Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  She had spent the night of the party in the guest room at Bryce's. Her mind filled with the bright afterglow of excitement, sleep had been a long time coming. She may have felt out of place during the evening, but in the aftermath she relived every scene with enthusiasm, remembering the people she had met and the conversations she had been a part of. It was like a dream, like stepping into a whole other world—the celebrities, the beautiful clothes she had worn, the music, the champagne, the pool glowing as darkness crept down the mountainside.

  A wry smile touched her mouth as she served a Falstaff and a Chivas to a couple from Beverly Hills. A fairy tale. Sam Rafferty as Cinderella with Evan Bryce as the fairy godfather. But the clock had struck, the enchantment was over, and she was back hustling for tips at the Moose, working the late shift until she could go home to her dumpy little empty house to sleep alone.

  The black mood swooped down on her like a vulture and dug its claws into her stomach. Tears gathered behind her eyes and she blinked them back as she made change for a fifty and gave service with a smile. Half an hour to go, then she could cry all she wanted and there would be no one to see her except Rascal.

  When she turned to go back to the bar, Bryce caught her eye. He was at his usual table, drinking Pellegrino with lime. The crowd around him was small. Just Sharon, Ben Lucas, and another man she had seen briefly at the party, a tall, stiff-looking man who might have been a television news anchor or a leading man from the era of Kirk Douglas. Of the foursome, only Bryce appeared to be having a good time. He flashed her a grin and motioned for her.

  “Hey there, beautiful, what time do you get off?”

  Samantha gave him a crooked smile, not quite sure how she was supposed to react. If she hadn't been stuck in New Eden, Montana, her whole life, she might have come back with a witty remark, but she felt awkward trying to pretend sophistication she didn't possess.

  “They've kept you hopping tonight,” he said. “I guess everyone is charged up over that break-in we heard about.”

  “Yeah,” she said, pulling her empty tray up in front of her, warming to him. He went out of his way to include her, to make her feel more important than she knew she was. She greedily soaked up his generosity and tried not to worry about what the rest of his friends probably thought about her. “Did you hear whose room it was?” she asked, excited at the prospect of sharing what little gossip she knew. “Marilee Jennings. She was at your party.”

  Ben Lucas raised his eyebrows and glanced across the table at the older man—Townsend.

  Bryce frowned and rubbed his chin. “Really? That's terrible. Was she hurt?”

  “He hit her in the head. I heard she had a concussion, but she's not in the hospital or anything. She was lucky.”

  He had a faraway look in his eyes, as if he were doing math in his head. “Yes, I guess she was,” he murmured.

  “It's creepy,” Samantha said, shivering a little, the fear showing through. “That kind of thing doesn't happen here. People getting attacked and robbed and stuff like that.”

  Bryce sharpened, his blue eyes narrowing. Concern creased his high forehead as his brows pulled together. “You're home alone. Will you be all right?”

  “Sure,” she said without much enthusiasm.

  “No, no, no.” He wagged his head. “I don't like that idea at all. Come and stay at the ranch.”

  Samantha blinked at the offer and the temptation that hit hard on its heels. A vision of the guest room played through her head like a commercial for a luxury hotel. “No, I couldn't,” she said automatically.

  “Of course you could. We'd be glad to have you, wouldn't we, Sharon?”

  Samantha flicked a glance at the statuesque blonde. Sharon didn't look glad to her. The smile that twisted the woman's thin lips was the kind that usually comes as a reaction to sucking on something unexpectedly bitter.

  “No, thanks, really,” Samantha said as her self-esteem sank. She imagined she could hear the words behind Sharon Russell's flat gaze—stupid little hick waitress. “I'll be okay. I'm used to staying alone. Besides, I don't have anything a thief would want.”

  “Maybe he wasn't a thief,” Sharon pointed out calmly, running a finger around the rim of her margarita glass.

  Samantha's eyes widened. Bryce shot his cousin a glower. “Way to go, cuz, scare the poor girl to death.”

  Sharon licked the salt off her finger and shrugged, unrepentant. “Better safe than sorry. A woman has to consider all the possibilities and act accordingly. If you don't feel safe, Sam, by all means, come out to Xanadu. You'll be safe with us.”

  Three tables over, a man cleared his throat noisily and raised an empty glass when Samantha glanced his way. She held up a hand to acknowledge him and turned back to Bryce. “I've got to go. Thanks for the offer, but I'll be okay.”

  He reached up and gave her hand a squeeze, made eye contact, and gave her a dose of sincere and fatherly. “Think about it. We won't be leaving for a while yet.”

  He watched her walk away, her thick braid twitching across her slim back as she went. Then he brought Drew Van Dellen's frown into focus at the bar beyond.

  “Bryce, we need to talk,” MacDonald Townsend said in a harsh, low voice.

  A dull throb started in behind Bryce's eyes. Townsend had been chanting that phrase all evening. Bryce kept putting him off just to be perverse. He was in no mood to listen to the judge's whining.

  “In a minute, Townsend,” he said irritably, his gaze never leaving Van Dellen. Gracefully he pushed himself to his feet and sauntered away from the table, smiling to himself as Townsend complained bitterly to Sharon and Ben Lucas behind his back.

  Drew set his pencil down atop the liquor inventory sheet as Bryce approached the bar. He didn't bother with a smile. “Mr. Bryce.”

  “Drew.” Bryce flashed the Redford grin and dropped his elbows on the bar. “I hear you had a little trouble last night.”

  “Nothing that will happen again if we can help it.”

  “How is Marilee?”

  “Well enough, all things considered. She had a nasty scare.”

  “No sign of the culprit?”

  “None.”

  “Hmm . . . Well, I imagine it was just a random burglary. Or someone got wind of her inheritance and thought maybe she'd gotten something valuable from our friend Lucy.”

  “Not the case,” Drew said neutrally. “Not something small enough to keep in her room, at any rate.”

  Bryce nodded as if he were conceding a point in a subtle debate. “One could never tell with Lucy. She was full of surprises.”

  “People are. Not all of them pleasant.” He cut a meaningful glance to Bryce's table. “Take, for example, your friend the judge. In person he doesn't seem quite the genial fellow the press would paint him.”

  “Yes, well, Townsend is under some personal strain these days,” Bryce said, smiling like a shark.

  Drew arched a brow and looked supremely bored. Bryce studied him intently for several moments, trying to read, trying to gauge and calculate angles.

  Drew went on, unperturbed by the scrutiny. “I wanted to have a word with you about Samantha.”

  “Did you?”

  The idea seemed to amuse him. Drew had all he could do to keep his expression bland. “Yes. She's very young, you know. Not terribly sophisticated when it comes to the ways of the world outside Montana.”

  “And?” Bryce spread his hands and raised his eyebrows, feigning ignorance. “Are you warning me off, Drew?” he asked with a chuckle.

  “Merely pointing out that she's inexperienced. And married.”

  “You couldn't tell it by the way her husband treats her.”

  “They're having their problems—”

  “She deserves better,” Bryce declared flatly. “She's a bright, lovely girl. I'm just letting her have a taste, giving her a little fun, a little attention.”

  And hoping to profit by it. Drew kept the opinion to himself. It would do no good to get into a figurative shoving m
atch. Bryce swung enough weight to put a sizable dent in their business if he so chose, and nothing would be accomplished other than boosting the man's ego another notch toward the ionosphere.

  “I just don't want to see her hurt, is all,” he said diplomatically, his gaze drifting to Samantha as she delivered a round to a table of tourists from Florida. She smiled at them and listened thoughtfully as they asked her a question about the history of the lodge. Pretty girl, sweet girl, as unspoiled as the wilderness. Pity she had such poor luck with men. Pity men had to be such bastards. The thought of her being caught in a tug-of-war between Bryce and the Raffertys made his heart ache. The knowledge that she wouldn't confide in him because of his own orientation only added to the sadness and the sense of helplessness.

  Bryce's eyes strayed to Samantha as well. Beautiful, exotic, innocent, fresh, ripe to taste what the world could offer her. She was youth and opportunity. With guidance and tutelage, her potential would have no bounds. The thought was as seductive to him as it should have been to her.

  “I don't have any intention of hurting her,” he murmured as plans shifted and realigned in his head. “Get me a whiskey, will you, Drew?”

  He took the drink back to the table, where Lucas was playing at seduction games with Sharon, and Townsend sat stewing. Lucas was out of his depth and didn't know it. Sharon's eyes gleamed with secret amusement. Townsend finished off a Stolichnaya, his stare petulant as Bryce eased back down into his chair at the head of the table.

  “How much longer are you going to put me off?”

  Bryce narrowed his eyes and made a pained face. “I'd say until you became too annoying to stomach, but that moment is already a distant memory.”

  Townsend ignored the insult. “Did you get the videotape?”

  “No.”

  A fine sheen of sweat misted across the judge's face. Even in the glow of firelight he looked abnormally pale, his skin stretched tight against the bones of his face. His eyes had taken on a haunted, paranoid quality. Bryce rubbed his chin and wondered just how much coke his honor was doing these days. Too much, the fool. If the man had ever possessed any nerve, it was gone now, burned away by excesses his spineless conscience couldn't handle.

  “Goddamn you, Bryce,” he snarled. His hand was trembling as he curled it tightly around his empty glass. “You never should have made it in the first place!”

  Bryce laid his elbows on the table and leaned forward, nonchalantly scanning the room for curious onlookers. Everyone was either engrossed in retelling a personal brush with crime or in making a last trip to the bar. Satisfied, he tilted his head in Townsend's direction, his lips thinning, pale eyes going cold.

  “It's part of the game, Your Honor,” he said softly. “You know what they say. If you can't stand the heat—Or what's the version in cop vernacular? If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.”

  Townsend's whole body began to quake visibly. The rims of his eyes went red. Bryce half expected an alien creature to burst from the man's chest. “If that tape falls into the wrong hands, my life is over!” His voice was a raw whisper, as if unseen hands were choking him.

  Bryce studied his fingernails, unconcerned. Nothing on the tape could be linked to him. He always made certain of that. That was part of his edge, one of the keys to his power. In his own mind, Townsend was already written off as a loss. The man was killing himself a thousand times over a phantom. He was a coward. Cowards could be used only so many times before there was nothing left of them.

  “You should have thought of that, my friend,” he said, glancing up to meet Townsend's eyes, “before you pulled the trigger.”

  “You're sure you won't come out to the ranch?”

  “I'll be fine,” Samantha said.

  Bryce sat behind the wheel of her old Camero, looking just as comfortable as he did in his Mercedes, which trailed behind them with Sharon driving. He shifted into neutral and left his hand on the knob as they idled at New Eden's stoplight. His hands were bony and roped with veins. An onyx ring with a gold crest rose up like a small mountain at the base of his middle finger and gleamed richly in the dashboard lights.

  Rich. The word tasted like chocolate and made her think about the feel of silk against her skin. She hefted her purse off her lap and set it on the floor, mentally counting her tips. If she set some of her tip money aside every day, she might be able to go into Latigo and buy herself something nice—in a month or three.

  “You'll be fine,” he said, giving her a wry look. “What about me? I'll be awake all night worrying about you.”

  She smiled at him softly, sincerely, her heart suddenly brimming. “That means a lot to me. It's nice to know someone cares.”

  It would have been nicer if that someone had been Will. Her gaze strayed to the glow of lights at the Hell and Gone.

  “Of course I care, Samantha.” He put the car in gear and eased his foot off the clutch as the light turned green. “I consider you a friend. How many times do I have to tell you that before you start believing me?”

  “I don't know,” she admitted guilelessly. “It's hard for me to imagine someone like you being friends with someone like me.”

  “Why wouldn't I want to be friends with a bright, beautiful young woman?”

  “I'm a cocktail waitress.”

  “That's what you do, not who you are. Never confuse the two, Samantha. That kind of thinking only limits you.”

  They turned onto Jackson Street and he pulled the Camero up to the curb in front of her house. The car's engine grumbled on for a moment after he turned the ignition off, like a stomach with indigestion. Bryce ignored it and turned sideways on the vinyl bucket seat to face her. In the pale glow of the streetlight his expression seemed earnest. He reached out with one hand and brushed the tips of his fingers against her cheek, pushing a stray strand of black hair back behind her ear.

  “You should have no limits but the sky, Samantha,” he said softly. “Don't let anything in your life hold you back.”

  The Mercedes pulled in behind them and the glare of the headlights gave Samantha an excuse to look away. He didn't understand her life. He didn't know where she had come from or what kinds of obstacles that life had built into it. He was rich and powerful. He was like a being from another world, a world she had no access to, a world she could only look at and wish for in the most frivolous of her fantasies.

  “I once had a job cleaning grease, dirt, and dead cockroaches out of a diner in Hell's Kitchen,” he said. “I owned one pair of shoes and washed my underwear in the sink of the communal bathroom in a rooming house I shared with drug addicts and transients.

  “We aren't always born to it, Samantha. Sometimes we have to have the courage to take a leap into the life we want.”

  He handed her the keys and climbed out, coming around to open her door for her. Samantha unfolded herself from the low-slung Camero. She kept her head down, pretending to be concerned about which purse compartment her keys went into. Bryce's words rolled around in her head like marbles, tumbling through a wash of conflicting feelings that had been building inside her for days—loneliness and dissatisfaction and longing and hunger for something more than she had. What did she have? A junker car. A rented house that looked forlorn even by moonlight. A puppy. A husband who ignored her. She thought of the party. The air of excitement. The important people who had spoken with her. The sense of, if not belonging, being included in something special.

  Bryce went into the house ahead of her to check for intruders. It took him all of three minutes to see every shabby room and look in every closet. Embarrassment burned Samantha's cheeks. She left most of the lights off, hoping he wouldn't notice her blush or the fact that everything she owned was second-hand.

  “Are there locks on these doors?” he asked as they stepped back out onto the front porch.

  She nodded, crossing her arms against the cool breeze and the onslaught of loneliness. Rascal rubbed up against her legs like an overgrown cat, then dropped at her feet and beg
an gnawing on her shoestrings.

  “Good. Use them. If only to give me an hour's sleep.”

  “I will. Thanks for seeing me home.”

  He gave her a look. “I'm glad to do it. Someone should be looking out for you.”

  That the someone should be Will didn't need to be spoken. The censure was there in Bryce's voice. Samantha felt guilt on Will's behalf, then wondered if Will ever felt a shred of it himself. If she were attacked, as Marilee Jennings had been, would he feel the least bit responsible for abandoning her?

  “Call me if you need anything,” Bryce said. “Even if you just get tired of playing it brave.”

  “Thanks,” she whispered, fighting the threat of tears. “You're a good friend.”

  He nodded and hummed a note of agreement, but his mind was elsewhere. He had a look about him as though he were considering whether or not to tell her something important. In the end he just sighed, leaned forward, and kissed her cheek. His hand lingered on her shoulder, and he squeezed gently as he stepped back.

  “Good night, sweetheart. Think about what I said.”

  Rascal dove off the porch and gave chase halfway across the yard as Bryce headed for the Mercedes. Samantha called the dog back, patting a hand against her thigh. The puppy wheeled around, charged back up the steps and flung himself against his mistress as she lowered herself to sit on the edge of the porch. Samantha cradled the wiggling dog against her and stroked his head absently, avoiding his eager tongue by tipping her head back to look up at the stars.

  You should have no limits but the sky. It was a million miles away. She could see it but never touch it. She tried to imagine what it might be like to cut loose all the bonds that held her to this spot on earth and soar up there among the stars. How free she would feel. How special. The only times she had ever felt special in her life had been with Will, when she believed that he loved her, when she believed they could have a life and a family together. Small dreams. Sweet dreams. Dreams that now seemed as distant as the diamond points of light in the sky. Broken dreams that tied her to a life of emptiness.