The Smoky Mountain Mist. Paula Graves
He nodded toward the door she’d left wide-open.
Inside the house, he laid Rachel on the sofa and pressed his fingers against her slender wrist. Her pulse was slow but steady. She seemed to be breathing steadily.
She was asleep.
He stood up and turned to look at his sister. She stared back at him, her hands on her hips and a look of suspicion, liberally tinged with fear, creasing her pretty face.
“What the hell happened? Did you do something to her?”
Anger churned in his gut, tempered only by the bitter knowledge that Delilah had every reason to suspect him of doing something wrong. God knew she’d dug him out of a whole lot of holes of his own digging over the years until she’d finally tired of saving him from himself.
“I found her in this condition,” he explained as he pulled a crocheted throw from the back of the sofa and covered Rachel with it. “On Purgatory Bridge.”
“On the bridge?”
“On the bridge,” he answered. “Up on the girders, about to practice her high-dive routine.”
“My God. She was trying to kill herself?”
“No. She’s on something. I thought maybe you could take a look, see if you could tell from her condition—”
“Not without a tox screen.” Delilah crossed to the sofa and crouched beside Rachel. “How was she behaving when you found her?”
“Drunk, but I didn’t really smell any liquor on her.” The memory of her body, warm and soft against his, roared back with a vengeance. She’d smelled good, he remembered. Clean and sweet, as if she’d just stepped out of a bath. “She was out of it, though. I’m not sure she even knew who she was, much less who I was.”
“Was she hallucinating?” Delilah checked Rachel’s eyes.
“Not hallucinating exactly,” Seth answered, leaning over his sister’s shoulder.
She shot him a “back off” look, and he stepped away. “What, then, exactly?”
“She seemed really happy. As if she were having the time of her life.”
“Standing on a girder over a thirty-foot drop?”
“Technically, she was swaying on a girder over a thirty-foot drop.” Even the memory gave him a chill. “Scared the hell outta me.”
“You should’ve taken her to a hospital.”
Worry ate at his gut. “Should we call nine-one-one?”
Delilah sat back on her heels, her brow furrowed. “Her vitals look pretty good. I could call a doctor friend of mine back in Alabama and get his take on her condition.”
“You have a theory,” Seth said, reading his sister’s body language.
“It could be gamma hydroxybutyrate—GHB.”
Seth’s chest tightened with dread. “The date rape drug?”
“Well, it’s also a club drug—lower doses create a sense of euphoria. You said you found her near Smoky Joe’s, right? She might have taken the GHB to get high.”
He shook his head swiftly. “No. She wouldn’t do that.”
Delilah turned her head to look at him, her eyes narrowed. “And you would know this how?”
“We work in the same place. If she had any kind of track record with drugs, I’d have heard about it.”
Delilah cocked her head. “Really. You think you know all there is to know about Rachel Davenport?”
He could tell from his sister’s tone that he’d tweaked her suspicious side again. What would she think if he told her he was working for her old boss, Adam Brand?
As tempted as he was to know the answer, he looked back at Rachel. “If it’s GHB, would it have made her climb up on a bridge and try to fly?”
“It might, if she’s the fanciful sort. GHB loosens inhibitions.”
Which might explain her drunken attempt at seduction in the middle of Purgatory Bridge, he thought. “How can we be sure?”
“A urine test might tell us,” Delilah answered, rising to her feet and pulling her cell phone out of the pocket of her jeans. “But it’s expensive to test for it, and it’s almost impossible to detect after twenty-four hours.” She shot her brother a pointed look. “Do you really want it on record that she’s got an illegal drug in her system?”
Delilah might look soft and pretty, but she was sharper than a briar patch. “No, I don’t,” he conceded.
“We can’t assume someone did this to her,” she said, punching in a phone number. “After all, she just buried her father. That might make some folks want to forget the world for a while.”
As she started speaking to the person on the other end of the call, Seth turned back to the sofa and crouched next to Rachel. She looked as if she was sleeping peacefully, her lips slightly parted and her features soft and relaxed. The calm expression on her face struck him hard as he realized he had never seen her that way, her features unlined with worry. The past year had been hell for her, watching her father slowly die in front of her while she struggled to learn the ropes of running his business.
He smoothed the hair away from her forehead. Most of the time when he’d seen her at the office, she had looked like a pillar of steel, stiff-spined and regal as she went about the trucking business. But every once in a while, when she didn’t know anyone else was looking, she had shed the tough facade and revealed her vulnerability. At those times, she’d looked breakable, as if the slightest push would send her crumbling to pieces.
Had her father’s death been the blow to finally shatter her?
Behind him, Delilah hung up the phone. “Eric says we just have to keep an eye on her vitals, make sure she’s not going into shock or organ failure,” she said tonelessly.
“Piece of cake,” he murmured drily.
“We could take shifts,” she suggested.
He shook his head. “Go on to bed. I’ll watch after her.” He certainly wouldn’t be getting any sleep until she was awake and back to her normal self again.
There was a long pause before Delilah spoke. “What’s your angle here, Seth? Why do you give a damn what happens to her?”
“She’s my boss,” he said, his tone flippant.
“Tell me you’re not planning to scam her in some way.”
He slanted a look at his sister. “I’m not.”
Once again, he saw contradictory emotions cross his sister’s expressive face. Part hope, part fear. He tamped down frustration. He’d spent years losing the trust of the people who loved him. He couldn’t expect them to trust him again just like that.
However much he might want it to be so.
BLACKNESS MELTED INTO featureless gray. Gray into misty blobs of shape and muted colors and, finally, as her eyes began to focus, the shapes firmed into solid forms. Win-dows with green muslin curtains blocking all but a few fragments of watery light. A tall, narrow chest of drawers standing against a nearby wall, a bowl-shaped torchiere lamp in the corner, currently dark. And across from her, sprawling loose-limbed in a low-slung armchair, sat Seth Hammond, his green eyes watching her.
She’d seen him at her father’s funeral, she remembered, fresh grief hitting her with a sharp blow. She’d looked up and seen him watching her, felt an electric pulse of awareness that had caught her by surprise.
And then what? Why couldn’t she remember what had happened next?
Her head felt thick and heavy as she tried to lift it. In