Smoky Mountain Setup. Paula Graves

near lost his life in the process.

      But he had to trust someone, or what was the point of going on? He couldn’t keep living under the radar forever.

      And he’d already gone nearly two years without seeing Olivia Sharp. There had been a time when he couldn’t have imagined such a thing, couldn’t have considered even a week without her, much less a lifetime without her spreading out in front of him as far as the eye could see.

      “Were you working with the Blue Ridge Infantry?” she asked, breaking the tense silence between them.

      He met her gaze, took a deep breath and answered the question with the truth.

      “Yes,” he said.

       Chapter Two

      Hearing Cade Landry admit what she’d spent the past year trying not to believe shouldn’t have felt like a kick in the teeth. But somehow, it did. It hit her hard enough that she took an involuntary step backward, her foot catching on the braided rug in the cabin’s entry.

      As she started to lose her balance, Landry lurched forward and caught her before she could fall, his arms wrapping around her waist. His hands were cold—she could feel the chill through her sweater—but his touch sent fire singing through her blood.

      He’d always had that effect on her. Even when he shouldn’t.

      She pulled free of his grasp, steadying herself by clutching the edge of the desk. “How long?”

      He stared at her, a puzzled expression on his face.

      “How long did you work for the Blue Ridge Infantry?” When he didn’t answer right away, she added, “Are you still working for them? Is that why you came here?”

      He took a deep breath and let it out in a soft whoosh. “I was never working for them.”

      She shook her head, shock starting to give way to a fury that burned like acid in her gut. “Don’t play semantics games with me, Landry.”

      His dark eyebrows arched, creasing his forehead. “Are you going to listen to what I have to say or should we just cut to the part where you call the cops to come haul my ass out of here?”

      “The latter, I think.” She went for her shotgun.

      He beat her there, jerking it out of her grasp. “Don’t,” he said sharply as she changed course, going for the P-11 she’d just emptied.

      She froze in place, turning slowly to look at him. Something hot and painful throbbed just under her breastbone as she met his hard gaze. “Just get it over with.”

      “I’m not what you think I am,” he said, lowering the Mossberg to his side. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

      “You’ll forgive me if I have a little trouble believing you.”

      His lips pressed to a thin line. “I was really hoping you, of all people, would look beyond the obvious.”

      She pushed down a sudden flutter of guilt. “You don’t get to play the victim card. You’re the one who disappeared almost a year ago without telling anyone where you were going.”

      “I did tell someone,” he said quietly, lowering the shotgun to the floor, still within his reach. “I told my SAC at the Johnson City RA that I had information the FBI needed to know about the Blue Ridge Infantry. And the next thing I knew, I was being bludgeoned and hauled to some backwoods hellhole and beaten to within an inch of my life.”

      For a second she pictured what he was saying, imagined him tied up and pummeled by the vicious hillbillies who comprised the mountain militia known as the Blue Ridge Infantry, and nausea burned in her gut. She knew from her own investigations that the hard-eyed men who ran the so-called militia as a criminal organization were capable of great cruelty. If they’d ever lived by a code of honor, those days were long past.

      Money and power drove them. In these hills these days, money and power too often came from drugs, guns and extortion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      She held his gaze but didn’t speak.

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

      “You’re the one who left,” she said.

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

      “You packed your things and left.”

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

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

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