Read Online The Smoky Mountain Mist by Paula Graves - Free Book Online Page B

threatening to spill. The urge to pull her into his arms and hold her close was almost more than he could resist. He settled for laying one hand on her shoulder and giving it a comforting squeeze.
    She wiped her eyes with the heel of one hand and flipped the sandwiches over. “I had a long time to prepare for my father’s death. And it was a relief by the end to see him finally out of pain. But now that I’m past that numb stage—”
    “Your dad was a good man. Not many people would’ve taken a chance on someone like me. This world’s a worse place with him gone.”
    His words had summoned tears again, but also a smile, which she turned on him like a ray of pure sunshine that brightened the room, even as the drizzle outside darkened the day.
    He smiled back briefly, then forced his attention back to the soup before he got any deeper into trouble.

Chapter Six
    After lunch, Rachel made a pot of coffee and they took their cups into the den on the eastern side of the house, where a large picture window offered a glimpse of Copperhead Ridge shrouded with mist. The rain had picked up again, casting the trees in hues of blue and gray. When she turned on the floor lamps that flanked the room, the scene outside faded into reflections of the warm, comfortably furnished den and the two slightly bedraggled people who occupied it.
    Seth found his own reflection depressing, given how quickly his bruises were darkening, making him look like the loser of a cage match. He turned his attention instead to Rachel, whose honey-brown hair lay in damp waves around her face. Scrubbed clean and pink, she looked about a decade younger and prettier than she had any right to be.
    “How’s your head feeling?” she asked.
    Light, he thought. But it didn’t have much to do with his mild concussion. “Better. Not really hurting anymore.”
    Her brief smile faded quickly. “I don’t know what to think about Davis.”
    “You mean whether or not he’s still alive?”
    She sank into an armchair across from the sofa, curling her legs under her. She waved for Seth to sit across from her on the sofa. “I mean if he’s dead. How am I supposed to feel about it?”
    “I don’t know that you’re supposed to feel any particular way,” Seth offered. “You just feel what you feel.”
    “I did love him once. He was the first man—” She stopped short, a delicate blush rising in her cheeks. She slanted a quick look at Seth. “It didn’t last. We wanted such different things out of life.”
    Whatever it had been that Davis Rogers had wanted out of life, it was surely closer to Rachel’s desires than anything Seth had done or wanted to do in his own life. If she and Davis had been miles apart, she and Seth were separated by whole galaxies.
    But it doesn’t matter, does it? That’s not why you’re here.
    “I haven’t even seen him in years. We ran into each other a while back at a football game in Charlottesville. Said hi, promised to call but never did—” She closed her eyes. “Why did he come here?”
    “Probably to attend your father’s funeral and see how you were.”
    “And now he might be dead because of me.”
    Seth reached across the space between them, covering her hands with one of his. “If he’s dead, it’s because someone beat the hell out of him.”
    “Because of me.”
    He crouched in front of her, closing his fingers around her wrists. “Look at me.”
    Her troubled blue eyes met his.
    “I know someone’s been methodically removing people from your life to isolate you. I know whoever’s pulling the strings hired Mark Bramlett to kill four women who were close to you. And now, maybe, he’s killed your old boyfriend, who came to town to make sure you were okay. I think he may have been behind drugging you last night, too.”
    Rachel’s eyes darkened with suspicion. “How do you know this?”
    “I started to suspect something was going on when I realized three of the four Bitterwood murders involved women