Carla Neggers: Cold Pursuit

Yep. He was still coming.

Ignoring the tug of pain in her left side, she reached into the trunk of her car for a cardboard box filled with food and supplies she’d grabbed out of her apartment. She thought of the other places she could have exiled herself. New Zealand, for example. The south of France. Costa Rica. It didn’t have to be Vermont. Black Falls. Her picturesque hometown in the heart of the Green Mountains.

It was summer in New Zealand, she thought as she lifted the box on her uninjured hip and noted that it was barely four o’clock and yet almost dark. The long, dark winter nights were upon northern New England. She’d left Washington early in order to arrive in Vermont while it was still daylight.

Using her elbow, she shut the trunk. Three brown-spotted bananas on top of the overflowing box hadn’t fared well on the long trip north, but she hadn’t wanted to leave them to rot in her microscopic Georgetown apartment. She didn’t know when she’d be back at her job with the Secret Service. Technically, she was just taking some time off. But everyone knew she’d been all but ordered to clear out of town for a bit.

Jo knew it, too.

Elijah seemed to be carrying a vase of flowers, but that didn’t make sense.

Flowers? Elijah?

Even from fifty yards away, he looked as sexy, rugged and forbidden as ever. She hadn’t realized he was home from the army. Not that her family in Black Falls would have told her, especially this week-because then she really might have chucked it all and bought a one-way ticket to New Zealand.

Elijah had built a house on the wooded hillside adjoining the thirty acres and its dozen, one-room, falling-down cabins he and his brothers and sister had every reason to expect to inherit one day. Instead, Drew Cameron had left the property to Jo. The shock of his death from hypothermia in an April snowstorm had only been compounded by that one detail in his last will and testament.

None of the Cameron siblings was more taken aback than Jo was herself by their father’s inexplicable act of generosity.

And yet…

She pushed the uncomfortable memory of her last encounter with Drew Cameron out of her mind. She didn’t want to go there. Not now, not especially with Elijah ambling her way.

She watched the hawk glide back toward her and disappear into the woods and hills above the cabins.

Cameron land.

There was no wind, but the air was brisk and chilly-she’d gotten used to Washington ’s warmer climate. She’d had to pull on her black fleece jacket when she’d crossed the Vermont border. She hadn’t expected to be back in Black Falls until Thanksgiving, and then only for a short visit with her family.

But here she was, and who knew for how long?

The brightly colored leaves of October had fallen, just the rusts and maroons of dying oak leaves clinging to branches among the hemlocks, pines and spruces along the dot of a glacial lake. Jo noticed a battered dark green wooden canoe in the grayish frost-killed grass down by the lake. It was on her property, but it wasn’t her canoe. No doubt it belonged to a Cameron-probably the one walking down the road with the flowers.

She carried her box across the weeds and dead pine needles that passed for a yard. Elijah kept coming. She saw no sign of a limp-her sister, Beth, had e-mailed her in April after news hit town that Elijah, a Special Forces soldier, had been wounded, badly, in Afghanistan.

It was the day after Devin Shay, a Black Falls High School senior, had found Drew Cameron dead on the mountain named for his ancestors.

Jo stopped at the front door-the only door-to the largest of the dilapidated cabins. It was set up on blocks and had moss growing on its roof, which couldn’t be good, and its board-and-batten exterior needed a fresh coat of dark brown paint. But it was the closest to the lake and the best of the lot. Most of the cabins probably should have been condemned years ago. A.J., the eldest Cameron, supposedly had drawn up plans for expanding Black Falls Lodge down to the lake, never expecting the land wouldn’t one day be his.

Elijah left the dirt road and walked toward her as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He wore a canvas jacket, close-fitting jeans and a navy blue Red Sox cap, and Jo noted the dark stubble of beard on his square Cameron jaw. If possible, he was even more appealing than he had been at nineteen, when he had whisked her off for three nights and four days in the very cabins she had just inherited.

She had never loved anyone the way she had Elijah Cameron.

But that was a long time ago.

He came up to the doorstep with his vase of flowers. They were all lilies-Asiatic lilies in varying shades of cream, apricot and copper.

Jo settled the box onto her right hip. She could have stayed with her sister or brother or in her old room growing up, but she’d opted for space, quiet and solitude. She’d always loved the lake. While she was doing damage control on her career, she figured she could also consider her options for what to do with her lakefront property.

Elijah barely contained a smile. “Rough week, Agent Harper?”

It wasn’t looking to get better anytime soon. “Hello, Elijah.”

“Jo.”

“I didn’t see you-”

“Not a chance. You’re a Secret Service agent who protects the lives of important people. You spotted me before you took the key out of your ignition.”

She sighed. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

His eyes, the same deep blue that had captivated her as a teenager, sparked with humor. “No, ma’am. It’s too good.”

“No one else is making this easy. No reason you should.” She nodded to the enormous vase of lilies he carried in the crook of one arm. “Taking up flower arranging, Elijah?”

“Penny dropped them off earlier. She didn’t want to leave them out in the open. They’re for you.”

Penny Hodges owned the only flower shop in Black Falls and had always had a soft spot for Elijah. She and his mother had been best friends. Drew used to accuse both women of coddling his second-born son and had seen himself as the only one willing to impose discipline on him.

Ancient history, Jo thought, and now both Elijah’s parents were gone.

“Who’re they from?” she asked.

“What makes you think I know?”

“You looked at the card.”

“Ah. Well.” He sniffed an apricot-colored lily. “So I did. Are you armed?”

“Elijah-”

“It can be dangerous, having a badass Secret Service agent next door.”

Just her luck that Elijah would be the first person she ran into in Black Falls. Despite the ordeals of the past seven months-his father’s death, his own near death-he looked fit, as muscular and as physical as ever. But Jo didn’t fool herself. Elijah Cameron wasn’t the same small-town Vermont boy who had stolen her heart and soul as a teenager.

And she wasn’t the same small-town girl.

“If the flowers are a gag gift from one of my colleagues, you can dump them in the lake. Paddle your canoe out to a deep spot and give them the heave-ho.”

“They’re from your new best friend in Washington.”

Charlie Neal, Jo thought. That little bastard had the gall to send her flowers.

She contained her reaction and said tightly, “Take them inside if you would. My hands aren’t exactly free.”

Elijah tugged open the rickety screen door. “Did you pick this cabin for old times’ sake?”

It was the cabin where they’d made love night and day after her high-school graduation. He had graduated the year before and spent the year working at Black Falls Lodge-long before A.J. took it over-and avoiding arrest by Jo’s father, the local police chief.

“This one has the best heat,” Jo said, neutral.