DREW WAS despondent over the attack. He paced back and forth along one end of the room in a black Reebok warm-up suit. His shoes were untied. His hair stood up in tufts that he continuously ran his hands back over as if to soothe himself. “This is terrible,” he said for the fourth time. “We’ve never had anything like this happen.”
Mari tried not to watch him pace. Moving her eyeballs intensified the pain drumming relentlessly in her head. Sheriff Quinn had been rousted out of his bed for the event-on Drew’s insistence. He leaned against the dresser, looking glum, while a deputy poked around the room. Raoul the night manager hovered outside the open door, trying not to appear superfluous.
“God, I feel so guilty,” Kevin said. He reached for Mari’s hand and gave it a squeeze. He sat beside her on the disheveled bed, looking like an ad for Calvin Klein nightwear. A navy blue silk robe was loosely belted at his slim waist, the V opening revealing a smooth, tightly muscled chest. Baggy beach shorts stopped just short of his knees. He was barefoot. “We’ve been talking about replacing these old locks with card keys for months. Maybe if we’d done it, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“It’s not your fault, Kev,” Mari murmured, tightening her fingers around his, offering him more comfort than he was giving her.
“You didn’t get a look at the fella at all?” Quinn said on a yawn.
She started to shake her head but caught herself. “It was dark. I hit the first switch when I came in, but the light bulb was burned out. At least, that’s what I assumed. Then everything happened too fast. He had on dark clothes and a ski mask. That’s all I can say for certain.”
“Was he tall, short, big, small?”
“Taller than me. Stronger than me.” At the moment she figured anyone not on a life support system was probably stronger than she was. Nausea swirled through her head and stomach. Her skull felt like a cracked egg. She gingerly touched the sore spot just behind her right temple. Her fingers came away sticky with congealing blood.
Kevin turned a little gray at the sight. “I’ll go get you an ice bag,” he offered, and left the room, nearly bowling Raoul over on his way out.
“Can you tell if anything was taken?” Quinn asked, rubbing the bridge of his crooked nose. He looked as if he had been sleeping in his uniform shirt. His hair was a field of wheat stubble that had been ravaged by cyclone winds.
Mari’s first instinctive fear had been for her guitar, but it sat unharmed in a corner. The rest of the room was strewn with clothes and upended furniture. She didn’t have anything worth taking. No expensive jewelry, no stashes of cash or traveler’s checks. The thief had struck out picking her room-if it had been a thief at all.
Her head boomed and echoed with the possibilities.
“Nothing was taken as far as I could tell,” she said. She looked sideways at the big sheriff, wondering if he would be receptive to hearing her theories concerning Lucy. Not, she decided. Dan Quinn struck her as a simple man. Steak and potatoes. The missionary position. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
He glanced at Drew. “Anybody else report hearing anything, seeing anything unusual?”
“Not at all. It was a normal night until this.” Drew dropped down on one knee in front of Mari and gazed up at her, tortured with guilt. “I’m so very sorry, luv.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I’ll have Raoul move your things to a suite while we’re gone to the emergency room.” At the door, the night manager brightened like a terrier at the prospect of importance. Drew’s expression toughened as Mari opened her mouth to protest. “You’re having that bump checked, and that’s the end of it. I’ll drive you myself.”
“We’ll dust the room for prints,” Quinn said, fighting another yawn. “And we’ll question the rest of the guests on this floor in the morning. See if they might have noticed anything. I’ve got the deputies on patrol looking out for anyone suspicious. Reckon he’s either long gone or gone to ground by now, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled.”
He looked as if he needed his peeled with a paring knife. The man was ready to fall asleep on his feet. Mari bit back her own questions. They could wait until morning, at least until the sheriff had gotten some sleep.
As promised, Drew delivered her to the New Eden Community Hospital himself. Kevin, admittedly woozy at the prospect of needles and blood, stayed behind to supervise while the deputy dusted the room for fingerprints and Raoul began the moving process. They took Drew’s black Porsche to the small hospital. Mari leaned back in the reclining leather seat and tried to concentrate on something other than the need to throw up.
“It’s such a shock,” Drew said. “One simply doesn’t expect crime in a place like New Eden. That’s part of the lure, isn’t it? Clean air, idyllic setting, utopian values.”
He was talking to himself. Trying to reason away the shock. Mari listened, understanding perfectly. Paradise wasn’t supposed to have a dark side. She felt as if that were the only side she was seeing-the parallel universe, where everything was cast in sinister shadows. Like cutting open a perfect apple and finding it full of rot and worms.
Her stomach rolled at the analogy.
“Drew,” she said weakly as sweat misted across her skin. “Do you have any idea what Lucy might have been into?”
“Into?” He wheeled the Porsche under the portico at the emergency room entrance. The white glow of fluorescent lighting spilled out of the hospital doors like artificial moonlight. “How do you mean?” he asked carefully.
“You said she liked to be in the thick of things, stirring up trouble. What if she poked at the wrong hornet’s nest? Did you ever think about that?”
He frowned, looking handsome and rumpled, his lean cheeks shadowed with stubble, his brows slashing down above his green eyes. “I think you took a nasty smack on the noggin. We ought to concentrate on that for the moment. Don’t let’s worry about Lucy. There’s nothing we can do to help her now.”
He started to turn for the door, but Mari caught his arm. Just that much movement unbalanced her enough to send dinner sluicing up the back of her throat. Her brain felt disconnected from her body, as if her psyche were trying to escape.
“Drew?” she asked, wanting desperately to slide into unconsciousness again. “Do you think Lucy could have been blackmailing someone?”
“I think you’re on the verge of delirium,” he said brusquely. “Let’s get you inside.”
She spent what was left of the night in the hospital. Dr. Larimer-who also had to be called in from the comfort of his bed-checked her eyes and reflexes, put three stitches in the cut on her head, and pronounced her fit.
“Fit for what?” Drew demanded, incensed at the man’s lack of concern.
The doctor, a squat man with unflattering horn-rimmed glasses and a retreating dark hairline, gave Drew an impatient look. “For whatever. It’s just a mild concussion.”
Nothing he didn’t see every day in the course of treating ranch hands and rodeo cowboys. This was tough country full of hardy folk. The look he leveled at Drew clearly set him outside that realm.
“We’ll keep you overnight for observation,” Larimer pronounced to Mari, obviously sensing the potential for trouble from these outsiders.
Mari sent Drew back to the Moose. All she wanted was a bed and a handful of painkillers, something to shut out the pounding and the suspicions for a few hours. What she got was a room across the hall from a crying baby. She lay in bed, the smell of bleach from the pillowcase burning her nose, thoughts of Lucy chasing each other through her head, the sound of crying rubbing her nerve endings raw.
She longed for comfort and thought of J.D. Had it been only hours earlier that she had lain in bed with him, listening to the rain? The memory was real enough for her to recall the warmth of his body, the strength of his arm around her, the pleasant scent of man and love-making. And yet it seemed surreal enough to make her wonder if she hadn’t imagined the whole encounter. She didn’t fall in lust with alpha males. She hadn’t come to Montana looking to bed a cowboy.
Even so, she closed her eyes and pretended he was there now, that she was tucked back to front against his big, muscular body. She pretended they belonged together, she pretended that he cared. The alternative was to feel alone. And on a night when thoughts of Lucy haunted her, thoughts of a death in the wilderness and a life with no one to love, alone was the last thing she wanted to feel.
Quinn looked better with a shave and a fresh shirt. His mood hadn’t improved with the light of a new day, however. He sat behind his desk, longing to sink his teeth into the fudge-caramel brownies his wife had sent to work with him for his coffee break, but he had the sinking feeling his coffee break wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
Marilee Jennings sat across from him, pale, dark-eyed with an ugly bruise on her cheek and an earnest expression that boded ill. It was almost enough to distract him from the fact that she was wearing another of her incongruous outfits-a filmy flowered skirt, paddock boots, a man-size denim jacket over a Save-the-Planet T-shirt.
Quinn didn’t like to think of anyone getting attacked in his territory. He especially didn’t like to think of any outsider getting attacked. They tended to squeal like stuck pigs at the least provocation-not that getting clubbed wasn’t just cause for outrage-and they tended to drag lawyers around with them like Dobermans on leashes. A simple case could suddenly be blown into the crime of the century with packs of roving media people sniffing around town for dirt and the lawyers preaching on the street corners like demented evangelists. The prospects set his stomach to churning. He frowned at the pyramid of brownies and the coffee growing cold in his Super Dad mug.
Life here had been a whole hell of a lot simpler B.C.-before celebrities.
“How are you doing this morning, Miz Jennings?” he asked politely. Leaning his elbows on the desktop, he discreetly pushed the plate of brownies out of his range of vision.
She gave him a crooked smile that held more humor than he would have expected. “I have a new sympathy for soccer balls-which is exactly what my head feels like. I’m told I’ll be fine in a day or two.”
“You didn’t really need to come in this morning, ma’am. It could have waited.”
“I take it there’s no sign of the man who attacked me?”
He shook his head, waiting for the diatribe on the incompetency of small-town police to begin. Marilee Jennings just looked sad, a little haunted maybe.
“I wouldn’t worry about him bothering you again,” he said. “He’s likely moved on to another town. Thieves tend to get skittish when they’ve come close to being caught.”
“If he was just a thief.”
Quinn tipped his head. “What do you mean?”
Mari took a deep breath, tightening her fingers into a knot in her lap. “I’m not sure he was there to rob me. I think he may have been looking for something in particular.”
“Such as?”
“I’m not sure.” He looked impatient and she rushed on before her courage could run out. “You know Lucy MacAdam’s house was broken into a few days after her death-”
“Vandals,” he said, moving his huge shoulders. “Sure I know about it. J. D. Rafferty called me out to have a look.”
“But what if it wasn’t vandals? Miller Daggrepont’s office was broken into not long after. Daggrepont was Lucy’s attorney. Don’t you find that strange?”
“Not especially.” He cut a glance at his brownies, unconsciously flicked his tongue across his lower lip, and looked back at Mari. He seemed to get larger and more intimidating the thinner his patience became. “It’s not unusual for a ranch house to get broken into when kids think there’s no one around to care or to catch them. I’m not saying it’s a common thing, but it happens. As for Daggrepont’s office, it’s just across the alley from the Hell and Gone. Gets broken into a couple times a year. I keep telling Miller to put a better lock on the door, but I guess he’d rather collect the insurance on that junk he claims is antique.”
“But now my hotel room has been broken into,” Mari pointed out, struggling to hold on to her own small scrap of patience. She was exhausted and her head was pounding. She wanted to take a couple of the painkillers Dr. Larimer had prescribed, climb into bed, and sleep for a week, but she had thought-hoped-she could arouse Quinn’s cop instincts first. If he saw anything in her suspicions, he might assign someone to check out the coincidences, and he might approach the case of her attack from a different angle.
He wasn’t looking aroused.
“Doesn’t that seem a little too coincidental?” she pressed on. “I was a friend of Lucy’s. She left all her stuff to me. What if she left me something someone wanted badly enough to commit a crime to get?”
“Did she?”
She closed her eyes against the frustration and the pain. He probably already thought she was a lunatic. Another “I don’t know” would seal her fate with him. “She left a letter for me in the event of her death-which in itself was strange. In the letter she mentioned a book-Martindale-Hubbell, it’s a directory of attorneys. There’s a set in her study, but one is missing.”
“If it’s missing and you think it’s what the thief was after, then why would he break into Miller’s office or into your room? He could have gotten it out of Miz MacAdam’s study when he broke in there.”
“Lucy might have hidden it. He might have thought she gave it to Daggrepont for safekeeping or that I had somehow managed to get ahold of it.”
“And why would she hide a directory of attorneys?”
“Maybe there’s something in it.”
“Such as?”
I don’t know. Three words guaranteed to jerk a cop’s chain. They were linear thinkers, cops. They liked evidence and logic and simple explanations. She could give Quinn none of those things. All she had was a matrix of ugly possibilities and hunches with Lucy at the center. If she told him she saw Judge MacDonald Townsend snorting cocaine at a party, he would likely ask her what she was on at the time.
Townsend was above reproach. She probably wouldn’t have believed it herself if she hadn’t seen it with her own two eyes, and if she hadn’t known about the judge and Lucy. Nor was Quinn liable to see anything strange about Ben Lucas representing Sheffield in the matter of Lucy’s death. Lucas was a prominent attorney with a license to practice in Montana. He ran in the same circles as Sheffield. So what if he had known Lucy back in Sacramento?
“I don’t mean to sound like a crackpot. But there are just some things about Lucy’s death that have bothered me from the first. Now this happens.”
“It was an open and shut case, Miz Jennings,” Quinn said tightly. “We got the man responsible.”
“Sheffield claimed he never saw Lucy.”
“I imagine he was lying about that. He shot a woman by mistake. When he realized what he’d done, he panicked.”
“Or someone else might have shot her.”
The sheriff blew out a gust of air. His brows plowed a deep V above the bridge of his crooked nose. The scar on his cheek was a vivid slash of red. “I suppose you have some idea who? I suppose you figure it was this mystery man who wants this mystery book you don’t really know anything about.”
“I’m only saying there are other possibilities. What about this hired hand of Lucy’s who disappeared after she was killed? Kendall Morton. By all accounts, he was a shady character.”
“That isn’t against the law in Montana, miss.”
“But did you check him out?” Mari badgered. “Did you at least check his criminal record?”
“I can’t divulge that kind of information,” Quinn said, color creeping up his thick neck into his face. “We did all that was necessary-”
“Necessary?” Mari scoffed, her hold on her temper slipping. “You hung a misdemeanor on a socialite and sent him back to Beverly Hills to liposuction the fat out of rich women’s butts. Did you even consider any other suspects? What about Del Rafferty? He took a shot at me yesterday!”
Quinn didn’t bat an eye. He went on as if people getting shot at was as ordinary as grass growing. “But he didn’t kill you, did he? If Del wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Maybe he wanted Lucy dead.”
“Because he wanted this directory of attorneys so he could hunt them all down and kill them too?”
“Don’t patronize me, Sheriff,” Mari snapped, leaning ahead in her chair. “Del Rafferty’s elevator stops well short of the top floor. He shot at me for coming into his territory. He might have thought he had reason to get rid of Lucy altogether.”
She felt like a traitor for saying it. Automatically she thought of J.D., of the way he protected and defended his uncle. She thought of Del. He had scared the hell out of her, but the look in his eyes kept coming back to her, tearing at her heart. Hell was his state of mind.
Quinn fixed her with a look of cold anger. “Listen, Miz Jennings: Del isn’t quite right in the head. Everybody knows that. But he don’t go around killing people. And if he somehow accidentally shot that woman-which is next to impossible-he would have ’fessed up. No Rafferty I ever knew would let an innocent man take the blame for something he did.”
Defeated, Mari held up a hand in surrender. Quinn would settle for nothing less than a smoking gun. He wasn’t about to make his life any harder by opening a case for which he already had a conviction. “Okay, I give up. I can see this is pointless.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said, rising to his full height, jaw set in affront. “I believe it is. I’m sorry your friend was killed. I’m sorry you were attacked. Believe me when I say I wish to God it hadn’t happened. I especially wish it hadn’t happened here.”
Which was his not-so-subtle way of saying he wished she and Lucy and all of their kind had never come to New Eden.
Mari stood slowly and looked Quinn square in the eye. “I wish that too, Sheriff. With all my heart.”
“What are you doin’ with that colt?” J.D. demanded.
Will, who was turning twelve that very day, was already in the saddle. The Appaloosa gelding was just two and wild as a cob. He’d run loose his whole life, had never felt the hand of man until Chaske ran him down from the hills three weeks before. J.D. had taken a shine to him instantly. The young horse had a fine way of carrying himself and a smart look in his eyes. He was a copper chestnut with white legs and blanket of snow white over his hindquarters. J.D. had been working him in the round pen with Chaske’s help, trying to get the colt used to people, then to a saddle. He hadn’t been ridden more than twice.
As Will took a short hold on the reins, the colt danced, his head sky high. He rolled his white-ringed eyes back, trying to see the unfamiliar person on his back.
Will shot J.D. a smug grin. “I’m gonna ride him.”
The feeling that burst through J.D. was jealousy, pure and simple. The colt was his. He had a natural talent with horses, and that was one thing his snot-nosed little brother couldn’t horn in on. Except now he was. Nothing was sacred.
“You’re gonna get dumped on your bony little butt, shithead. Get off him.”
Will took a tighter hold on the reins. The colt danced around in a circle, blowing through flared nostrils. The color was gone from Will’s face, but he showed no other sign of losing his nerve. “I can ride him if I want, John Dopeface. You don’t own him.”
“I own him more than you do,” J.D. shot back. He jumped up on a rail on the corral fence and reached for the colt’s bridle. The horse shied sideways, beyond trusting anyone. “Get off before you ruin him!”
Will ignored him, his attention snagged by the sound of Sondra’s voice as she and some of her town friends came down across the yard toward the corral. She was laughing and talking, her voice like the sound of water tumbling down a mountain stream. She dressed like a town lady, which J.D. hated, but then, he hated most everything about Sondra and Sondra’s snotty friends. He was too busy glaring at them to notice that Will was taking the colt out through the gate.
Everything seemed to happen at once then. Will said something to catch his mother’s attention. She turned toward him, smiling brightly, and raised a hand to wave. The colt went off like a rocket. He shot straight up in the air, all four legs coming off the ground. Will’s eyes went as round as silver dollars, then squeezed shut as the horse came down, driving his head down between his knees and jerking him halfway over the animal’s neck in the process.
There was nothing to do but watch the wreck happen. J.D. stayed on the rail, his fingers digging into the rough wood. Sondra was screaming. Her lover went running to find help, but there was no helping Will. He would be the victim of his own stupidity. So would the colt.
J.D. watched, sick at heart, as the colt pitched and squealed, wild with fright. Will somersaulted off and hit the dirt with a sickening thud. The colt wheeled and ran away from the crowd and straight into the corral fence. He hurled himself up against it, trying desperately to clear the high rail, tangling his forelegs between the bars in the process.
As the townspeople crowded around the groaning Will, J.D. went to the aid of the horse, talking to him softly, trying to calm him, praying the animal wouldn’t break a leg in his scramble to free himself from his predicament. The colt’s copper coat was nearly black with sweat and flecked with lather. Blood ran down the white stockings on his forelegs, where he had scraped the skin away against the bars of the fence.
Chaske came and took the horse, frowning darkly at the damage that had been done to the animal-physically and mentally. Every bit of work they had done was ruined that quickly, that carelessly. J.D. started to follow him toward the barn, but the old man shook his head and shot a meaningful glance at the crowd gathered around Will.
“See to your brother first.”
J.D. started to protest, but bit the words back as Chaske stared at him long and hard.
Will was alive and moaning, soaking up the sympathies of the townspeople like an obnoxious little sponge. J.D. was more worried about the colt. Getting dumped was a common enough occurrence; people seldom died of it and it was generally their own fault anyway. The colt, on the other hand, might never lose his mistrust of people now. And that was all Will’s fault.
He took up a stance where he could scowl down at Will. Sondra glared up at him through her tears. She kneeled in the dirt beside her baby, cradling his head in her lap, stroking his cheek as he cried softly and held one arm against his middle. “How could you do this!”
J.D. all but jumped back at the attack. “It wasn’t my fault! I told him he’d break his stupid neck!”
“You should have stopped him. My God, J.D., you’re sixteen. Will’s just a little boy! Don’t you have any sense of responsibility at all?”
She couldn’t have hit him any harder with an ax handle. Responsibility? What would she know about responsibility? She was the one who had left her family for her own selfish reasons. She didn’t know spit about responsibility. And she’d bred a son in her own selfish image. J.D. knew without question that Will would turn the story around so that none of the blame would rest on his own head. It would all be J.D.’s responsibility-like the chores and the house and every job Dad ignored because he was too busy pining away for a wife who was as faithless as a bitch in heat. And J.D. would take it and bear up and never say a word to anyone, because he was a Rafferty, and that was his biggest responsibility.
J.D. brought himself back to the present, shaking his head at the fog that had shrouded his brain. It wasn’t like him to look back. What was done was done. It didn’t matter anymore.
But as he looked across the pen at Will, he knew that wasn’t true. It did matter. It mattered a lot. The stakes had only gotten higher and higher with the passage of time, until now everything hung in the balance. The ranch sat on the pinnacle, teetering precariously. Will was the weight that could tip it either way.
They hadn’t spoken a word since the scene outside the Hell and Gone. J.D. hadn’t trusted himself. He knew his temper only made things worse, but he could hardly look at Will these days without seeing red. From the beginning he had been the one who loved the ranch, worked the ranch, fought tooth and nail for the ranch, yet Will had the power to lose it for him. Between his gambling and his womanizing, he seemed hell-bent on doing just that.
The idea of not being in control of his own destiny made J.D. furious and terrified in a way nothing else could. All their futures-his, Del’s, Tucker’s, Chaske’s-were sliding into the hands of a man who had never taken responsibility for anything in his life.
Will leaned against the side of the barn, bent over at the waist, drinking from the hose. He had shown up in time for breakfast, refused everything but black coffee, which he drank in silence, leaning back against the kitchen counter. Mirrored aviator sunglasses shaded eyes that were most probably bloodshot. He took them off now and sprayed himself in the face with the water.
They had spent the day finishing inoculations and all the other miscellaneous checks on the steers and heifers. As predicted, the corral was a sea of mud, churned deep by the hooves of thousand-pound animals. J.D. was covered with muck to his waist. He could feel flecks of it drying on his face and the back of his neck. Pushing himself away from the rail, he made his way toward the hose.
Will handed it to him, then stood back, settled his sunglasses into place, and slicked his dark hair back with his hands, turning his profile to the setting sun. He looked like a movie star bathed in golden light. Tom Cruise come to play cowboy for a day in Hollywood’s newest fun spot. The analogy only fueled J.D.’s temper. He used the hose to douse it, letting the cold well water pour over the back of his head and down the sides of his face.
Tucker had already gone to the house to see about supper. Chaske was doing the chores. The day was winding down, the sun sliding toward the far side of the Gallatin range. Down the hill from the pens, the cattle dogs were hunting mice, bounding through the bluebells and needlegrass, setting the tall stalks of beargrass bending to and fro like the stems of metronomes. Somewhere in the woods beyond, a wild tom turkey gobbled, advertising for a date.
J.D. turned the water off and straightened slowly, taking in all of those things, feeling a sharp pang of longing in his chest, as if they were already lost.
“We need to talk,” he said quietly.
Will regarded him from behind the one-way glass of his aviator lenses. There was no infamous grin, no joke, no dimples cutting into his cheeks. “Translate that for me, J.D. You want to talk with me or at me?”
“We need to talk about Samantha.”
He shook his head, turned, and looked out at the meadow where the dogs were chasing each other. “I don’t want to have this conversation.”
“Neither do I.”
The grin cut across his face then, as sharp as a scimitar. “Then let’s skip it.”
“And pretend nothing’s wrong? You don’t want to deal with it, so we should ignore it?” J.D. shook his head, struggling to hold his temper when what he wanted to do was wrap his hands around his brother’s throat and choke him until his eyes bugged out. “Do you have any idea how serious this could be-her falling in with Bryce’s crowd? Do you even have a clue, Will?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a clue,” Will sneered. “She’s my wife. How do you think I feel?”
“I can’t imagine. You act like you don’t give a damn what she does. You’re off to the Hell and Gone every night, trying to nail anything in a skirt. Am I supposed to think you’re heartbroken?”
“You don’t understand anything,” Will said bitterly, and started across the yard for his truck.
J.D. grabbed his arm and hauled him back around. “Don’t pull that act with me,” he growled, jabbing an accusatory finger in Will’s face. “You’re not the innocent victim here; you’re guilty as hell! You married that girl, then you dumped her. Now she’s in a position to cut all our throats, and all you do about it is get drunk and go dancing!”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Get her back. Face up to your responsibilities. Act like a man for once.”
“Why should I?” Will taunted, his own temper simmering in an oily mix of pain and inadequacy. “Why should I, when you’re man enough for the whole fucking state of Montana? I could never measure up in your eyes no matter what I did, so why should I bother?”
“Jesus. Is that all this is about for you? Who’s got the biggest dick? Some shithead case of sibling rivalry? I’m talking about our lives here, Will!”
“That is our life,” he spat back. “Haven’t you been paying attention for the last twenty-eight years?”
J.D. stepped back with his hands raised as if to ward off the entire conversation. “This is unbelievable,” he muttered more to himself than to Will. “We could lose the ranch and all you want to do is sulk over a whiskey because you were born second! Christ almighty, don’t you have any pride at all? Don’t you have an ounce of self-respect?”
Will stared at him long and hard from behind his disguise, sure that J.D. could see right through it, as he always did, always had. He stood there, feeling stripped bare. The eternal screwup, fooling everyone with a wink and a grin. Except J.D. Never once had he fooled J.D. Now the act was wearing thin all the way around. The curtain wasn’t just coming down, it was coming unraveled, and he was scared as hell that when it was over, there would be nothing left to hide behind and nothing left to hide.
“No,” he said quietly, stunned by the truth of it. “I don’t.”
This time when he started for his truck J.D. let him go. He stood there by the side of the barn, completely still, drained of everything but fear. Around him was the only life he had ever wanted. The ranch. The mountains. The horses and cattle. The coolness and the quiet that crept out from under the trees as the sunlight drained away. The squealing call of a bull elk. The eerie whirring sound of a nighthawk diving through the twilight for its prey.
This was all he had ever allowed himself to want, all he had ever loved. It hung now by a thread, swinging in the breeze.