Smoky Mountain Setup (5 page)

“He’s in love with you?”

“I don’t think Quinn has ever loved anyone that way,” she said with a soft laugh. “But he’s a man.”

“And you’re a beautiful woman. Who seems very alone.”

She looked up at him. “I choose to be alone.”

“Why?” He shook his head. “You’re not a loner, Livvie. You enjoy being around other people. You like companionship.”

“That was two years ago. My life is very different now. For one thing, I’m too busy for relationships. My job is dangerous and thankless, and I don’t want to inflict that kind of stress on someone else.”

“Even one of your fellow agents at The Gates? They’re working the same stressful job. They understand the long hours, being on call—”

“Why are you pressing this issue? Do you want me to tell you I’ve moved on from you? I have. It was two years ago.” Her voice rose with emotion. “When I left the FBI, I didn’t look back. Are you happy?”

“No.” He stared back at her, his nostrils flaring. “No, I’m not happy.”

She snapped her mouth shut and looked away.

“I know I drove you away. To this day, I don’t know how to trust you again, but I have missed you every single moment. The smell of you haunts my dreams. I can close my eyes and conjure up a vivid memory of the sun glinting off your hair that long weekend we spent on Assateague Island. I can feel the thunder of horse hooves beneath my feet when that wild herd ran past us on the beach. I can remember the way your laugh rang in my ears like music.”

He hadn’t moved an inch closer, hadn’t reached out across the distance between them, but his voice caressed her, seduced her, until she felt a throb of desire pulsing low in her belly.

“I didn’t come here to get you back. Or ask for another chance,” he said in a deep growl that made her think of long, hot summer nights naked in his arms. “But I don’t know if I could keep on living if you weren’t.”

He moved then, rising to his feet and pacing across the room to the window. Outside, the snowfall continued, barely visible in the deepening dusk. Soon night would fall, silent and deep in the snowbound woods.

And she would be alone with the only man she’d ever let herself love.

She couldn’t stop herself from rising to join him at the window. He turned slowly to face her, his face half in shadow.

“They’re wrong,” she said. “The BRI, I mean.”

“About what?”

“Alexander Quinn might very well want to sleep with me. He might even feel some level of affection for me. But he wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice my life if he believed it would serve justice in some way. That’s the sort of man he is. So if your friends in the Blue Ridge Infantry believe they can use me to control him in any way, they are sadly mistaken.”

“That won’t stop them from trying.”

She lifted her chin. “Let them try.”

His eyes narrowed as he held her gaze, studying her as if he’d never seen her before. “You’re different,” he murmured finally, reaching up to brush a piece of hair away from her cheek. His fingers lingered a moment, and she felt how work-roughened they’d become since the last time he’d touched her that way.

He dropped his hand to his side. “Do you trust me enough to give me back my weapon?”

Trust
might not be the right word, she thought, but she was willing to take the risk. “Yes.”

He moved away from her to the rolltop desk and retrieved his pistol, reloading it with both speed and skill. “Any chance you have more 9 mm ammo around?”

“Of course.”

His gaze lifted to meet hers, a slow smile spreading over his face, carving dimples into his cheeks and taking a decade off his appearance. “Should’ve known.”

As she started toward the hall closet where she kept her extra weapons and ammunition, the lights went off, plunging the cabin into gloom relieved only by the dying fireplace embers.

“There goes the power,” she said with a sigh, detouring toward the hearth to coax the fire back to life.

“Wait,” he murmured as she reached for the poker. He was much closer than she’d expected; she hadn’t heard his approach.

“What?” she asked, her voice dropping to a near whisper.

“How sure are you that the snow caused the power to go out?”

“It’s not unusual during a snowstorm—”

He tugged her away from the window. “Or during a siege.”

Chapter Five

Only the soft crackle of the smoldering fire and the quiet hiss of their respirations relieved the sudden blanket of silence that fell over the cabin. Outside, snow continued to fall quietly as Landry listened for any out-of-place noises.

Olivia moved away from the fireplace and picked up the Mossberg shotgun leaning against the wall by the desk. She slanted a quick look at Landry before she started toward the front door and grabbed the thick leather jacket that hung on a hook by the entry.

He caught up with her, closing his hand around her wrist. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She shook off his grasp and turned to look at him, her blue eyes glimmering in the low light. “I’m going outside to see if I can tell what knocked the power out.”

“Didn’t you hear a single word I said about a siege?”

“If there are people out there who want to take me captive, I’d rather get the fight over now than hide like a coward in the cabin.”

“Well, you’re not going out there alone.” He chambered a round in the P-11. “I’ll go first.”

“Why? Because you’re the guy?”

He angled a quick look at her. “Because you’re the target, and the target should never be the first person out the door.”

She frowned but stepped back. “You need a jacket.”

He backtracked and shrugged on the thick fleece coat he’d picked up earlier that day at the thrift store in Barrowville, hurrying in case she changed her mind about allowing him to join her.

But she waited for him at the door, her gaze drawing him all the way in as he closed the distance between them. She was a tall woman, nearly as tall as he was, and if anything, she looked even stronger and fitter than she’d been when they’d worked together in the FBI.

They’d always been a good team, right until the case that had broken them. He hoped the old instincts would kick back in for them now, despite all that had passed between them, because if there really were people out there lying in wait for Olivia, it would take all their skills and a whole lot of luck to make it out of the situation unscathed.

An icy blast of air greeted them as they stepped out onto the cabin porch. Wind had swirled snow beneath the porch roof, depositing about two inches halfway onto the porch’s weathered wooden floor.

Landry paused at the top of the porch steps and surveyed the cold white expanse in front of him. If there had been anyone moving around out here in the past little while, they hadn’t come close to the porch. The snowfield was pristine and undisturbed.

“The snow probably knocked a branch on a wire somewhere between here and the nearest transformer.” Olivia’s low voice, only inches from his ear, sent a ripple of pure sexual awareness darting down his spine.

He turned to look at her. “We should check all the way around the house before we let down our guard.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t protest as he led her down the steps into the thickening snow. Almost five inches covered the ground, even more gathering at the edges of the porch where the wind had blown the snow into rising drifts. It was a soft, wet snow, flattening under his boots as they slowly circled the cabin, looking for any signs of intruders.

But nothing had disturbed the snow around the cabin, save for a small set of tracks belonging to what he guessed was probably a foraging raccoon, looking for a meal.

“It was just the snow,” Olivia murmured, giving him a nudge toward the front of the cabin.

He trudged back through the tracks they’d left in the snow and nodded for her to precede him up the porch steps. She climbed the steps with a soft sigh he recognized as a sign of impatience and turned to face him when he joined her in front of the door.

“Fine,” he said. “It was just the snow. This time.”

Olivia shook the slush from her boots and opened the cabin door to head inside. He knocked the snow from his own boots before he followed her in.

She closed and locked the door behind him, shrugging out of her damp coat. “Are we going to do this every time you hear a noise you can’t identify?”

He tamped down a flood of annoyance. “If I think it’s necessary.”

She released another sigh as she hung the coat back on its hook. “Okay, fair enough. Let’s get the fire cranked up. I’m freezing.”

He took off his coat and hung it on the hook beside hers. “How can I help? Need more wood?”

“It’s in a bin by the back door. Straight down the hall.”

He found the wood bin and grabbed a couple of pieces for the fire then returned to the front room. He found Olivia kneeling in front of the hearth, adding newspaper as kindling to the charred logs still glowing faintly red. He added the wood to the fire and looked around for matches.

Olivia reached into a small steel canister on the mantel and withdrew a narrow fireplace lighter. “Here.”

He touched the butane flame to the kindling. It ignited with a soft
whoosh
,
and the logs soon caught fire, emitting a delicious wave of heat into the room.

“Nice,” Olivia murmured, extending her hands toward the flames.

He pulled the room’s two armchairs close to the fire. “Sit.”

She did as he said, leaning toward the warmth. “Thanks.”

He sat in the chair next to her, holding his icy fingers toward the fire until some of the numbness subsided. “No, thank
you
.”

“For what?”

“For extending a little Southern hospitality to a poor, weary traveler?” he suggested with a smile.

Her lips curved in response. “You didn’t give me a lot of choice.”

“Maybe not. But I am grateful to be here in front of this fire instead of out there in all that cold white stuff.”

Olivia fell silent, her gaze directed at the flickering fire. Settling back in the chair, Landry allowed himself to study her profile, take in the lean lines of her body only partially hidden by her sweater and jeans. His earlier observation was correct; she was in excellent shape. She’d always been a curvy woman, and that hadn’t changed, but the curves were matched with toned muscles and an overall look of vibrant health.

Leaving the FBI and going to work for The Gates seemed to have been good for her, at least physically.

But what about her spirit? The Olivia Sharp he’d known and loved had been a firecracker, full of explosive energy and a fierce inquisitiveness that had taken her very far very fast in the FBI.

But not this woman in front of him. She was quiet, contemplative and remarkably still.

She stirred as he watched her, turning her gaze to him. “I could heat up some milk over the fire for hot chocolate. Or even water for coffee, if you’d prefer that—”

“You’ve changed.” He hadn’t meant to blurt the words aloud, but he couldn’t take them back.

Her eyelids flickered and she looked away. “So have you.”

Now that he’d started down this conversational path, he decided, he might as well go all in. “Are you happy?”

“I’m...content.”

He felt an ache settle in his chest at the hint of melancholy in her tone. “Is contentment enough?”

“For now.”

“Do you anticipate finding more than contentment at some point in the future?”

She slanted a look his way. “Why don’t you just come out and ask whatever it is you want to know?”

“Do you miss me?” He clamped his mouth shut as soon as the words escaped his lips. He hadn’t intended to ask such a blunt, self-serving question.

“Yes.” Her answer, equally blunt, caught him by surprise.

They fell quiet, letting the crackle of the fire fill the lingering silence. Landry wasn’t sure how much time had passed before she spoke again, but the flames in the hearth had already begun to die down.

“I loved you. Like I’d never loved anyone in my life.” Her gaze remained directed forward, toward the fireplace, the flickering light from the flames bathing her face in a warm glow. “When things fell apart, I had to keep going. Keep working the job, not let the loss derail me. But I just couldn’t keep going, day in and day out, working alone when I’d gotten so used to you being there.”

The ache in his chest intensified. “I’m sorry.”

“You’d been transferred by then. It’s not like we’d have been working together anyway.”

“I was a mess,” he admitted. “It was hard to care about anything for a long time. I worked the job, but it just didn’t mean anything to me anymore.”

“I heard you’d started going through the motions.”

Guilt flooded him, hot and sour. “I did. Much to my shame. I don’t really have an excuse. I just knew I wasn’t ever going to get any further up the ladder than I already was, and any screwup would probably be the end of the line for me.”

“Easier to keep your nose clean if you’re not rocking the boat.”

“Yeah. I guess. I’m not sure I gave it that much thought. It’s just—nothing meant anything. Every time I cleared a case, three more would pop up to take their place. Bureaucratic crap kept creeping further and further down the line into the field offices. We were dealing with federal-level politics in the Johnson City RA, for Pete’s sake.”

“Why didn’t you just leave the FBI, then?”

“And do what? I spent over a decade solving crimes and protecting lives. It’s all I really know how to do at this point.”

“You could have come to work for Quinn at The Gates, for one thing.” She picked up the fire poker and gave the logs a nudge.

“I wasn’t ready.” He stopped short as she snapped her gaze up to meet his.

“You weren’t ready to work with me again.”

“That’s not it, exactly.”

She turned back to the fire. “Then what is it?”

“I know Ava Trent probably didn’t have anything good to say about me. Or McKenna Rigsby, either. But my job was to watch their backs, and I didn’t want to leave them in the lurch.”

“So you stayed for your partners?” She arched an eyebrow but still didn’t look at him.

“I wanted my job to mean something again. I thought if I stuck around, if I did what it took to get through the day, I’d feel that fire again.” He shook his head. “As if that fire came from outside of me.”

She remained silent for a long time, her singular focus on the flickering fire beginning to make him squirm inside. The Olivia Sharp who’d been his partner, in his work life and his personal life, had been a vibrant force of nature. Quiet contemplation had never been her style.

Maybe that woman really was gone. Maybe he’d lost her in the aftermath of the Richmond debacle just as surely as he’d lost himself.

“I never understood why you couldn’t forgive me for not remembering what happened.” Her low murmur seemed loud in the snowbound hush of the cabin, yet he was certain he’d misunderstood her.

“What?”

She slowly turned her gaze to meet his, her blue eyes blazing with a mixture of anger and pain. “I had a head injury. I couldn’t remember anything that happened right before or right after the explosion. But you seemed to think I should be able to pull those memories out of nothing to prove you weren’t lying. That wasn’t fair.”

“It wasn’t what you couldn’t remember that was the problem. It’s what you told the investigators.”

Her brow furrowed. “I didn’t tell them anything. I couldn’t. I didn’t remember anything.”

“Yet you somehow managed to remember me pushing you and the other team members to disobey the hold order.” His voice sharpened.

“I did no such thing.”

He shook his head. Why was she denying it? Did she think he hadn’t learned what she’d said in her official statement?

The agents who’d interrogated him had shown him a transcript of her testimony, signed off by Olivia, that had laid the whole mess on his shoulders.

Surely she remembered what she’d told the investigators. The words were certainly burned in
his
mind— “Agent Landry believed that waiting would allow the hostage-takers to escape, so he decided to countermand the official orders and go into the building.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing.” He was starting to feel sick, his dinner roiling in queasy waves in his gut. “It doesn’t matter.”

Her lips flattened with anger. “You’re right—it doesn’t. The real problem is that you never trusted me. Not really.”

How could he argue with her? His lack of faith—in anyone and anything—had long preceded Olivia’s presence in his life.

He closed his eyes. “You, of all people, know why I didn’t trust anyone easily.”

Her fingers closed around his jaw, tugging his face around, forcing him to open his eyes and look into her pain-filled gaze. “I am not her. I never was. I never will be.”

He didn’t know what to say in response. She was right. Of course she was right. And yet...

She dropped her hand away from his face and turned back to the fire. “We were doomed from the start.”

We were
, he thought bleakly.

So why hadn’t he done the wise thing and walked away before it blew up in their faces?

* * *

T
HE
SNOW
STOPPED
around midnight, but the electricity didn’t return. The cabin had been built to keep out the cold mountain winds, but with only the fire in the hearth to keep the place warm, it hadn’t taken long for the temperature inside the cabin to drop precipitously.

“This is the last of the quilts,” Olivia told Landry as he sat in silent misery by the fire. Without talking about it, they’d both settled on the thick rug in front of the hearth, huddled together for warmth.

What they hadn’t done was speak any more about the past, about the mistakes they’d both made that had led them from the closest of companions to the awkward strangers now sitting side by side under a mountain of handmade quilts.

She’d made it seem that the end of their relationship was entirely his fault, but that wasn’t fair, was it? She had her own demons, had made her own mistakes.

“I should have confronted you when you just left without a word.”

He made a low, growling sound deep in his throat. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“I guess not.”

He sighed. “I was always a mess. I never should have inflicted myself on you in the first place.”