Paula Graves - Blood on Copperhead Trail

“We’ve been trekking through snow for almost five hours, and last I looked, it wasn’t letting up.”

“I’d say it’ll be over before dark falls.”

“And then we go back down the mountain?”

She shot him an apologetic look. “Not after dark. Way too treacherous. We’ve got enough wood to keep us warm. We can stay here until daylight.”

Looking around the room, he spotted one narrow bed. “And sleep where?”

She looked at the bed and back at him. “You were saying something about body heat?”

His heart flipped a couple of times.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Alabama native PAULA GRAVESwrote her first book, a mystery starring herself and her neighborhood friends, at the age of six. A voracious reader, Paula loves books that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she works as a creative director for a Birmingham advertising agency and spends time with her family and friends. She is a member of Southern Magic Romance Writers, Heart of Dixie Romance Writers and Romance Writers of America.

Paula invites readers to visit her website, www.paulagraves.com.

For the day job gang, Lisa, Amanda and Jessica, for putting up with my distraction and all that writing and editing I do during my lunch hour.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Excerpt

Chapter One

The trail shelter wasn’t built for cold weather, but the three girls occupying the small wooden shed were young, healthy and warmly tucked inside their cold-weather sleeping bags. Overnight, the mercury had dropped into the mid-thirties, which might have tempted less-determined hikers off the trail and into their warm homes in the valley below. But youth and risk were longtime bedfellows.

He depended on it ever to be so.

Overhead, the moon played hide-and-seek behind scudding clouds, casting deep blue shadows through the spindly bare limbs of the birch, maple and hickory trees that grew on Copperhead Ridge. The air was damp with the promise of snow.

But not yet.

His breath spreading a pale cloud of condensation in front of his eyes, he pulled the digital camera from his pack. A whimsical image filled his mind. Himself as a mighty, fierce dragon, huffing smoke as he stalked his winsome prey.

The camera made a soft whirring sound as it autofocused on the sleeping beauties. He held his breath, waiting to see if the sound was enough to awaken the girls. A part of him wished it would wake them, though he’d have to move now, rather than later, cutting short his plans. But the challenge these young, fit women posed excited him to the point that his carefully laid plans seemed more an impediment than a means to increase his anticipation.

Slow and steady wins the race, he thought. The experience would be better for having waited.

He snapped off a series of shots from different angles, relishing each composition, imagining them in their finished state. Despite the quick flashes of light from his camera, the princesses slept on, oblivious.

He stepped away from the shelter, punching buttons to print the shots he’d just snapped. They came out remarkably clear, he saw with surprise. He hadn’t been sure they would.

Or maybe he’d been hoping he’d have to sneak over to the shelter again.

A clear acrylic box, cloudy with scuff marks from exposure to the elements, stood on a rickety wooden pedestal outside the shelter. It housed a worn trail logbook similar to those found farther east on the Appalachian Trail. The latest entry was dated that day. The girls had recorded their arrival and their plans for the next day’s hike home.

He slipped the snapshots into the journal, marking the latest entry.

A snuffling sound from within the open-faced shelter froze him in place. He couldn’t see the girls from where he stood, so he waited, still and silent, for a repeat of the noise.

But the only sound he heard was the cold mountain breeze shaking the trees overhead, the leafless limbs rattling like bones.

After a few more minutes of quiet, he slipped away, a dark shape in the darker woods, where he would bide his time until daybreak.

And the girls slept on.

* * *

“I’MNOTTHEENEMY.” Though Laney Hanvey was using her best “soothe the witness” voice, she couldn’t tell her efforts at calm reassurance were having any effect on the dark-eyed detective across the tearoom table from her.

“Never said you were.” Ivy Hawkins arched one dark eyebrow, as if to say she saw right through Laney’s efforts at handling her. “I’m just saying I don’t know whether anyone besides Glen Rayburn was on Wayne Cortland’s payroll, and the D.A. sending a nanny down here to spank our bottoms and teach us how to behave ain’t gonna change that.”

Laney didn’t know whether to laugh at Ivy’s description of her job or be offended. “The captain of detectives killed himself rather than face indictment. The chief of police resigned, an admission that he wasn’t in control of his department. Surely you understand why the district attorney felt the need to send a public integrity officer down here to ask a few questions.”

“We have an internal affairs bureau of our own.”

“And I know how well police officers admire their internal affairs brethren.”

Ivy’s lips quirked, a tacit concession. “Why did you single me out?”

“Who says I did?”

Ivy looked around the airy tearoom of Sequoyah House, then back at Laney. “You’re telling me you bring all the cops to the fanciest restaurant in town for pretty little cucumber sandwiches and weak, tepid dishwater?”

Laney looked down at the cups of Earl Grey in front of them and smiled. “You’re laying on the redneck a little thick, aren’t you?”

Ivy’s eyes met hers again. “I’m not the one putting on airs, Charlane.”

Touché, Laney thought.

Ivy’s expression softened. “You’ve gotten better at your poker face. I almost didn’t see you flinch. You’ve come a long way from Smoky Ridge.”

“I didn’t bring you here to talk about old times.”

Ivy leaned across the table toward her. “Are you sure? Maybe you thought invoking a little Smoky Ridge sisterhood might soften me up? Make me spill all my deep, dark secrets?”

“I don’t suspect you of anything, Ivy. I just want to pick your brain about whom you might suspect of being Glen Rayburn’s accomplice.”

“And I told you, I don’t suspect anyone in particular.” Ivy’s mouth clamped closed at the end of the sentence, but it was too late.

“So you do think there may be others who were on Cortland’s payroll.”

“I think the possibility exists,” Ivy said carefully. “But I don’t know if I’m right, and I sure don’t intend to toss you a sacrificial lamb to get you off my back.”

“Fair enough.” Laney sat back and sipped the warm tea, trying not to think of Ivy’s description of it. But the image was already in her mind. She set the teacup on the saucer and forced down the swallow.

“The cucumber sandwiches weren’t too bad,” Ivy said with a crooked smile. “But I’m going to have to grab something from Ledbetter’s on my way back to the cop shop, because I’m still hungry. Want to join me?”

An image of Maisey Ledbetter’s chicken-fried steak with milk gravy flooded Laney’s brain. “You’re an enabler,” she grumbled.