HUMILIATED and hurt, Samantha spent the remainder of the day in the guest room Bryce had allocated her. He checked on her within moments of the scene on the terrace, but she refused to let him in the room. He talked to her through the bedroom door, telling her everything would be all right, that she shouldn’t shut him out. But she kept her face buried in the pillow and eventually he went away.
She cried until she thought she would be sick from it, them, exhausted, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. When she woke up, the sun had slipped behind the mountains and the room was dim with shadows.
Disoriented and groggy, she sat up and looked at her surroundings. For a moment she thought she was dreaming, that she had only to shake herself and she would be on her own lumpy mattress in the little house she shared with Will.
Will.
She closed her eyes as it all came rushing back. Every bit of it. Her crumbling marriage. Will stumbling drunk on Bryce’s terrace. The way he had punched Bryce. The ugly things he’d said to her and about her.
Take my wife… Hell, I never wanted one in the first place!
Samantha’s eyes burned and her throat closed, but no tears came. She had cried them all. More miserable than she’d ever been in her life, she leaned back against the headboard of the elegant bed and looked down at herself. The elegant copper silk outfit she had put on before Will’s arrival was a roadmap of wrinkles and creases. It looked terrible and she felt that somehow the fabric had undergone some kind of chemical reaction from contact with her skin, as if something so fine had been designed to sort the worthy from the worthless.
Poor, stupid kid. Thought you could pretend different, didn’t you? Stupid dreamer. Grow up, Samantha. Grow up and see what you really are.
Trembling at the self-castigation, she got up from the bed and went to look at herself in the huge beveled mirror above the bleached pine bureau. The reflection wasn’t pretty. Not even the dim lighting could hide the effects of her earlier crying jag. The makeup she had applied so carefully had run and streaked on her puffy face. Her hair hung limp and disheveled. She’d lost an earring somewhere.
She looked pathetic. She felt pathetic.
No wonder Will didn’t want her. She wasn’t worth wanting. She was naive and foolish. Bryce’s friends were probably downstairs laughing at her. Poor little dim-witted tomboy barmaid, pretending she could fit in with the rich and beautiful people.
Her breath coming in broken, disjointed spasms, she turned away from the mirror. She felt hollow inside, aching and hollow, as if everything in her had been yanked out and discarded. Her shoulders pulled forward and she curled in on herself as she moved, walking like an old woman. She felt as ugly and freakish as a giant praying mantis, and as fragile; as if someone could grab her and snap her in two, just crunch up her long bones and toss them aside.
She moved to stand by the window that looked down on the pool and pressed her forehead against the glass. The underwater lights had been turned on, but there was no sign of any of Bryce’s guests. She wondered if they were gathered downstairs, wondered if she could somehow slip past them and leave the house without being seen.
She didn’t belong here. She didn’t feel as if she belonged anywhere, but she knew she didn’t belong here. Bryce wouldn’t want her here anyway, not after what Will had done. And she couldn’t bear the thought of facing the rest of them-Ben Lucas and Uma Kimball and Sharon. Especially Sharon. Just the thought of Sharon’s possible comments regarding the afternoon were enough to make her feel ill.
No. Cinderella’s time at the ball was up.
Dry sobs croaked in her throat as she took off the clothes Bryce had bought for her and hung them in the wardrobe. She removed the remaining earring and the necklace and bracelets, then went into the bathroom and scrubbed off the makeup and the lingering traces of perfume. She plaited her hair in its serviceable braid and secured the end with a rubber band from her purse. She pulled on her old jeans, but stopped short of putting on the white oxford shirt.
It belonged to Will. She rubbed the soft, worn collar between her fingertips, bunched the fabric in her hands, and brought it up to her face. She imagined she could still smell his scent on it, could still feel the warmth of his body in the fibers. But she knew she couldn’t. Will was gone from her life. The shirt may have belonged to him, but she didn’t belong to him anymore. He didn’t want her. Had never wanted her.
Her heart breaking, she folded the shirt and put it in a dresser drawer, trading it for a white silk T-shirt-the plainest thing she could take.
She straightened the bed covers and tidied the bath, wanting to leave as few traces of her existence as possible. She would just slip out of the house and out of the lives of the people in the house and go back to what was left of her own life. A shabby house and a rusty car and a puppy.
She would have to borrow a car. Or maybe she could hitch a ride with one of the hands-
“Samantha?” Bryce’s voice sounded outside the door to the sitting area of the suite.
She froze in her tracks on her way to the door, her heart bumping up against the base of her throat. She didn’t want to see him, didn’t think she could face him. Maybe if she didn’t answer him again-
“Samantha, I know you’re awake. I heard you moving around. Open the door, sweetheart. I’ve brought you some dinner. We’ll talk.”
“I-I don’t know what to say,” she mumbled.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said gently. “You can just eat and I’ll talk for both of us. How’s that?”
Too kind, she thought, biting her lip.
“Samantha?”
“All right.”
Dreading the moment, she opened the door. Bryce stood with a tray in his hands. The only visible signs of his fight with Will were a bruise and cut on his chin and raw spots on the knuckles of his right hand. His lower lip was split and puffy. He took in her attire in one long, speculative look and hummed a little.
“I thought I would just go,” she admitted, turning the lamp on the dresser to low. Just enough light so Bryce could see what he was doing, not enough to spotlight her raw eyes and puffy face.
He set the tray down on the small round table near the window and busied his hands, uncovering the plate and pouring two glasses from a bottle of chardonnay. He had anticipated this reaction. The humiliation would be far too heavy for Samantha’s fragile ego to bear. Rafferty would have to pay for this. Long and painfully. He had held a perfect wild rose in his grasp and crushed her with his carelessness. He deserved to be ruined.
“Why do you think you should do that, honey?” he asked gently.
Samantha stared at him with a weird feeling of having just awakened from a dream. His tone of voice was calm and unaffected, as if nothing at all had happened. “Well… with what happened this afternoon and all… I just thought…”
He turned to her and gave her his warmest, most understanding smile. Fatherly, he thought. Kind. “That wasn’t your fault.”
“Will is my husband-”
“Will is a fool. He didn’t have any right to come here. He didn’t have any right to say those things to you.”
Samantha swallowed the knot of guilt in her throat. “I’m his wife.”
“He doesn’t deserve you.” He tilted his head as he came toward her, reading the emotions in her clear, dark eyes as easily as he would a grade-school primer. Gently he tugged her fingers out of the pockets of her jeans and curled his bony hands around them. “He doesn’t own you.”
He doesn’t want you.
She couldn’t be a wife to a man who refused to be a husband. She wasn’t a wife. She didn’t have anyone. She didn’t have anything.
A fresh wave of tears filled her eyes, and her mouth began to tremble.
Bryce smiled to himself as he drew her against him and wrapped his arms around her. “He doesn’t deserve your tears, Samantha. He had a diamond and he threw it away. That’s his loss, not yours.”
She pressed her face down on his shoulder and sobbed as if the world were going to end. He supposed her world was ending, shattering like a cheap Christmas ornament. Like an egg breaking to allow her to emerge into a newer, larger, better world. His world. He liked the analogy. She was a beautiful baby bird in the lush paradise that was his world. And he would guide her and flaunt her. She would be more, have more, than she had ever dreamed. And she would be his.
“I-I’m s-sorry,” Samantha stammered, trying to draw back from him. She had been raised not to cry in front of people. This was just another humiliation-crying on Evan Bryce for the second time in the scant few days she’d known him. “I n-never d-do this,” she said by way of apology. “I-I n-never cry on p-people.”
Bryce let her move back just enough so he could reach up between them and brush the tears from her cheek with the pad of his thumb. The gentle smile curved his wide mouth again and he held her eyes with his. “I’m honored, then,” he murmured. “You feel comfortable with me. You trust me. That means a lot to me-to be your friend. I want only the best for you, Samantha.”
She looked into his bright eyes, eyes shining with kind lights, and felt something like desperation claw inside her. She was nothing, she had nothing. He wanted the best for her. He liked her. He thought of her as his friend.
“I need a friend,” she whispered.
“I’m here.” He drew her slowly into his arms again and held her close, stroking a hand over her hair. His other hand rubbed up and down her back in a hypnotic rhythm. “I’m here,” he whispered, his lips brushing her ear. “I’ll be anything you need.”
She slipped her arms around him and he rocked her in a lazy, languid slow dance, pressing her closer still. Outside, the world had faded away to black. Time took on a dreamlike quality, surreal and dim. Samantha let herself float on it. She anchored herself to her only friend and let her mind drift in the mist.
She didn’t have anyone, anything in the world, except this kind man who held her.
His lips pressed against her temple, grazed her ear.
I’ll be anything you need, Samantha…
I’ll give you anything…
I love you…
She soaked in the whispered words like a dry sponge. She wondered if he’d even said them or if she had only wanted so badly to hear them from someone, anyone at all. She might have been dreaming. She’d thought so before.
“I love you,” he whispered, and kissed her cheek and the corner of her mouth. His erection poked against her belly, and she felt her body quicken and twitch in response.
“We can’t,” she whispered, but she made no move to pull away. Drifting, drifting still on the fog, in the dream.
“Yes,” he murmured. “I love you, Samantha. Let me show you what that’s like.”
“But I-”
“Shhh… Let me love the pain away.”
She thought she should stop him, but his hands were inside her blouse and tracing mesmerizing patterns on her back and sides, and it felt so good. Then he was cupping her breast and the air in her lungs thinned.
It had been so long. She had been so lonely.
This is just a dream…
He lowered her to the bed and followed her down. The spread was cool against her bare skin. He had loosened her hair and it spilled like silk around her. His mouth fastened on her nipple and need tore through her. The need to be loved, to be touched.
His fingers slid into the tangle of dark curls between her legs and she opened to him. He was kind and gentle. He wanted her. Will didn’t. She looked up into his strange light eyes as he poised over her.
“Do you really love me?” she murmured.
Bryce held himself motionless. Energy pulsed down through his body. He felt supercharged, electrified, on the brink of a new greatness. New power.
“Yes,” he answered, knowing it was as true as it ever had been in his life.
“You fucked her, didn’t you?” Sharon spat out the accusation, deliberately choosing the harshest, ugliest word she could to describe what she knew had happened.
Bryce didn’t dignify her charge with a response. He stood before the big windows in the elegant living room, looking out at the night. In fact, he was barely paying attention to his cousin. He felt huge, as if power had enlarged his entire body in order to contain the humming energy that coursed through him. His brain was racing with ideas and plans. In the all-important center of his thoughts, Sharon had already been dismissed.
She didn’t take to the idea with grace. She moved across the dark room like a stalking tigress. She wore her hair slicked straight back from her face, secured in a chignon, a style that only emphasized the harshness of her features. In the tarnished light from the display cases, her eyes glowed with anger.
“She’s so sweet,” Bryce murmured to the world at large, marveling in the concept of sweetness. “I can’t believe how sweet she was, how needy.”
His wonder struck Sharon like a hail of jagged gravel, pelting her ego, biting into her heart. She couldn’t be sweet. She had never held any sweetness inside her. Need she knew too well. What she needed now was to distract Bryce from his preoccupation. If he became too fixated on the girl, he would shut her out altogether. The idea terrified her, but she would never show him that fear. Never.
“We’re all needy,” she breathed, brushing up against him.
She let him feel her full breasts through the sheer fabric of the black lounging pajamas she wore. Rubbing against him like a cat, she started to cup him through his jeans. He turned and moved away from her without a hint of interest.
Panic balled like a fist in the back of Sharon’s throat, and she had to fight to keep it out of her voice. “If she was so wonderful, what are you doing down here?”
Bryce paused by the sideboard, considered the idea of a small drink, then discarded it. He didn’t want anything interfering with the high. He didn’t want anything slowing his thought processes. He envisioned himself as a diamond-brilliant, hard, powerful.
“She’s fragile,” he said. “She’ll need finessing. She’ll probably have second thoughts. If I smother her with possession, she’ll bolt.” He rubbed his chin for a moment, staring off into the middle distance, his face aglow with his pleasure in his own brilliance. “Finesse.” He smiled the Redford smile. “That’s the ticket.”
“How about finessing me?” Sharon said, forcing a smile as she closed in on him again. A subtle tremor of desperation thrummed in her low voice. She hoped he didn’t notice it. Something like a spring coiled tighter and tighter in her chest.
“Not tonight,” Bryce said impatiently.
He walked away from her for a second time. Without looking at her. Without touching her or promising tomorrow. The spring wound tighter.
“Not tonight,” she snapped, her voice low and vibrating with anger. She stalked around a white leather sofa and cut off his path to the window. “You have to save yourself for your precious virgin princess. Is that it?”
Bryce gave her a flat, hooded look. “Spare me the jealous-woman act. You stood right here and told me to sleep with her.”
“For us,” she clarified. “Not for you. For us, for the plan, to get what we want, not so you can wander around in a fog, dazzled by innocence.”
He huffed out a breath. “Take a Valium and go to bed. You’re getting on my nerves.”
“How dare you dismiss me like some bothersome servant.”
“That’s exactly how you’re behaving.”
“You bastard!” she spat out, her voice a feral, animal sound low in her throat as the anger burned away her control. “After all I’ve been to you! After all I’ve done for you!”
When he tried to turn away again, she grabbed his arm and dug her fingernails in to hold him while she tore her top open with her other hand, baring her breasts. “Look at me!” she snarled. “Look at me, damn you!”
He looked. Without desire. Without emotion. He stared at her, repulsed by what he saw-desperation, degradation, dissipation; a jaded, aging harlot whose depravity knew few bounds. Never once did it occur to him that he was looking in a mirror. He was above and beyond. Bound for new glory. Reborn in the eyes of an innocent.
He brought his eyes to his cousin’s and said without inflection, “You’re losing control.”
Sharon fell back, clutching the ruined front of her top together. Ashamed, beaten, stunned at what he had reduced her to. Numb with the shock of it.
“I’m not the one who’s losing control,” she whispered. “Look at yourself. Your brain is infected with this girl. She’s all you think about. A week ago you wouldn’t have given her a second glance.”
“That was a week ago. Now I know her. Now I see the possibilities. That’s one of your many faults, Sharon, you lack foresight.”
“No. I can see perfectly,” she said bitterly. “You’re obsessed with her. The way you were obsessed with Lucy-”
He shook his head and grinned that damned Redford grin, having the gall to be amused at her. “No. You’re so wrong. It’s not that at all.”
She stared at him, forcing herself to read the expression in his eyes, the strange euphoria. “You think you’ve fallen in love with her, don’t you?” she whispered, barely able to stand the sound of the words. She could feel her world crumbling around her. Her mind raced for some way to stop the damage. She had leverage. Bryce couldn’t drop her altogether; she had enough on him to make her an invaluable ally or a formidable enemy. She could destroy him if she had to.
But she couldn’t make him love her. She hadn’t thought him capable of romantic love. He was a man capable of many things, but love was not among them.
He didn’t turn back as he walked to the doorway and killed the lights in the display cases. “I don’t think, I know I love her.”
“She’ll leave you, you know,” she said, struggling for calm, clinging to some small scrap of pride and cynicism. “She’ll find out what you really are and she’ll hate you, and she’ll leave you.”
“No,” he murmured, feeling omnipotent. “I won’t allow that.”
The dream was of death. Filled with a cast of people who were either in fact dead or metaphorically dead to her. Lucy with a clean round hole through her body. Townsend with no skull above his eyebrows. Miller Daggrepont wearing a jaunty purple ascot around his fat throat. Del Rafferty with the lower part of his face gone. Then there was Brad Enright, a stick-on label on the pocket of his Egyptian cotton shirt that read HELLO, MY NAME IS: ASSHOLE. And Will wearing a goofy cap that had been outfitted to hold a beer can on either side of his head. Clear plastic straws looped down in a circuitous route to his mouth.
The guests milled around at a cocktail party held in Del Rafferty’s cabin. Her family stood off to the side, near the guns, refusing to mingle. Kendall Morton leered at them from the corner, where he stood in a cloud of self-generated dust.
Mari walked in wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and a vest and nothing else, and realized immediately that she was severely underdressed. Her mother and sisters shook their heads.
“Marilee, you’re just not one of us,” her mother said.
“She’s sure as hell not one of us,” Will said.
They circled around her and started moving in closer and closer, their faces grim with disapproval. Except Lucy’s. Lucy was smiling her wry half-smile. J.D. stood beside her.
“Here, peach,” she said, holding out the Mr. Peanut tin. “Something to take with you on your trip.”
“What trip?”
“The trip to find yourself.”
Then the floor opened up and she was falling straight down into a black hole, staring up at the ring of faces and half faces.
Lucy waved. “Be sure to send a postcard!”
She jerked awake and her heart sprinted into high gear as she tried without success to get her bearings. Darkness. Cool, damp. She was sitting up… on the deck outside Lucy’s house.
Drawing in a deep breath of night air, she pressed a hand over her breastbone and assured herself that she was real and alive. Her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and familiar shapes came into focus-the rail of the deck, the towering pine trees, indistinct outlines of the llamas in the pasture near the creek.
She had come out from town to feed them, had meant to sit in the Adirondack chair on the deck only a moment or two as the sun set. She had certainly never meant to fall asleep. Now the sense of being alone in the wilderness seeped into her like cold dew.
Three people had died violently in this dark paradise. Each of those deaths had touched her in some way. She could feel them touching her now, like bony fingers reaching up from the afterlife, clawing at her, pulling at her, trying to draw her deeper into the evil.
And she was going with them. Willingly. Not exactly the kind of trip she’d had in mind when she piled her business suits in the back of her Honda and left Sacramento a lifetime ago.
She had come here for fun. She wasn’t having any. She had come here to find herself and was instead trying to find a killer. She had come here for companionship. She was alone.
Somewhere down the valley, coyotes began to sing. In contrast to their high, thin voices, the air on the deck seemed to thicken with an electricity that raised the hair on the backs of Mari’s arms. She was alone, but suddenly she didn’t feel alone. She felt the intensity of a gaze on her, eyes that could have been anywhere in the darkness.
Kendall Morton’s round, ugly face floated through her imagination. She had called a friend who worked the night shift in the California Highway Patrol computer room and called in six years’ worth of markers for favors. Could he contact the Montana computer banks-providing Montana had computer banks-and get a rap sheet on Kendall Morton? He had sighed heavily, made noises about losing his job, then promised to have something for her by morning.
Kendall drifted away and a vision of Del Rafferty took his place. An apparition. A ghost. Another of the walking dead from her dream. One of the suspects. She wanted to pity him, but she couldn’t discount him. He had been a paid killer in the service, and the war had never ended for him. Or maybe he had traded one war for another; service to his country for service to the Rafferty land.
She didn’t want to find out the hard way.
She eased herself forward in the chair, trying to breathe slowly, straining to hear above the drumbeat of her pulse in her ears.
“You sleep like a city girl.”
J.D. eased out of the shadows at the corner of the house, hands in the pockets of his jeans, big shoulders hunched. Mari glared at him over her shoulder as she rose from the chair.
“What are you doing here?”
“Some big mountain lion could have had you for supper.”
“Not likely,” she retorted, calling up her guide-book facts. “There’s never been a report of a mountain lion attacking anyone in this area.”
He raised a brow. “Maybe the poor son of bitch wasn’t around afterward to tell the tale.”
Refusing to play games, Mari ignored his line of questioning and stuck with her own. “I asked you what you were doing here, Rafferty. You weren’t invited.”
“I saw a light in the upstairs window,” he said, leaning back casually against the railing. He didn’t feel casual. He felt like a clenched fist. He felt pressure from all sides compressing him into something hard and dangerous. And she looked soft and sleep-rumpled. If he pulled her against him now, he imagined her body would be warm, her nose cold, and her hair would smell like dew and pine. But her eyes were wary beneath the slash of dark brows, and he knew she wouldn’t willingly come to him now. He had seen to that. He had pushed her away. Because it was for the best. Because he didn’t want the distraction or the danger of a woman in his life.
Never been a liar, J.D.?
“You’ve been relieved of your duties as caretaker,” Mari said. “You’re not responsible for this place.”
His concern hadn’t been for the place, but he wouldn’t admit that. It wasn’t the time. The time had passed.
“Habit,” he said.
“Break it.”
“Del says he saw a big cat up along Five-Mile Creek,” he said, looking off to the south, as if he half expected to see something prowling among the dark stand of trees.
“Yeah, I’ll bet Del sees a lot of things,” Mari said, more sharply than she had intended. She would have skinned snakes with her teeth for a cigarette. Her fingers flexed and clenched, nervous for something to do.
“Don’t, Mary Lee,” J.D. warned, his voice tight and weary. “This day’s been too damn long already. I don’t want to talk about Del.” Or think about Del, or deal with Del, or believe what Del might have become while living under the protective banner of the Stars and Bars.
“Tell me about it. I started out the morning by finding a dead body. That just set the tone right off, you know what I mean?”
J.D. pushed himself away from the railing and stared at her. “You what!”
She gave a look that said she had been the butt of a tasteless practical joke. “Found a dead body. Yesterday was your lucky day; today was mine.”
“Who?”
“MacDonald Townsend. Esteemed judge. Philanderer. Cokehead. That MacDonald Townsend. You’ll like this; it’s very macho: he blew the top of his head off with a.357 Colt Python.”
“Judas,” he said, the word blowing out of him on an exhaled breath. He narrowed his eyes and focused hard on Mary Lee’s face. She looked as pale as cream in the dark. “Are you all right?”
She jammed her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket and tipped her chin up, as if he had affronted her pride. “I don’t think I’ll eat grits again anytime soon.”
“Judas,” he muttered again.
He had to give her credit for not falling apart just in retelling the tale. He thought most women would have. But then, as Mary Lee liked to remind him, she was not most women. She was seldom what he expected her to be-or wanted her to be, for that matter. She stood there beside him with her chin up, daring him. Tough little cookie.
“Where did you find him?” J.D. asked in a thick voice, stepping back as she stepped away.
Mari cleared her throat and tucked her hair behind one ear, staring hard at the boards of the deck. “In his study. I went to talk to him about Lucy. I thought he might know something. They were involved, you know. I think Lucy might have been blackmailing him.”
She cut a glance at J.D. for his reaction. He didn’t so much as blink at the suggestion. As if he expected as much from Lucy or thought that blackmail was perhaps a common hobby among the kind of people Lucy had associated with.
“Townsend,” he said, his brows drawing together in concentration, a deep line of concern digging into his forehead. “He a friend of Bryce’s?”
“Was. Past tense. Why?”
J.D. didn’t answer. He just stood there, stroking his thumb back and forth across his lower lip as his mind worked. He had ridden back up along Five-Mile Creek after leaving Del, as much to clear his head as to look for signs of Del’s phantom cougar. The creek ran through a narrow strip of Forest Service land that acted as a buffer of sorts between Rafferty land and Bryce’s land. Heavily wooded, it had seemed like twilight in the middle of the day-a sensation that might have been peaceful if it hadn’t been oddly disturbing.
He hadn’t expected to find much of anything worth looking at. Some tracks maybe, nothing more. The area was isolated, with no easy access. Not the sort of place the tourists and hikers sought out. The Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness offered miles of trails for them, although he had seen backpackers and signs of backpackers on Rafferty land more and more as the legitimate park areas became more crowded. What he found on Five-Mile Creek he couldn’t attribute to weekend foot traffic.
Signs of horses-a number of horses-and dogs. The carcass of what had been a big, strong hunting dog a week or so ago lay half in the creek, its body torn and rotting, fouling the water. He pulled it out and left it on the bank for nature to dispose of. The state of decay made it difficult to determine how the dog had met his end. He thought of Del’s claim of a big cat, and wondered. A cougar would turn and fight if it had to.
Horses, dogs, cigarette butts, and shell casings on the ground. Signs of a hunt. But there was nothing in season. Cougars were protected, at any rate-not that some didn’t meet untimely ends every year. There were guides who would promise big cats to hunters for a price. Poaching was one of the most common-and most profitable-crimes in the state of Montana.
Horses, dogs, signs of a hunt. And just north of Five-Mile Creek lay Evan Bryce’s private paradise. Bryce the sportsman. Bryce the high roller. Bryce, who was a friend of the dead judge who was the lover of the dead Lucy, who was the client of the dead lawyer, Daggrepont.
“I broke the news to Bryce myself,” Mari said. “He was devastated.” She rolled her eyes and made a face.
“What’d he do?”
“He made the appropriate noises, but his heart wasn’t in it. Actually, I think he couldn’t have cared less. I didn’t see any genuine emotion out of him until Will crashed the party. Talk about uncomfortable moments. I don’t think Emily Post ever covered what to do when a drunken cowboy assaults the host and accuses him of playing the ol’ bump and grind with his wife.”
“Oh, Jesus,” J.D. swore, driving a hand back over his forehead and through his short dark hair. He cocked a leg and huffed out a sigh as he tried in vain to massage the knots from his neck. “What happened?”
“Will took a couple swings at Bryce, said some mean things to Samantha. Samantha ran into the house in tears, then Bryce broke a chair on Will’s ribs. He’s got an ugly temper. I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of it.”
“I’d rather you didn’t get on any side of him.”
“Yeah, like you have anything to say about it.”
She started to turn from him, as if she meant to walk away. J.D. snagged her by the arm and took a subtly aggressive step toward her. “I mean it, Mary Lee. I don’t like the feel of any of this.”
“And I don’t like you telling me what to do,” she said, scowling at him. She felt as if she hadn’t slept in days and the insulation on her temper was being stripped away layer by layer, exposing a tangle of raw nerve endings, which Rafferty poked at every time he came around. “You’re not a player here, cowboy, as far as I can see. You made that very clear last night. And before that, and before that. All you ever wanted from Lucy or me was sex and this land. You’re not getting either now, so that puts your nose out of joint. Tough.
“You don’t want me nosing around Lucy’s death. You don’t want me checking out your loony uncle. You don’t want me hanging around Bryce. Well, guess what, Rafferty? I don’t care what you don’t want. You don’t want me on mutually acceptable terms, so get the hell out of my life.”
She pulled her arm free of his grasp and started toward the house, feeling old and battle-scarred. Fleetingly she wondered what the folks back home would say if they could see her now. Little Marilee, who had almost compromised her life away in a failed attempt to please everybody else. If someone asked her to compromise now, she thought she would probably just haul off and punch that person in the mouth.
“You know,” she said, turning back toward J.D., “you’re nothing but a hypocrite, Rafferty. You sit up on your big horse on your precious mountain and pontificate about integrity and personal accountability. Look in a mirror. I’d say you’re about a quart low on both.”
J.D. said nothing. He stood on the deck and watched her go in. A few minutes later, her Honda started up on the other side of the house and gravel crunched and popped beneath the tires as she drove out of the yard.