"Dark Paradise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoag Tami)

CHAPTER 2

COME ON, come on, you big gear-jamming son of a bitch! Oh! Oh! OH!”

Mari focused an exasperated, exhausted glare at the wall beyond her rented bed. There was a starving-artist-quality painting of a moose in a mountainscape hanging above the imitation mahogany Mediterranean-style headboard. The painting bucked against the cheap, paper-thin wallboard in time with the heavy thumping going on in the adjacent room. The clock on the night-stand glowed 1:43 in pee-yellow digits. She had gotten the last room in the place.

“Ride me, Luanne! Eee-hah! Ride me! Ride me! Christ all-fucking mighty!”

The verbal commentary disintegrated into animal grunts and groans and panting that rose in pitch and volume to a vulgar crescendo. Blessed silence followed.

Mari cast a glance heavenward. “Please let them be dead.”

Heaving a sigh, she bent her head and pinched the bridge of her nose between a thumb and forefinger. She stood slumped back against the imitation mahogany dresser, half sitting, half leaning, still dressed in her wilted jeans and wrinkled T-shirt and vest. She couldn’t bring herself to take her shoes off and walk barefoot on the grungy carpet, let alone undress and crawl between the sheets.

She had turned off the single sixty-watt lamp on the nightstand, but the room was still bright enough for her to see every depressing detail. The relentless white glare of the mercury vapor light in the parking lot burned through the thin drapes that refused to meet in the middle of the window. Adding to the ambience was a dull red glow from the old neon sign that beckoned the road-weary to the Paradise Motel.

There was nothing vaguely resembling paradise here. A ghost of a cynical smile twisted Mari’s lips at the thought that Luanne and Bob-Ray and his amazing gearshift of steel would probably say otherwise. It was all a matter of perspective, and Mari’s perspective was bleak. She looked around the room with its tacky appointments and ratty shag carpet, a fist tightening in her chest. She hadn’t envisioned her first night in Montana being spent in a fuck-stop for truckers.

There would have been humor in the situation if Lucy had been here to share the entertainment and the six-pack of Miller Lite Mari had hauled with her all the way from Sacramento. But Lucy wasn’t here.

Mari lifted a can to her lips and sipped, beyond caring that it was flat and warm. She had found half a pack of cigarettes in her glove compartment and had lit them all in a relentless chain that left her throat raw and her mouth tasting like shit. Her eyes burned from the smoke and from the tears she had been holding at bay all night. Her head throbbed from the pressure and from the effects of beer on an empty stomach.

She had been too shocked to cry in front of J. D. Rafferty, which was just as well. She doubted he would have offered her anything in the way of sympathy. He didn’t even have the decency to pretend he was sorry for Lucy’s death.

“Jeez,” she muttered, shaking her head as she pushed away from the dresser to pace slowly along the foot of the bed. “Now I want a man to lie to me. There’s a first. Bradford, where are you when I need you?”

Back in Sacramento with the woman he had dumped her for, the jerk.

After two years of “serious commitment,” as he had labeled it, Bradford Enright had dropped her like a hot rock. He had already moved in with Ms. Junior Partner before he bothered telling Mari about her demotion. Their relationship had suddenly become null and void in the face of more advantageous opportunities. Ms. Junior Partner was more in tune with him, he said. Ms. Junior Partner shared his goals and his philosophies.

Their parting argument played through her mind like a videotape that had been shown and rewound again and again over the course of the past two weeks.

“What philosophy is that, Brad? Screw everybody and bill them for double the hours?”

“Jesus, Marilee, what a bitchy thing to say!”

“Well, excuuuse me! Getting dumped has that effect, you know. It makes me cranky.”

“It wasn’t working, Mari, you know that. It hasn’t been working for the last six months.”

“Coincidentally, about the same amount of time has passed since the iron bun joined your firm.”

“Leave Pauline out of this.”

“That’s kind of hard to do, seeing as how the two of you have been playing merger games after hours for-how long now?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“I wasn’t getting much here, Marilee. You’re always too tired or too stressed or-”

“You! You have the gall to complain to me about our sex life?”

“What are you saying? Are you saying I didn’t satisfy you?”

“I’m saying I’ve had better orgasms by myself!”

“Fine. Reduce the conversation to a gutter level. The bottom line is we don’t have a future together, Marilee. We don’t want the same things professionally or socially. There’s no point in going on with it.”

“Bottom line. You want to talk bottom line? Fine. Here’s a bottom line for you, Bradford. You owe me about three thousand dollars for services rendered in my professional capacity. Would you care to cough that up before you pack your toothbrush, or should I bill the firm?”

She would never see a dime of it, not that she cared so much about the money. It was the idea that burned her cookies. She felt used. He had taken advantage of their relationship while he had been struggling to get a toehold at the firm. I have to share a secretary, Marilee. Please, can’t you just type this up for me. Just this once (twice, three times, eighty-five times). Don’t you want me to look good? Couldn’t you just help out a little with those transcripts? It would make such a good impression if I could have this done… He had treated her as if she were his personal, free-of-charge legal secretary. Now that he was moving up in the world, he wouldn’t have to save pennies by literally screwing a court reporter out of her fees.

She felt like a fool. How she had ever managed to fall for a lawyer in the first place was beyond her. No. That was a lie. In her heart she knew what she had been doing with the upwardly mobile Bradford Enright, and it was so Freudian, it was depressing. Her family had approved of him. They may have seen her career as a court reporter as being a giant step down from their expectations for her, but Brad had made a nice consolation prize. They could look at him and still hold out some hope that she would settle into the life of pleasant snobbery to which they were all accustomed.

What a hypocrite she was. In her heart she knew she’d never really loved Brad. He was right: they didn’t want any of the same things-including each other. She had gone through the motions, pretended passion, lied to him and to herself time and again by saying she was happy, when the truth was a partner at Hawkins and Briggs didn’t come close to making the list of things she wanted out of life. The time had come to admit that.

She’d spent too much of her life as a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. She’d spent too much time trying to fit into the lifestyle her family thought of as normal. She wasn’t Annaliese or Lisbeth. She was Mari the Misfit. She’d spent too much time trying to atone for that. No more.

She sold her court reporter’s equipment, sublet her apartment for the summer, loaded her suits and her guitar in the back of her Honda, and headed for Montana. She had made no plans beyond summer, beyond basking in the glow of enlightenment. She was free to be herself at last. Born anew at twenty-eight.

Still, all the self-revelation of the past two weeks didn’t completely dull the sting of Brad’s betrayal. Lucy would have understood that, having won, lost, and dumped an astounding number of men herself. She and Lucy should have been sitting on Lucy’s bed right now in their nightgowns, eating junk food and trashing Brad, and then trashing men in general until they ended up laughing themselves into tears.

Dammit, Lucy.

Guilt swept through her, chasing a current of resentment. She wanted Lucy to be there for her. How selfish was that? She had a case of wounded pride and jitters over finally finding the nerve to stand up and be herself. Lucy was dead. Dead was forever.

Feeling disjointed, disembodied, Mari sank down on the edge of the bed. She reached out blindly for the guitar she had propped against a chair and pulled it into her arms like a child, hugging it against her. She held it at an angle so she could rest her cheek against its neck. The smell of the wood was familiar, welcome, a constant in a life that had too often seemed alien to her. This old guitar had been a friend for a lot of lonely years. It never found fault in her. It never cast judgment. It never abandoned her. It knew everything that was in her heart.

Her fingers moved over the strings almost of their own volition, callused fingertips of her left hand pressing down above the frets, the fingers of her right hand plucking gently at a tune that came from a private well of pain deep inside her. The emotions that fought and tangled like wrestling bears crystallized simply in the music. In just a handful of notes the feelings were expressed more eloquently than she could ever have spoken them. Sweet, sad notes, as poignant as a mourning dove’s call, filled the stale air of the room and pierced her skin like tiny daggers.

The tears came hard, almost grudgingly, as if she didn’t want to give them up without proof that her friend wasn’t going to come waltzing through the door with a smirk on her face. That would be like Lucy. To Lucy, life was just one big practical joke perpetrated on the human race by bored and cynical gods.

The joke’s on you this time, Luce.

A dry, broken sob tore Mari’s throat and then she was spent, exhausted, drained as dry as the gas tank of her Honda. She set the guitar aside and fell back across the bed, staring through her tears at the water stains on the ceiling. The silence of the night rang in her ears. The loneliness of it swelled in her chest like a balloon. Above her the moose from the starving-artist painting gazed down on her with melancholy eyes.

She’d never felt so alone.

Her dreams were a jumble of faces and places and sounds, all of it underscored by a low hum of tension and the dark, sinister sensation of falling into a deep black crevasse. J. D. Rafferty’s granite countenance loomed over her, shadowed by the brim of his hat. She felt his big, work-roughened hands on her body, touching her breasts, which were exposed because-much to her dismay-she had forgotten to wear anything but an old pair of boxer shorts and hiking boots.

Lucy lingered in the shadows, watching with wicked amusement. “Ride him, cowgirl. He’ll let you be on top.”

Rafferty ignored her. As he massaged Mari’s breasts, he murmured to her in a low, coarse voice.

“Man, Luanne, you’ve got the biggest tits I’ve ever seen.”

She shivered. Her brain stumbled in confusion at the name. He pulled the revolver from the holster on his hip and fired it over his head. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Mari jolted awake in time to see the moose descending on her. She shrieked and brought her arms up to deflect the blow, knocking the painting onto the floor. The banging she had interpreted as gunshots in her dream went on without cease.

Luanne and Bob-Ray were at it again.

She tried to swing her legs over the side of the bed and discovered that in her fitful sleep she had rolled into the Grand Canyon of mattress valleys.

“I think I saw this bed on The Twilight Zone,” she grumbled, trying to rock herself into a sitting position. “People fell through it into an alternate universe.”

Wishing fleetingly she had stuck with one of the dozen aerobics classes she had signed up for in the last three years, she heaved herself out of the chasm and tumbled onto the floor. A shuddering groan vibrated through the room as the air conditioner kicked into high gear, blasting arctic air and the smell of mildew. The control knob was missing and the plug looked like something no certified electrician would touch without first shutting down power to the whole north end of town.

Rubbing her frigid hands up and down her cold, bare arms, she peered out through the separation in the drapes to see the first faint pink tints of dawn streaking behind the snow-capped peaks to the east. At the edge of the parking lot, the Paradise Motel sign buzzed and flickered. Not a creature was stirring… except Bob-Ray and Li’l Sizzler, the Amazing Human Breakfast Sausage.

“Goddamn, Luanne! You could suck the white off rice!”

Mari groaned and rubbed her hands over her face.

“I could never get enough of you, Bob-Ray.”

“A sad truth that’s been made abundantly clear in the last five hours,” Mari said through her teeth.

“Well, come on up here, then, darlin.’ I’ll give you all you can handle.”

Luanne squealed like a mare in heat and the banging-audio and physical-began again.

Her temper frayed down to the ragged nub, Mari grabbed the Gideon Bible from the nightstand and used it as a gavel against the wall.

“Hey, Mr. Piston!” she bellowed. “Give it a rest, will ya!”

There was a moment of taut silence, then the perpetrators burst into giggles and the bed springs started squeaking again.

Giving up on any hope of rest, she headed toward the bathroom.

She hadn’t taken in more than a glimpse of the town of New Eden on her way to Lucy’s place. Coming back after her encounter with Rafferty, she had gone no farther than the motel on the north edge of town. Now she drove down the wide main street slowly, glancing at the ornate false fronts of brick buildings that had probably witnessed cattle drives and gunfights a century before. They were mixed with clapboard storefronts and the odd, low-slung “modern” building that had gone up in the sixties, when architects had been completely devoid of taste.

New Eden had a rumpled, dusty look. Comfortable. Quiet. A curious mix of shabbiness and pride. Some of the shops were vacant and run-down, their windows staring blankly at the street. Others were being treated to cosmetic face-lifts. Painting scaffolds stood along their sides like giant Tinker Toys. Among the usual small-town businesses Mari counted four art galleries, three shops devoted to selling fly-fishing gear, and half a dozen places that advertised espresso.

In the gray early morning, a trio of dogs trotted down the sidewalk and crossed the street in front of Mari, looking up at her but not seeming at all concerned that she wouldn’t slow down for them. She chuckled as she watched them head directly for a place called the Rainbow Cafe. Trusting their judgment, she pulled her little Honda into a slot along a row of hulking, battered pickups and cut the engine.

In keeping with its name, the front of the Rainbow Cafe had been painted in stripes of five different pastel colors. The wooden sign that swung gently from a rusted iron arm was hand-lettered in a fashion that made Mari think of teenage doodling-free-form, naively artistic. It promised good food and lots of it. Her stomach growled.

A small, dark-haired waitress stood holding the front door open with one hand, letting the smell of breakfast and sound of George Strait on the jukebox drift out. The other hand was propped on a wide hip, a limp dishrag dangling from the fingertips. Her attention was on the trio of dogs that sat on the stoop. They gazed up at her with the kind of pitiful, hopeful look all dogs instinctively know people are suckers for. She frowned at them, her wide ruby mouth pulling down at the corners.

“You all go around to the back,” she said irritably. “I won’t have you stealing steaks off the customers’ plates on your way through to the kitchen.”

The leader of the pack, a black and white border collie with one blue eye and one brown eye, tipped his head to one side, ears perked, and hummed a little note that sounded for all the world like a canine version of please. The waitress narrowed her eyes at him and stood fast. After a minute, the dog gave in and led his cohorts down the narrow space between the buildings.

“Moocher,” the waitress grumbled, her lips twitching into a smile.

Someone should have captured her on film, Mari thought, her artist’s eye assessing and memorizing. The woman whose name tag identified her as Nora was pushing forty, and every day of it was etched in fine lines on her face. But that didn’t keep her from being beautiful in an earthy, real way. Beneath the dime-store makeup, hers was a face that radiated character, broken hearts, and honest hard work. It was heart-shaped with prominent cheekbones and a slim, straight nose, lean-cheeked and bony, as if the fat beneath the skin had been boiled away in the steamy heat of the diner kitchen. Her mane of dark hair was as frizzy as a Brillo pad, its thickness clamped back with a silver barrette. The pink and white polyester uniform was a holdover from the seventies. It buttoned over nonexistent breasts, nipped in on a slender waist, and hugged a set of hips that looked as if they had been specifically designed for a man to hang on to during sex.

“This must be the best restaurant in town,” Mari said, clutching an armload of Montana travel books against the front of her oversize denim jacket.

“You better believe it, honey,” the waitress said with a grin. “If there’s a line of pickups out front and dogs begging at the door, you know you’ll get a good, honest meal. No skimping here, and the coffee’s always hot and strong.”

“I’m sold.”

Nora shot a discreet glance at the brown and white polka dot dress that swirled around Mari’s calves and the paddock boots and baggy crew socks, but there was no flash of disapproval in her eyes. Mari liked her instantly.

“I love your hair,” the waitress said. “That your real color?”

Mari grinned. “Yep.”

She followed Nora inside and slid into a high-backed booth that gave her a view out the wide front window.

She deposited her books on the Formica table and forgot them as she tried to absorb everything she could about this first experience in the Rainbow. She had read every travel guide and tourist brochure there was anyway. One of her vows to herself when she had decided on a new life was not to let it speed past her while she was too busy trying to fit in. She had spent too much time with her nose to the grindstone, the world and its people hurtling past her in a blur. When she had decided to come to Montana, she had gone to the library and checked out and read every book available about the state. She had immersed herself in tales of cattle barons and copper barons and robber barons, and in descriptions of mountain ranges and meadows and high plains. But the Rainbow was the real thing, and she didn’t want to miss a sliver of it.

The air in the restaurant was warm and moist, redolent with the rich, greasy scents of bacon and sausage, and the sweet perfume of pancake syrup. Beneath it all lingered the strong aromas of coffee and men, and above it hung a pall of cigarette smoke. The tables were cheap, the chairs serviceable chrome and red vinyl that had probably been sitting there for three or four decades. Mari wondered if anyone realized the decor would have been considered trendy kitsch in the hip diners of northern California. Somehow, she didn’t think anyone at the Rainbow Cafe in New Eden, Montana, would give a good damn. The thought made her smile.

A quick reconnaissance of the customers told her she was the only woman in the place who wasn’t wearing a pink uniform. Regardless of shape or size, the men all had the look of men who worked outdoors and made their living with their hands-creased, leathery faces, narrow eyes that gave her hard, direct looks, then slid away almost shyly.

She ordered all the fat and cholesterol on the menu, not in any mood to count calories. She hadn’t had a substantial meal in weeks, and she had a long day ahead of her. Better to face it on a full stomach. While she waited for Nora to bring the food, she gazed out at the wedge of town she could see through the front window.

There was an old-fashioned hardware store across the street with a wide front porch and an old green screen door. Shiny new spades and rakes and pitchforks leaned against the weathered white clapboard. A sign in the window advertised a special on wheelbarrows. Next to the hardware store was a drugstore that had been established in 1892 according to the ornate gold lettering on the front window. Next to the drugstore, gaudy spandex in neon colors hung like pieces of indecipherable modern art in the window of Mountain Man Bike and Athletic.

The sight of the bike shop was jarring, but not nearly so jarring as the sight of a money-green Ferrari purring down the street. Incongruities.

“Here to buy land?” Nora asked as she set down a plate heaped with golden pancakes and another loaded with bacon and a Denver omelette.

“No, I’m…” It didn’t seem right to say she was on vacation in the wake of Lucy’s death. “It’s more of a pause at a life crossroads.”

The waitress arched a thinly plucked brow and considered, accepting the definition with a nod of approval. “Guess I’ve seen a few of those myself.”

Mari snapped off an inch of bacon and popped it in her mouth. “I came to visit a friend for a while, but that isn’t going to work out after all.”

Nora hummed wisely. “Man trouble, huh?”

“No. She’s-um-she’s dead.”

“Mercy!” Her dark eyes went wide in a quick flash of surprise. Then she pulled her practicality back down around her like a skirt that had been caught up by a sudden gust of wind. “Well, yeah, that’d put a damper on things, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Mari forked up a chunk of omelette and chewed thoughtfully, letting a moment of silence pass in Lucy’s honor. “Maybe you knew her,” she said at last. “Lucy MacAdam? She’d been living here for about a year.”

Several other diners glanced her way at the mention of Lucy’s name, but her attention was on the waitress. She already thought of Nora of the Rainbow Cafe as being honest and dependable, a woman who would know the score around whatever town she called home.

“No…” Nora narrowed her big brown eyes in concentration and shook her head as if trying to shake loose a memory to connect with the name. “No… oh, wait. Was she that one got shot up on Rafferty’s Ridge?”

Rafferty. The name gave Mari a jolt that was like an electric shock.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry,” Nora cooed in sympathy, giving her a motherly squeeze on the shoulder. “I didn’t know her. That crowd she ran with don’t come in here much.”

“What crowd?”

“That Hollyweird bunch. Bryce and all them. Don’t you know them?”

“No. I never met any of Lucy’s friends here.” She had heard bits and pieces about them, details Lucy dropped extravagantly into her few letters and conversations, like brightly colored gemstones, designed to dazzle and impress. Celebrities. Important people. Movers and shakers who came to New Eden for some trendy communing with nature. The kind of crowd Lucy would be drawn to for the excitement, the novelty, the notoriety. She had always thrived on being at the center of the storm.

“Well, that’s a strike in your favor with me,” Nora said dryly. “They’re big tippers, but I don’t go much for their attitudes. I’m not some trick poodle for them to come in here and snicker at. They can just take all their money and go play somewhere else as far as I’m concerned.”

“Come on, Nora,” a warm male voice sounded from the booth behind Mari. She craned her neck around and looked up as a cowboy rose and slid his arms around the waitress. He was trim and athletic with silky dark hair falling across his forehead and sky-blue eyes brimming with mischief. He grinned a grin that would have put Tom Cruise to shame. “You tellin’ me you don’t want a part in Clint Eastwood’s next big western?”

A grudging blush bloomed on Nora’s cheeks even as she set her features into a scowl. “I’m tellin’ you to keep your hands to yourself, Will Rafferty.”

He ignored her command, rocking her from side to side in time with the crooning of Vince Gill on the jukebox. He laid his lean cheek against hers and his eyes drifted shut dreamily. “He’d go for you, you know. You’re five times better looking than Sondra Locke ever was. He’d make you a star, Nora Davis.”

“I’ll make you see stars,” Nora snorted. She pulled her order pad from the pocket of her starched apron and smacked him in the forehead with it.

“Ouch!” Will stepped back, making a pained face, rubbing at the spot where the binding had nailed him.

Nora cut him a look. “You’re married, Romeo, in case you forgot.” She snatched up her coffee urn and walked away, turning back when she was three tables away, a sassy smile canting her wide painted mouth. “And I am ten times better looking than Sondra Locke with her stringy hair and runny red nose and no eyelashes.”

Will Rafferty threw back his head and laughed, delighted. “Nora, you’re a wonder!”

“Don’t you forget it, junior,” she drawled, sashaying off toward the kitchen, her wide hips swinging.

From under her lashes Mari studied the man standing beside her. Rafferty. He had to be a relative. There was a strong family resemblance in the square jaw and chin, the straight browline. He was younger than the man she had met last night-probably around her own age-and slighter of build, not nearly so imposing physically. He had the lithe, athletic look of a dancer. But the biggest difference was that this Rafferty had no trouble smiling.

He turned the power of that bright white grin on her, blue eyes on high beam, a dimple biting into his cheek. The smile was irresistibly incorrigible. Mari half expected to see canary feathers peeking out from between his teeth. It was the kind of smile that made sensible women do foolish things. She felt her knees quiver, but the weakness never made it to her head. She considered herself temporarily immune to charming men. One of the few benefits of getting dumped.

“Will Rafferty.” He introduced himself with a flam-boyant little half-bow, then held a hand out to her in greeting. “Welcome to the Garden of Eden.”

“Marilee Jennings. Are you supposed to be Adam or the snake?” she asked with a wry smile as she shook his hand.

“Cain.” He slid into the seat across from her and bobbed his eyebrows. “As in ‘raisin’ Cain.’ ”

“A comparison your wife finds amusing?”

The smile tightened and he glanced away. “We’re separated.”

Mari reserved comment and forked up a spongy cube of pancake.

“So you were a friend of Lucy’s, huh?”

“We used to hang out together when she lived in Sacramento. Did you know her?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stole a strip of bacon from her plate and bit the end off it, his blue eyes, as bright as neon, locked on hers once again. “She was something.”

He didn’t specify what. Mari wondered if J.D. was the only Rafferty who had known Lucy in the biblical sense. Lucy wouldn’t have cared that Will Rafferty was married, only that he was cute as sin and filled out his jeans in a way that pleased her roving eye. Lucy said it wasn’t up to her to be any man’s conscience. Her attitude toward infidelity had always bothered Mari. Come to that, her attitude toward sex in general had been too liberal for Mari’s tastes. Lucy had called her a prude. She wasn’t; she just didn’t like the idea of needing a score card to keep her lovers’ names straight.

“Nora said that Lucy was-that the accident happened someplace called Rafferty Ridge,” she said. “Are you that Rafferty?”

“One of,” Will replied, sneaking a triangle of toast out from under the edge of her half-eaten omelette. “Do you always eat this much?”

“Do you always mooch food off strangers’ plates?”

He grinned. “Only when I’m hungry.” She slapped his hand with her fork as he reached for another piece of bacon. “The Stars and Bars is up the hill a ways from Lucy’s place. That’s Rafferty land. Most of that ridge is ours. Some’s BLM land-that’s Bureau of Land Management-some’s Forest Service-”

“You have to be related to J. D. Rafferty, then.”

“Yep. That’s what my mama always told me,” he said with a devilish grin. “He’s my big brother. I never had any say in the matter. You’ve met St. John, have you?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Mari grumbled.

She tucked a tumble of wild hair behind her ear and polished off her second cup of coffee. Nora swept in and refilled her cup, shooting Will a look. He blew her a kiss and chuckled with good humor when she rolled her eyes.

“He scared the shit out of me, told me point-blank my friend was dead, and went on to make it clear to me that he wasn’t the least bit sorry about any of it.”

“Yep.” Will sat back in the booth and stretched his arms out in front of him, working a kink out of his shoulder. “That’s J.D. He got all the tact in the family.”

Mari sniffed and speared the last piece of bacon just as Will’s fingertips brushed over it. “Must have been a defective gene,” she said caustically. “No offense, but your brother is about the biggest jerk I’ve run into.”

“None taken,” he said, his face glowing with unholy glee. “He can be an abrasive son of a gun.”

“He could give lessons to concrete.”

The sound of someone rising in the booth behind her sounded to Mari like the ominous roll of thunder. Her heart sank like a rock into the morass of heavy food she’d consumed as J. D. Rafferty stepped into view. He stood beside her table, looming like an oak tree, not so much as sparing her a glance. Slowly he settled a pale gray hat in place and pulled the brim low, his unwavering gaze on his brother.

“You done shooting your mouth off?” he said quietly, his low voice setting off discordant vibrations inside Mari. “We got work to do.”

“That’s what I love about you, bro,” Will said, the finest razor’s edge in his tone as he slid from the booth. “You’re just a great big bundle of fun.”

“Fun?” The corner of J.D.’s mouth curled in derision. “What’s that?”

The air between and around the two brothers was suddenly charged with enough electricity to make hair stand on end. Mari watched with guarded fascination as some tense, silent communication passed between their eyes. Will broke contact first, turning for the door without a word.

J.D. turned toward Mari, his gaze heating from gray ice to molten pewter as it lingered on her lower lip. Mari fought the urge to squirm in her seat. It was all she could do to keep from covering her mouth with her hand.

Rafferty met her eyes and smiled, the slight curve of his lips radiating male arrogance. “You don’t have to like me, Mary Lee,” he murmured.

His meaning was crystal clear. Mari glared at him, wishing they weren’t in quite so public a place so she could feel free to rip him up with her opinion of him. Still, she couldn’t let him get away unscathed. She gave him a look of utter disgust and mouthed Fuck you.

The gray eyes darkened, the smile took on a feral quality. “Anytime, city girl.”

“When hell freezes over.”

He leaned down close, his eyes never leaving hers. He curled his big hands into the fabric of her old denim jacket and pulled the edges closed. “Better button up, sweetheart. I feel a cold spell coming on.”

Mari shoved his hands away. “It’s called rejection, slick,” she said through her teeth. “Have the local schoolmarm look it up for you.”

J.D. stepped back, chuckling at her sass. He tipped his hat ever so slightly, conceding the round but not the war. “Miz Jennings.”

Mari said nothing. She felt used and furious. Will Rafferty had set her up and egged her on to get a rise out of his brother. And J.D… She decided the initials stood for Jackass Deluxe.

Nora appeared beside the booth, rag in hand, and leaned across the table to wipe away the crumbs Will had left. “Those Raffertys are enough to give a girl cardiac arrest,” she said matter-of-factly. “They don’t make men like that anymore.”

“No,” Mari said, scowling as she watched J. D. Rafferty through the front window. He climbed into a battered blue and gray four-by-four truck with STARS AND BARS emblazoned across the bug guard. “I thought they broke the mold after the Stone Age.”