Blue Ridge Ricochet. Paula Graves

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      “I’ll take the sofa,” he offered. “No need to run you out of your bed.”

      She shook her head. “Take the bed. You’re the one in bad condition. The sofa sleeps fine, and I’m short enough not to be uncomfortable sleeping on it.” She waved her hand toward the pillows and blankets piled up at the end of the sofa. “I’m set for the night.”

      He looked at her, taking in the guileless expression on her face. He wanted desperately to trust someone, especially someone as pretty as the woman who’d introduced herself as Nicki. But trust didn’t come easily to someone like him on the best of days. And good days had been thin on the ground for him for a while now.

      “You’re remarkably easygoing for someone who just had a stranger crash her life,” he said as he pushed to his feet.

      She rose with him. “That’ll probably change when you’re stronger.”

      “Glad to know you plan to keep me on my toes.”

      “I’ve seen you flat on your face. On your toes is definitely the way to go.” She nodded toward the hallway. “Go to bed. I’ll lock up and we’ll see how you feel in the morning.”

      The walk to the bedroom felt as if he was hiking uphill all the way, but he finally made it to the edge of the bed and sank on the soft mattress, facedown. He would move in just a minute. Crawl under the covers and settle down like a real human being.

      It was the last lucid thought he had for a long while.

      * * *

      WHEN SHE CHECKED on Dallas Cole, she found him lying facedown on the bed, angled diagonally across the mattress as if he’d fallen asleep as soon as his body hit the bed.

      Good. She needed him to be dead to the world for a little while.

      She had somewhere to go.

      Bundling up against the dropping temperature outside, she headed east through the woods that butted up to her cabin, going uphill for almost a mile until she reached the small creek that snaked its way down the mountain to join with Bowden Fork south of River’s End. At this particular curve of the stream, there was a small natural cave that was only a few feet deep and barely tall enough for Nicki to enter hunched over.

      Just inside, a loose stone hid a cavity about eight inches deep into the cave wall. About the size of the mail cubbyhole at the motel where she’d worked a few years ago, the cavity was just big enough to hold a folded-up letter like the one tucked in the pocket of her jeans.

      She took a deep breath and tucked the letter into the cavity, then replaced the stone.

      Outside the cave, she scanned the woods around her to be certain she was alone. But there was nobody else out there. Only idiots and people with something to hide would be out in this weather.

      Next to the cave was a fallen log. She turned the log onto its side until a broken limb about the length of her forearm revealed itself. She propped up the log with a stone to keep it from rolling back over and headed back down the mountain toward her cabin.

      She didn’t know how often the man she thought of as Agent X passed this way. Sometimes two or more days would go by before she’d see the log back in its original position, her signal that something was waiting for her inside the cave cubbyhole.

      But she had a feeling he passed this way daily, just in case she needed his help. At least, she liked to think he did.

      It made her feel a little less alone in this dangerous world in which she now operated.

      The people she worked with at the diner in town called her a dinosaur because she eschewed so much of the technology they couldn’t live without. She owned no computer, though she knew more about how to use them than any of her coworkers and customers would believe. She had a cell phone out of necessity, since power on the mountain could go down so easily, leaving her without phone service, as well. But she turned on the phone only when her landline wasn’t working. She had no desire to be instantly reachable, especially when she was on what she’d come to think of as her secret missions.

      How on earth had her life come to this? There’d been a time, not very long ago, when nobody who knew her would believe she’d take on a dangerous undercover mission on the side of the good guys.

      Not Nicolette Jamison, the wild girl from the Smoky Mountains who’d never met a bad situation she couldn’t make worse. Somehow, by the grace of God and a generous utilization of her good looks and native charm, she’d managed to skirt the edge of the law without quite crossing the point of no return, keeping her record clean enough to pass cursory scrutiny.

      She’d never pretended to be a saint. Hell, she wasn’t one now.

      But she knew the difference between trouble and evil. Trouble could lose you a few nights of sleep. Evil would rob you of your life without blinking. And the men she was tangling with these days were about as evil as they came in these parts.

      Snow had begun to fall by the time she reached the clearing where her cabin slumbered quietly in the dark. Fat, fluffy flakes started to pile up on her shoulders and dampen the ski cap she’d tugged down to cover her ears. She hurried up the porch steps as quickly as she dared, dodging the spot on the second step that creaked whenever it took any weight, and hurried to the front door, automatically checking the lock to make sure it was still secure.

      Still locked up, nice and tight.

      She slipped her key into the lock and turned it carefully. The door opened with only the faintest of creaks and closed behind her with an almost imperceptible snick. She engaged the lock and sat in the nearest chair to remove her hiking boots before she padded silently in socked feet down the hallway toward her bedroom.

      The door was still open a crack, just as she’d left it. She could just make out Dallas Cole’s lean form, still lying diagonally across the bed. She waited a moment until she could make out the steady rise and fall of his breathing before she tiptoed back to the living room and finished undressing for the night.

      She slipped on a pair of flannel pajamas she’d found tucked in the bottom of her drawer, a gag gift from her cousin last Christmas inspired by her past visit, when he’d found her sleeping in his bed, dressed in his Atlanta Braves T-shirt and nothing else. The timing had been particularly bad, given that he’d promised his bed to the pretty blonde he had brought home for the night.

      Flannel pajamas were about as far from her normal nighttime attire as it got, but she was trying out the straight and narrow these days. Well, straighter and narrower, anyway. No more wandering around in skimpy nighties when strange men were staying the night.

      No more strange men staying the night anymore, for that matter. Some undesirable habits deserved to be broken, and her addiction to bad boys was one of them.

      She wondered what kind of boy Dallas Cole was. If all she had to go on was the FBI record her boss, Alexander Quinn, had gotten his hands on, she’d say Dallas Cole was about as good a boy as they got. Hardworking, well liked by his colleagues, a go-getter who was looking to move up the ladder at the FBI even though he wasn’t a special agent.

      What had happened that night three СКАЧАТЬ