by Tami Hoag
“Lucy?” she called again, her heart sinking like a stone at the sure knowledge that she wouldn't get an answer.
Her gaze drifted to the stairway that led up to the loft where the bedrooms were tucked, then cut to the telephone that had been ripped from the kitchen wall and now hung by slender tendons of wire.
Her heart beat faster. A fine mist of sweat slicked her palms.
“Lucy?”
“She's dead.”
The words were like a pair of shotgun blasts in the still of the room. Mari wheeled around, a scream wedged in her throat right behind her heart. He stood at the other end of the table, six feet of hewn granite in faded jeans and a chambray work shirt. How anything that big could have sneaked up on her was beyond reasoning. Her perceptions distorted by fear, she thought his shoulders rivaled the mountains for size. He stood there, staring at her from beneath the low-riding brim of a dusty black Stetson, his gaze narrow, measuring, his mouth set in a grim, compressed line. His right hand—big with blunt-tipped fingers—hung at his side just inches from a holstered revolver that looked big enough to bring down a buffalo.
He spoke again, his voice low and rusty, his question jolting her like a cattle prod. “Who are you?”
“Who am I?” she blurted out. “Who the fuck are you?”
His scowl seemed to tighten at her language, but Mari couldn't find it in her to care about decorum at the moment. From the corner of her eye she caught sight of a foot-long heavy brass candlestick lying on its side on the table. She inched her fingers down from the back of the chair and slid them around the cold, hard brass, her gaze locked on the stranger.
“What have you done with Lucy?”
He tucked his chin back. “Nothing.”
“I think you ought to know that I'm not here alone,” Mari said with all the bravado she could muster. “My husband . . . Bruno . . . is out looking around the buildings.”
“You came alone,” he drawled, squinting at her. “Saw you from the ridge.”
He'd seen her. He'd been watching. A man with a gun had been watching her. Mari's fingers tightened on the candlestick. His first words came back to her through the tangle in her brain. She's dead. Terror gripped her throat like an unseen hand. Lucy. He'd killed Lucy.
With a strangled cry she hurled the candlestick at him and bolted for the door, tripping over an uprooted ficus. She heard him grunt and swear as the missile hit. The candlestick sounded as loud as a cathedral bell as it met the pine floor. The scramble of boots sounded like a herd of horses stampeding after her. She kept her focus on the front door, willing it closer, but as in a nightmare, her arms and legs weighed her down like lead. The air around her seemed to take on a heaviness that defied speed. She scrambled, stretched, stumbled, sobs catching in her throat as she gasped for breath.
He caught her from behind, one hand grabbing hold of her vest and T-shirt. He hauled her backward, banding his other arm around her waist and pulling her into the rock wall that was his body.
“Hold still!”
Mari clawed the beefy forearm that was pushing the air from her lungs. Wild, animal sounds of distress mewed in her throat, and she kicked his shins with vicious intent, connecting the heels of her sneakers with bone two swings out of three.
“Dammit, hold still!” he ordered, tightening his arm against her. “I didn't kill her. It was an accident.”
“Tell it to a lawyer!” she managed to shout, pushing frantically at the big hand that was pressed up against her diaphragm. She couldn't budge him. She couldn't hurt him. He had her. The panic that thought bred nearly choked her.
“Listen to me,” he ordered sharply. Then he gentled his tone as skills from other parts of his life kicked in. He knew better than to fight fear with force. “Easy,” he murmured to her in the same low, soothing voice he used with frightened horses. “Listen to me now. Just take it easy. I'm not here to hurt you.”
“Yeah? Well, you're doing a pretty damn good imitation of it,” she snapped, squirming. “You're pushing my spleen into my lungs.”
Immediately he loosened his grip but still held her firmly against him. “Just settle down. Just take it easy.”
Mari craned her neck around to get a look at his eyes. Men could say anything, but their eyes seldom lied. She had learned that in the courtroom and in the offices of countless lawyers. She had taken down testimony word for word, lies and truths, but she had learned very early on to read the difference in the witness's eyes. The pair boring down on her were tucked deep beneath an uncompromising ledge of brow. They were the gray of storm clouds, and slightly narrow, as if he were permanently squinting against the glare of the sun. They gave little away of the man, but there was nothing in them that hinted at lies or violence.
She relaxed marginally and he rewarded her by easing her down so that her feet touched the floor. Air rushed back into her lungs and she sucked it in greedily, trying not to lean back into him for support. She was already too aware of his body, the size and strength of it, the heat of it. His left hand encircled her upper arm, the knuckles just brushing the outer swell of her breast. The fingers of his right hand splayed over her belly, thumb and forefinger bracketing the inner and under contours of the same breast.
He smelled of hard work, leather, and horses. Concentrate on that, Marilee. He smells like a horse.
As he murmured to her in his low, soothing voice, his breath drifted like a warm breeze across the shell of her ear and the side of her face. Butter mint. She couldn't think of a single psychopathic killer who had been described as having butter mints on his breath.
“You gonna be still?” he asked softly.
Her body was pressed back into his, reminding him just how soft a woman could be. His line of sight down over her shoulder gave him an unobstructed view of the rise and fall of her breasts as she struggled to slow her breathing. The loose vest she wore had slipped back during the struggle. The outline of a lacy bra was unmistakable, reminding him just how delicate a woman's underwear could be.
All he needed to do was turn his hand a fraction and he could fill his palm with the weight of her breast. His fingers flexed involuntarily against her rib cage.
Damn. He'd gone too long without. That was clear enough. He didn't allow himself to indiscriminately want women. He had too many more important things to focus his attention on. He shouldn't have even considered the possibility with this one. A friend of Lucy MacAdam's. He didn't have to know any more about her than that to know she was trouble.
He dropped his hand away from her belly abruptly and took a half-step back, distancing himself from temptation.
Mari turned to face him, her sneakers crunching on the kindling that had once been an end table constructed of raw twigs. Still trembling, she planted one hand on her hip and snagged back a tangled mass of hair from her eyes with the other, anchoring it at the back of her neck.
“Who are you?” she demanded, wary.
“J. D. Rafferty.” He bent to pick up the hat he'd lost in the scuffle, never taking his eyes off her. “I live up the hill a ways.”
“And you're in the habit of just walking into people's homes?”
“No, ma'am.”
“But you saw me come in, so you just thought ‘Hey, what the hell? I might as well go scare the shit out of her'?”
He narrowed his eyes. “No, ma'am. The lawyer asked me to look after the stock. I saw you come in, saw the lights. Didn't want anything funny going on while I was down here.”
Mari cast a damning glance around the room, stricken anew by the utter destruction. “Looks to me like something already happened, Mr. Rafferty. And I don't happen to think it's particularly funny.”
“Kids,” he muttered, staring at the broken frame of a bentwood rocker. He detested waste, and that was what vandalism was—waste of time, energy, property. Waste and disrespect. “Town kids get a little tanked up. They go riding around, lookin' for trouble. Don't usually take 'em long to find it. This happened a week ago. I called the sher
iff. A deputy came out and wrote it up, for what that's worth.”
Putting off the inevitable, Mari went to the ficus that had foiled her escape and righted it carefully, her hands gentle as she stroked the smooth trunk and touched the dying leaves.
“I didn't catch your name while you were kicking my shins black and blue,” Rafferty said sardonically.
“Marilee. Marilee Jennings.”
“Mary Lee—”
“No. Marilee. It's all one word.”
He scowled at that, as if he didn't trust anybody who had such a name. Mari almost smiled. Her mother wouldn't like J. D. Rafferty. He was too rough. Crude, Abigail would say. Abigail Falkner Jennings thrived on pretention. She had given all her daughters pretentious names that only snooty people didn't stumble over—Lisbeth, Annaliese, Marilee.
“She's dead,” he declared bluntly.
She would have put the question off a while longer, would have thought of inane things for another moment or two. Her fingers tightened on the trunk of the ficus as if trying to hold something that had already slipped beyond her grasp.
“Happened about ten days ago . . .”
Ten days. Ten days ago she had been crying over a man she didn't love, giving up a career she'd never wanted, breaking ties to the family she had never fit into. Lucy had been dying.
She brought a hand up to press it over her trembling lips. She shook her head in denial, desperation and tears swimming in her eyes. Lucy couldn't be dead—she was too ornery, too cynical, too wise. Only the good die young, Marilee. She could still see the sharp gleam of certainty and caustic humor in her friend's eyes as she'd said it. Jesus, Lucy should have lived to be a hundred.
“. . . hunting accident . . .”
Rafferty's words penetrated the fog only dimly. He sounded as if he were talking to her from a great distance instead of just a few feet away. She stared at him, her defenses raising shields that deflected the harshness of the subject and focused her attention on unimportant things. His hair—it was sensibly short and the color of sable. He had a little cowlick in front at the edge of his high, broad forehead. His tan—it ended in a line of demarcation from his hatband. Somehow that made him seem less dangerous, more human. The paler skin looked soft and vulnerable. Stupid word for a man with a six-gun strapped to his hips—vulnerable.
“Hunting?” she mumbled as if the word were foreign.
J.D. pressed his lips together, impatience and compassion warring inside him. She looked as fragile as a china doll, as if the slightest bump or pressure would shatter her like the lamps and pots that lay scattered on the floor. Beneath the tangled fringe of flaxen bangs and the soft arcs of dark brows, her deep-set blue eyes were huge and brimming with pain and confusion.
Something in him wanted to offer comfort. He labeled it foolishness and shoved it aside. He didn't want anything to do with her. He hadn't wanted anything to do with Lucy, but she had drawn him into her web like a black widow spider. He wanted this place, that was true enough, but he didn't want this. He had plainly and purely hated Lucy MacAdam. Couldn't figure why someone hadn't shot her on purpose years before. The woman before him was her friend, another outsider, which made her tainted by both association and circumstance. The sooner he was rid of her, the better.
He steeled himself against her tears and settled his hat firmly on his head, an insult she would probably never fathom.
“Lucy didn't go hunting,” she mumbled stupidly.
“It was an accident. Some damned city idiot shot without looking.”
Ten days ago. It seemed impossible to Mari that she could have lived ten days oblivious of the death of a friend. Shot. God. People moved to the country to avoid getting shot, to escape city violence. Lucy had come to paradise only to be gunned down. It was ludicrous.
Mari shook her head again, trying to clear the dizziness, only making it worse. “W-where is she?”
“Six feet under, I reckon,” he said brutally. “I wouldn't know.”
“But you were her friend—”
“No, ma'am.”
He moved toward her slowly, deliberately, his expression dark and intense. He came too close. Close enough that she had to tilt her head back to look at him.
“We had sex,” he said bluntly, his voice low and rough. “Friendship never entered into it.”
Rafferty raised a hand and traced his thumb down her cheek to the corner of her mouth. “How about you, Mary Lee?” he whispered. “You want to give a cowboy a ride?”
He knew he was being a bastard. J.D. didn't give a damn. If he was lucky he would scare her away from this place.
“How about it, Mary Lee?” he murmured. “I'll let you be on top.”
“You son of a bitch!”
Thinking she would choke on her outrage, Mari kicked him in the shin. He jumped back from her, swearing, his face flushing dark with pain and fury. Belatedly she questioned the wisdom of making him angry. He could take what he wanted. They were in the middle of nowhere. No one knew she had come to Montana. He could rape her and kill her and dump her body in the mountains, never to be found. Christ, for all she knew, he had killed Lucy. But the deed was done. She couldn't cower from him now.
“Get out!” she screamed. “Get the hell out of here!”
J.D. gathered his temper with a ruthless mental fist. He moved to the front door and leaned a hand against the jamb, looking back at her from under the brim of his black hat. The door stood open to the night, inviting a swarm of bugs to buzz around the antler chandelier in the foyer. “All you had to do was say no.”
He tipped his hat in a gesture that seemed more mocking than polite. Mari followed him out and watched as he mounted a stout sorrel horse that stood waiting in the puddle of amber light that spilled from the house.
“There's a motel on the edge of town,” he said, settling into the saddle. “Drive slow on your way down. You hit an elk with that damned Japanese car and there won't be enough left to make a sardine can.”
She crossed her arms against the chill of the evening and glared at him. “You could at least say you're sorry,” she said bitterly.
“I'm not,” he replied, and reined his horse away.
She watched him ride off at an easy lope, away from the ranch yard, away from the road. The darkness swallowed him up long before the hollow drum of hoofbeats faded.
“Bastard,” she muttered, turning back to go inside.
The adrenaline ebbed from her system, leaving the weight of exhaustion in its wake. The last vestiges of shock lingered like novocaine, keeping the first sting of grief at bay. She tried to fix her mind on the mundane tasks of getting back to town and finding a hotel room, tried to forget the residual feel of J. D. Rafferty's hands on her, his big body pressed against her back, his rawsilk voice murmuring indecent proposals. But the sensations lingered disturbingly, adding a vague, grimy film of guilt to the complex layers of emotion. Feeling a need to wash both physically and psychologically, she went in search of a bathroom, finding one on the second floor.
It had fared no better than the rest of the house. The lid from the toilet tank had been smashed. It looked as if someone had taken a jackhammer to the shower stall, then broke up the tile floor into rubble and dust. The faucets still worked, and she filled the sink with cold water, bending over to bathe her face with it. She pulled the bottom of her T-shirt out of her jeans and used it as a towel, then stood, staring for a moment into the cracked, gilt-framed mirror that hung above the vanity.
The woman who stared back was pale and dark-eyed with pain. She looked like the survivor of a hurricane, ravaged by wind and elements that had roared so far beyond her control that she felt as insignificant and powerless as a gnat. She had packed up her life and run to Montana, to a friend who had been dead more than a week. Lucy would have seen a bitter, ironic humor in that.
She thought of her friend, of what Lucy would have had to say about the way things had turned out, and tears swelled over her lashes and slid down her cheeks.
It started out as a bad hair day and went downhill from there.
He watched her through a Simmons Silver 3¥9 wide-angle Prohunter scope. Not his favorite, especially not for this time of night, but it was all he had with him. He came here nearly every night, not because he expected to see the blonde, but because he wanted to draw her down off his mountain. She lingered there, a pale apparition among the dark trees, a phantom carried on the wings of owls. She haunted him. Too many things did.
He never slept at night. The dead came to him anyway. There was nothing he could do to stop them, but he stayed awake and watchful, willing them to leave. An exhausting vigil that was never rewarded.
He watched her cross the yard toward a small foreign car, his heart galloping, a dozen hammers pounding against the plate in his head. The fine lines of the sight crossed her chest. His cheek rested against the stock of the Remington 700 rifle. Half a breath settled in his lungs. His heart rate slowed in conditioned response. His fingertip remained still against the trigger.
There was no killing a ghost. He knew that better than anyone. He could only pray for it to leave and not come back to his mountain.
If only there were a God to hear him . . .
CHAPTER
2
COME ON, come on, you big gear-jamming son of a bitch! Oh! Oh! OH!”
Mari focused an exasperated, exhausted glare at the wall beyond her rented bed. There was a starving-artist-quality painting of a moose in a mountainscape hanging above the imitation mahogany Mediterranean-style headboard. The painting bucked against the cheap, paper-thin wallboard in time with the heavy thumping going on in the adjacent room. The clock on the night-stand glowed 1:43 in pee-yellow digits. She had gotten the last room in the place.