MARI WOKE in the Adirondack chair as the first hint of morning turned the sky a pearly gray. Every part of her hurt from sleeping out in the cool damp night in an unnatural position. She struggled up out of the chair and slumped around the deck like Quasimodo, trying to work the kinks out, snagging the feet of her convenience store nylons on the wood planks of the deck. Her head was pounding from the French cigarettes and from the dreams that had wrecked what little sleep she’d gotten. The images had slammed around inside her head, screaming to get out, never finding the door, never lining up neatly the way she wanted them to so that she could make sense of all the dark clues and sinister feelings.
She leaned against the back of the chair and groaned, bringing a fist up to rub her eyes and push her hair back. Still clutched in her fist was the letter Lucy had left behind for her. Unable to face it before coffee, she tucked it under the base of the dew-covered peanut tin and went inside.
While she heated water on the stove for instant caffeine, she went into the powder room off the kitchen and went through an abbreviated version of her usual morning routine, trying not to look at herself in the mirror. But like driving by a car wreck, morbid curiosity got the better of her and she chanced a glance, gasping in horror at the reflection. Her eyes were shot through with jagged bolts of red and underlined with raccoon rings of mascara. Rummaging through the small medicine cabinet, she found a bottle of Murine and a jar of petroleum jelly and did her best to repair the damage.
In Lucy’s bedroom, where the aftermath of the vandals had yet to be cleared away, Mari dug through the rubble for something fresh to wear. The mattress had been torn off the bed and slit open. A table lamp had apparently been hurled into the large beveled glass mirror that hung above the dresser. Clothing spewed out of open dresser drawers and trailed across the floor from the closet, blouses and dresses lying on the carpet with sleeves bent at strange angles, looking like inanimate casualties. The only piece of glass intact in the room was a goldfish bowl on the nightstand that was half full of condom packets.
Mari pretended there was no mess. She ignored the condoms and the statement they made about Lucy’s lifestyle and went in search of something to wear, digging up clean underwear, jeans, a T-shirt from Mazatlán, and a neon-orange sweatshirt with an enormous, raised hot pink outline of a woman’s lips slanting across the front.
Coffee in hand, she went back out to the deck and lit the last of the Gauloises. As sweet smoke curled up from the end of it, she picked up the letter and studied it again.
We all have our calling in life… Mine was being a thorn in wealthy paws… It got me where you are today. Or did it get me where I am?
The lines had made no sense at all when she had first read the letter. Now her attention homed in on two sentences: It got me where you are today. Or did it get me where I am?
Where you are today-the ranch. Or did it get me where I am-dead.
Mari bit her lip as she sifted through the possibilities, each one uglier than the last. Her heart picked up a beat and then another. Caffeine, she told herself. Nicotine. Or the chance that Lucy had foreseen her own murder.
Murder. She couldn’t think of the word without seeing blood, without seeing the photos from Sheriff Quinn’s file. Lucy’s lifeless body lying in the grass, a hole blown through her.
Lucy knew things she shouldn’t have about people with power, people with money. The summer she had been sleeping with Judge Townsend, he had brought her to Montana for a weekend. She told Mari that was how she found her little ranch. Her hideout.
Outlaws had hideouts. Outlaws got shot.
Dr. Sheffield claimed he hadn’t seen her. What if he had? What if Lucy had known something she shouldn’t have about him? What if the tears he’d spilled at the hearing hadn’t been from abject grief, but abject guilt?
She stared down at the peanut tin, acutely aware of the expensive log house behind her and the priceless land that stretched out before her, of the llamas and the Range Rover, the pricey clothes strewn across the floor of the bedroom, and the lavish lifestyle.
Lucy knew things she shouldn’t have known about people with money and power. Lucy was dead.
Mari folded the note and tapped it against her pursed lips. She had to see where the shooting had happened, to see for herself if it could have been an accident. And she had to talk to the man who had found the body-Del Rafferty-J.D. or no J.D.
By noon Mari and Clyde were headed up the mountain, map in hand, for all the good it would do her. Sheriff Quinn had drawn it on the back of an old Burger King wrapper, scrawling instructions such as “bear left at the blue rock” and “head north at the dead cow.” Mari figured she would be lucky if she didn’t end up in Canada.
The sheriff’s words regarding Del Rafferty had been less than encouraging. “You won’t find him unless he wants you to, which he won’t. He don’t take to strangers.”
Mari tried not to dwell on J.D.’s claim that his uncle could shoot the balls off a mouse at two hundred yards.
The higher they climbed up the side of the mountain, the more nervous she became. The terrain was rugged, the trail obscure. The scenery might have taken her breath away if she hadn’t been too preoccupied to notice it. Fragrant, shaded pine forests gave way to beautiful green meadows, which gave way to more forest. All of it pitching up and up, hurling itself at the huge Montana sky. All Mari could think was that the Lucy she had known would never have taken the time to bruise her butt in this godforsaken saddle, riding a mule halfway up the side of a mountain. Never-unless there was something major in it for her.
Maybe she had come to rendezvous with Sheffield for a liaison. But why here, when there were a million easier private places to get to?
“Too bad you can’t talk, Clyde,” she said to the mule, stroking his slick warm neck. “You could tell me exactly what happened. Maybe we should get M. E. Fralick to help us. She could probably hang some crystals on you and commune with you on a psychic plane.”
Clyde glanced back at her, a cynical look in his eyes, long ears wiggling as a deer fly buzzed around them.
They stood at the edge of a clearing, resting. Mari had let the mule take a drink from the stream they had pretty much followed up the mountain. Now she let him bury his nose in the clover for a moment, the reins sliding through her fingers. She longed to climb down and stretch her legs, but she was already stiff and sore from her ride to the Stars and Bars the day before, and she was afraid if she got off, she might not be able to get back on.
Overhead, gray clouds were rumbling across the sky like bloated sponges, filling up the blue bowl, shutting out the sun. Great. They were a zillion miles from home, and now it was going to rain. Consulting the map, she tried to discern where they were while ignoring her stomach’s growls at the aroma of cheeseburger that clung to the paper.
She was fairly confident about having passed the blue rock, but the dead cow was another matter. They had come across a scattered pile of bleached bones, but she wasn’t exactly an expert on the skeletal remains of farm animals.
“It might have been a cow,” she muttered. “Or we might be way lost.”
Clyde’s head came up suddenly and the mule jumped forward, gathering his muscular body beneath him, ready to bolt and run. The map flew out of Mari’s hands as she scrambled to keep her seat and haul in the reins, and the rattling paper further served to frighten the mule, who leapt ahead another ten feet. Across the clearing, a pair of whitetail deer bolted in unison and glided away into the cover of the forest.
Mari pulled the mule around in a galloping circle, her heart in her throat, every muscle tensed. Stay on, stay on, stay on! The words chanted through her mind a hundred miles an hour as she fought for control of her mount. If she fell and Clyde took off, it was a hell of a long walk back. Of course, if she fell and broke her neck, she wouldn’t have to worry about walking.
The mule came in hand and stopped, his head still high, his body quivering like a race car idling at the starting line. He pinned his long ears back and blew loudly through flared nostrils.
“Good mule, nice mule,” Mari gasped, stroking his neck with a trembling hand. “Chill out, will you, Clyde?”
The adrenaline rush subsided, leaving her feeling wobbly and light-headed. The cool, meadow-scented air surged in and out of her lungs in ragged gusts. But as Clyde made no further attempt to bolt, she began to relax. Belatedly, she wondered what had spooked him. The deer, probably. Or another of Bryce’s hunting buddies?
“Hey, anybody out there with a gun!” she called breathlessly. The mule shuddered beneath her. “I’m not an elk!”
Silence. The breeze stirred. Thunder grumbled over the next mountain range to the west. A chipmunk chattered at her from its perch on a fallen tree trunk. Her call was not returned. The mule was still quaking beneath her.
She didn’t hear the crack of the rifle until a split second before the bullet smashed into the dead stump behind her. Then everything happened so quickly, her brain couldn’t keep the order straight. She was falling backward. Clyde was a rear view of bulging hindquarters and flying hooves. She wondered dimly if she had been shot. Then she hit the ground and everything went black.
When the world began coming back into focus, she didn’t know if she was dead or alive. Alive, she suspected, wincing. Dead shouldn’t hurt. Awareness of her body came back pain by pain, and she opened her eyes and gasped at the face staring down at her. It wasn’t the face of anyone she had been told she would see in heaven, and she fully expected to go there even though she wasn’t a regular at church. No, the face that stared down at her was the face of a cowboy, and something in his eyes told her he may not have come from hell, but he had very likely seen it.
Beneath the brim of his gray cowboy hat, beneath the heavy rim of his brows, his narrow eyes were a stormy mix of gray and blue, swirling with what looked to Mari like madness. Anger, fear, a brittle tension that threatened to snap. He was probably fifty. His face was lean and weathered, brown and carved with lines like a tooled belt. Some mishap had left him with a puckered round scar the size of a penny on his left jaw. It pulled the corner of his mouth into a grotesque, perpetual frown. In his big, raw hands he held a very large, very deadly looking rifle.
“Don’t kill me,” Mari whispered, wondering wildly what she might do to prevent him, wondering if death might not be the most pleasant alternative she had. She was suddenly all too aware of just how remote this area was. Fragments of lines from her guidebooks flashed through her head-nearly a million acres of wilderness, ninety percent of it roadless. He could take her anywhere, do anything to her, and there would be no witnesses except the wildlife. Her heart shuddered like a dying bird.
“If I had meant to kill you, ma’am,” he said in a low, hoarse voice, “then you’d be dead.”
The voice. She blinked hard, as if that might somehow clear her head. The voice was J.D.’s voice, but lower, rustier. The face was a harder, abused version of J.D.’s face. Slowly, she pushed herself into a sitting position, her gaze darting from the face to the rifle and back.
“Del Rafferty?” she ventured weakly.
He narrowed his eyes to slits. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And Quinn said I’d never find you.”
Del walked ahead of his horse, his mood as sour as the acid churning in his stomach. He hadn’t meant to saddle himself with the blond woman. He had meant to scare her off. The last thing he wanted was a woman at his place, especially this woman.
His mind tried to scramble things around, as it often did, tried to make him think she had followed him up here, had been stalking him because she had sensed his presence, because she knew. It tried to tell him she was the other one in disguise, come to haunt him. But he brought the boot heel of reality down on those wild rantings and squashed them like June bugs. She wasn’t the other one. She was the new one and she was just here, that was all. He didn’t have to like it. All he had to do was deal with it. Tolerate her, then get rid of her.
Her mule was probably halfway home by now. Damn shame she couldn’t have managed to keep her fanny on its back.
“So, you live up here?” she asked.
Del glanced at her over his shoulder and said nothing. She sat in his saddle on his grullo gelding, her hair a wild mop of streaky blond, a bruise darkening on her right cheekbone. He supposed she was pretty, but he had long ago given up thinking about women in a sexual way. He tried never to think of them at all, same as he tried never to think about the ’Nam or the period after he had come home, which he referred to as his black hole period, when everything had been sucked into the dark void of his mind. He lived his life a second at a time, focusing totally on the moment, just to get him from one to the next.
“My friend was killed somewhere around here a couple of weeks ago. Shot in a hunting accident. The sheriff told me you’re the one who found her body.”
Del just walked on, trying not to hear her. He concentrated on his breathing, on putting one foot in front of the other as he led the horse up the steep trail to the summer cow camp. If he ignored her, she might become invisible to him-or he to her. That idea held great appeal. If he were invisible, she might stop talking.
“I was hoping you could answer some questions for me. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get some details. You know, fill in the gaps in the story.”
On the other hand, there was always the grim possibility that she never stopped talking. She had been talking to the mule when he had first brought her up in the cross hairs of the Leupold 10X scope.
“Quinn told me you didn’t come across the body until two days after the fact, but I was wondering if you might have heard anything or seen anything that day she was shot?”
The images flashed before his eyes-darkness, moonlight, the woman running. Suddenly blind to his surroundings, he stumbled on the trail and jerked himself back to the present, cursing himself mentally and cursing the woman. He could hear her ragged breathing, roaring in his ears as if it were coming over loudspeakers. He could hear the dogs. His heart pumped hard in his chest.
“… Anything might be helpful. I just need to know-”
“I don’t know!” he screamed, wheeling around so fast he frightened the horse. The gelding spooked and, wide-eyed, jerked back against the reins. Del ignored him. His gaze was hard on the blond woman, a corpse sitting in his saddle with a ragged, gory hole blown through her chest so that he could see straight through her, halfway to the Spanish Peaks. “I don’t wanna know what happened to you! I don’t wanna know about the tigers! Leave me alone! Leave me alone or I’ll leave you for the dog-boys, damn you!”
In a blink, the corpse was gone and the new woman was staring at him as moon-eyed as the horse, her face chalk white.
“L-Lucy,” she stammered weakly. “Her name was Lucy. I’m Mari.”
Del jerked around, ashamed and embarrassed, and kept on walking. This was why he stayed at the summer camp. He couldn’t be around people. They broke his concentration, snapped it like a thin rubber band, and then everything in his head came apart, the jagged fragments exploded outward, bright and dark and bloody. Beneath the metal plate, his brain began to throb.
The sky rumbled overhead and rain began to fall.
Mari didn’t say another word on the ride to his cabin. Del Rafferty had told her to begin with that he would radio for someone to come and get her. After his little break from reality, she could only hope it wouldn’t take that somebody too long to get up here. His mind obviously wasn’t firing on all cylinders. It would have been nice if someone had seen fit to tell her that right from the start. Of course, Quinn hadn’t believed she would find the man, and J.D. had warned her off-twice-which would have been enough in his mind. He probably couldn’t conceive of anyone going against his high-handed dictates.
The camp finally came into sight through the branches of the pine trees. A small cabin, complete with outhouse, a three-sided shed, and a corral with four horses in it. A trio of dogs raced out to meet them, barking, baying, yipping with excitement as they dashed around the horse and their master. Rafferty ignored them. He tied the horse to a hitching rail and went into the cabin without so much as glancing at Mari.
The rain came a little harder. Mari slid down off the gelding and darted for the shelter of the cabin before the man could lock her out. As she reached for the door-knob, she turned her head casually to the left and came face-to-face with a rattlesnake.
A scream ripped from her throat and she threw herself back, clutching at her heart. The snake sat coiled and poised to strike inside a box constructed of a wood frame covered with two layers of chicken wire. The cage was one foot square and nailed to the wall of the cabin at head height half a foot away from the door. The snake looked big enough to wrap itself around its prison several times over. It was as thick as her wrist, tan and brown and black with elliptical eyes as bright and shiny as jet beads. It flicked its tongue at her, its tail quivering.
What kind of lunatic kept something like that nailed to the side of his house?
The door swung open and Del Rafferty glared at her. “Leave my snake alone. Get in here where I can see you.”
He grabbed ahold of her wrist and pulled her into the cabin, jerking her past the snake so quickly that she had no time to worry about the thing striking her.
The cabin consisted of just one large room. There was a kitchen area with a one-burner wood stove, a tiny refrigerator, a crude table with two chairs. Open shelves were stocked with necessities. Canned foods, condiments, canisters of sugar and flour, cans of Dr Pepper. There was a sink with a pump-action faucet. The rest of the cabin was taken up by an old couch, a narrow, neatly made iron bed, and a dozen or more rifles, cleaned and polished and lined up in racks along the end wall.
Mari stared at the arsenal, jaw slack. The guns were all huge and deadly looking, some with scopes of exotic size and shape. Del Rafferty slipped the one he’d shot at her with off his shoulder and went about the business of unloading it and wiping it down, completely ignoring her as he did so. She thought of the way he’d fired at her, never offering so much as a word of apology afterward. She thought of Lucy riding into that same clearing.
Sheffield claimed he hadn’t seen her. Had Del Rafferty?
She backed away from him, her gaze locked on the scar that disfigured his jaw. The backs of her knees hit the edge of a kitchen chair, and she sat down abruptly, her hand landing on the tabletop, sending a hunting knife skittering.
Her stomach rolled over like a dead dog as she turned and, for the first time, took in the knives neatly lined up beside a sharpening stone and a can of 3-In-One oil. Del walked straight up to her, picked up the buck knife with its wide, vicious blade, and set it out of her reach, as if he thought she might somehow spoil its edge just by touching it. Her heart slid down from her tonsils to the base of her throat.
He called the Stars and Bars on a radio tucked among the condiments on the small kitchen counter. His only words on making contact were “Get up here. There’s a woman. I want her gone.” Then he went out to tend to his horse, leaving Mari alone with her imagination.
It took J.D. an hour to reach the camp. An hour in the cab of his truck, lurching up the side of the mountain on the old logging trail, a torrential downpour obscuring his vision to a watery blur and turning the trail into a quagmire. The old truck slid and skidded, bounced and jolted, rattling J.D.’s temper with every bump. By the time he climbed out of the mud-splattered 4X4, he was fit to wring somebody’s neck. Del hadn’t named names, but there was little doubt in J.D.’s mind that the woman plaguing his uncle’s solitary existence was Mary Lee.
Del’s hounds came running through the puddles, baying. Zip jumped out of the truck bed with a bark of welcome for his pals. The four dogs trotted around the pickup, sniffing and peeing on the tires. The rain had moved on to the other side of the Absarokas, on toward the Beartooth range, leaving everything dripping, glistening, fragrant. A million bugs filled the air, and the birds sang sweet spring songs.
All J.D. noticed was the mud that sucked at his boots as he stomped across the yard toward the cabin. When he got back home, they would be inoculating steers and heifers up to their asses in muck. On the up side, he could put off changing the irrigation dams to the hay ground for another day or two. He would give that job to Tucker and let Chaske get a start on trimming and shoeing the cow horses while he drove into New Eden to meet with the banker about the Flying K deal. The plans and schemes and worries zoomed around in his head like the swallows swooping through the air to feast on the post-rain insect swarms.
Del appeared out of the shadows of the woodshed looking pale and angry. His forehead was banded with lines of tension. The scar on his jaw jerked his mouth down at the corner.
“Don’t want her here,” he said tightly.
“That makes two of us,” J.D. grumbled.
“Never stops talking.”
“She claims to be capable of silence. I haven’t witnessed it yet myself.”
Del grabbed his arm in a viselike grip. His eyes were glassy. “Sometimes she’s the other one,” he blurted out desperately. “I don’t want the other one coming back. I don’t want anyone here. This is my place.”
“I know.” J.D. gentled his tone, reining back his own temper as he turned and faced his uncle.
His heart sank like a stone. Del was on one of his mental ledges. There had been a time when J.D. had fully expected him to hurl himself off into the great abyss-literally-but he had thought those times were past. The old soldier had been passing fair for a long time. He did well up here by himself-as well as could be expected, considering the war had fractured his mind beyond repair. He tended the cattle when they came up to summer pasture. The rest of the time he spent with his rifles and his dogs.
City people would have called that crazy, but for Del it was a reasonably sane existence, better than what he’d had in the V.A. hospital, better than what he had found in countless bottles of Jack Daniel’s after he had come back from the war. He had found a balance. Now that balance was slipping-thanks to Mary Lee Jennings.
“I’ll take her away,” J.D. said. “She’ll never come back. That’s a promise.”
A shudder jolted through Del. He stared at his nephew and wanted to cry like a child. He was a disgrace: weak, crazy, a burden on his family. The shame of that twined inside him with the threads of old memories, old fears, things from the past, from the ’Nam. All of it coiled together in his brain like snakes, writhing and biting one another, impossible to separate. He had tried to calm himself, to push all the bad stuff out of his head, but he was beyond calming. He had reached the point where the mental fist of self-protection had closed tightly over that small part of his mind that was sanity while the snakes battled and twisted and his heart pumped frantically.
“What about the other one? I don’t want the other one coming back.”
J.D. sighed heavily. “She won’t come back, Del. She’s dead.”
Del shook his head and turned away, rubbing the disk of smooth, hard flesh on his jaw, his fingers coming away wet with saliva. The North Vietnamese bullet that had shattered his face and blown a hole through his skull had severed nerves en route. Now he drooled like an idiot. He wiped the trail of spit with his shirt-sleeve. J.D. didn’t know the dead came back to him on a regular basis. J.D. didn’t know he often saw them in the trees at night, moving among the dark trunks-the corpses of men he had served with, the rotted bodies of men he had shot. The blonde. People said the dead were dead and gone. They didn’t know anything.
“You want me to send Tucker up?” J.D. asked, trying to hide the resignation and sadness in his voice with a businesslike tone. “Make sure everything’s ready for when we move the cattle up?”
“No, no,” Del mumbled, rubbing his scar, then its companion hidden beneath his graying dark hair. Sometimes he dreamed the knot of mended flesh was a screw he could remove and the whole top half of his head would come off and the serpents would crawl out and wither and die in the light of day. “No. Just want to be left alone. Leave me alone.”
J.D. watched him stagger away, his gait burdened by the leaden weight of the nightmares and torments that never left him. His heart ached at the sight. His uncle had been a good man once, honorable, strong. He had joined the marines and volunteered for combat duty because he was a patriot and his convictions ran deep. He had given himself in service to his country and his country had sent him back bent and broken, disfigured physically and mentally, a twisted shell that held little of the fine young man he had once been. He had gone away a hero and come back another responsibility to add to J.D.’s never-ending list.
When he turned toward the cabin, J.D. caught a glimpse of Mary Lee darting away from the front door, which stood ajar. His anger surging back full-force, he strode to the door and jerked it open. She stood ten feet from him, eyes wide, small hands clasped beneath an enormous pink mouth on her neon-orange sweatshirt.
He started to reach for her, then jerked his hand back and swung it in the direction of the door instead. “Get in the truck and don’t say a word,” he ordered through his teeth.
Mari obeyed without complaint. She wanted to get away from Del Rafferty. There would be plenty of time to fight with J.D. once the cabin was behind them. She darted through the door and past the snake, then stopped to roll up the legs of her jeans and slopped through the mud to the truck. Standing on the running board, she toed her gooey sneakers off and tossed them to the back. With a curt hand signal, J.D. ordered Zip to the back also and climbed in on the driver’s side. He didn’t speak until they were pointed down the mountain and the woods had swallowed up the camp behind them.
“I told you to leave him alone.”
“You’re not my father,” Mari said tightly. “You can’t tell me what to do. Come to think of it, neither could he.”
He looked at her as if just the idea of her disobedience were incomprehensible. “I told you to leave him alone. I meant it. Did you think I said it just because I like the sound of my own voice?”
“I’m sure I don’t know why you said it. You never bothered to explain. It apparently never occurred to you to say, ‘oh, by the way, Mary Lee, steer clear of my uncle because he’s certifiably bizarre.’ ”
J.D.’s grip tightened on the steering wheel as the pickup bucked down the logging trail. He clenched his jaw and blinked hard, as if his fury were impeding his vision. “You don’t have any idea what you’ve done.”
“What I’ve done! Excuse me, but I was the one he tried to shoot.”
“He didn’t try to shoot you. If Del had wanted to shoot you, you’d be dead now.”
“Like Lucy?” The words were out of her mouth before her brain had a chance to snatch them back.
J.D. shot her a narrow glare. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“What do you think it means?” she snapped. “Your uncle is a psychotic with enough guns to invade Cuba single-handed-”
“He’s not psychotic.”
“He shot at me. He mistook me for a talking corpse-”
“He’s got problems,” J.D. admitted grudgingly while wrestling for control of the steering wheel. The pickup roared a protest when he shifted gears, pumping the brakes as they angled down a steep grade. “I told you to leave him alone. If you’d listened-”
“If you’d bothered to explain-”
“I don’t have to explain anything to you!” he roared, the anger and frustration tearing through him. He hated having outsiders messing with his life, his land, his family. He especially hated this one because a part of him he seemed to have no control over wanted her so badly. “I don’t owe you nothing, lady, you got that? You don’t belong here-”
“Oh, give me a break with that King of the Mountain crap,” Mari sneered, bracing a hand against the dash as the truck pitched violently from side to side. “It’s a free country, your highness. I’m here and I don’t give a rat’s ass whether you like it or not. My friend is dead and I’m going to find out why. I don’t care what you-”
“It was an accident! Christ, why can’t you just leave it at that? It was an accident. It happened. It’s over. Justice was served.”
“Not by a long way. I don’t call a fine and a slap on the wrist justice. And frankly, there’s something about this whole accident scenario that smells like an open sewer under a hot sun at high noon.”
J.D. stared at her through slitted eyes, his foot easing off the gas. “What do you mean?”
Mari opened her mouth to answer him and had it shut for her as the front end of the truck flung itself downward and they came to a jarring halt. She slammed sideways into the dashboard and fell to her knees on the floor. J.D. banged his head on the windshield and pulled himself back, swearing loudly. He shifted the truck into reverse and tried to rock it up out of the hole, spewing mud in all directions as the tires spun. The pickup stayed rooted to the spot.
“Great,” he snapped, clambering down out of the cab and slamming the door.
Mari swung her door open and tumbled out, forgetting she was barefoot, annoyed at the interruption of their fight. She staggered and stumbled around the nose of the truck, struggling to keep herself upright on the steep hillside. Mud and dead leaves oozed up between her toes. Zip leapt out of the back of the truck and dashed off into the woods after adventure, a big grin on his face.
“Great job of driving, Rafferty,” Mari jeered.
He lifted a finger in warning. “Don’t start with me, Mary Lee. I’m mad as hell the way it is.”
“You’re mad? I’ve been shot at, kidnapped, had the pee scared out of me, and spent the last hour wondering if anyone would show up to save me before Rambo decided to skin me with one of his many knives and fashion lampshades out of my hide. If anyone has a right to be angry here, it’s me.”
J.D. leaned over her, towering above her more than usual with the added advantage of standing uphill. “You don’t have any rights,” he bellowed. “You don’t belong here. I told you to stay away!”
“And I told you to quit bossing me around!” Mari shouted. She planted both hands against his chest and shoved him as hard as she could.
He shoved back automatically, knocking her off balance. Mari let out a little shriek and caught him around the knees as she slipped. Off guard and off balance, J.D. dropped like a felled sequoia, and they went down the hillside in a tangle of arms and legs and bodies, grunting, swearing, tumbling over each other.
They came to rest in a spot where the ground flattened out just before a huge moss-covered boulder. Mari was on the bottom. J.D. rose up over her, the heels of his hands digging into the soft ground on either side of her head.
She stared up at him, her deep clear blue eyes unfocused until she blinked hard to clear away the fog. There were twigs and leaves stuck in her hair and a bruise darkening on her cheek. Her lips were parted, her breath puffing in and out. The need that had gripped J.D. in its talons for days now tightened its hold ruthlessly.
Instantly the air around them seemed suddenly hotter, thicker, redolent with the ripe, fertile scents of the forest. Their gazes locked and held. J.D. moved slightly, experimentally, against her. Her breath caught. Her eyes widened. She made no move to protest.
“You make me so damn mad, Mary Lee,” he whispered. Mad with need of her. Every other emotion he had felt toward her-the anger, the frustration, the kinder feelings he wouldn’t name-channeled themselves into the desire, making it burn hotter, brighter. It didn’t matter that she was wrong for him. Nothing mattered except the need. “You make me want you,” he growled.
Mari started to deny the charge but stopped herself. She could feel his erection against her and didn’t bother to tell herself she didn’t want him. She did. She wanted him with every fiber of her being. The need burst through her, radiating out from the hard fist of desire in the core of her, astonishing her. She wasn’t the sort to live by her hormones. She didn’t tumble into bed with just any man. And this man made her as angry as he made her hot. He was stubborn, arrogant, high-handed, hard-headed. She remembered thinking that the attraction that flared between the two of them was good for nothing but wild, hot, mind-numbing sex.
At the moment she could not for the life of her see what was so bad about that.
“I don’t want you here,” he murmured, lowering himself onto her. He leaned on one elbow and with his other hand stroked the tangled strands of hair back from her face. His breath came harder at the feel of her breasts against his chest. “I don’t want you here, but I want you so bad I can’t stand it. I want you now. Right now. You gonna try to stop me this time, Mary Lee?”
It wasn’t a challenge, it was her last chance. The moment shimmered between them, quivered with tension. J.D. stared down into her eyes, waiting. She was too aware of his arousal, too aware of her own. The sensitive flesh between her legs was pounding with need, aching for the feel of him, and he was more than ready to comply. Would she try to stop him? Did she want to?
Slowly she shook her head.
He lowered his mouth to hers, sealing their fate. The instant their lips touched, the second his tongue slid against hers, all sanity was lost, vaporized by the heat that flared between them. He kissed her roughly, wildly, possessively. She locked her hands around the back of his head and kissed him back with equal abandon.
They tore at their clothes. The snaps of his work shirt pulled apart and her small, cool hands were on his chest, combing through the thicket of dark hair. Her fingers ran down over the taut muscles of his belly and back. He pulled her sweatshirt and T-shirt off in one tangle, barely breaking the kiss, and blindly flung the knotted mess aside into a huckleberry bush. Then her breasts were naked against him, and whatever scrap of reason he might have had left was incinerated.
Mari gasped at the touch of his body against hers. He was fever hot. Her every nerve ending was vibrating, quivering at the slightest contact. She was aware of each chest hair that brushed across her nipples. They kissed and groped, rolling around on their little plateau of ground, oblivious of the mud, the leaves, the twigs; blind to everything but passion.
They came up on their knees and J.D. bent her back over his arm and fastened his mouth on her breast, flicking his tongue against her nipple, then sucking hard, wringing wild cries from her. Mari’s fingers tangled with his at the waist of her jeans, fumbling with the button, wrestling the zipper down.
Pants and panties were shoved out of the way. Her legs parted and his big hand found her most tender flesh. Hot. Wet. Aching for his touch. He parted the delicate folds with his callused fingertips and she arched against him, inviting him, begging him.
Mari twisted and bucked against him, mindless with need, desperate for the feel of him inside her. She worked a hand between their bodies and held him, pulling on him, rubbing him through the soft fabric of his old jeans, wringing a deep moan up from the depths of his chest.
Dragging his mouth down to her breasts again, he kissed her and nipped her as he tore his belt loose and struggled to free himself. Mari pushed him back, sinking to her knees in the soft ground, kissing his chest. Eager to please and torture him as he had her, she found the brown button of his flat male nipple and captured it lightly between her teeth, rubbing the tip of her tongue back and forth across it. She shoved his hands aside and fought with the fly of his jeans, wrenching the zipper down. His white cotton briefs were tugged down quickly, and he was in her hands, as hard and smooth as a steel rod, hot and heavy and throbbing with life.
J.D.’s control broke at the feel of her fingers closing around him. He shoved her back down and mounted her, driving fully into her in one powerful thrust. She called his name and came immediately, powerfully. J.D. gritted his teeth and hung on as her woman’s body tightened rhythmically, exquisitely around him. Her fingertips dug into his back. Her wild cries called him to join her in ecstasy. Beyond holding back, he began to move, pumping in and out of her, reaching deep with every stroke.
“Wrap your legs around me, Mary Lee,” he commanded, then groaned as she did so, pulling him deeper still.
Mari locked her thighs around his hips, her arms around his heaving ribs, then she tucked her head against his shoulder and hung on for the ride. She was past identifying individual sensations. There were no words for the place he was taking her. Paradise had been found in that first moment of joining, but he was taking her beyond paradise into uncharted territory at a pace that stole her breath. The heat was engulfing them. She was on fire with bliss. Every thrust touched a place inside her no other man had ever managed to find.
The second explosion was even more enormous than the first. Behind her eyelids everything went white. She heard J.D. groan as he buried himself deep one last time and came in a hot rush. Then time and space ceased to exist.
Awareness returned layer by gossamer layer. She was breathing, a chore that consumed her concentration for several moments. When she thought she had it mastered, she worked at opening her eyes. Her eyelids seemed to weigh ten pounds each and required incredible mental stamina to raise. When the feat was accomplished, she was staring into J.D.’s ear. He lay heavily on top of her, motionless.
“Are we still alive?” she asked in awe.
He raised himself up slowly. His chest was heaving. There were bits of dead leaf caught in his chest hair. Mari reached up and gently brushed it away, focusing on the task, putting off the inevitable.
J.D. studied her carefully, taking in her fading blush and hooded eyes. There was a bruise on her cheek. He couldn’t remember whether she had it before. Her wild mane was snarled and tangled with twigs and crumbs of earth.
Christ almighty. They were in the middle of the woods, lying naked on a carpet of wet dead leaves. Around them life on the mountain went on as usual. A jay called thief! from somewhere in the canopy of branches above them. A yellow warbler sang merrily-wee-see-wee-see-wiss-wiss-u. A red squirrel darted past them and Zip bounded from between a pair of aspen saplings and gave chase, gracefully leaping over his master’s prone form.
Embarrassment washed through J.D. He never lost control with a woman. Never. Even as a teenager he had managed his lust with an iron fist. It was a point of honor, part of the pledge he had taken all those years ago. It rattled him to think he could forget those hard lessons in the time it took to unzip his jeans.
Mary Lee was looking up at him now, watching him carefully. Mary Lee, the outsider. Mary Lee, heir to the throne of Lucy MacAdam.
Jesus, Rafferty, what were you thinking?
He moved away from her, jerking his pants up and fumbling with the zipper. Mari watched him, a cold, hard lump of dread settling in her stomach. It occurred to her belatedly that this was what was wrong with wild, hot, mind-numbing sex. Afterward, when the novocaine of arousal faded, you were left with whatever pains and problems were there to begin with. Rafferty didn’t want her on his precious mountain. He couldn’t look at her without seeing Lucy and Bryce and everyone else who was trying to take his homeland away from him.
She sighed and reached for the multicolored ball of fabric that was her shirt. Untangling the sleeves, she pulled T-shirt and sweatshirt over her head together, then shook her hair and tried to comb her fingers through it to dislodge the debris.
“Well, it was fun while it lasted,” she said dryly.
J.D. shot her a look as he shrugged into his shirt. She was trying to be tough. She was trying to be as nonchalant about this as Lucy would have been. But she didn’t look tough or unconcerned. She looked fragile. As if she needed holding. God knew he wasn’t the man to offer comfort or reassurance. He shouldn’t have wanted anything more between them than animosity. That was safest. That was best.
Their gazes caught. Her eyes were clear and huge, like blue glass jewels set deep beneath her dark brows. Her mouth was a soft, vulnerable bow, her lips swollen from his kisses. Possessiveness surged through him. He couldn’t seem to stop it. He reached for her, pulled her into his embrace, his gaze locked on hers.
“If you think this is over, you’d better think again, Mary Lee.”
Mari blinked at him, breathless at the prospects his words opened up. “We’re not finished?”
“Not by a long shot.” He bent his head and nuzzled her cheek, nipped her throat, her earlobe. He stroked a hand down her back to her bare bottom. His fingers cupped and kneaded the ripe swell of one buttock. He pulled her snug against him and growled low in his throat as arousal tightened again in his groin. “Hell, we just barely took the edge off.”