Smoky Mountain Setup (11 page)

She smiled. “The goal is sleep?”

He nodded toward the room across from hers, where he’d stashed his own things. “I’ll be there in the morning. I promise.”

She pressed her hand to the front of his shirt, feeling the reassuring thud of his heartbeat against her palm. “If you aren’t, I’m hunting you down.”

He sneaked a quick look around, as if reassuring himself they were alone, then bent and gave her a quick kiss. “Get some sleep.”

She waited in her doorway until he entered his own room and closed the door behind him, then turned and entered her own dorm room, flicking on the light.

The bed was the way she’d left it, slightly rumpled and full of recent memories of Landry—the way he smelled, the sensation of his hands on her bare skin, the electric thrill of their bodies pressed close and straining for more. She closed her eyes and sank on the edge of the bed, swamped by memories. Of their first meeting, the literal electric shock that passed between them as they shook hands, making them laugh and snatch their hands away.

The more visceral shock of desire the first time they’d taken a step past the slow burn of attraction and kissed at the end of a long day at work.

She lay back on the bed, opening her eyes to stare at the ceiling. They hadn’t planned to start a relationship. For weeks, even months, they pretended what was happening between them was just chemical. Two people enjoying each other, no strings attached.

But there had been strings. Probably from the beginning. Despite her tumultuous childhood with a promiscuous and reckless mother, despite his parents’ distant, businesslike marriage, somehow, they’d been foolish enough to believe in the possibility of forever.

And then the bombing at the warehouse in Richmond had blown everything apart.

The tears she’d been fighting earlier leaked from her eyes and slid down her cheeks. She brushed them away, angry at the sign of weakness and glad that Landry wasn’t here to see it.

She couldn’t start thinking about forever again. She just had to focus on getting through one day at a time. She had to figure out a way to get Landry out of the mess he was in. Give him back the life that the BRI had stolen from him when he’d ended up their captive.

Then maybe she’d figure out how to say a proper goodbye this time.

* * *

H
E
’
D
ARRIVED
AT
his apartment after midnight, the metallic taste of fear in his mouth and his mind reeling with questions he didn’t know how to answer. He’d tried to help Agent Rigsby, hadn’t he? It had been a risk to try to call her and warn her that someone else from the FBI was coming after her.

But before he’d hung up the phone with Darryl Boyle, supervisory special agent with the FBI’s Knoxville field office, he’d known McKenna Rigsby was in big trouble.

Boyle was railroading her. The man had said nothing incriminating, but Landry had heard the flicker of eagerness in his voice when he told Landry Rigsby had called him, as well.

He was going after her. And he had no intention of bringing her back alive.

Landry had tried to help her, but he couldn’t reach her before Boyle did. He wasn’t even sure where she’d be—she’d set a trap, hoping to ensnare the person who had tried to kill her before, and she might not have been in either of the two locations where she’d told him and Boyle she’d be.

He’d just hoped she’d got away. He’d done all he dared. He had his own trouble with the FBI, with a career that was already on life support. He couldn’t risk sticking his neck out, in case he was wrong about Boyle.

What a coward he’d been.

When the four men materialized out of the shadows of his living room, he’d been unprepared for a fight. They took him down with ease, binding him with duct tape and hustling him out to a van he hadn’t noticed parked outside his unit.

That had been the beginning of his trip to hell.

Chapter Eleven

Olivia woke to darkness and a gnawing sense of unease she couldn’t place. She knew she was in one of the dorm rooms in the basement of the old Buckley Mansion that Alexander Quinn had transformed into The Gates. She hadn’t been awakened by a sudden noise or an unexpected touch in the night. She’d just gone from sleep to animal awareness in one fluid motion, without any idea why all of her senses were suddenly tingling.

She listened to the darkness, waiting for some noise, some sensation to remind her what had summoned her from sleep, but there was nothing but the languid silence of a mostly unoccupied space. Down here, in the rooms built out of the mansion’s stone foundation, even the creaks and groans of the old house settling rarely penetrated this quiet sanctuary.

Maybe one of the other agents had come down to catch some sleep before morning, she thought, pushing off the covers and swinging her feet down to the cold floor. Shivering, she felt around for the slip-on shoes she’d retrieved from her desk in the agents’ bull pen and slid them on her feet.

She padded to the door, stopping to listen before she opened it and stepped outside into the dimly lit main room. The basement dormitory consisted of one long, wide corridor with six small bedrooms branching off on either side, three to the right and three to the left. There was a large bathroom at the end of the hall. That door was open, as were four of the other doors in the dorm.

Only Landry’s door remained closed. Apparently, all of the other agents remaining on the premises were still upstairs with Quinn.

She crossed the hallway and pressed her ear to the closed door, wondering if she’d heard noises coming from the room across the hall. But she could hear nothing from inside, except a faint creaking noise that might have been the bedsprings shifting under Landry’s weight.

Or was she simply imagining that she could hear sounds of occupation, because the alternative—the possibility that what had jarred her awake had been Landry sneaking out of the dorm—was something she didn’t want to believe?

Just open the door
, her anxiety whispered in her ear.
Open it and you’ll know if he bugged out on you.

She turned the door handle, half expecting it to be locked. But it moved easily in her grasp, the door swinging quietly inward.

Landry was there, still in the bed. The creaking noise she’d heard repeated twice, louder now.

He was moving in his sleep, jerky twitches rather than thrashing that might hint at a violent nightmare. But the light angling through the open doorway fell on his face, revealing an expression that was nothing short of terror.

Landry jerked up to a sitting position so suddenly, she couldn’t hold back a gasp of surprise. Her hand flexed, rattling the doorknob, and his gaze whipped up to meet hers.

“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I didn’t mean—”

He pulled his knees up under the twisted sheets and rested his elbows on them, pressing his face into his hands for a long moment. The muscles in his back flexed, revealing pale streaks she hadn’t seen before.

She reached for the switch on the wall and flooded the room with light.

Landry squinted up at her. “What the hell?”

“What are those?” she asked, crossing to the bed to get a better look at the pale scars marring his back. “Oh, my God. What happened to you?”

He looked away from her. “The Blue Ridge Infantry happened.”

She touched one of the pale scars. He flinched and she pulled her hand back quickly. “They beat you.”

“You didn’t think it was a trip to the beach, did you?”

“What did they hit you with?” She tried to school her expression, to approach the question without emotion. She’d seen terrible things as an FBI agent and also working at The Gates. She’d seen some of the worst things people could do to their fellow human beings, and she’d always thought herself to be stoic and controlled.

But the thought of someone wielding a whip or a stick or whatever had made these scars—

“They’re healed. They don’t matter.” He reached over and picked up his discarded T-shirt, pulling it over his head. “You should be trying to get some sleep.”

“I was. Something woke me.”

He frowned. “You think you heard something?”

“I’m not sure.” She sank onto the side of his bed. “I guess maybe I’m still on edge.”

“I can’t imagine why,” he murmured in a dry tone.

She managed a smile. “Are you sure you’re okay? You were tossing and turning when I came in.”

“Unfamiliar bed.”

“Yeah.” She plucked at the bedsheets. “You haven’t really had a chance to talk to anybody about what the BRI put you through, have you?”

“Couldn’t exactly go into therapy while I was running for my life.”

“You know it’s not healthy to try to bury a traumatic experience.”

He laughed softly. “I seem to remember a beautiful, hardheaded FBI agent who chafed at the idea of post-operation counseling.”

“And that same agent didn’t cope very well after Richmond, remember? I lost so much after what happened at the warehouse. I lost myself.” She blinked back the rush of hot tears burning her eyes. “I lost you.”

He looked up at her, his green eyes glistening with pain. “You really think post-trauma counseling would have saved us?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head, feeling suddenly helpless. “I just wish we’d fought harder. I wish we’d valued our relationship more.”

“You think I threw it away, don’t you?” His lips thinned to a hard line. “You think I pushed you away.”

“I used to.” She rubbed away a tear that trickled from the corner of her eye. “But I pushed you away, too. I knew you were angry with me. I should have worked harder to be certain I understood why. Maybe if I’d tried, you’d have confronted me after what the debriefing team told you about my statement, and I could have assured you they were lying.”

“I’m not sure I’d have believed you,” he admitted, looking away.

“I’d have made you believe me.”

“You shouldn’t have had to make me believe you. I should have believed you because of who you were. What you were to me.”

His use of the past tense made her stomach ache. “You never could. Could you?”

The sadness in his eyes hurt her heart. “I wanted to.” He shook his head. “I guess I was so used to lies spoken as casually as small talk. There were so many things I wanted desperately as a kid to believe. Promises my parents made that they never kept.” He laughed bleakly. “You’d think all those years later, I could have just let it go. They never really wanted kids, and when they had one by accident, they figured out a way to go on with their lives as if I had never happened. It had nothing to do with me. Not really. I didn’t matter enough for it to be about me.”

Growing up poor with a flighty, promiscuous mother, Olivia had pictured the lives of wealthy people as a utopian promised land, where every child had two parents, all they wanted to eat, all the clothes they wanted to wear and every luxury she could imagine.

She’d never realized there were privations that money couldn’t alleviate, until she’d met Cade Landry.

“I guess you haven’t spoken with your parents since you went missing?” she asked.

“I don’t imagine they care.”

She shook her head. His parents had done one hell of a number on him with their casual, thoughtless neglect. “What about Mary? Does she know you’re still alive?”

He shook his head. “Mary’s safer thinking I’m dead.”

“You don’t think the BRI’s reach goes all the way to Savannah, do you?”

“No point in risking it.” He shrugged. “Mary’s got a new batch of kids to raise. Did you know that? Last time I talked to her, she was working for a lawyer and his wife. Seem like nice people, from what she said. And the kids are stinking cute. She emailed me photos from Christmas a year ago.”

His nanny, Mary Allen, had been the closest thing he’d had to a parent growing up. She’d been only twenty years old when his parents had hired her, shortly after Landry’s birth, and she’d given him the attention his parents had withheld.

But even she had kept a certain distance, emotionally. Or tried to, Olivia supposed, thinking of a few things Landry had let slip about his relationship with his nanny. Mary had seemed determined to give Landry’s parents every chance to be what he needed them to be. She hadn’t wanted him to replace his parents with her.

Olivia had met Mary once, on a weekend trip to Savannah early in her relationship with Landry. She’d been a trim, pretty woman with curly brown hair liberally streaked with gray and kind blue eyes that had made Olivia instantly wish she’d had a Mary Allen in her own life growing up.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think. To navel-gaze, I think was how you used to put it.” Landry slanted a lopsided smile at her. “I do wish you’d come to me and told me the truth. I don’t know if I’d have believed you right away, but in time, I think I would have.”

An ache of regret throbbed in her chest. “You think so, do you?”

“You probably wouldn’t have forgiven me for doubting you, so I’m not sure it would have solved anything,” he admitted. “But it would have been comforting anyway. Knowing you didn’t think I was lying about the order to go into the warehouse.”

She turned to face him, catching his hands in hers. “I never once believed you were lying about that. Not once. No matter what other trust issues I had, I never doubted you were a good FBI agent. You didn’t ignore orders on a whim, and you didn’t put people’s lives in danger for selfish reasons. I know you wanted to stop those guys. I did, too. But I wouldn’t have defied orders and blundered into that warehouse just because I was eager to make an arrest. And neither would you.”

His eyes narrowed briefly. “You mean that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

He blinked rapidly, and she didn’t miss the hint of moisture in his eyes as he looked down at their clasped hands. “Thank you.”

“I know a lot has happened since Richmond. I know we can’t go back to what we had then. I don’t really want to.”

He let go of her hands. “Yeah, a whole lot of water under that bridge.”

She took his hands again, giving them a sharp tug to make him look at her. “It wasn’t enough then. Not for either one of us. It’s not something we should aspire to now.”

His eyes narrowed. “Aspire to?”

“I don’t want to live this way anymore. I want more than half a relationship. I want to be able to trust someone else. I want someone else to be able to trust me, too.”

He nodded. “I get that.”

“Maybe that person will never be you. That’s something you’re going to have to figure out. I just know that as much as I loved you then, it wasn’t enough. It would never have been enough, not the way it was. Not with everything we held back.”

He released a huff of air. “Yeah. You’re right. It wouldn’t have been.”

She let his hands go and stood up. “I’m going back to my room now. You try to get some sleep. And if you need me, you know where to find me.”

It took strength to walk out of his room and not look back, but she made herself do it. Made herself walk across the wide corridor, enter her dorm room and close the door behind her.

And if she cried herself to sleep, it was nobody’s business but her own.

* * *

“W
E
STOCKED
UP
for the snowstorm,” Mark Fitzpatrick told Landry as he passed him a plate of eggs, bacon and toast, steaming hot from the stove.

“Did you buy up all the milk and bread?” Landry asked with a smile, knowing that a fellow Southerner would get the joke.

“What was left.” Fitz grinned. “Don’t you wonder why people don’t make a run on charcoal and grills instead when snow is forecast? Seems those things would be more useful.”

Landry joined the other agents who’d gathered at the conference table for breakfast. Their numbers had expanded, he noted. There was a small, dark-haired woman sitting next to Sutton Calhoun, and across from her, a taller brunette had joined Adam Brand and Alexander Quinn, her head close to theirs in conversation.

“Ivy Calhoun and Delilah Brand,” Olivia told him as he settled beside her at the table. “They’re both cops in Bitterwood. They worked the overnight shift as part of the department’s snow contingency plan or something.”

“And there’s another guy’s wife who’s a cop, too, right? You said she was called out on Grant Carver’s disappearance?”

“Right. Sara Dennison. Dennison headed out last night to meet up with her and see if she could tell us any more about the investigation. I guess they haven’t made it back here yet.”

Two more people came into the conference room, still dressed in heavy clothing and red-cheeked from the cold outside. One was a tall, rawboned man in his midthirties with wavy brown hair and dark eyes, while the woman beside him was petite, blonde and sweet-faced. They both gave Landry a curious glance.

Then the man did a double take. “Cade Landry.”

Landry sighed. He’d spent the past few months trying to look as different from his FBI photo as he could, but apparently there were some things a man couldn’t change about himself.

“Landry, this is Anson Daughtry, our IT director, and his wife, Ginny, one of our accountants.” Olivia gave Anson and Ginny a pointed look. “Who’re both supposed to be somewhere sunny on their honeymoon.”

“And miss the fun? Who do you think we are?” Daughtry set down their plates of food and pulled out a chair for his wife before settling across from Landry and Olivia. “We just walked in—anything new on Carver?”

“Not that we’ve heard,” Olivia answered.

Daughtry gave Landry a curious look. “I heard you’d shown up, but I thought you two were stuck in your cabin.”

“You knew I was at her cabin?”

“He was the one I had monitoring that bank account in Barrowville,” Olivia murmured.

“I see.” He arched an eyebrow at Daughtry. “And from that, you figured out who I was and where I was?”

“Well, we knew you had once had a relationship with Bombshell Barb—” Daughtry’s mouth snapped shut, and Landry saw Ginny dig an elbow into her husband’s ribs. “We knew you were once involved with Agent Sharp, so when the bank activity showed up—”