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The Smoky Mountain Mist
Paula Graves


Ever since she was named CEO of her family business, strange things have been happening –terrifying incidents that could be tied to Rachel’s past.But the only person who believes her is former bad boy Seth Hammond. Her intense, rough-around-the-edges protector has blindsided her with his passion. But Rachel also believes in Seth…and possibly love?












Rachel caught his arm.


Seth turned back to her, his gaze first settling where her fingers circled his rain-slick forearm, then rising to meet hers. His eyes were forest-green in the low light, as deep and mysterious as the rainy woods outside the car.

“You saved my life last night, and you’ve asked for nothing in return. You didn’t even try to use it against me just now, when you could have. Any con man worth his salt would have.”

He grimaced. “I’m no saint.”

“I’m not saying you are. I’m just saying I believe you.”

The interior of the car seemed to contract, the space between their bodies suddenly infinitesimal. She could feel heat radiating from his body, answered by her own. Despite his battered condition, despite the million and one reasons she shouldn’t feel this aching magnetism toward him, she couldn’t pretend she didn’t find him attractive.




About the Author


Alabama native PAULA GRAVES wrote her first book, a mystery starring herself and her neighborhood friends, at the age of six. A voracious reader, Paula loves books that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she works as a creative director for a Birmingham advertising agency and spends time with her family and friends. She is a member of Southern Magic Romance Writers, Heart of Dixie Romance Writers and Romance Writers of America.

Paula invites readers to visit her website, www.paulagraves.com.




The Smoky Mountain Mist


Paula Graves






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


For the old Lakewood gang,

those still with us and those gone,

who made trips to the Smokies so much fun.




Chapter One


Rachel Davenport knew she was being watched, and she hated it, though the gazes directed her way that cool Oc-tober morning appeared kind and full of sympathy. Only a few of her fellow mourners knew the full truth about why she’d disappeared for almost a year after her moth-er’s sudden death fifteen years ago, but that didn’t change the self-consciousness descending over her like a pall.

She locked her spine and lifted her head, refusing to give anyone reason to doubt her strength. She’d survived so far and didn’t intend to fall apart now. She wasn’t going to give anyone a show.

“It’s a lovely gathering, isn’t it?” Diane, her father’s wife of the past eight years, dabbed her eyes with a delicate lace-rimmed handkerchief. “So many people.”

“Yes,” Rachel agreed, feeling a stab of shame. She wasn’t the only person who’d lost someone she loved. Diane might be flighty and benignly self-absorbed, but she’d made George Davenport’s last days happy ones. He’d loved Diane dearly and indulged her happily, and she’d been nothing but a caring, cheerful and devoted wife in his dying days. Even if Rachel had resented the other woman in her father’s life—and she hadn’t—she would have loved Diane for giving her father joy for the past eight years.

“I sometimes forget that he touched so many lives. With me he was just Georgie. Not the businessman, you know? Just a sweet, sweet man who liked to garden and sing to me at night.” Fresh tears trickled from Diane’s eyes. She blotted them away with the handkerchief, saved from a streaky face by good waterproof mascara. She lifted her red-rimmed eyes to Rachel. “I’m going to miss the hell out of that man.”

Rachel gave her a swift, fierce hug. “So am I.”

The preacher took his place at the side of the casket and spoke the scripture verses her father had chosen, hopeful words from the book of Ephesians, her father’s favorite. Rachel wanted to find comfort in them, but a shroud of loss seemed to smother her whole.

She couldn’t remember ever feeling quite so alone. Her father had been her rock for as long as she could remember, and now he was gone. There was her uncle Rafe, of course, but he lived two hours away and spent much of his time on the road looking for new acts for his music hall.

And as much as she liked and appreciated Diane, they had too little in common to be true friends, much less family. Nor did she really consider her stepbrother, Diane’s son, Paul, anything more than a casual friend, though they’d become closer since she’d quit her job with the Maryville Public Library to take over as office manager for her father’s trucking company.

She sometimes wondered why her father hadn’t ceded control of the business to Paul instead of her. He’d worked at Davenport Trucking for over a decade. Her father had met Diane through her son, not the other way around. He had been assistant operations manager for several years now and knew the business about as well as anyone else.

Far better than she did, even though she’d learned a lot in the past year.

She watched her stepbrother edge closer to the casket. As his lips began moving, as if he was speaking to the man encased in shiny oak and satin, a dark-clad figure a few yards behind him snagged Rachel’s attention. He was lean and composed, dressed in a suit that fit him well enough but seemed completely at odds with his slightly spiky dark hair and feral looks. A pair of dark sunglasses obscured his eyes but not the belligerently square jaw and high cheekbones.

It was Seth Hammond, one of the mechanics from the trucking company. Other Davenport Trucking employees had attended the funeral, of course, so she wasn’t sure why she was surprised to see Seth here. Except he’d never been close to her father, or to anyone else at the company for that matter. She’d always figured him for a loner.

As her gaze started to slide away from him, he lifted the glasses up on his head, and his eyes snapped up to meet hers.

A zapping sensation jolted through her chest, stopping her cold. His gaze locked with hers, daring her to look away. The air in her lungs froze, then burned until she forced it out in a deep, shaky sigh.

He looked away, and she felt as if someone had cut all the strings holding her upright. Her knees wobbled, and she gripped Diane’s arm.

“What is it?” Diane asked softly.

Rachel closed her eyes for a moment to regain her sense of equilibrium, then looked up at the man again.

But he was gone.

“I DON’T KNOW. She looks okay, I guess.” From his parking spot near the edge of the cemetery, Seth Hammond kept an eye on Rachel Davenport. The cemetery workers had lowered the oak casket into the gaping grave nearly twenty minutes ago, and most of the gathered mourners had dispersed, leaving the immediate family to say their final private goodbyes to George Davenport.

“It’s not a coincidence that everyone around her is gone.” The deep voice rumbling through the cell phone receiver like an annoying fly in Seth’s ear belonged to Adam Brand, FBI special agent in charge. Seth had no idea why the D.C.-based federal agent was so interested in a trucking company heiress from the Smoky Moun-tains of Tennessee, but Brand paid well, and Seth wasn’t in a position to say no to an honest job.

The only alternative was a dishonest job, and while he’d once been damned good at dishonesty, he’d found little satisfaction in those endeavors. It was a curse, he supposed, when the thing you could do the best was something that sucked the soul right out of you.

“I agree. It’s not a coincidence.” Seth’s viewpoint from the car several yards away wasn’t ideal, but the last thing a man with his reputation needed was to be spotted watching a woman through binoculars. So he had to make do with body language rather than facial expressions to get a sense of what Rachel Davenport was thinking and feeling. Grief, obviously. It covered her like morning fog in the Smokies, deceptively ephemeral. She stood straight, her chin high, her movements composed and measured. But he had a strong feeling that the slightest nudge would send her crumbling into ruins.

Everyone was gone now. Her mother by her own hand fifteen years ago, her father by cancer three days ago. No brothers or sisters, save for her stepbrother, Paul, and it wasn’t like they’d grown up together as real siblings the way Seth and his sister had.

“Have you seen Delilah recently?” Brand asked with his usual uncanny way of knowing the paths Seth’s mind was traveling at any given moment.

“Ran into her at Ledbetter’s Café over the weekend,” Seth answered. He left it at that. He wasn’t going to gossip about his sister.

Brand had never said, and Seth had never asked, why he didn’t just call up Delilah himself if he wanted to know how she was doing. Seth assumed things had gone sideways between them at some point. Probably why Dee had left the FBI years ago and eventually gone to work for Cooper Security. At the time, Seth had felt relieved by his sister’s choice, well aware of the risk that, sooner or later, his sister’s job and his own less savory choice of occupations might collide.

Of course, now that he’d found his way onto the straight and narrow, she was having trouble believing in the new, improved Seth Hammond.

“I got some good snaps of the funeral-goers, I think. I’ll check them out when I get a chance.” A hard thud on the passenger window made him jerk. He looked up to find Delilah’s sharp brown eyes burning holes into the glass window separating them. “Gotta go,” he said to Brand and hung up, shoving the cell phone into his pocket. He slanted a quick look at the backseat to make sure he’d concealed the surveillance glasses he’d been using to take images of the funeral. They were safely hidden in his gym bag on the floorboard.

With a silent sigh, he lowered the passenger window. “Hey, Dee.”

“What are you doin’ here?” His sister had been back in Tennessee for two weeks and already she’d shed her citified accent for the hard Appalachian twang of her childhood. “Up to somethin’?”

Her suspicious tone poked at his defensive side. “I was attending my boss’s funeral.”

“Funeral’s over, and yet here you are.” Delilah looked over the top of the car toward the Davenport family. “You thinking of conning a poor, grieving heiress out of her daddy’s money?”

“Funny.”

“I’m serious as a heart attack.” Her voice rose slightly, making him wince.

He glanced at the Davenport family, wondering if they had heard. “You’re making a scene, Dee.”

“Hammonds are good at making scenes, Seth. You know that.” Delilah reached into the open window, unlatched the car door and pulled it open, sliding into the passenger seat. “Better?”

“You ran into Mama, did you?” he asked drily, not missing the bleak expression in her dark eyes.

“The Bitterwood P.D. called me to come pick her up or they were throwing her in the drunk tank.” Delilah grimaced. “Who the hell told them I was back in town, anyway?”

“Sugar, there ain’t no lyin’ low in Bitterwood. Too damned small and too damned nosy.” Unlike his sister, he’d never really left the hills, though he’d kept clear of Bitterwood for a few years to let the dust settle. If not for Cleve Calhoun’s stroke five years ago, he might never have come back. But Cleve had needed him, and Seth had found a bittersweet sort of satisfaction in trying to live clean in the place where he’d first learned the taste of iniquity.

He sneaked a glance at George Davenport’s grave. The family had dispersed, Paul Bailey and his mother, Diane, walking arm in arm toward Paul’s car, while Ra-chel headed slowly across the cemetery toward another grave nearby. Marjorie Kenner’s, if he remembered correctly. Mark Bramlett’s last victim.

“I know vulnerable marks are your catnip,” Delilah drawled, “but can’t you let the girl have a few days of unmolested grief before you bilk her out of her millions?”

“You have such a high opinion of me,” he murmured, dragging his gaze away from Rachel’s stiffened spine.

“Well-earned, darlin’,” she answered, just as quietly.

“I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you I don’t do that sort of thing anymore?”

“Yeah, and Mama swore she’d drunk her last, too, as I was puttin’ her ginned-up backside to bed.” Bitter resignation edged her voice.

Oh, Dee, he thought. People keep lettin’ you down, don’t they?

“Tell me you’re not up to something.”

“I’m done with that life, Dee. I’ve been done with it a few years now.”

Her wary but hopeful look made his heart hurt. “I left the truck over on the other side of the cemetery. Why don’t you drive me over there?”

He spared one more glance at Rachel Davenport, wondering how much longer she’d be able to remain upright. Someone had been working overtime the past few weeks, making sure she’d come tumbling down sooner or later.

The question was, why?

“I DIDN’T GET to talk to you at the service.”

Rachel’s nervous system jolted at the sound of a familiar voice a few feet away. She turned from Marjo-rie’s grave to look into a pair of concerned brown eyes.

Davis Rogers hadn’t changed a bit since their breakup five years ago. With his clean-cut good looks and effortless poise, he’d always come across as a confident, successful lawyer, even when he was still in law school at the University of Virginia.

She’d been sucked in by that easy self-composure, such a contrast to her own lack of confidence. It had been so easy to bask in his reflected successes.

For a while at least.

Then she’d found her own feet and realized his all-encompassing influence over her life had become less a shelter and more a shackle.

Easy lesson to forget on a day like today, she thought, battered by the familiar urge to enclose herself in his arms and let him make the rest of the world go away. She straightened her spine and resisted the temptation. “I didn’t realize you’d even heard about my father.”

“It made the papers in Raleigh. I wanted to pay my respects and see how you were holding up.” He brushed a piece of hair away from her face. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine.” His touch left her feeling little more than mild comfort. “I’m sad,” she added at his skeptical look. “And I’ll be sad for a while. But I’m okay.”

It wasn’t a lie. She was going to be okay. Despite her crushing sense of grief, she felt confident she wasn’t in danger of losing herself.

“Maybe what you need is to get out and get your mind off things.” Davis cupped her elbow with his large hand. “The clerk at the bed-and-breakfast where I’m staying suggested a great bar near the university in Knoxville where we can listen to college bands and relive our misspent youth. What do you say, Rach? It’ll be like Char-lottesville all over again.”

She grimaced. “I never really liked those bars, you know. I just went because you liked them.”

His expression of surprise was almost comical. “You didn’t?”

“I’m a Tennessee girl. I liked country music and bluegrass,” she said with a smile.

He looked mildly horrified, but he managed to smile. “I’m sure we can find a honky-tonk in Knoxville.”

“There’s a little place here in Bitterwood we could go. They have a house bluegrass band and really good loaded potato skins.” After the past few months of watching her father dying one painful inch at a time, maybe what she needed was to indulge herself. Get her mind off her losses, if only for a little while.

And why not go with Davis? She wasn’t still in love with him, but she’d always liked and trusted him. It was safer than going alone. The man who’d killed four of her friends might be dead and gone, but the world was still full of danger. A woman alone had to be careful.

And she was alone, she knew, bleakness seeping into her momentary optimism.

So very alone.

FOR THE FIRST time in years, Seth Hammond had a place to himself. It wasn’t much to talk about, a ramshackle bungalow halfway up Smoky Ridge, but for the next few weeks, he wouldn’t have to share it with anyone else. The house’s owner, Cleve Calhoun, was in Knoxville for therapy to help him regain some of the faculties he’d lost to a stroke five years ago.

By seven o’clock, Seth had decided that alone time wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Even if the satellite reception wasn’t terrible, there wasn’t much on TV worth watching these days. The Vols game wasn’t until Satur-day, and with the Braves out of play-off contention, there wasn’t much point in watching baseball, either.

He’d already gone through the photos from the funeral he’d taken with his high-tech camera glasses, but as far as he could tell, there was nobody stalking Ra-chel Davenport at the funeral except himself. He supposed he could go through the photos one more time, but he’d seen enough of Rachel’s grief for one day. He’d uploaded the images to the FTP site Adam Brand had given him. Maybe the FBI agent would have better luck than he had. Brand, after all, at least knew what it was he was looking for.

He certainly hadn’t bothered to let Seth in on the secret.

You have turned into a dull old coot, Seth told himself, eyeing the frozen dinner he’d just pulled from Cleve’s freezer with a look of dismay. There was a time when you could’ve walked into any bar in Maryville and gone home with a beautiful woman. What the hell happened to you?

The straight and narrow, he thought. He’d given up more than just the con game, it appeared.

“To hell with that.” He shoved the frozen dinner back into the frost-lined freezer compartment. He was thirty-two years old, not sixty. Playing nursemaid to a crippled old man had, ironically, kept him lean and strong, since he’d had to haul Cleve Calhoun around like a baby. And while he wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants, he’d never had trouble catching a woman’s eye.

An image of Rachel Davenport’s cool blue eyes meeting his that morning at the funeral punched him in the gut. He couldn’t remember if she’d ever looked him in the eye before that moment.

Probably not. At the trucking company, he was more a part of the scenery than a person. A chair or a desk or one of the trucks he repaired, maybe. He’d become good at blending in. It had been his best asset as a con artist, enabling him to learn a mark’s vulnerabilities without drawing attention to himself. Cleve had nicknamed him Chameleon because of his skill at becoming part of the background.

That same skill had served him well as a paid FBI informant, though there had been a few times, most recently in a dangerous backwoods enclave of meth dealers, when he’d come close to breaking cover.

But looking into Rachel Davenport’s eyes that morning, he’d felt the full weight of being invisible. For a second, she’d seen him. Her blue eyes had widened and her soft pink lips had parted in surprise, as if she’d felt the same electric zing that had shot through his body when their gazes connected.

Maybe that was the longing driving him now, propelling him out of the shack and into Cleve’s old red Charger in search of another connection. It was a night to stand out from the crowd, not blend in, and he knew just the honky-tonk to do it in.

The road into Bitterwood proper from the mountains was a winding series of switchbacks and straightaways called Old Purgatory Road. Back in the day, when they were just kids, Delilah, a couple of years older and eons wiser, had told Seth that it was named so because hell was located in a deep, dark cavern in the heart of Smoky Ridge, their mountain home, and the only way to get in or out was Purgatory Road.

Of course, later he’d learned that Purgatory was actually a town about ten miles to the northeast, and the road had once been the only road between there and Bitterwood, but Delilah’s story had stuck with him anyway. Even now, there were times when he thought she’d been right all along. Hell did reside in the black heart of Smoky Ridge, and it was all too easy for a person to find himself on a fast track there.

Purgatory Road flattened out as it crossed Vesper Road and wound gently through the valley, where Bit-terwood’s small, four-block downtown lay. There was little there of note—the two-story brick building that housed the town administrative offices, including the Bitterwood Police Department, a tiny postage stamp of a post office and a few old shops and boutiques that stubbornly resisted the destructive sands of time.

Bitterwood closed shop at five in the evening. Ev-erything was dark and shuttered as Seth drove through. All the nighttime action happened in the outskirts. Bit-terwood had years ago voted to allow liquor sales by the drink as well as package sales, hoping to keep up with the nearby tourist traps. While the tourist boom had bypassed the little mountain town despite the effort, the gin-guzzling horse was out of the barn, and the occasional attempts by civic-minded folks to rescind the liquor ordinances never garnered enough votes to pass.

Seth had never been much of a drinker himself. Cleve had taught him that lesson. A man who lived by his instincts couldn’t afford to let anything impair them. Plus, he’d grown up dodging the blows of his mean, drug-addled father. And all liquor had done for his mother was dull the pain of her husband’s abuse and leave her a shell of a woman long after the old bastard had blown himself up in a meth lab accident.

He’d never have gone to Smoky Joe’s Saloon for the drinks anyway. They watered down the stuff too much, as much to limit the drunken brawls as to make an extra buck. But they had a great house band that played old-style Tennessee bluegrass, and some of the prettiest girls in the county went there for the music.

He saw the neon lights of Smoky Joe’s ahead across Purgatory Bridge, the steel-and-concrete truss bridge spanning Bitterwood Creek, which meandered through a narrow gorge thirty feet below. The lights distracted him for only a second, but that was almost all it took. He slammed on the brakes as the darkened form of a car loomed in his headlights, dead ahead.

The Charger’s brakes squealed but held, and the muscle car shuddered to a stop with inches to spare.

“Son of a bitch!” he growled as he found his breath again. Who the hell had parked a car in the middle of the bridge without even turning on emergency signals?

With a start, he recognized the vehicle, a silver Honda Accord. He’d seen Rachel Davenport drive that car in and out of the employee parking lot at Davenport Trucking every day for the past year.

His chest tightening with alarm, he put on his own emergency flashers and got out of the car, approaching the Honda with caution.

Out of the corner of his eye, he detected movement in the darkness. He whipped his gaze in that direction.

She stood atop the narrow steel railing, her small hands curled in the decorative lacework of the old truss bridge. She swayed a little, like a tree limb buffeted by the light breeze blowing through the girders. The air ruffled her skirt and fluttered her long hair.

“Ms. Davenport?” Seth’s heart squeezed as one of her feet slid along the thin metal support and she sagged toward the thirty-foot drop below.

“Ms. Davenport is dead,” she said in a faint, mournful tone. “Killed herself, you know.”

Seth edged toward her, careful not to move too quickly for fear of spooking her. “Rachel, that girder’s not real steady. Don’t you want to come down here to the nice, solid ground?”

She laughed softly. “Solid. Solid.” She said the word with comical gusto. “‘She’s solid.’ What does that mean? It makes you sound stiff and heavy, doesn’t it? Solid.”

Okay, not suicidal, he decided as he took a couple more steps toward her. Drunk?

“Do you think I’m cursed?” There was none of her earlier amusement in that question.

“I don’t think so, no.” He was almost close enough to touch her. But he had to be careful. If he grabbed at her and missed, she could go over the side in a heartbeat.

“I think I am,” she said. Her voice had taken on a definite slurring cadence. But he decided she didn’t sound drunk so much as drugged. Had someone given her a sedative after the funeral? Maybe she’d had a bad reaction to it.

“I don’t think you’re cursed,” Seth disagreed, easing his hand toward her in the dark. “I think you’re tired and sad. And, you know, that’s okay. It means you’re human.”

Her eyes glittered in the reflected light of the Char-ger’s flashers. “I wish I were a bird,” she said plaintively. “Then I could fly away over the mountains and never have to land again.” She took a sudden turn outward, teetering atop the rail as if preparing to take flight. “She said I should fly.”

Then, in heart-stopping slow motion, she began to fall forward, off the bridge.




Chapter Two


He wasn’t going to reach her in time.

A nightmare played out in his head as he threw himself toward her. His hands clawing at the air where she’d been a split second earlier. His body slamming into the rail that stopped him just short of throwing himself after her over the side of the bridge. He could see her plummeting, her slender body dancing like a feather in the cold October breeze until it shattered on the rocks below.

Then his fingers met flesh; his arms snaked around her hips, anchoring her to him. Though she was tall and thin, she was heavy enough to fill the next few seconds of Seth’s life with sheer terror as he struggled to keep her from tumbling into the gorge and taking him with her.

He finally brought her down to the ground and crushed her close, his heart pounding a thunderous rhythm in his ears. She pressed closer to him, her nose nuzzling against the side of his neck.

“This is nice,” she said, her fingers playing over the muscles of his chest. “You smell nice.”

His body’s reaction was quick and fierce. He struggled to regain control, but she wasn’t helping him a bit. Her exploring hands slid downward to rest against his hips. His heart gave a jolt as her mouth brushed over the tendon at the side of his neck, the tip of her tongue flicking against the flesh.

“Taste good, too.”

He dragged her away, holding her at arm’s length in a gentle but firm grip. “I need to get you home.”

She smiled at him, but he could see in the dim light that her eyes were glassy. Clearly she had no idea where she was or maybe even who she was. Whatever chemical had driven her up on the girder was still in control.

“Rachel, do you have the key to your car?” He didn’t want to leave her car there to be a hazard to other drivers trying to cross the bridge.

She shook her head drunkenly.

Keeping a grip on one of her arms, he crossed and checked the vehicle. The key was in the ignition. At least she hadn’t locked the door, so he could move it off the bridge. But did he dare let Rachel go long enough to do so?

“Rachel, let’s take a ride, okay?”

“’Kay.” She got into the passenger seat willingly enough when he directed her there, and she was fumbling with the radio dials when he slid in behind the steering wheel. “Where’s the music?”

“Just a minute, sugar.” He started the car. A second later, hard-edged bluegrass poured through the CD speak-ers—Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson. He had that album in his own car.

She started singing along with no-holds gusto, her voice a raspy alto, and complained when he parked the car off the road and cut the engine.

“Just a minute and we’ll make the music come back,” he promised, keeping an eye on the road. There had been no traffic so far, but his luck wouldn’t hold much longer. He needed to get her out of there before anyone else saw the condition she was in.

He almost laughed at himself as he realized what he was thinking. He’d been a cover-up artist from way back, trying to hide the ugly face of his home life from the people around them. He’d gotten good at telling lies.

Then he’d gotten good at running cons.

Still, he thought it was smart to protect Rachel Dav-enport from prying eyes until she was in some sort of condition to defend herself. He didn’t know what had happened to her tonight, or how big a part she’d played in her own troubles, but he didn’t care. Everybody made mistakes, and she’d been under a hell of a lot more pressure than most folks these past few weeks.

She could sort things out with her conscience when she was sober. He wasn’t going to add to her problems by parading her in front of other people.

He buckled her safely into the passenger seat of the Charger and slid behind the wheel, pulling the bluegrass CD from a holder attached to his sun visor. He put the CD in the player and punched the skip button until the song she’d been singing earlier came on. She picked up the tune happily, and he let her serenade him while he thought through what to do next.

Delivering her to her family was the most obvious answer, but Seth didn’t like that idea. Someone had gone to deadly lengths in the past few weeks to rip away her emotional underpinnings, and Seth didn’t know enough about her relationship with her stepmother and stepbrother to risk taking her home in this condition. She seemed friendly enough with them, but they didn’t appear particularly close. In fact, there was some speculation at work whether Paul Bailey was annoyed at being bypassed as acting CEO. He might not have Rachel’s best interests at heart.

The particulars of George Davenport’s will had become an open secret around the office ever since he’d changed it shortly after his terminal liver cancer diagnosis a year ago. Everybody at the trucking company knew he’d specified that his daughter, Rachel, should be the company’s CEO. It had been a bit of a scandal, since until that point in her life, Rachel Davenport had been happy working as a librarian in Maryville. What did she know about running a business?

She’d done okay, taking over more and more of her fa-ther’s duties until his death, but would Paul Bailey have seen it that way?

The song ended, and the next cut on the album began, a plaintive ballad that Rachel didn’t seem to know. She hummed along, swaying gently against the constraints of the seat belt. She was beginning to wind down, he noticed with a glance her way. Her eyes were starting to droop closed.

Maybe he should have taken her straight to the hospital in Maryville to get checked out, he realized. What if she’d overdosed on whatever she’d taken? What if she needed treatment?

He bypassed the turnoff that would take him to the Edgewood area, where Bitterwood’s small but influential moneyed class lived, and headed instead to Vesper Road. Delilah was housesitting there for Ivy Hawkins, a girl they’d grown up with on Smoky Ridge.

A detective with the Bitterwood Police Department, Ivy was on administrative leave following a shooting that had left a hired killer dead and a whole lot of questions unanswered. Ivy had taken advantage of the enforced time off to visit with her mother, who’d recently moved to Birmingham, and had offered Delilah a place to stay while she was in town.

“Rachel, you still with me?” he asked with alarm as he noticed her head lolling to one side.

She didn’t answer.

He drove faster than he should down twisty Vesper Road, hoping the deer, coyotes and black bears stayed in the woods where they belonged instead of straying into the path of his speeding car. He almost missed his turn and ended up whipping down Ivy Hawkins’s driveway with an impressive clatter of gravel that brought Deli-lah out to confront him before he even had a chance to cut the engine.

“What the hell?” she asked as she circled around to the passenger door.

“You did some medic training at that fancy place you work, right?”

Delilah’s eyebrows lifted at the sight of Rachel Davenport in the passenger seat. “What’s wrong with her?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.” He gave Rachel’s shoulder a light shake. She didn’t respond.

“What are you doing with her?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it inside.” He nodded toward the door she’d left wide-open.

Inside the house, he laid Rachel on the sofa and pressed his fingers against her slender wrist. Her pulse was slow but steady. She seemed to be breathing steadily.

She was asleep.

He stood up and turned to look at his sister. She stared back at him, her hands on her hips and a look of suspicion, liberally tinged with fear, creasing her pretty face.

“What the hell happened? Did you do something to her?”

Anger churned in his gut, tempered only by the bitter knowledge that Delilah had every reason to suspect him of doing something wrong. God knew she’d dug him out of a whole lot of holes of his own digging over the years until she’d finally tired of saving him from himself.

“I found her in this condition,” he explained as he pulled a crocheted throw from the back of the sofa and covered Rachel with it. “On Purgatory Bridge.”

“On the bridge?”

“On the bridge,” he answered. “Up on the girders, about to practice her high-dive routine.”

“My God. She was trying to kill herself?”

“No. She’s on something. I thought maybe you could take a look, see if you could tell from her condition—”

“Not without a tox screen.” Delilah crossed to the sofa and crouched beside Rachel. “How was she behaving when you found her?”

“Drunk, but I didn’t really smell any liquor on her.” The memory of her body, warm and soft against his, roared back with a vengeance. She’d smelled good, he remembered. Clean and sweet, as if she’d just stepped out of a bath. “She was out of it, though. I’m not sure she even knew who she was, much less who I was.”

“Was she hallucinating?” Delilah checked Rachel’s eyes.

“Not hallucinating exactly,” Seth answered, leaning over his sister’s shoulder.

She shot him a “back off” look, and he stepped away. “What, then, exactly?”

“She seemed really happy. As if she were having the time of her life.”

“Standing on a girder over a thirty-foot drop?”

“Technically, she was swaying on a girder over a thirty-foot drop.” Even the memory gave him a chill. “Scared the hell outta me.”

“You should’ve taken her to a hospital.”

Worry ate at his gut. “Should we call nine-one-one?”

Delilah sat back on her heels, her brow furrowed. “Her vitals look pretty good. I could call a doctor friend of mine back in Alabama and get his take on her condition.”

“You have a theory,” Seth said, reading his sister’s body language.

“It could be gamma hydroxybutyrate—GHB.”

Seth’s chest tightened with dread. “The date rape drug?”

“Well, it’s also a club drug—lower doses create a sense of euphoria. You said you found her near Smoky Joe’s, right? She might have taken the GHB to get high.”

He shook his head swiftly. “No. She wouldn’t do that.”

Delilah turned her head to look at him, her eyes narrowed. “And you would know this how?”

“We work in the same place. If she had any kind of track record with drugs, I’d have heard about it.”

Delilah cocked her head. “Really. You think you know all there is to know about Rachel Davenport?”

He could tell from his sister’s tone that he’d tweaked her suspicious side again. What would she think if he told her he was working for her old boss, Adam Brand?

As tempted as he was to know the answer, he looked back at Rachel. “If it’s GHB, would it have made her climb up on a bridge and try to fly?”

“It might, if she’s the fanciful sort. GHB loosens inhibitions.”

Which might explain her drunken attempt at seduction in the middle of Purgatory Bridge, he thought. “How can we be sure?”

“A urine test might tell us,” Delilah answered, rising to her feet and pulling her cell phone out of the pocket of her jeans. “But it’s expensive to test for it, and it’s almost impossible to detect after twenty-four hours.” She shot her brother a pointed look. “Do you really want it on record that she’s got an illegal drug in her system?”

Delilah might look soft and pretty, but she was sharper than a briar patch. “No, I don’t,” he conceded.

“We can’t assume someone did this to her,” she said, punching in a phone number. “After all, she just buried her father. That might make some folks want to forget the world for a while.”

As she started speaking to the person on the other end of the call, Seth turned back to the sofa and crouched next to Rachel. She looked as if she was sleeping peacefully, her lips slightly parted and her features soft and relaxed. The calm expression on her face struck him hard as he realized he had never seen her that way, her features unlined with worry. The past year had been hell for her, watching her father slowly die in front of her while she struggled to learn the ropes of running his business.

He smoothed the hair away from her forehead. Most of the time when he’d seen her at the office, she had looked like a pillar of steel, stiff-spined and regal as she went about the trucking business. But every once in a while, when she didn’t know anyone else was looking, she had shed the tough facade and revealed her vulnerability. At those times, she’d looked breakable, as if the slightest push would send her crumbling to pieces.

Had her father’s death been the blow to finally shatter her?

Behind him, Delilah hung up the phone. “Eric says we just have to keep an eye on her vitals, make sure she’s not going into shock or organ failure,” she said tonelessly.

“Piece of cake,” he murmured drily.

“We could take shifts,” she suggested.

He shook his head. “Go on to bed. I’ll watch after her.” He certainly wouldn’t be getting any sleep until she was awake and back to her normal self again.

There was a long pause before Delilah spoke. “What’s your angle here, Seth? Why do you give a damn what happens to her?”

“She’s my boss,” he said, his tone flippant.

“Tell me you’re not planning to scam her in some way.”

He slanted a look at his sister. “I’m not.”

Once again, he saw contradictory emotions cross his sister’s expressive face. Part hope, part fear. He tamped down frustration. He’d spent years losing the trust of the people who loved him. He couldn’t expect them to trust him again just like that.

However much he might want it to be so.

BLACKNESS MELTED INTO featureless gray. Gray into misty blobs of shape and muted colors and, finally, as her eyes began to focus, the shapes firmed into solid forms. Win-dows with green muslin curtains blocking all but a few fragments of watery light. A tall, narrow chest of drawers standing against a nearby wall, a bowl-shaped torchiere lamp in the corner, currently dark. And across from her, sprawling loose-limbed in a low-slung armchair, sat Seth Hammond, his green eyes watching her.

She’d seen him at her father’s funeral, she remembered, fresh grief hitting her with a sharp blow. She’d looked up and seen him watching her, felt an electric pulse of awareness that had caught her by surprise.

And then what? Why couldn’t she remember what had happened next?

Her head felt thick and heavy as she tried to lift it. In her chest, her heart beat a frantic cadence of panic.

Where was this place? How had she gotten here? Why couldn’t she remember anything beyond her fa-ther’s graveside funeral service?

She knew time must have passed. The light seeping into the small room was faint and rosy-hued, suggesting either sunrise or sunset. The funeral had taken place late in the morning.

How had she gotten here?

Why was he here?

“What is this?” she asked. Her voice sounded shaky, frightening her further. Why couldn’t she muster the energy to move?

She needed to get out of here. She needed to go home, find something familiar and grounding, to purge herself of the panic rising like floodwaters in her brain.

“Shh.” Seth spoke softly. “It’s okay, Ms. Davenport. You’re okay.”

She pushed past her strange lethargy and sat up, her head swimming. “What did you do to me?”

His expression shifted, as if a hardened mask covered his features. “What can you remember?”

She shoved at the crocheted throw tangled around her legs. “That’s not for me to answer!” she growled at him, flailing a little as the throw twisted itself further around her limbs, trapping her in place.

Seth unfolded himself slowly from the chair, rising to his full height. He wasn’t the tallest man she’d ever met, but he was tall enough and imposing without much effort. It was those eyes, she thought. Sharp and focused, as if nothing could ever slip past him without notice. Full of mystery, as well, as if he knew things no one else did or possibly could.

Her fear shifted into something just as dangerous.

Fascination.

Snake and bird, she thought as he walked closer, his pace unhurried and deceptively unthreatening.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” He plucked at the crocheted blanket until it slithered harmlessly away from her body. He never touched her once, but somehow she felt his hands on her anyway, strong and warm. A flush washed over her, heating her from deep inside until she thought she was going to spontaneously combust.

What the hell was wrong with her?

He asked you a question, the rational part of her brain reminded her. Answer the question. Maybe he knows something you need to know.

Instead, she tried to make a run for the door she spotted just beyond his broad shoulders. She made it a few steps before her wobbling legs gave out on her. She plunged forward, landing heavily against the man’s body.

His arms whipped around her, holding her upright and pinning her against his hard, lean body. The faint scent of aftershave filled her brain with a fragment of a memory—strong arms, a gentle masculine murmur in her ear, the salty-sweet taste of flesh beneath her tongue—

She tore herself out of his grasp and stumbled sideways until she came up hard against the wall. Her hair spilled into her face, blinding her. She shook it away. “What did you do to me?”

She had meant the question to be strong. Confronta-tional. But to her ears, it sounded weak and plaintive, like a brokenhearted child coming face-to-face with a world gone mad.

Or maybe it’s not the world that’s gone mad, a mean little voice in the back of her head taunted.

Maybe it’s you.




Chapter Three


Seth met Rachel Davenport’s terrified gaze and felt sick. It didn’t help that he knew he’d done nothing wrong. She clearly believed he had. And he would find few defenders if she made her accusation public.

Cleve Calhoun had always told him it never paid to help people. “They hate you for it.”

What if Cleve was right?

“You’re awake.” The sound of Delilah’s voice behind him, calm and emotionless, sent a jolt down his nervous system.

Rachel’s attention shifted toward Delilah in confusion. “Who are you?”

“Delilah Hammond,” Delilah answered. She took the crocheted throw Seth was still holding and started folding it as she walked past him toward the sofa. “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel admitted. Her wary gaze shifted back and forth from Delilah to Seth. “I don’t remember what happened.”

Delilah slanted a quick look at Seth. “That’s one of the symptoms.”

“Symptoms of what?” Rachel asked, looking more and more panicky.

“GHB use,” Delilah answered. “Apparently you did a little partying last night.”

“What?” Rachel’s panic elided straight into indignation. “What are you suggesting, that I did drugs or some-thing?”

“Considering my brother found you about to do a double gainer off Purgatory Bridge—”

“I don’t think you planned to jump off,” Seth said quickly, shooting his sister a hard look. “But you were not entirely in control of yourself.”

Delilah’s eyebrows arched delicately. Rachel just looked at him as if he’d grown a second head.

“I was not on Purgatory Bridge last night,” she said flatly. “I would never, ever…” She looked nauseated by the idea.

“You were on the bridge,” he said quietly. “Apparently whatever you took last night has affected your memory.”

“I don’t…take drugs.” Her anger faded again, and the fear returned, shining coldly in her blue eyes.

“Maybe someone gave something to you without your knowledge.”

Seth’s suggestion only made her look more afraid. “I don’t remember going anywhere last night. I don’t—” She stopped short, pressing her fingertips against her lips. “I don’t remember anything.”

“If you took GHB—”

Seth shot his sister a warning look.

She made a slight face at him and rephrased. “If someone slipped you GHB or something like it, it’s not uncommon for you to experience amnesia about the hours before and after the dosage.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Seth asked. Rachel stared at him. “I want to go home.”

“Okay,” he said. “I can take you home.”

She shook her head quickly. “Her. She can take me.”

Damn, that hurt more than he expected. “Okay. But what do you plan to tell your family?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“I didn’t know if you’d want people to ask uncomfortable questions.”

Her expression shifted again, and her gaze rose to Seth’s face. “My father would know what to do.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry he’s not here for you.”

Her eyes darkened with pain. “Did you know my father asked if I thought he should hire you?” she said slowly. “He told me your record. Admitted it would be a risk. I don’t know why he asked me. At the time, I didn’t have much to do with the company. I guess now I know why.”

“He trusted your instincts,” Seth said.

She looked down at her hands. “Maybe he shouldn’t have.”

“What did you tell him?” Delilah asked, her tone curious. “About Seth?”

Rachel’s gaze snapped up to meet Seth’s. “I told him to give the man a second chance.”

“Thank you,” Seth said.

“I’ve been known to be wrong.”

Ouch again.

Her eyes narrowed for a moment before she looked away, her profile cool and distant. To Delilah, she said, “I would appreciate a ride home. Do you think I should go to a doctor? To get tested for—” She stopped short, agony in her expression.

“Probably,” Delilah said. “I could drive you to Knox-ville if you don’t want to see anyone local.”

She shot Delilah a look of gratitude, the first positive expression Seth had seen from her since she’d awoken. “Yes. Please.”

As Delilah directed her out to the truck, she looked over her shoulder at her brother. “I’ll take care of her.” She followed Rachel out into the misty morning drizzle falling outside.

He nodded his gratitude and watched them from the open doorway until the truck disappeared around the bend, swallowed by the swirling fog. Then he grabbed his keys and headed out to the Charger, ignoring the urge to go back inside and catch some sleep.

He had to talk to a man about a girl.

NO SIGN OF recent sexual activity. The doctor’s words continued ringing in her ears long after he’d left her to dress for departure. He’d said other things as well—preliminary tox screen was negative, but if she’d consumed GHB or another similar drug, it might not be easily detectible on a standard test. And depending on how long it had been since the drug was administered, it might not show up on a more specific analysis. He’d seemed indifferent to her decision not to test for it.

She supposed he had patients who needed him more than she did.

“How are you doing?” Delilah Hammond looked around the closed curtain, her expression neutral. There was an uncanny stillness about the other woman, an ability to remain calm and focused despite having a drug-addled woman dumped in her lap to take care of. She had a vague memory that there had been a Hammond girl from the Bitterwood area who’d become an FBI agent.

“I’m fine,” Rachel lied. “Are you an FBI agent?”

Delilah’s dark eyebrows lifted. “Um, not anymore. I left the FBI years ago. I work for a private security company now.”

“Oh.”

“What did the doctor tell you?” she asked gently.

“No sign of sexual activity, but they also couldn’t find a toxicological explanation for my memory loss. Some-thing about the tests not being good at spotting GHB or drugs like it.”

“You don’t have any memory of where you might have gone last night?” Delilah picked up Rachel’s discarded clothes from the chair next to the exam table and handed them to her.

“None. The last thing I remember is being at the cemetery.”

Delilah left the exam area without being asked, giving Rachel a chance to change back into her own clothes in private. When Rachel called her name once she’d finished dressing, Delilah came back around the curtain.

“Look, I’m going to be straight with you,” Delilah said. “Because I’d want someone to be straight with me. I know about Mark Bramlett and the murders. I know that they all seemed to be connected to Davenport Truck-ing in some way. Or, more accurately, connected to you.”

Rachel put her fingertips against her throbbing temples. “Why do I feel as if everybody knows more about what’s going on in my life than I do?”

“If someone’s targeting you, up to this point it’s been pretty oblique. But drugging you up and leaving you to fend for yourself outside on a cold October night while you’re high as a kite?” Delilah shook her head. “That’s awfully direct, if you ask me. You really need to figure out why someone would want you out of the way.”

“You think I should go to the police.”

The other woman’s brow furrowed. “Normally, I’d say yes.”

“But?”

“But is there any reason why it might not be in your best interest for the police to be involved?”

Rachel’s head was pounding. “I don’t know. I can’t think.”

“Okay, okay.” Delilah laid her hands on Rachel’s shoulders, her touch soothing. “You don’t have to make that decision right now. Let’s get you home and settled in. Is there someone there who can keep an eye on you until you’re feeling more like yourself?”

“No,” Rachel said, remembering that her stepmother had made plans to leave for Wilmington after the funeral. Diane’s sister had invited Diane to visit for a few days. Paul had his own place, and while she and her stepbrother were friendly enough, she wouldn’t feel comfortable asking him to play nursemaid. She already suspected he thought she was in over her head at the trucking company. He might even be right.

She didn’t want to give him more reasons to doubt her.

“I’d offer to watch after you myself, but I have to drive to Alabama as soon as I can get away. I have a meeting with my boss, and it’s a long drive. But you’re welcome to stay at the house while I’m gone.”

She wondered if Seth was staying there, too. She didn’t let herself ask. “I’m okay. I’ll be fine at home by myself.”

“Are you sure?”

Rachel nodded, even though she wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

“SMOKY JOE” BRESLIN WASN’T exactly thrilled when Seth roused him from bed on a rainy morning to answer a few questions, and his responses were laced liberally with profanities and lubricated by a few shots of good Ten-nessee whiskey. Seth had never been much of a drinker, so he nursed a single shot while Breslin knocked back three without blinking.

“Yeah, she was in here last night. Looked like a hothouse flower in a weed patch, but she seemed to be enjoying the music. And there were a few fellows who enjoyed lookin’ at her, so who was I to judge?”

“Was she alone?” Seth asked.

“No, came in with some frat boy type. He tried a little something with her and she gave him a whack in the face, and some of the boys escorted him out. Not long after that, she headed out of here.”

“What kind of condition was she in?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really watchin’ when she left. I know she wasn’t fallin’-down drunk or nothin’.”

“You didn’t check to make sure she wasn’t driving?”

“Hell, you know how it can get around here on a busy night! I can’t babysit everybody who comes here for the show. I do know she didn’t have much to drink, so I didn’t worry too much about it.”

Which meant that unless she’d gone somewhere else to drink, it hadn’t been alcohol alone that had put her up on that bridge.

“What can you tell me about the frat boy?” he asked Joe.

The older man grimaced. “Just some slicked-down city fellow. You know the type, comes in here with his nose in the air givin’ everyone the stink-eye like he was better than them. I was glad to see the girl give him what for, if you want my opinion.” Joe poured another glass of whiskey and motioned to top off Seth’s.

Seth waved him off. “Did he pay for the drinks?”

“Yeah.”

“Cash or credit?”

“Credit. One of them gold-type cards for big spenders. Flashed it like it was a Rolex watch or something.”

“Would you have the receipt?”

Joe cut his eyes at Seth. “You pullin’ another scam? I don’t put up with that around here. You know that.”

“No, no scam.” He took no offense. “The woman he hit on is a friend of mine, see. I’d like to talk to the man about his behavior toward her.”

“I see.” Joe shot him an approving look. “Well, tell you the truth, she seemed to handle him pretty good all by her lonesome. But I’ll see what I can dig up for you. Just promise me you’re not gonna beat him up or shoot him or anything like that. I don’t want the cops trackin’ you back here and giving me any trouble.”

“Just want to talk,” Seth assured him, although if he found out that Frat Boy had anything to do with drugging Rachel Davenport, he couldn’t promise he’d keep his fists to himself. She’d come way too close to going off the bridge the night before. She wouldn’t have been likely to survive that fall.

Maybe the guy had slipped her something hoping it would make it easy to get lucky with her rather than to make her go off the deep end and hurt herself, but that distinction sure as hell didn’t make drugging her any less heinous a crime.

And there was still the matter of the murders. Over the past two months, four women connected to Rachel Dav-enport had been murdered in what had initially seemed like random killings. Until investigators found the perpetrator and learned he’d been hired to kill those women and make the deaths look random. With his dying words, he’d admitted that it was “all about the girl.”

All about Rachel Davenport.

Joe came back from the cluttered office just off the bar bearing a slip of paper. “Guy signed his name ‘Davis Rogers.’”

The name wasn’t familiar. Could have been someone Rachel knew from Maryville or even an old friend in town for her father’s funeral. He’d ask her about him when she got back from the hospital.

The thought of her trip to Knoxville made his chest tighten as he left Smoky Joe’s Saloon and headed toward the road to Maryville. He’d taken the past two days off work, but he was scheduled to work the next four. He had some vacation time coming to him, and he figured this might be the right time to take it.

He was surprised to find Paul Bailey in the office when he asked to see whoever was in charge while Rachel was out. Bailey had the account books open and looked up reluctantly when Seth stepped inside.

“Mr. Bailey, I’ve had a family situation come up. I know it’s short notice, but I have a couple of weeks of vacation built up, and I’d like to take them now if possible.”

Bailey’s gaze was a little unfocused, as if his mind was still on whatever he’d been doing before Seth interrupted. “Yeah, sure. Nobody else has any days off scheduled, and they’ll be happy to have the extra hours this time of year, with the holidays coming up. Just let Sharon at the front desk know what days you’re taking, and she’ll put it on the schedule.”

“Thank you.” Seth started to turn away, then paused. “I’m real sorry about Mr. Davenport.”

“Thank you,” Bailey answered with a regretful half smile.

On impulse, Seth added, “By the way, do you know a Davis Rogers?”

Bailey’s gaze focused completely. “Why do you ask?”

“I just ran into a guy with that name last night at a bar,” Seth lied. “He mentioned he knew the family. We drank a toast to Mr. Davenport.”

“Last night?”

Seth kept his expression neutral. “Yeah. He mentioned he was thinking about selling his car, and I know someone in the market. I should’ve gotten his phone number, but I didn’t think about it until afterward.”

“He’s not from here,” Bailey said with a dismissive wave. “Probably couldn’t work out a sale anyway before he heads back to Virginia.”

Seth had a vague memory that Rachel had gone to college somewhere in Virginia. So, maybe an old college friend.

Maybe even an old boyfriend.

A sliver of dismay cut a path through the center of his chest. He tried to ignore it. “Thanks anyway.” He left the office before Paul Bailey started to wonder why one of his fleet mechanics was suddenly asking a lot of nosy questions.

He stopped in the fleet garage, where he and the other mechanics shared a small break room. The three mechanics working in the garage today were out in the main room, so he had the place to himself.

Grabbing the phone book they kept in a desk drawer, he searched the hotel listings, bypassing the cheaper places. Joe Breslin had described Davis Rogers as a slicked-back frat boy, which suggested he’d stay at a nice hotel.

Was that Rachel’s type? Preppy college boys with their trust funds and their country club golf games?

Drop it, Hammond. Not your concern.

She wasn’t exactly what he considered his type, either. She was attractive, clearly, but quiet and reserved. And maybe if he hadn’t begun to put clues together that suggested the recent Bitterwood murders were connected to Davenport Trucking, he might never have allowed himself to think about Rachel Davenport as a person and not just a company figurehead.

But ever since he’d given up the con game for the straight and narrow, he’d shown an alarming tendency to take other people’s troubles to heart. And Rachel Daven-port’s life was eaten up with trouble these days.

An old twelve-step guy he knew had told him overcompensation was a common trait among people who felt the need to make amends for what they’d done. They tended to go overboard, wanting to save the whole damned world instead of fix the one or two things they could actually fix.

And here he was, proving the guy right.

Using his cell phone, he called Maryville hotels with no luck. He was about to start calling Knoxville hotels when he remembered there was a bed-and-breakfast in Bitterwood that offered the sort of services a guy like Davis Rogers would probably expect from his lodgings. The odds were better that he was staying in Knoxville, but Sequoyah House was a local call, so what would it hurt?

The proprietor at Sequoyah House put him right through to Davis Rogers’s room when he asked. Nobody answered the phone, even after several rings, but Seth had the information he needed.

He had a few tough questions for Davis Rogers, and now he knew where to find him.




Chapter Four


On the ride back to Bitterwood, Rachel realized she had no idea where her car was parked. Seth had said he’d found her on Purgatory Bridge, so it made sense that she’d left her car somewhere in the area. Delilah agreed to detour to the bridge to take a look.

Sure enough, as soon as they neared the bridge, Deli-lah had spotted the Honda Accord parked off the road near the bridge entrance, just as Seth had said.

“Do you have your keys?” Delilah asked as she pulled the truck up next to Rachel’s car.

“Yeah. I found them in my pocket.” God, she wished she could erase the last twenty-four hours and start fresh. But then, she’d have to face her father’s funeral all over again. Feel the pain of saying goodbye all over again. The stress of staying strong and not breaking. Not letting anyone see her crumble.

What would those mourners at the funeral have thought, she wondered, if they’d seen her acrobatics on the steel girders of Purgatory Bridge last night?

She shuddered at the thought, not just the idea of making a spectacle of herself in front of those people, but also the idea of Purgatory Bridge itself. Crossing the delicate-looking truss bridge in a car was nerve-racking enough. Standing on the railings with land a terrifying thirty feet below?

Unimaginable.

The morning rain had gone from a soft drizzle to sporadic showers. Currently it wasn’t raining, but fog swirled around them like lowering clouds. As Rachel crunched her way across the wet gravel on the shoulder of the road, Delilah rolled down the passenger window. “You sure you feel up to driving?”

“I’m fine,” she said automatically.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” Delilah smiled gently as she rolled the window back up, shutting out the damp coolness of the day. Rachel watched until the truck disappeared around the bend before she slid behind the wheel of the Honda.

The car’s interior seemed oppressively silent, her sudden sense of isolation exacerbated by the tendrils of fog wrapping around the car. Outside, the world looked increasingly gray and alien, so she turned her attention to the car itself, hoping something would jog her missing memory.

What had she done the last time she was in her car? Why couldn’t she remember anything between standing at her father’s gravesite and waking up in a strange room with Seth Hammond watching her with those intense green eyes?

A trilling sound split the air, making her jump. She found the offending noisemaker—her cell phone, which lay on the passenger floorboard. Grinning sheepishly, she grabbed it and checked the display. She didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Rach! Thank God, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

“Davis?” The voice on the other end of the line belonged to her grad school boyfriend, Davis Rogers. She hadn’t heard from him in years.

“I thought maybe you regretted giving me your number and were screening my calls. Did you get home okay?” Before she could answer, he continued, “Of course you did, or you wouldn’t be answering the phone. Look, about last night—”

Suddenly, there was a thud on the other end of the line, and the connection went dead.

Rachel pulled the phone away from her face, startled. She looked at the display again. The number had a Vir-ginia area code, but Davis had spoken as if he was here in Tennessee.

She tried calling the number on the display, but it went to voice mail.

He’d said he’d been trying to call her. She checked her own voice mail and discovered three messages, all from Davis. The first informed her where he was staying—the Sequoyah House, a bed-and-breakfast inn out near Cutter Horse Farm. She entered the information in her phone’s notepad and checked the other messages.

In the last message, Davis sounded upset. “Rachel, it’s Davis again. Look, I’m sorry about last night, but he seemed to think you might be receptive. I’ve really missed you. I didn’t like leaving you in that place. Please call me back so I can apologize.”

She stared at the phone. What place? Surely not Smoky Joe’s. Why was her ex in town in the first place—for her father’s funeral? Had she seen him yesterday?

And why had his call cut off?

SEQUOYAH HOUSE WAS a sprawling two-story farmhouse nestled in a clearing at the base of Copperhead Ridge. Behind the house, the mountain loomed like a guardian over the rain-washed valley below. It was the kind of place that lent itself more to romantic getaways than lodgings for a man alone.

But maybe Davis Rogers hadn’t planned to be alone for long.

Most of the lobby furnishings looked to be rustic antiques, the bounty of a rich and varied Smoky Mountain tradition of craftsmanship. But despite its hominess, Se-quoyah House couldn’t hide a definite air of money, and plenty of it.

The woman behind the large mahogany front desk smiled at him politely, her cool gray eyes taking in his cotton golf shirt, timeworn jeans and barbershop haircut. No doubt wondering if he could afford the hotel’s rates.

“May I help you?” she asked in a neutral tone.

“I’m here to see one of your guests, Davis Rogers.”

“Mr. Rogers is not in his room. May I give him a message?”

“Yes. Would you tell him Seth Hammond stopped by to see him about a matter concerning Rachel Davenport?”

He could tell by the flicker in her eyes that she recognized his name. His reputation preceded him.

“Where can he reach you?”

Seth pulled one of the business cards sitting in a silver holder on the desk. “May I?” At her nod of assent, he flipped the card over and wrote his cell phone number on the back.

The woman took the card. “I’ll give him the message.”

He walked slowly down the front porch steps and headed back to where he’d parked in a section of the clearing leveled off and covered with interlocked pavers to form a parking lot. Among the other cars parked there he spotted a shiny blue Mercedes with Virginia license plates.

Seth looked through the driver’s window. The car’s interior looked spotless, with nothing to identify the owner. If Ivy Hawkins weren’t on administrative leave for another week, Seth might have risked calling her to see if she could run down the plate number. She’d investigated the murders that had started this whole mess, after all. She’d damned near fallen victim to the killer herself. She might be persuaded.

But her partner, Antoine Parsons, had no reason to listen to anything Seth had to say. And what would it matter, really? Seth already knew Davis was staying at Sequoyah House. Though if the car with the Virginia plates was his, it did raise the question—if he wasn’t in his room, and he wasn’t in his car, where exactly was he?

As he headed back toward the Charger through the cold rain, a ringing sound stopped him midstep. It seemed faint, as if it was coming from a small distance away, but he didn’t see anyone around.

He followed the sound to a patch of dense oak leaf hydrangea bushes growing wild at the edge of the tree line. The cream-colored blossoms had started to fade with the onset of colder weather, but the leaves were thick enough to force Seth to crouch to locate the phone by the fourth ring. It lay faceup on the ground.

Seth picked up the phone and pressed the answer button. “Hello?” he said, expecting the voice on the other end to belong to the phone’s owner, calling to locate his missing phone.

The last thing he expected was to hear Rachel Dav-enport’s voice. “Davis?”

Seth’s gaze slid across the parking lot to the car with the Virginia plates. His chest tightened.

“Davis?” Rachel repeated.

“It’s not Davis,” he answered slowly. “It’s Seth Hammond.”

She was silent for a moment. “This is the number Davis Rogers left on my cell phone. Where is he? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I heard the phone ringing and answered, figuring the owner might be looking for his phone.”

“Where are you?”

“Outside Sequoyah House.” He pushed to his feet and started moving slowly down the line of bushes, looking through the thick foliage for something he desperately hoped he wouldn’t find.

“What are you doing there?” She couldn’t keep the suspicion from her tone, and he couldn’t exactly blame her.

“I went and talked to Joe Breslin at Smoky Joe’s Sa-loon. He remembered seeing you there with a man last night. So he looked up the man’s credit card receipt and got a name for me.”

“I was at Smoky Joe’s with Davis?” She sounded skeptical. “That is definitely not his kind of place.”

“Maybe it’s yours,” he suggested, remembering her sing-along with the bluegrass CD.

“Did you talk to Davis?”

“The clerk said he wasn’t in his room, so I left him a message to call me.” He paused as he caught sight of something dark behind one of the bushes. “I used your name. Hope you don’t mind.” He hunkered down next to the bush and carefully pushed aside the leaves to see what lay behind.

His heart sank to his toes.

Curled up in the fetal position, covered in blood and bruises, lay a man. Seth couldn’t tell if he was breathing. “Rachel, I have to go. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

He disconnected the call and put the cell phone in his jacket pocket. The tightly packed underbrush forced him to crawl through the narrow spaces between the bushes to get back to where the man lay with his back against the trunk of a birch tree. He’d been beaten, and badly. His face was misshapen with broken bones, his eyes purple and swollen shut. Blood drenched the front of his shirt, making it hard to tell what color it had been originally. One of his legs lay at an unnatural angle, suggesting a break or a dislocation.

Seth touched the man’s throat and found a faint pulse. He didn’t know what Davis Rogers looked like, but the proximity of the battered man and the discarded cell phone suggested a connection. He backed out of the bushes, reaching into his pocket for his own cell phone to dial 911.

But before his fingers cleared his pocket, something hit him hard against the back of the neck, slamming him forward into the bushes. His forehead cracked against the trunk of the birch tree, the blow filling his vision with dozens of exploding, colorful spots.

A second blow caught him near the small of his back, over his left kidney, shooting fire through his side. That was a kick, he realized with the last vestige of sense remaining in his aching head.

Then a hard knock to the back of his head turned out the lights.

AFTER TEN MINUTES had passed without a call back from Seth, Rachel’s worry level hit the stratosphere. There had been something in his tone when he’d rung off that had kept her stomach in knots ever since.

He’d sounded…grim. As if he’d just made a gruesome discovery.

Given the fact that he’d answered Davis’s phone a few seconds earlier, Rachel wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he’d found.

What if something bad had happened to Davis? He’d been her first real boyfriend, the first man she’d ever slept with. The first man she’d ever loved, even if it had ultimately been a doomed sort of love.

She might not be in love with him anymore, but she still cared. And if Seth’s tone of voice meant anything—

Forget waiting. She was tired of waiting. Seth had said he was at Sequoyah House. The bed-and-breakfast was five minutes away.

She grabbed her car keys and headed for the door. If she wanted to know what was going on, she could damned well find out for herself.

EVERYTHING ON SETH’S body seemed to hurt, but not enough to suggest he was on the verge of dying. He opened his eyes carefully and found himself gazing up into a rain-dark sky. He was drenched and cold, and his head felt as if he’d spent the past few hours banging it against a wall.

He lifted his legs one at a time and decided they were still in decent working order, though he felt a mild shooting pain in his side when he moved. Both arms appeared intact, though there was fresh blood on one arm. No sign of a cut beneath the red drops, so he guessed the blood had come from another part of his body.

He couldn’t breathe through his nose. When he lifted his hand to his face, he learned why. Blood stained his fingers, and his nose felt sore to the touch. He forced himself to sit up, groaning softly at the effort, and looked around him.

He was in the woods, though there was a break in the trees to his right, revealing the corner of a large clapboard house. Sequoyah House, he thought, the memory accompanied by no small amount of pain.

Some of his memories seemed to be missing. He knew who he was. He knew what day it was, unless he’d been out longer than he thought. He knew what he’d been doing earlier that day—he’d been hoping to talk to Rachel Davenport’s old friend Davis Rogers. But Rogers hadn’t been in his room, so Seth had given the desk clerk a message for Rachel’s friend and left the bed-and-breakfast.

He remembered walking back to the parking area where he’d left the Charger.

What then?

His cell phone rang, barely audible. He pulled it out from the back pocket of his sodden jeans and saw Adam Brand’s name on the display. Perfect. Just perfect.

Then an image flashed through his aching head. A cell phone—but not this cell phone. Another one. He’d heard it ringing and come here into the woods to find it.

But where was the cell phone now?

He answered his phone to stop the noise. “Yeah?” The greeting came out surly. Seth didn’t give a damn—surly was exactly how he felt.

“You were supposed to check in this morning,” Brand said.

“Yeah, well, I was detained.” He winced as he tried to push to his feet. “And the case has gone to hell in a handbasket, thanks for asking.”

“What’s happened?”

“Too much to tell you over the phone. I’ll type you up a report. Okay?”

“Is something wrong? You sound like hell.”

Seth spotted a rusty patch in the leaves nearby. His brow furrowed, sending a fresh ache through his brain. “I’ll put that in the report, too.” He hung up and crossed to the dark spot in the leaves.

The rain had washed away all but a few remnants of red. Seth picked up one of the stained leaves and took a closer look.

Blood. There was blood here on the ground. Was this where he’d been attacked?

No. Not him. There had been someone else. An image flitted through his pain-addled mind, moving so fast he almost didn’t catch it.

But he saw enough. He saw the body of a man, curled into a ball, as if he’d passed out trying to protect his body from the blows. And passed out he had, because Seth had a sudden, distinct memory of checking the man’s pulse and finding it barely there.

So where was the man now? Had whoever left this throbbing bump on the back of Seth’s head taken the body away from here and dumped it elsewhere?

If so, they’d apparently taken the discarded cell phone, as well, because it was no longer in the pocket of his jacket.

He trudged through the rainy woods, heading for the clearing ahead. His vision kept shifting on him, making him stagger a little, and it was a relief to reach the Char-ger after what seemed like the longest fifty-yard walk of his life. He sagged against the side of the car, pressing his cheek against the cold metal frame of the chassis for a moment. It seemed to ease the pain in his skull, so he stood there awhile longer.

Only the sound of a vehicle approaching spurred him to move. He pushed away from the car and started to unlock to door when he realized the Charger was listing drastically to one side. Looking down, he saw why—both of the driver’s-side tires were flat.

He groaned with dismay.

The vehicle turned off the road and into the parking lot. Seth forced his drooping gaze upward and was surprised to see Rachel Davenport staring back at him through the swishing windshield wipers of her car. She parked behind him and got out, her expression horrified.

“My God, what happened to you?”

He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the Char-ger’s front window and winced at the sight. His nose was bloody and starting to bruise. An oozing scrape marred the skin over his left eye, as well.

“Should’ve seen the other guy,” he said with a cocky grin, hoping to wipe that look of concern off her face. The last thing he could deal with in his weakened condition was a Rachel Davenport who felt sorry for him. He needed her angry and spitting fire so she’d go away and leave him to safely lick his wounds in private.




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