The Legend of Smuggler's Cave (6 page)

Briar opened one eye and found herself looking up at her son’s bright, wide eyes. He poked her again in the ribs and laughed.

“Hey there, mister.” She pushed herself up on her elbows and looked around the borrowed bedroom, so unlike her bedroom at home, and wondered how on earth she’d let Dalton Hale convince her to come here to stay.

“I’m hungwy,” Logan informed her, patting her cheeks with his little hands. He bounced, too, foot to foot, the springy mattress too great a temptation for an energetic boy his age.

“I bet you are.” She hugged him to her, dipping her nose into the curve of his neck for a nice long smell. “Did you find the potty okay?” The guest room had a bathroom of its own, and somehow in the chaos of the previous night, she’d managed to remember his step stool for the bathroom.

Poor Dalton Hale, she remembered with a little smile as she followed Logan to the bathroom. His eyes had grown so huge watching her gather up the necessities of life with a three-year-old, she’d half expected that he’d rescind his offer of a place to stay.

Her watch read nine in the morning. She wondered if Dalton had left for the office already without waking them. He’d given her the grand tour of the place the night before so she’d know where everything was and how to work the security system. But by the time he’d shown her the guest bedroom where she and Logan would sleep, she’d been riding the last fumes of her adrenaline rush. He’d cut the tour short, told her to get some sleep and escaped to his own room before she’d been able to ask about his plans for the next morning.

Holding Logan’s hand, she helped him down the long flight of stairs down to the first floor, trying not to gape like a hillbilly on her first trip to town. It wasn’t so much that the house was grand and ostentatious—it wasn’t, really. It was large and roomy, yes, but it didn’t have priceless paintings on the wall or rare sculptures displayed under glass.

But almost everywhere she looked, she saw things that were nothing but luxuries, things that had no purpose beyond looking pretty or drawing the eye to something else. Things that Dalton Hale had bought, not because he needed them or could make use of them but because they’d caught his eye and pleased his tastes.

That’s what I want for Logan,
she thought.
I want him to be able to have things he likes just because he likes them. And not worry about whether they’re taking money away from the things he needs.

To her surprise, Dalton was still there, perched on one of the breakfast bar stools in the kitchen reading the Knoxville morning newspaper. He looked up and smiled, the expression softening the stern lines of his face.

“Did you sleep okay?” he asked.

“Better than expected. I thought you’d be off to work by now.”

“I took the day off.” He folded the paper and set it aside, sliding off the stool to crouch in front of Logan, who was half hiding behind Briar. “What would you like for cereal, little man?”

Logan leaned his head around Briar’s leg. “Ice cream.”

Dalton grinned and looked up at Briar, who shook her head firmly. “I think we’d better have something a little more nutritious.”

“He likes peanut butter with sliced bananas on toast,” she suggested, trying to think of something even a bachelor might have in his kitchen.

“I can handle that.” Logan rose and crossed to the large pantry by the refrigerator. His kitchen, like the rest of his house, was built for convenience and ease of use, with plenty of cabinets and miles of counter space. The breakfast bar doubled as a butcher block, but despite its large size, it barely seemed to make a dent in the spacious room.

“I know folks who’d kill to have a kitchen like this,” she said as he brought a jar of peanut butter, a couple of ripe bananas and a bag of sliced bread to the counter. “And no jury in this part of Tennessee would convict them.”

“It’s too big for one person,” he admitted. “But it comes in handy when I entertain.”

“Do you do much of that? Entertaining?”

He put four slices of toast in the oversize toaster on the counter nearby. “More than I want to. The price of politics.”

She set Logan on one of the stools and perched on the one beside him. “I’ll do some shopping for Logan and me sometime today. So we don’t eat you out of house and home.”

He paused in the middle of twisting the top off the peanut butter jar. “No. You’re here as my guests.”

“No, we’re not.” She lifted her chin. “We’re here so you can pick my brain about Johnny. And I’m here because you live in a gated community and you have a real nice alarm system. We’re not friends.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and for a second she thought she saw something that looked suspiciously like hurt in his green eyes. Then he looked down at the open jar of peanut butter and shrugged. “As you wish.” He sounded indifferent, not insulted, and she shook off the guilt that had fluttered for a moment in the center of her chest.

“Speaking of that,” she added a moment later, “how soon can you get me those files we talked about last night?”

The toast popped up and he gingerly removed the hot bread from the toaster and set it on a paper towel spread across the counter. “I’ll have to go into Barrowville to retrieve them, but I think today would be better spent figuring out the logistics of your stay here.”

“I work the five-to-midnight shift at the station,” she said, reaching for the bananas sitting next to the jar of peanut butter. While Dalton spread peanut butter on the bread, she peeled the bananas and started slicing them into thin rounds and putting them atop the peanut butter and toast. “My aunt has been watching Logan while I’m at work, but she can’t deal with him with her arm broken the way it is.”

“I took the liberty of calling Laney this morning to discuss the options.” He left the counter and walked over to the refrigerator.

“Yeah?”

He pulled a jug of milk from the refrigerator and looked at the expiration date. Wincing, he put it back into the refrigerator and turned to look at her, his expression apologetic. “Will water be okay?”

“Water’s fine,” she answered, hiding a smile. “What did Laney have to say?”

“My work keeps me in the office until six most nights. It’s a ten-minute commute from Barrowville to here, so I can be home by six-fifteen or six-twenty at the latest. I assume you’d need to leave for work around four-thirty in order to have time to change into your uniform and gear, so we’re talking about less than a two-hour window of time we need to cover, correct?”

“I suppose so.”

“How well behaved is Logan? In general?”

“He’s a three-year-old boy. He’s impatient and rowdy, but he’s not particularly disobedient. It helps if he likes you.”

Dalton set a small cup of water in front of Logan and bent to look him in the eye. “You like me pretty well, don’t you, Logan?”

Logan looked up at him as if considering the question. “Ice cream?”

“Cupboard love,” Briar murmured.

“What I’m thinking is you could leave a little early and drive him by my office when you’re ready to go to work. Laney and I can take turns watching him until it’s time to leave the office.”

“I don’t know about that—” Briar began.

“I can set up a place for him to play. I’ll buy him some coloring books and picture books—is he starting to learn to read?”

She nodded. “He has a few favorite books. I brought them with me.”

“I can buy duplicates for the office, then. So he’ll have the things that are familiar to him.”

“You don’t have to do that. I can pack them in his little backpack to take with him. But are you sure you want to do this? I don’t want him to interfere with your work.”

“I’m sure. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. The point of bringing him here is to protect him from the people trying to use him against you. Hiring a babysitter neither of us knows isn’t going to work, is it?”

She shook her head quickly. “No.”

“Do you trust me with him, Briar?” His green eyes were darkly intense as he met her troubled gaze. “Do you trust that I will protect him for you?”

There was no good reason why she should, she knew. He was little more than a stranger to her, and his motives were anything but unselfish. He was bitter and angry at his life at the moment, and even when he wasn’t, he possessed the sort of driving ambition that could make a man grow self-focused and myopic.

But for some reason, she found herself nodding in answer to his question. “I do. I trust you to protect him.”

“Then it’s settled? At least until we try the system and find it wanting?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I have a condition.”

His eyes narrowed warily. “Another one?”

“Yes. You need to learn how to shoot a gun the right way. No more of that aiming at the ground and hoping nothing bad happens.” She allowed herself a little smile at his expense. “If you’re going to try to look like a good ol’ boy to win an election, the least you owe your constituents is to walk the walk as well as you talk the talk.”

Chapter Six

“How long have you been shooting?” Dalton asked a couple of hours later as he peered at the rather sad results of his first target-practice round. He’d hoped to acquit himself better, but he wasn’t surprised to see how badly he’d failed.

Briar tucked an errant curl behind her ear and cocked her head as she studied the holes in the target. “My uncle Corey gave me my cousin Dan’s .22 when I turned eight. Dan was getting a bigger one, and Uncle Corey knew I’d been wanting a gun of my own. Of course, my daddy taught me to use a rifle earlier, I guess when I was six or so.”

“That young?”

She shot him a look that made him feel like an idiot. “If you’re going to have guns in the house with kids around, you need to teach them young that they’re not to be toyed with. I’ve already introduced Logan to my pistol and my shotgun. He knows not to touch them, even if they’re not loaded. When he’s a little older, I’ll teach him how to shoot.”

“My father wasn’t much of a gun person.” Almost as soon as the words escaped his lips, he felt a hot wave of embarrassment flush through him. He felt Briar’s gaze on him but he couldn’t quite meet her gaze. “Lucky for Dana Massey, huh?”

Not too long ago, his father had taken a few potshots at Dana when she’d started nosing around in her mother’s past. Apparently, his father and grandfather had feared she was getting too close to the truth about Dalton’s parentage, and they’d decided to take dire steps to stop her. But it had been his father who’d ended up with a bullet in his shoulder and a future in jail stretching out in front of him. “Dana thinks your father didn’t really want his shots to hit her. That’s why he missed so badly.”

Dalton handed her the borrowed rifle and walked a few steps away. “I think he was just a bad shot.”

When she didn’t say anything else, he ventured a quick look at her. She was just looking at him, a thoughtful expression on her face.

It struck him, not for the first time over the past couple of days, that Briar Blackwood was a pretty woman. It wasn’t the kind of polished beauty he met in his work or even the corn-fed cuteness of small-town beauty queens who rode parade floats or won the local pageant crowns. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup, and her hair was a mess, but he found he liked looking at her anyway. She had a natural sort of prettiness that came from good health, good genes and, he was beginning to believe, a good soul.

He had seen earlier at his house that she felt out of place there. She’d tried not to let it show, but her poker face wasn’t nearly as good as she’d probably like to believe. She didn’t enjoy feeling obligated to him, like some poor mountain girl he’d taken pity on.

He didn’t pity her, though. She was, in many ways, a remarkable woman. A strong woman, with discipline, integrity and guts.

Dalton had done his homework on Briar Blackwood before he’d ever approached her, looking into the basics of who she was and what kind of life she’d lived before and after marrying Johnny Blackwood. She had been born a Culpepper, and a person didn’t grow up in Bitterwood, Tennessee, without knowing a Culpepper was more likely than not to break the law. How she’d dodged that family tradition he didn’t know, but her record was clean, and now she was that most rare of creatures, a Ridge County Culpepper who wore a badge.

She’d married Johnny Blackwood when she turned eighteen and remained his wife until Johnny’s death nine years later. She’d worked as an emergency services dispatcher while going to community college part-time to get her criminal justice degree. She’d gone through the Bitterwood Police Academy and graduated with honors back in December.

By all accounts, she was a good-hearted, hardworking woman liked by one and all. He certainly couldn’t claim such a thing about himself, not since his life had gone so askew. There were plenty of people who didn’t care much for him at all, starting with the Bitterwood chief of police.

Doyle had arrived at the rifle range about fifteen minutes ago. Dalton had spotted the chief about the time Briar finished her brief primer on shooting a rifle. Doyle must have seen Logan with Detective Nix, who had agreed to watch the boy at the police station while Briar gave Dalton shooting lessons. No doubt the prospect of watching Dalton make a fool of himself on the range had been too tempting for the chief to resist.

“Doyle’s here,” he told Briar.

“I know. I saw him earlier.” She switched out the target to a new one. “Come on. Let’s give it another try.”

She’d showed him how to load the rifle earlier, and fortunately, he was a quick study. Her nod of approval when he had finished reloading felt like lavish praise.

“Remember, you’re not pulling the trigger. You’re pressing it. You want as little movement in the rifle as possible. Don’t close your eyes when it fires. You want to keep looking at the target. Guide it in.”

He slanted a look at her, and she grinned a little sheepishly.

“I know it sounds like hokum, but the thing is, if you’re focusing on getting that round into the target, your whole body is aligned toward that goal and you’re just going to make a better shot.”

He settled the rifle barrel on the bench rest and sighted the target through the scope.

“And breathe,” she added. “Just breathe.”

He focused on the target and tried to rid his mind of everything but that one center spot he wanted to hit. But clearing his mind seemed to be something he could no longer do at will.

So he did the next best thing. He focused his thoughts on Briar and Logan. He’d promised to help her protect her son, and if he had to spend hours every day on this range, shooting this bloody rifle and suffering the scrutiny of Doyle Massey, he’d do it. He’d given himself this task, inserted himself into their world for his own purposes.

Competence was the least he owed them.

He pressed the trigger. The rifle kicked but he held it as steady as he could, keeping his eye on the target.

The bullet didn’t hit center, but it was close.

“Nice,” Briar said softly from her position a few feet away.

He couldn’t hold back a satisfied grin.

He took his time and fired the next three rounds into the target. None of the three got as close as the first round, but his aim was considerably improved over his earlier effort.

“Not bad at all,” Briar told him as they studied the target more closely. “You’re pulling a little to the right with your shots, though. You’ll need to figure out how to compensate for that.”

Dalton started to answer when he saw Doyle walking toward them behind Briar’s back. He tried not to react, but he couldn’t seem to keep his lips from pressing into a thin line of annoyance.

“How long are you going to keep hating him for being your mother’s son?” Briar asked softly without turning around.

“I don’t hate him.”

Her eyebrow twitched upward a notch, but she didn’t comment.

“Second try was pretty respectable,” Doyle commented when he got close. “Pulling a little to the right, but not bad at all.”

Dalton wanted to snap out some brilliant cutting remark, but he didn’t want to do it in front of Briar. He settled for something milder if not entirely friendly. “Town not keeping you busy, chief?”

“Overseeing the shooting range is part of my job description.” Doyle turned his gaze to Briar. “Logan’s got my entire station wrapped around his little finger. I’m pretty sure we’re about to make him an honorary police officer.”

She flashed the chief a toothy grin that made Dalton’s breath catch. Damn, but when she smiled, she just lit up everything around her. It made him want to make her smile more often. God knew, she’d had little enough to smile about in her life.

“I’ll go take him off Nix’s hands,” she said, glancing at Dalton. “Chief, would you sign Mr. Hale out of the range for me?”

Dalton opened his mouth to protest, but she was already well down the firing range. He clamped his mouth shut and looked at Doyle.

“How’s she doing?” Doyle asked, ignoring the glare Dalton couldn’t keep in check.

He sighed. “She’s remarkably resilient.”

Doyle smiled a little at the description. “She is that.” He gestured with his head for Dalton to follow him.

They walked down to the range master’s kiosk, where Dalton handed over his visitor’s badge and signed out of the range. From there Doyle kept stride with him as they crossed the grassy no-man’s-land between the police station and the firing range.

“You’ve lived here all your life,” Doyle said after a few moments of silence. “Has there always been this much trouble with the bad elements around these parts? Or is this something new?”

Dalton was surprised by the question. Not so much by the content as the fact that Doyle spoke as if he actually wanted Dalton’s opinion. “It’s both, I guess. They were always around—the drug dealers, the militias, even the anarchists. But recently, thanks to Wayne Cortland, they’ve coalesced. And they’re a hell of a lot meaner and more effective now that they’ve joined forces.”

“It’s an odd coalition,” Doyle mused. “Although I guess maybe it’s the anarchy element that’s holding them together.”

“That and the money. They get to wreak havoc on civilization and make obscene amounts of cash doing it.”

“But what do they do with that cash? The elements we’re after are still out there in the hills, living like they always did.”

Dalton thought about the question for a moment, realizing it was an angle to his investigation he hadn’t really given proper thought before. “I don’t know. I guess that’s something we should find the answer to.”

Doyle nodded. “I guess it is.”

Dalton stopped as they reached the back entrance of the police station. “I’m investigating what’s left of the Cortland crime organization.”

Doyle nodded. “I know. I’m engaged to your colleague, remember.”

Dalton managed a smile. “I hope you realize how lucky you are to be marrying her.”

“I do.”

“I don’t hate you.” Dalton bit his bottom lip as the words spilled from his mouth and hung in the warm air between them. He hadn’t meant to blurt them aloud, but he found he wasn’t that sorry he had.

Doyle’s eyes narrowed slightly, but his lips curved at the corners. “Duly noted.”

“I’m not ready to be part of your family, either.”

“Nobody expects you to.”

He looked away from Doyle’s understanding gaze, not willing to go past this declaration of a truce.

“Have you talked to your father recently?” Doyle asked.

The muscles of Dalton’s neck and shoulders tightened until they ached. “That’s none of your business.”

“You’re right.” Doyle nodded toward the door. “After you.”

They walked in silence to the stairs. Once there, Doyle paused, his jaw tightening as he looked up the flight of stairs.

His leg,
Dalton thought. The chief had broken his leg a little over a month ago in a car crash.

A car crash Dalton’s grandfather had engineered.

Doyle hadn’t been out of the cast long. “Take the elevator,” Dalton suggested.

Doyle glanced at him. “I need the exercise.” He started up the stairs, clearly favoring the bad leg.

“You’re a stubborn fool,” Dalton called up after him.

Doyle turned at the landing, grinning at him. “Takes one to know one.”

Dalton took the steps two at a time, blasting past Doyle before they reached the top.

“Show-off,” Doyle muttered.

To Dalton’s surprise, he felt a grin creeping over his face in response.

He didn’t wait for Doyle, striding quickly down the corridor to the detectives’ office, where he found Briar sitting on the edge of Walker Nix’s desk, her jean-clad legs dangling as she watched Nix reading one of Logan’s books to him while the little boy blinked to stop himself from nodding off. Dalton paused in the doorway, suddenly feeling like an interloper.

Doyle limped up behind him, stopping beside him in the doorway. He looked at the homey little scene for a moment before murmuring, “Nix is like family to Briar.”

She thinks the world of him,
Dalton thought, watching the smile play across her face. What would he have to do to make her smile at him that way?

And why did it matter?

“What do you really want from them?” Doyle asked softly. His tone wasn’t accusatory, Dalton realized. Just curious.

“I want to keep them safe.”

“Why?”

Dalton closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”

Doyle gave him a light thump on his chest as he hobbled past him. “Maybe you should give that some thought.”

Briar looked up at the chief’s approach, her gaze sliding past Doyle to lock with Dalton’s. He felt a shimmery sensation in the center of his chest as those solemn gray eyes held his and a faint smile played across her full lips.

Why did he want so badly to keep them safe, badly enough to upend his orderly life to bring them into the heart of it?

Doyle was right, as much as Dalton loathed to admit it. He needed to figure out his motives, and quickly. Because he’d worked too hard for too many years to let his plans be derailed by another reckless decision.

* * *

D
ALTON
H
ALE
’
S
GAZE
was so focused and relentless that Briar imagined she could feel it brushing across her cheek like a gust of wind. He’d come in with his half brother—had something happened between them on the walk to the station from the firing range? Neither looked any worse for the trip, so she assumed they’d avoided getting into a tangle. But Dalton’s silent scrutiny was really starting to wear on her nerves.

“What?” she asked finally after she’d strapped her sleeping son in his car seat in the back of the Jeep.

“What what?” he countered drily.

She opened her own door. “You’ve been lookin’ at me for an hour. Do I have spinach in my teeth?”

“Did you eat spinach today?”

“Don’t be so literal.” She slid behind the steering wheel.

Dalton’s mouth curved as he settled in the passenger seat beside her. “You don’t have spinach in your teeth.”

“Then what?”

“I heard the chief offer you the night off. Why didn’t you take it?”