks of the cabin floor beneath his damp boots. “Doesn’t change the outcome, does it? We both walked away and didn’t look back, right?”

“Why did you come here?” she asked again, not because she believed he’d answer her any more truthfully than before, but because it was better than thinking about just how many times over the past two years, with how much regret, she’d looked back on the life she and Landry had once shared.

“Because I thought—” He looked up at her, pinning her to the wall with the intensity of his green-eyed gaze. “It doesn’t matter what I thought, does it? You’ve made up your mind about me. I get it.” He turned away, heading for the door.

She hurried forward and picked up the shotgun. “I didn’t say you could leave.”

He turned to look at her. “You’re going to shoot me to stop me?”

“If I have to.” She sounded sincere enough, even to her own skeptical ears. But her heart wasn’t nearly as sure.

She’d loved him once, as much as she’d ever loved anyone in her whole life. Hell, maybe she still did.

If he tried to leave, would she really pull the trigger to stop him from fleeing?

“You won’t shoot me,” he said softly. “At least, that’s what I want to keep believing. So I won’t put you in that position.”

“You’ll turn yourself in?”

He frowned. “I’d rather not. At least, not yet. There’s a lot I still need to tell you before you’ll understand exactly what we’re up against and why.”

“What we’re up against?”

He nodded. “I have to assume someone at that bank in Barrowville will remember the name Cade Landry. And why it’s so memorable. They’ll call the authorities to report my visit to the bank. And like you said, it won’t take long for them to connect us. We were partners, Olivia.” He moved toward her, walking with slow, sure deliberation. “Lovers.”

His voice lowered to a sensual rumble, bringing back a flood of memories she’d spent two years trying to excise from her brain. “Don’t.”

“It’s too late to undo it, Livvie. I took a risk coming here, and maybe I shouldn’t have.” He came to a stop just a few inches from where she stood, and she made herself remain in place, though the pounding pulse in her ears seemed to plead for her to run as far and as fast as she could.

Losing him once had nearly unraveled her. If she let him back into her heart—into her bed—again...

“I said I was working with the Blue Ridge Infantry, and that’s the truth. But it’s only part of it.” His hand came up slowly until his fingertips brushed her jawline, sending a shiver of sexual awareness jolting through her. “Did you know they were targeting The Gates?”

She swallowed with difficulty. “Of course. We’ve been trying to bring them down since Quinn first opened the doors of The Gates.”

“I’m not on their side, Olivia. That’s not what I meant by working with them—” He stopped midsentence, his head coming up suddenly. It took a moment for Olivia to hear what he’d obviously heard—a car engine moving up the road toward her cabin.

Landry moved away from her and crossed to her front window, sliding the curtains open an inch.

“Could be a neighbor,” she said quietly, suddenly afraid he was going to bolt, even though a few minutes earlier, she’d been hoping he’d leave and not look back.

It was just curiosity, she told herself, the need to know what he’d been starting to tell her about his connection to the BRI. It certainly had nothing to do with the way her jaw still tingled where he’d touched her or the quickened pace of her heart whenever she looked his way.

“They’re stopping here,” he said bluntly, turning back to look at her. She saw fear in his eyes, raw and wild, and realized she had only a few seconds to keep him from doing something reckless.

She pushed past him and looked through the curtains. The truck that had stopped outside her house was a familiar but, under the circumstances, not exactly welcome sight. “It’s Alexander Quinn.”

Landry groaned. “Your boss.”

She looked at him, wondering how much he knew about Quinn. “You said you’re not on the BRI’s side. Neither is Quinn. If you know anything about The Gates, you have to know that.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s going to turn a blind eye to the warrants out for my arrest.”

“You might be surprised.”

He shook his head and picked up his duffel bag. “I’m going out the back. Just give me a head start.”

She caught his arm as he started past her, not letting go even when he tried to tug free of her grasp. “Don’t run. Not yet. My bedroom is through that doorway. First room on the right. Let me find out what Quinn wants.”

Landry stared at her as if he were trying to read all the way through to her soul. Finally, the sound of footsteps on the front porch spurred him into action. He went through the doorway and veered right into her bedroom, closing the door behind him with a soft click.

Olivia took a deep breath just as Quinn knocked.

Showtime.

* * *

HER ROOM SMELLED like Olivia, that half-sweet, half-tart scent he’d never been able to identify as anything other than her own unique essence. For a few seconds all he could do was breathe, fill his lungs with that scent, store it away for another drought like the two years they’d been apart since he’d left Richmond—and Olivia—behind.

The bedroom was small and sparsely furnished—a bed, a chest of drawers and a small trunk at the foot of the bed. The bedding was simple and neat—two pillows in pale blue cotton cases, sheets that matched and a thick quilt that looked handmade.

Despite the tension running through him like currents of electricity, despite the muted sound of the door knock just a room away, Landry couldn’t stop himself from smiling. It faded quickly, but the flicker of sentiment remained—she hadn’t really changed in the past two years if she was still decorating with handmade quilts.

She made the quilts herself, a secret she’d kept from her fellow FBI agents with the ferocity of a mother bear guarding her den. “If you ever tell anyone about this,” she’d sworn when she’d finally let him in on her secret, “I will hunt you down and kill you.”

The sound of voices drifted down the hallway. The rumble of a male voice, barely discernible, followed by Olivia’s alto drawl.

“New bike?” the male voice asked.

“Picked it up at a yard sale,” Olivia answered.

Landry pressed his ear to the door, trying to hear the conversation more clearly.

“It’s a man’s bike,” Quinn said in a tone that was deliberately nonchalant.

“I bought it from a man,” she answered, a shrug in her voice. “Women’s bikes are usually too small for a woman my height.”

Good save, Landry thought.

“I got a call from Daughtry,” Quinn said, still sounding like someone making small talk. “He said you got a hit on some bank account you’d asked him to monitor.”

“That man doesn’t know the meaning of honeymoon, does he?” Olivia laughed softly, but Landry heard the faint strain of tension behind her words.

Did Quinn hear it, too?

“One of the reasons I hired him,” Quinn answered. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“You didn’t ask a question.”

Still as smart-mouthed as ever, Landry thought.

“Whose account did you ask him to monitor?”

“Mine,” she replied. “I’ve been noticing some discrepancies in my bank statement, so I thought maybe someone had hacked my password for that account. It’s not a lot of money, but still.”

“So there’s someone tapping into your account? Why didn’t you just change the password?”

“That would only stop them from accessing the account. I wanted to catch someone in the act.”

“Did you?”

“Maybe. I have some feelers out.”

Landry didn’t hear anything else for several long seconds, not even an unintelligible murmur that would suggest they’d merely lowered their voices. The silence was unnerving. If he couldn’t hear them, he had no way of knowing where they were.

Or how close they were getting to his hiding place.

Come on, he thought. Start talking again.

“As much as I relish the screwball comedy potential of being snowed in with you, Quinn, you’re not going to be able to get that truck back down the mountain if you don’t make tracks in the next few minutes.”

“Now you’re just tempting me, Olivia.” There was a warmth to Quinn’s voice that made Landry’s gut tighten.

What the hell?

“Funny,” Olivia said, but there was no censure in her voice, only a soft amusement that made Landry want to kick down the door.

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay here alone? A few of the agents are bunking down at the office for the duration. It’s a little college dorm for my tastes, but I think you can handle the frat-boy atmosphere if you’d rather tough it out in a crowd.”

“No, thanks,” she said with a laugh that was too friendly for Landry’s peace of mind. “I’ll be fine here. I have a load of résumés to go through and some housework I’ve put off for the past couple of months. But thanks for the concern.”

“Are you sure everything’s okay?” Quinn asked in a tone so quiet and intimate Landry had to strain to make out the words.

“Everything’s fine.”

“Olivia, I know you’re blaming yourself for how close Daughtry and Ginny came to losing their lives, but you’re not infallible. Nobody in this business is. We all make mistakes.”

Olivia’s response was spoken too quietly for Landry to hear. But Quinn’s next words gave him a pretty good idea what she’d said.

“There are a lot of ways to pay for mistakes. Sometimes your own conscience is the harshest judge of all. I think you’ve already given yourself more penance than I’d have ever suggested. That’s why I let you come up with your own punishment.”

“I would have fired me.”

“That’s why you’re not the boss.”

There was another long silence. Landry clenched his fists to keep from reaching for the door handle.

“Call if you need anything. I might know how to get my hands on a snowmobile.” Quinn’s voice, tinged with amusement, broke the silence, and Landry started breathing again.

He heard the door close and waited until he heard Olivia’s footsteps outside the door.

“Still in there?” she asked quietly.

He opened the door to face her. “I was contemplating escape.”

“He’s gone.”

“I heard.”

One sandy eyebrow arched over a sky blue eye. “You were eavesdropping?”

“Was there something you didn’t want me to hear?”

The other eyebrow joined the first, creasing her forehead. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He meant to change the subject, talk about what a bad idea it was for him to stick around the cabin with her in case her boss decided to come back to check on her in that snowmobile he’d mentioned. But those weren’t the words that came out of his mouth.

Instead, to his dismay, he asked, “What the hell is going on between you and your boss?”

Chapter Three

“You were right,” Quinn said. “He’s there.”

Anson Daughtry’s voice over the phone picked up a little static as Quinn eased his Ford F-150 pickup around a mountain curve. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Right now? Nothing. She’s going to be snowed in with him for a couple of days, and maybe she’ll get some information out of him.”

“Did you bug the place?” Daughtry’s question was delivered bone dry, but Quinn knew his IT director’s unfavorable opinion about eavesdropping, especially on employees at The Gates.

“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” Quinn answered just as drily.

“So, you’re just leaving her alone with him, without any way of knowing whether or not she might be in trouble?”

“She knows how to call for help if she needs it.”

Daughtry made a sound of pure frustration. “Don’t you think he’s dangerous?”

“I’m sure he’s dangerous. To someone. The question is, to whom?”

“So you’re just letting Sharp find out for you? In a snowbound cabin?”

“If I can’t trust my agents to handle themselves in dangerous situations with dangerous people, what the hell am I doing running a security firm?” Quinn had hired Olivia Sharp because everything he’d ever heard about her told him she was perfectly capable of holding her own in a high-risk situation. She’d been a member of an elite FBI SWAT team for six years, and in every dangerous situation he’d put her in since hiring her, she’d proved her mettle. “Sharp is every bit as dangerous as Cade Landry ever thought of being, and she doesn’t have any illusions where he’s concerned.”

“She was involved with him before.”

“What makes you think that?” Quinn asked carefully.

“I hear things.”

“Then maybe you heard that they’re no longer together. And that it ended badly. Which means she’s not going to assume his motives for showing up at her cabin in the middle of a snowstorm are entirely pure.”

“Love’s not that straightforward,” Daughtry said bluntly, in the tone of a man on his honeymoon.

“Let me worry about my agents, Daughtry. You worry about your wife. I’m sure she’s shooting you glaring looks by now, considering how long we’ve been on this call.” He pressed the end-call button on his phone and stifled a smile. One of his still-single agents had recently groused that the marriage bug was spreading like a contagion at the office, and Quinn couldn’t really deny it.

Take a pair of single, physically fit, energetic and bright people, toss them in the middle of a high-risk, high-stakes situation and step back, because sparks were going to fly. A lot of the time, those sparks fizzled out to nothing once the danger was over, but in some cases, his agents had made real connections with each other, the kind that had a chance to last a lifetime.

Quinn was about as far as a man got from being a romantic, but he’d learned a long time ago not to interfere when a man and a woman wanted to be together.

Very bad things could happen.

* * *

OLIVIA STARED AT Cade Landry, certain she’d misunderstood his question. Because there was no way in the world he’d just stood there and asked her what was going on between her and Alexander Quinn, as if it was any business of his. He wasn’t a fool or an idiot, and only one of those would stand here in her bedroom doorway, two years after walking out of her life without even a goodbye, and question anything at all about her personal life. Especially in that particular tone of outrage.

But here he was, gazing at her with green eyes blazing with fury, his jaw muscles tight and his nostrils flaring.

“We’re going to pretend you didn’t just ask me that question,” she said in a deceptively soft voice. But she could tell from the troubled look in Landry’s eyes that he heard the undertones of danger.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m in no position to question anything about your life.” He looked down and started to move around her, heading toward the front room.

“Where are you going?” She caught up with him as he was reaching for the unloaded pistol still lying on her rolltop desk.

“I shouldn’t have come here.”

She caught his hand, stopping him as he started to pick up the pistol. “Why did you come here? Why now?”

He looked down at her hand covering his, and she felt the muscles in his wrist twitch as he slowly turned to look at her. “Because 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.