Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  The woman stepped back, tipped her head, and laid a long hand against her forehead. “‘Weep not for me, nor all the pieces of my shattered heart,' ” she said loudly, her voice suddenly dripping the honey of the Deep South. “‘I shall gather them to me and go on, valiant and undaunted.' ” She straightened and heaved a cleansing sigh, her features settling back into the same fierce, businesslike expression she had worn a moment before. “From Lila Rose by Baxter Brady. It closed after three weeks in the St. James, though through no fault of mine. I assure you, I was brilliant.”

  Mari just blinked.

  The woman pulled a small highly polished black stone from the pocket of her jumper and pressed it gently into Mari's palm, curling her fingers up to hold it in place. “There. That will help.”

  Without another word she strode away, boots clumping on the wooden steps as she left the veranda for the parking lot on the south side of the building. Mari stared after her, forcing a couple in Rodeo Drive western wear to step around her on their way into the hotel. As the doors swung shut behind them, a puff of air brought out the aromas of fresh bread and simmering herbs. Mari's nose locked on like a bloodhound's. Food. Food always made sense. Rousing herself, she went in search of it.

  The Mystic Moose bar was magnificent. Instead of recreating the fussy opulence of Madam Belle's Golden Eagle, the new owners had opted for rustic chic. Rough white stucco walls and heavy, carved mahogany wood-work. Massive versions of Lucy's antler chandelier hung from the thick exposed beams in the high ceiling. The back wall was dominated by a series of tall multipaned windows and French doors that led onto a broad terrace and gave a magnificent view of the mountains that rose to the east. The centerpiece of the south wall was a huge fieldstone fireplace, over which hung an enormous mounted moose head. The moose looked straight across to a beautiful bar that gleamed in the soft afternoon light with the rich patina of age and loving care. Behind it, Madam Belle's gilt-framed mirror still hung; twenty feet of homage to an illicit affair of a bygone era.

  There was a fair number of customers for the middle of the afternoon. A few cast curious looks in Mari's direction as she made her way to a table near the fireplace and settled into a large, comfortable captain's chair. She put her rock on the table and stared at it vacantly.

  “If you don't mind my saying, luv, you look positively knackered.”

  The cultured British tones brought her head up and added another layer of confusion to the fog shrouding her brain. “Excuse me?”

  “I say, you look all done in,” he said, a gentle smile curving his mouth. He looked fortyish and attractive with wavy auburn hair, a bold nose, and a kind shine in his eyes. An afternoon beard shadowed his lean cheeks, but took nothing away from the overall impression of style and quality he projected in a loose-fitting ivory silk shirt and coffee-brown trousers. He leaned across the table and placed a cocktail napkin beside her stone. “Is something the matter?”

  “Well, for starters, I have a fractured aura.”

  “Ah, you've met M.E.” At her blank look he expanded. “M. E. Fralick, maven of the Broadway stage and patron of all things New Age.”

  The name rang a dim bell, but it didn't cut through the pounding in her temples.

  “How about a cappuccino?” he suggested.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a G and T—with a capital G—and a large plate of anything edible.”

  “A woman after my own heart. By the bye, my name is Andrew Van Dellen. Aside from playing waiter on occasion, I'm one of the lucky owners of the Mystic Moose.”

  “Marilee Jennings,” she said, trying to offer a smile.

  He straightened a bit and stared at her for a moment, brows knit. Humming a note, he tapped a forefinger against his pursed lips. “Marilee. Marilee Jennings?” The light bulb went on. “Oh, my God, you're Lucy's friend!”

  Across the room, at the bar, Samantha Rafferty scooped up her serving tray, sloshing imported beer and Pellegrino. The bartender shot her a look, and tears instantly burned at the backs of her eyes. Not that she really gave a damn about the drinks. She had bigger things on her mind. This was just a job she was screwing up. How important was that, when her whole life was one big, balled-up mess?

  If only she'd had the sense to go straight home last night. But no. Glutton for punishment that she was, she just had to take a few turns past the Hell and Gone, cruising the street in her ancient rusted-out Camero until Will stumbled out the door of the saloon with his arm around a buxom blonde.

  The tears pressed harder, glazing across her vision. She clenched her jaw and held her breath as she set the drinks on the long table, heedless as to who had ordered what. What did any of them have to complain about? They were rich, they were movie stars, they didn't have to drive around in a fifteen-year-old car in the middle of the night, looking for a cheating husband.

  Damn you, Will.

  Damn me for loving you.

  Her vision blurred to a jumble of watery colors. As she bent to set down the last of the drinks, she misjudged the distance to the table and let go of a tall mug of beer too soon. The glass hit the table with a thunk and beer spewed out of it like water from a floodgate, drenching the tabletop. Several women at the table gasped. The man whose drink it was bolted backward, shooting up out of his chair as the beer ran off the edge of the table. Samantha gaped in horror at the mess that seemed so symbolic of her whole life, and burst into tears.

  “No, no, sweetheart, don't cry!” Evan Bryce laid a fatherly hand on Samantha's shoulder. “It was an accident. No harm done.”

  Mortified, Samantha mumbled behind the hands she had pressed over her face, “I'm so sorry, Mr. Bryce! I—I'm s-so sorry!”

  He slid his arm around her and gave her a comforting squeeze. “Hey,” he said with humor in his voice. “I've had beautiful young women do far worse things to me!”

  The courtiers who sat around his table all laughed indulgently. Samantha wished the floor would open and swallow her whole. Evan Bryce was the most powerful among New Eden's new power elite. He was some kind of celebrity, a producer or something. Samantha had seen him on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Entertainment Tonight. He was always on the awards shows or the judging panel at the Miss America pageant. The people who visited him at his ranch outside of town were like a Who's Who of Hollywood and California politics. And she had managed to dump a pint of beer practically in his lap.

  “Come on, now,” Bryce said, leading her toward the chair he had so hurriedly vacated. “You've obviously been working too hard, Samantha. Sit down. See that there's no hard feelings.”

  That he knew her name jolted her for an instant, until she remembered it was pinned to her chest. Stupid. The word lashed her like a whip. Stupid kid. She'd heard it from her father often enough when she'd been growing up, so that now, even though she had been living away from her family for over a year, it came back to her and crumbled the debris of her self-confidence into even smaller pieces.

  “No, I couldn't,” she mumbled, backing out of his grasp. She could feel the eyes of the others on her, and imagined she knew what they thought. They thought she was a hick, a stupid, silly half-breed girl who couldn't even manage to keep a drink order straight. “I have work to do.”

  Bryce pulled a face. “I don't think Drew would begrudge you five minutes as my guest.”

  “I don't know, Bryce,” one of his friends said slyly. “He may get jealous. I think he's had his eye on you.”

  The rest of them laughed. Samantha took in their faces in a glance—beautiful beyond what was normally human, teeth too white and too straight, eyes gleaming with some kind of sharp emotion she knew nothing about.

  “I have to go,” she blurted out. Then she wheeled and ran for the service door beside the bar, laughter ringing in her ears, her long black braid slapping her back like a whip as she went.

  A long red-carpeted hall was at the rear of the building. Doors off it led into the kitchen, into Mr. Van Dellen's and Mr. Bronson's off
ices. Samantha went past these and hit the bar of the door that led outside. The stone terrace ran most of the length of the hotel, but the north end was divided from the rest by a tall, weathered lattice screen, giving the employees an area to slip out to for breaks.

  Samantha thanked God it was empty at the moment. She had never been one to cry in front of people. Even Will. Even the night he'd left she had managed to keep the tears at bay until he was out the door.

  Damn you, Will.

  She couldn't remember a time when she hadn't loved Will Rafferty. Even in junior high she had secretly pined away over him, when she had been a lowly eighth-grader and he one of the coolest boys in the senior class. Will Rafferty with his devil's grin and to-die-for blue eyes. Practically every girl in school had a crush on him. He was a rebel, a rascal, and a small-time rodeo star. And for a while he had been all hers.

  The thought that that time was over, maybe for good, made her shake inside. She leaned over the split-wood railing at the edge of the terrace, doubling over in emotional pain, the tears crowding her throat like jagged rocks. It wasn't fair. She loved him. He was the one thing she had ever asked for in her whole miserable life. Why couldn't he love her back in the same way?

  She knew he had married her on a whim. He had won a little money in the saddle bronc riding at the Memorial Day rodeo in Gardiner. She had won a little money in the barrel racing. They had ended up at the same celebratory party. Will, full of himself as always, caught up in the thrill of victory, and made uninhibited by innumerable shots of Jack Daniel's, had declared his love for her. Three days later they had driven to Nevada in his new red and white pickup and tied the knot.

  In her heart of hearts Samantha had suspected at the time he wasn't truly serious about getting married, but she had grabbed the chance with both hands and hung on tight. Now she was living alone in the little cottage they had rented over on Jackson Street. She had her freedom from her family. She had a ring on her finger. And now she had nothing at all.

  The loneliness that gripped her heart squeezed as hard as a fist.

  “Can it really be all that bad?”

  Samantha started at the sound of the soft voice, but there was no running away this time. She'd already made enough of a fool of herself. Evan Bryce took a position at the rail beside her. When he offered her a monogrammed linen handkerchief, she took it and dabbed her eyes. He didn't watch, looking instead toward the mountains, giving her a kind of privacy, a moment to compose herself. She used it to study him.

  She supposed he was about the same age as her father, though all similarities stopped there. Her father was a hulking brute of a man, coarse and dark. Bryce was small. Catlike, she thought; lean, wiry, and graceful. His forehead was very high and broad, and beneath a ledge of brow, his eyes were a pale, startling shade of blue, his mouth a wide, thin line above a small chin. He wore his shoulder-length sun-streaked blond hair swept back, emphasizing his forehead.

  She had seen him in the Moose many times. He came to hold court. The people he brought with him treated him like royalty. Sometimes he came in looking like something out of Gentleman's Quarterly. Most of the time he was dressed as he was now—in faded jeans that fit him like a glove and a loose, faded chambray shirt, which he wore with the sleeves neatly rolled up and the front open halfway to his belly button, exposing a thick pelt of dark chest hair. It was his version of cowboy dress, she supposed, though anyone who had ever known a cowboy would never mistake him for one.

  He turned toward her then, catching her looking at him. Samantha thrust his handkerchief out to him and turned toward the mountains. She could feel him staring at her for a long while before he spoke.

  “I'm sorry if my friends embarrassed you, Samantha. They didn't mean to.”

  “It wasn't them.”

  “What then?” he asked softly. “A young woman as lovely as you should never have to cry so hard.”

  Samantha sniffed, her full lips twitching upward at one corner. She never thought of herself as lovely. She was tall and slender with almost boyish hips and no breasts to speak of—something that had never bothered her in her tomboy days, something that bothered her a great deal when she thought of Will and the buxom blonde coming out of the Hell and Gone. As far as her face went, she had always found it an odd mix of white and Indian, a jumble of oversize features that didn't quite go together.

  “Boyfriend trouble?” Bryce ventured.

  Glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, she weighed the wisdom of confiding in this man. She couldn't imagine why he should care what went on in her life. She was just a nobody cocktail waitress. But the kindness and concern she read in his tanned face touched a very tender spot inside.

  She didn't have anyone else to turn to. Her parents were no shining example of wedded bliss. When her father wasn't drunk, he wasn't home. Her mother had six kids to raise and no energy or enthusiasm for the job. Samantha didn't have many friends who hadn't been Will's friends first. And she had always been too reticent for a tell-all girlfriend anyway. She might have gone to Will's brother for support, because she trusted him, but she had always felt J.D. didn't approve of the marriage. She had always felt he'd somehow known exactly what was what between her and Will, that he had seen past the façade of newlywed bliss from the first.

  But here was this kind man, taking an interest, offering her a chance to unburden herself a little.

  “My husband,” she said in a small voice, looking down at a cluster of pink bitterroot that grew in a rock garden beyond the fence. “We're having some problems. . . . He moved out.”

  Bryce made a sound of understanding and slipped an arm companionably around her shoulders. “Then he's a fool, isn't he?”

  Will was a lot of things. Samantha couldn't find it in her to voice a single one of them. Her throat closed up with misery, and scalding tears squeezed out of her tightly closed eyes. Needing nothing so badly as a shoulder to cry on, she turned and pressed her face against the one being offered to her.

  They drank a toast to Lucy.

  Andrew Van Dellen and his partner, Kevin Bronson, joined Mari at her table. Kevin was tall and rangy with an Ivy League look about him. He hadn't seen thirty yet. Tears glazed his eyes when he raised his glass in Lucy's memory.

  “It was so senseless,” he murmured.

  “Death often is,” Drew commented impatiently. The look they exchanged said they had already had this conversation at least once. “There's no use contemplating it. People live their lives until fate intervenes, that's all.”

  Kevin set his handsome jaw. “You can't say it couldn't have been prevented, Drew. Why should Sheffield have been up there with a gun in the first place? Lucy's dead because he had to go tramping through the woods like Rambo and try to prove his manhood by killing some poor dumb animal.”

  “He wasn't doing anything illegal.”

  “That doesn't mean it wasn't immoral or that it wasn't preventable. If Bryce—”

  Drew cut him off with one gently raised finger and a tip of his head. “Don't speak ill of the customers, dear boy. It's bad form.”

  Kevin leaned back in his chair and stared up at the moose head above the fireplace, visibly struggling to rein in his temper. Drew shifted toward Mari, who had watched their exchange with avid interest while she ate. She had already devoured half a breast-of-chicken sandwich and most of the accompanying herbed fries. The food was rejuvenating her, sending fuel to a brain that had been running on empty. The drink was taking the edge off her nerves. Kevin and Drew were giving her mind something solid and real to focus on.

  “Kev thinks the NRA will destroy civilization as we know it,” Drew said with a touch of humor. Kevin's frown only tightened. “The truth is that Bryce is well within his rights to offer those elk for hunting. Hunting is a time-honored sport. And if one wants to get terribly deep, we are, after all, a species of hunters. It's gone on for eons.”

  “Men used to hit women over the head with mastodon bones and drag them off by the hair. We
don't still do that.”

  “Some do.”

  “It isn't funny.”

  Their eyes held for a brittle moment, then Drew cupped a hand over his partner's shoulder. “Don't let's fight about it,” he murmured tiredly. “At least not in front of a guest.”

  Kevin looked across the table. “I'm sorry, Mari. The whole subject just makes me crazy.”

  “I don't exactly like the thought of my friend getting killed in place of an elk, myself,” she said, setting aside the last bite of her sandwich. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and fiddled with the bauble that dangled from the lobe.

  “What makes me so angry is the hypocrisy,” Kevin said, his voice lowered to keep it from traveling to the wrong ears. “Bryce pledges money and land to the Nature Conservancy and then runs around killing everything on the planet.”

  “It's not at all unusual for hunters to support conservation efforts,” Drew argued. “Their purpose is sport, not annihilation.”

  “I fail to see how anyone can derive pleasure from denying another living creature its life.”

  “Oh, bloody hell, here we go again.”

  “No.” Kevin jerked his chair back from the table and rose. “Here I go again.” Drew rolled his eyes and dropped his head against one hand. Kevin ignored him. “Mari, I'm sorry we couldn't have met under better circumstances.”

  He shot a look at the blond man approaching the table, his lips thinning, then turned and headed for the lobby.

  “Kevin still has his nose out of joint, I see,” Bryce commented mildly.

  Drew rose from his chair, looking as if the effort were physically taxing. “Do forgive him, Mr. Bryce. It's easier for him to blame someone than to believe life can be so randomly senseless.”

  “He's forgetting that Lucy was a friend of mine as well as his.”

  “Yes, well, Kevin is young; he tends to think in absolutes.”

  Bryce's attention had already moved on from Kevin Bronson to Mari. She met his gaze, finding the Nordic blue of his eyes almost chilling, but his smile was warm as he offered her his hand. She wiped the smear of dill-speckled crème fraiche from her hand onto the bottom of her jacket and accepted the gesture.