Smoky Mountain Setup - Paula Graves

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of being snowed in with you, Quinn, you’re not going to be able to get that truck back down the mountain if you don’t make tracks in the next few minutes.”

      “Now you’re just tempting me, Olivia.” There was a warmth to Quinn’s voice that made Landry’s gut tighten.

      What the hell?

      “Funny,” Olivia said, but there was no censure in her voice, only a soft amusement that made Landry want to kick down the door.

      “Are you sure you’re going to be okay here alone? A few of the agents are bunking down at the office for the duration. It’s a little college dorm for my tastes, but I think you can handle the frat-boy atmosphere if you’d rather tough it out in a crowd.”

      “No, thanks,” she said with a laugh that was too friendly for Landry’s peace of mind. “I’ll be fine here. I have a load of résumés to go through and some housework I’ve put off for the past couple of months. But thanks for the concern.”

      “Are you sure everything’s okay?” Quinn asked in a tone so quiet and intimate Landry had to strain to make out the words.

      “Everything’s fine.”

      “Olivia, I know you’re blaming yourself for how close Daughtry and Ginny came to losing their lives, but you’re not infallible. Nobody in this business is. We all make mistakes.”

      Olivia’s response was spoken too quietly for Landry to hear. But Quinn’s next words gave him a pretty good idea what she’d said.

      “There are a lot of ways to pay for mistakes. Sometimes your own conscience is the harshest judge of all. I think you’ve already given yourself more penance than I’d have ever suggested. That’s why I let you come up with your own punishment.”

      “I would have fired me.”

      “That’s why you’re not the boss.”

      There was another long silence. Landry clenched his fists to keep from reaching for the door handle.

      “Call if you need anything. I might know how to get my hands on a snowmobile.” Quinn’s voice, tinged with amusement, broke the silence, and Landry started breathing again.

      He heard the door close and waited until he heard Olivia’s footsteps outside the door.

      “Still in there?” she asked quietly.

      He opened the door to face her. “I was contemplating escape.”

      “He’s gone.”

      “I heard.”

      One sandy eyebrow arched over a sky blue eye. “You were eavesdropping?”

      “Was there something you didn’t want me to hear?”

      The other eyebrow joined the first, creasing her forehead. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      He meant to change the subject, talk about what a bad idea it was for him to stick around the cabin with her in case her boss decided to come back to check on her in that snowmobile he’d mentioned. But those weren’t the words that came out of his mouth.

      Instead, to his dismay, he asked, “What the hell is going on between you and your boss?”

       Chapter Three

      “You were right,” Quinn said. “He’s there.”

      Anson Daughtry’s voice over the phone picked up a little static as Quinn eased his Ford F-150 pickup around a mountain curve. “What are you going to do about it?”

      “Right now? Nothing. She’s going to be snowed in with him for a couple of days, and maybe she’ll get some information out of him.”

      “Did you bug the place?” Daughtry’s question was delivered bone dry, but Quinn knew his IT director’s unfavorable opinion about eavesdropping, especially on employees at The Gates.

      “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” Quinn answered just as drily.

      “So, you’re just leaving her alone with him, without any way of knowing whether or not she might be in trouble?”

      “She knows how to call for help if she needs it.”

      Daughtry made a sound of pure frustration. “Don’t you think he’s dangerous?”

      “I’m sure he’s dangerous. To someone. The question is, to whom?”

      “So you’re just letting Sharp find out for you? In a snowbound cabin?”

      “If I can’t trust my agents to handle themselves in dangerous situations with dangerous people, what the hell am I doing running a security firm?” Quinn had hired Olivia Sharp because everything he’d ever heard about her told him she was perfectly capable of holding her own in a high-risk situation. She’d been a member of an elite FBI SWAT team for six years, and in every dangerous situation he’d put her in since hiring her, she’d proved her mettle. “Sharp is every bit as dangerous as Cade Landry ever thought of being, and she doesn’t have any illusions where he’s concerned.”

      “She was involved with him before.”

      “What makes you think that?” Quinn asked carefully.

      “I hear things.”

      “Then maybe you heard that they’re no longer together. And that it ended badly. Which means she’s not going to assume his motives for showing up at her cabin in the middle of a snowstorm are entirely pure.”

      “Love’s not that straightforward,” Daughtry said bluntly, in the tone of a man on his honeymoon.

      “Let me worry about my agents, Daughtry. You worry about your wife. I’m sure she’s shooting you glaring looks by now, considering how long we’ve been on this call.” He pressed the end-call button on his phone and stifled a smile. One of his still-single agents had recently groused that the marriage bug was spreading like a contagion at the office, and Quinn couldn’t really deny it.

      Take a pair of single, physically fit, energetic and bright people, toss them in the middle of a high-risk, high-stakes situation and step back, because sparks were going to fly. A lot of the time, those sparks fizzled out to nothing once the danger was over, but in some cases, his agents had made real connections with each other, the kind that had a chance to last a lifetime.

      Quinn was about as far as a man got from being a romantic, but he’d learned a long time ago not to interfere when a man and a woman wanted to be together.

      Very bad things could happen.

      * * *

      OLIVIA STARED AT Cade Landry, certain she’d misunderstood his question. Because there was no way in the world he’d just stood there and asked her what was going on between her and Alexander Quinn, as if it was any business of his. He wasn’t a fool or an idiot, and only one of those would stand here in her bedroom doorway, two years after walking out of her life without even a goodbye, and question anything at all about her personal life. Especially in that particular tone of outrage.

      But here he was, gazing at her with green eyes blazing with fury, his jaw muscles tight and his nostrils flaring.

      “We’re going to pretend you didn’t just ask me that question,” she said in a deceptively soft voice. But she could tell from the troubled look in Landry’s eyes that he heard the undertones of danger.

      “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m in no position to question anything about your life.” He looked down and started to move around her, heading toward the front room.

      “Where are you going?” She caught up with him as he was reaching for the unloaded pistol still lying on her rolltop desk.

      “I shouldn’t have come here.”

      She

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