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

CHAPTER 4

THE MYSTIC Moose had been the finest saloon, hotel, and house of ill repute for miles around during the days of the cattle barons. Of course, it wasn’t called the Mystic Moose in those days, but the Golden Eagle-both for the majestic birds that hunted in the mountains around New Eden and for the gilded replica sent to the first proprietor of the hotel by Jay Gould in honor of the grand opening.

Madam Belle Beauchamp had built the place with the considerable fortune she had accrued on her back beneath the richest of the robber barons and cattlemen, and on her knees peering through keyholes while those same gentlemen wheeled and dealed both above the tables and under them. Madam Belle had known all the great men of the day and had made a killing in the stock market. Even though she had traveled extensively, she had called New Eden home until her death because she loved the land, the mountains, and the hearty, hard-working, God-fearing, mostly honest people who had taken root there.

No expense had been spared in the building of the hotel. Every room had been gaudy and grand. The chandeliers that hung in the main salon had been shipped west from New York City by train. The twenty-foot gilt-framed mirror behind the bar had reportedly come from a castle in Europe, courtesy of an adoring duke. Montana had never seen anything more extravagant than Madam Belle’s Board and Brothel, as it had been called by some.

Sadly, Madam Belle’s popularity faded with her beauty, and her fortune trickled away into bad investments and worse lovers. As spectacular as the Golden Eagle was, New Eden was too far off the beaten path for any but the most curious to visit. The hotel fell into disrepair. Madam Belle fell to her death from the second floor gallery, a victim of dry rot in the balustrade. And so ended the flight of the Golden Eagle.

Mari stood on the veranda of the renovated hotel, reading the story that was beautifully hand-lettered on yellowed parchment and displayed tastefully in a glass case on the wall beside the carved front doors. The details didn’t even make a dent on her brain. She wasn’t even sure how she had come to be standing at the doors to the Mystic Moose.

After leaving the sheriff’s office, she had just started walking, needing to clear those awful scenes from her memory-Lucy’s body from a distance, Lucy’s body up close, entry wound, exit wound. Her head pounded from the effort to eradicate those horrific images of blood, death, decay. She had walked the west side of Main Street clear out to the Paradise Motel, then crossed and walked back down the east side, oblivious of the sights and sounds and people around her.

The contradictions of the town penetrated in only the most abstract of ways-the pickups that looked as though they had been gone after with tire irons and the luxury cars that cost more than most people’s houses; the boarded-up, bankrupt stores and the windows displaying extravagant silver jewelry and custom-made sharkskin cowboy boots; the ruddy-faced cowboys and ranchers in town on errands and the faces of people who had graced the covers of People magazine. All of it seemed more dreamlike than real. In keeping with the theme of the day.

She walked for hours, heedless of her surroundings, unaware of the curious and pensive looks she got from the locals; preoccupied by thoughts of death, fate, justice, injustice, coincidence, Raffertys. Fragments of thought hurtled through her mind like shrapnel, sharp-edged and painful. There were too many bits and pieces. She couldn’t seem to grasp any one of them long enough to make sense of it. Caffeine and grief and exhaustion pulled at her sanity and shook her nerves like so many ragged threads, until she wanted to grab her hair with both hands and just hang on, screaming.

She needed to sit down somewhere quiet and dark, have a drink to dull hypersensitive senses, smoke a cigarette to give herself something ordinary to focus on.

The double doors of the Moose swung open, and a tall, handsome woman in a long denim jumper and expensive-looking suede boots strode out, her jaw set at a challenging angle, her eyes homing in on Mari from behind a pair of large glasses with blue and violet frames. Her face was a long oval with strong features and a slim, unpainted mouth. A dense, wild mane of red-gold hair bounced around her shoulders.

Mari started to step out of her way, murmuring an apology, but the woman took hold of her shoulders with both beringed hands and looked her square in the face.

“Dear girl,” she said dramatically, her expression dead serious. “You have a very fractured aura.”

Mari’s jaw fell open, but no words came out. A jumble of quartz crystals on sterling chains hung around the woman’s neck. Opals the size and shape of sparrow eggs dangled from her elegant earlobes. “I-I’m sorry… I guess,” she mumbled, feeling more and more like Alice on the other side of the looking-glass.

The woman stepped back, tipped her head, and laid a long hand against her forehead. “‘Weep not for me, nor all the pieces of my shattered heart,’ ” she said loudly, her voice suddenly dripping the honey of the Deep South. “‘I shall gather them to me and go on, valiant and undaunted.’ ” She straightened and heaved a cleansing sigh, her features settling back into the same fierce, businesslike expression she had worn a moment before. “From Lila Rose by Baxter Brady. It closed after three weeks in the St. James, though through no fault of mine. I assure you, I was brilliant.”

Mari just blinked.

The woman pulled a small highly polished black stone from the pocket of her jumper and pressed it gently into Mari’s palm, curling her fingers up to hold it in place. “There. That will help.”

Without another word she strode away, boots clumping on the wooden steps as she left the veranda for the parking lot on the south side of the building. Mari stared after her, forcing a couple in Rodeo Drive western wear to step around her on their way into the hotel. As the doors swung shut behind them, a puff of air brought out the aromas of fresh bread and simmering herbs. Mari’s nose locked on like a bloodhound’s. Food. Food always made sense. Rousing herself, she went in search of it.

The Mystic Moose bar was magnificent. Instead of recreating the fussy opulence of Madam Belle’s Golden Eagle, the new owners had opted for rustic chic. Rough white stucco walls and heavy, carved mahogany wood-work. Massive versions of Lucy’s antler chandelier hung from the thick exposed beams in the high ceiling. The back wall was dominated by a series of tall multipaned windows and French doors that led onto a broad terrace and gave a magnificent view of the mountains that rose to the east. The centerpiece of the south wall was a huge fieldstone fireplace, over which hung an enormous mounted moose head. The moose looked straight across to a beautiful bar that gleamed in the soft afternoon light with the rich patina of age and loving care. Behind it, Madam Belle’s gilt-framed mirror still hung; twenty feet of homage to an illicit affair of a bygone era.

There was a fair number of customers for the middle of the afternoon. A few cast curious looks in Mari’s direction as she made her way to a table near the fireplace and settled into a large, comfortable captain’s chair. She put her rock on the table and stared at it vacantly.

“If you don’t mind my saying, luv, you look positively knackered.”

The cultured British tones brought her head up and added another layer of confusion to the fog shrouding her brain. “Excuse me?”

“I say, you look all done in,” he said, a gentle smile curving his mouth. He looked fortyish and attractive with wavy auburn hair, a bold nose, and a kind shine in his eyes. An afternoon beard shadowed his lean cheeks, but took nothing away from the overall impression of style and quality he projected in a loose-fitting ivory silk shirt and coffee-brown trousers. He leaned across the table and placed a cocktail napkin beside her stone. “Is something the matter?”

“Well, for starters, I have a fractured aura.”

“Ah, you’ve met M.E.” At her blank look he expanded. “M. E. Fralick, maven of the Broadway stage and patron of all things New Age.”

The name rang a dim bell, but it didn’t cut through the pounding in her temples.

“How about a cappuccino?” he suggested.

“I was thinking more along the lines of a G and T-with a capital G-and a large plate of anything edible.”

“A woman after my own heart. By the bye, my name is Andrew Van Dellen. Aside from playing waiter on occasion, I’m one of the lucky owners of the Mystic Moose.”

“Marilee Jennings,” she said, trying to offer a smile.

He straightened a bit and stared at her for a moment, brows knit. Humming a note, he tapped a forefinger against his pursed lips. “Marilee. Marilee Jennings?” The light bulb went on. “Oh, my God, you’re Lucy’s friend!”

Across the room, at the bar, Samantha Rafferty scooped up her serving tray, sloshing imported beer and Pellegrino. The bartender shot her a look, and tears instantly burned at the backs of her eyes. Not that she really gave a damn about the drinks. She had bigger things on her mind. This was just a job she was screwing up. How important was that, when her whole life was one big, balled-up mess?

If only she’d had the sense to go straight home last night. But no. Glutton for punishment that she was, she just had to take a few turns past the Hell and Gone, cruising the street in her ancient rusted-out Camero until Will stumbled out the door of the saloon with his arm around a buxom blonde.

The tears pressed harder, glazing across her vision. She clenched her jaw and held her breath as she set the drinks on the long table, heedless as to who had ordered what. What did any of them have to complain about? They were rich, they were movie stars, they didn’t have to drive around in a fifteen-year-old car in the middle of the night, looking for a cheating husband.

Damn you, Will.

Damn me for loving you.

Her vision blurred to a jumble of watery colors. As she bent to set down the last of the drinks, she misjudged the distance to the table and let go of a tall mug of beer too soon. The glass hit the table with a thunk and beer spewed out of it like water from a floodgate, drenching the tabletop. Several women at the table gasped. The man whose drink it was bolted backward, shooting up out of his chair as the beer ran off the edge of the table. Samantha gaped in horror at the mess that seemed so symbolic of her whole life, and burst into tears.

“No, no, sweetheart, don’t cry!” Evan Bryce laid a fatherly hand on Samantha’s shoulder. “It was an accident. No harm done.”

Mortified, Samantha mumbled behind the hands she had pressed over her face, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bryce! I-I’m s-so sorry!”

He slid his arm around her and gave her a comforting squeeze. “Hey,” he said with humor in his voice. “I’ve had beautiful young women do far worse things to me!”

The courtiers who sat around his table all laughed indulgently. Samantha wished the floor would open and swallow her whole. Evan Bryce was the most powerful among New Eden’s new power elite. He was some kind of celebrity, a producer or something. Samantha had seen him on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Entertainment Tonight. He was always on the awards shows or the judging panel at the Miss America pageant. The people who visited him at his ranch outside of town were like a Who’s Who of Hollywood and California politics. And she had managed to dump a pint of beer practically in his lap.

“Come on, now,” Bryce said, leading her toward the chair he had so hurriedly vacated. “You’ve obviously been working too hard, Samantha. Sit down. See that there’s no hard feelings.”

That he knew her name jolted her for an instant, until she remembered it was pinned to her chest. Stupid. The word lashed her like a whip. Stupid kid. She’d heard it from her father often enough when she’d been growing up, so that now, even though she had been living away from her family for over a year, it came back to her and crumbled the debris of her self-confidence into even smaller pieces.

“No, I couldn’t,” she mumbled, backing out of his grasp. She could feel the eyes of the others on her, and imagined she knew what they thought. They thought she was a hick, a stupid, silly half-breed girl who couldn’t even manage to keep a drink order straight. “I have work to do.”

Bryce pulled a face. “I don’t think Drew would begrudge you five minutes as my guest.”

“I don’t know, Bryce,” one of his friends said slyly. “He may get jealous. I think he’s had his eye on you.”

The rest of them laughed. Samantha took in their faces in a glance-beautiful beyond what was normally human, teeth too white and too straight, eyes gleaming with some kind of sharp emotion she knew nothing about.

“I have to go,” she blurted out. Then she wheeled and ran for the service door beside the bar, laughter ringing in her ears, her long black braid slapping her back like a whip as she went.

A long red-carpeted hall was at the rear of the building. Doors off it led into the kitchen, into Mr. Van Dellen’s and Mr. Bronson’s offices. Samantha went past these and hit the bar of the door that led outside. The stone terrace ran most of the length of the hotel, but the north end was divided from the rest by a tall, weathered lattice screen, giving the employees an area to slip out to for breaks.

Samantha thanked God it was empty at the moment. She had never been one to cry in front of people. Even Will. Even the night he’d left she had managed to keep the tears at bay until he was out the door.

Damn you, Will.

She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t loved Will Rafferty. Even in junior high she had secretly pined away over him, when she had been a lowly eighth-grader and he one of the coolest boys in the senior class. Will Rafferty with his devil’s grin and to-die-for blue eyes. Practically every girl in school had a crush on him. He was a rebel, a rascal, and a small-time rodeo star. And for a while he had been all hers.

The thought that that time was over, maybe for good, made her shake inside. She leaned over the split-wood railing at the edge of the terrace, doubling over in emotional pain, the tears crowding her throat like jagged rocks. It wasn’t fair. She loved him. He was the one thing she had ever asked for in her whole miserable life. Why couldn’t he love her back in the same way?

She knew he had married her on a whim. He had won a little money in the saddle bronc riding at the Memorial Day rodeo in Gardiner. She had won a little money in the barrel racing. They had ended up at the same celebratory party. Will, full of himself as always, caught up in the thrill of victory, and made uninhibited by innumerable shots of Jack Daniel’s, had declared his love for her. Three days later they had driven to Nevada in his new red and white pickup and tied the knot.

In her heart of hearts Samantha had suspected at the time he wasn’t truly serious about getting married, but she had grabbed the chance with both hands and hung on tight. Now she was living alone in the little cottage they had rented over on Jackson Street. She had her freedom from her family. She had a ring on her finger. And now she had nothing at all.

The loneliness that gripped her heart squeezed as hard as a fist.

“Can it really be all that bad?”

Samantha started at the sound of the soft voice, but there was no running away this time. She’d already made enough of a fool of herself. Evan Bryce took a position at the rail beside her. When he offered her a monogrammed linen handkerchief, she took it and dabbed her eyes. He didn’t watch, looking instead toward the mountains, giving her a kind of privacy, a moment to compose herself. She used it to study him.

She supposed he was about the same age as her father, though all similarities stopped there. Her father was a hulking brute of a man, coarse and dark. Bryce was small. Catlike, she thought; lean, wiry, and graceful. His forehead was very high and broad, and beneath a ledge of brow, his eyes were a pale, startling shade of blue, his mouth a wide, thin line above a small chin. He wore his shoulder-length sun-streaked blond hair swept back, emphasizing his forehead.

She had seen him in the Moose many times. He came to hold court. The people he brought with him treated him like royalty. Sometimes he came in looking like something out of Gentleman’s Quarterly. Most of the time he was dressed as he was now-in faded jeans that fit him like a glove and a loose, faded chambray shirt, which he wore with the sleeves neatly rolled up and the front open halfway to his belly button, exposing a thick pelt of dark chest hair. It was his version of cowboy dress, she supposed, though anyone who had ever known a cowboy would never mistake him for one.

He turned toward her then, catching her looking at him. Samantha thrust his handkerchief out to him and turned toward the mountains. She could feel him staring at her for a long while before he spoke.

“I’m sorry if my friends embarrassed you, Samantha. They didn’t mean to.”

“It wasn’t them.”

“What then?” he asked softly. “A young woman as lovely as you should never have to cry so hard.”

Samantha sniffed, her full lips twitching upward at one corner. She never thought of herself as lovely. She was tall and slender with almost boyish hips and no breasts to speak of-something that had never bothered her in her tomboy days, something that bothered her a great deal when she thought of Will and the buxom blonde coming out of the Hell and Gone. As far as her face went, she had always found it an odd mix of white and Indian, a jumble of oversize features that didn’t quite go together.

“Boyfriend trouble?” Bryce ventured.

Glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, she weighed the wisdom of confiding in this man. She couldn’t imagine why he should care what went on in her life. She was just a nobody cocktail waitress. But the kindness and concern she read in his tanned face touched a very tender spot inside.

She didn’t have anyone else to turn to. Her parents were no shining example of wedded bliss. When her father wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t home. Her mother had six kids to raise and no energy or enthusiasm for the job. Samantha didn’t have many friends who hadn’t been Will’s friends first. And she had always been too reticent for a tell-all girlfriend anyway. She might have gone to Will’s brother for support, because she trusted him, but she had always felt J.D. didn’t approve of the marriage. She had always felt he’d somehow known exactly what was what between her and Will, that he had seen past the façade of newlywed bliss from the first.

But here was this kind man, taking an interest, offering her a chance to unburden herself a little.

“My husband,” she said in a small voice, looking down at a cluster of pink bitterroot that grew in a rock garden beyond the fence. “We’re having some problems… He moved out.”

Bryce made a sound of understanding and slipped an arm companionably around her shoulders. “Then he’s a fool, isn’t he?”

Will was a lot of things. Samantha couldn’t find it in her to voice a single one of them. Her throat closed up with misery, and scalding tears squeezed out of her tightly closed eyes. Needing nothing so badly as a shoulder to cry on, she turned and pressed her face against the one being offered to her.

They drank a toast to Lucy.

Andrew Van Dellen and his partner, Kevin Bronson, joined Mari at her table. Kevin was tall and rangy with an Ivy League look about him. He hadn’t seen thirty yet. Tears glazed his eyes when he raised his glass in Lucy’s memory.

“It was so senseless,” he murmured.

“Death often is,” Drew commented impatiently. The look they exchanged said they had already had this conversation at least once. “There’s no use contemplating it. People live their lives until fate intervenes, that’s all.”

Kevin set his handsome jaw. “You can’t say it couldn’t have been prevented, Drew. Why should Sheffield have been up there with a gun in the first place? Lucy’s dead because he had to go tramping through the woods like Rambo and try to prove his manhood by killing some poor dumb animal.”

“He wasn’t doing anything illegal.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t immoral or that it wasn’t preventable. If Bryce-”

Drew cut him off with one gently raised finger and a tip of his head. “Don’t speak ill of the customers, dear boy. It’s bad form.”

Kevin leaned back in his chair and stared up at the moose head above the fireplace, visibly struggling to rein in his temper. Drew shifted toward Mari, who had watched their exchange with avid interest while she ate. She had already devoured half a breast-of-chicken sandwich and most of the accompanying herbed fries. The food was rejuvenating her, sending fuel to a brain that had been running on empty. The drink was taking the edge off her nerves. Kevin and Drew were giving her mind something solid and real to focus on.

“Kev thinks the NRA will destroy civilization as we know it,” Drew said with a touch of humor. Kevin’s frown only tightened. “The truth is that Bryce is well within his rights to offer those elk for hunting. Hunting is a time-honored sport. And if one wants to get terribly deep, we are, after all, a species of hunters. It’s gone on for eons.”

“Men used to hit women over the head with mastodon bones and drag them off by the hair. We don’t still do that.”

“Some do.”

“It isn’t funny.”

Their eyes held for a brittle moment, then Drew cupped a hand over his partner’s shoulder. “Don’t let’s fight about it,” he murmured tiredly. “At least not in front of a guest.”

Kevin looked across the table. “I’m sorry, Mari. The whole subject just makes me crazy.”

“I don’t exactly like the thought of my friend getting killed in place of an elk, myself,” she said, setting aside the last bite of her sandwich. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and fiddled with the bauble that dangled from the lobe.

“What makes me so angry is the hypocrisy,” Kevin said, his voice lowered to keep it from traveling to the wrong ears. “Bryce pledges money and land to the Nature Conservancy and then runs around killing everything on the planet.”

“It’s not at all unusual for hunters to support conservation efforts,” Drew argued. “Their purpose is sport, not annihilation.”

“I fail to see how anyone can derive pleasure from denying another living creature its life.”

“Oh, bloody hell, here we go again.”

“No.” Kevin jerked his chair back from the table and rose. “Here I go again.” Drew rolled his eyes and dropped his head against one hand. Kevin ignored him. “Mari, I’m sorry we couldn’t have met under better circumstances.”

He shot a look at the blond man approaching the table, his lips thinning, then turned and headed for the lobby.

“Kevin still has his nose out of joint, I see,” Bryce commented mildly.

Drew rose from his chair, looking as if the effort were physically taxing. “Do forgive him, Mr. Bryce. It’s easier for him to blame someone than to believe life can be so randomly senseless.”

“He’s forgetting that Lucy was a friend of mine as well as his.”

“Yes, well, Kevin is young; he tends to think in absolutes.”

Bryce’s attention had already moved on from Kevin Bronson to Mari. She met his gaze, finding the Nordic blue of his eyes almost chilling, but his smile was warm as he offered her his hand. She wiped the smear of dill-speckled crème fraiche from her hand onto the bottom of her jacket and accepted the gesture.

“Evan Bryce.”

“Marilee Jennings. I was a friend of Lucy’s, too, from when she lived in Sacramento. In fact, I came here to spend some time with her at her ranch.”

He offered just the right amount of sympathy, the corners of his mouth tugging down, concern tracing a little line up between his eyebrows. “Lucy was too young to die. And so vibrant, so full of life. I miss her as much as anyone. I hope you don’t blame me for her death, as some do.”

Mari shrugged and shoved up the long sleeves of her jacket to expose her hands again. “I don’t know who to blame,” she said carefully.

“It was an accident; there is no blame,” he said, settling the issue, at least in his own mind.

Mari knew it would be days, weeks, months before she could resign herself that way. It might have been easier if she hadn’t come into the play in the middle, if she had been here and lived through the circumstances surrounding Lucy’s death.

“Will you be staying long in New Eden?” Bryce asked.

“I don’t know. I’m too shell-shocked to think about it yet. I just found out about Lucy’s… accident… last night.”

He stroked his small chin and nodded in understanding. “I hope you’ll be able to enjoy some of your stay. It’s a beautiful place. You’re more than welcome to come out to my ranch for a visit. It’s not far from Lucy’s-have you been there?”

“Last night.”

“Xanadu-my place-is just a few miles to the north. Any friend of Lucy’s is welcome in my home.”

“Thank you. I’ll remember that.”

He said his good-byes and left them. Mari watched as he returned to his table by the window. The others heralded him like a returning monarch. She recognized two actresses and a supermodel among the beautiful faces. They were the kind of people Lucy would have gravitated toward. Gorgeous, rich, important or self-important depending on point of view. In the chair directly to Bryce’s right sat a stunning statuesque blonde with strong, almost masculine features and sharply winged brows. The woman met her gaze evenly, lifted her wineglass in a subtle salute, and tipped her head. Then she turned casually toward her companion and the contact was broken, leaving Mari wondering if she had imagined the whole thing.

“Well, darling,” Drew said, drawing her attention back to him. “I hate to rush off, but I’ve got to see that all’s well in the kitchen before the dinner crowd arrives.” He lifted her hand from the tabletop and pressed it between both of his, his expression earnestly apologetic. “I’m sorry for all the unpleasantness.”

Mari shook it off. “I think I’d feel worse if everyone were pretending nothing had happened. It’s all just too ‘twilight zone’ as it is.”

“True.”

“Thanks for the drink and the meal.”

“Our compliments. And you’ll stay, of course.”

“Well, I-”

His brows pulled together as the thought hit him. “Where did you stay last night?”

“The Paradise.”

“Good Christ! The Parasite! I hope to God you didn’t sit on the toilet seat.”

“I didn’t even lie on the sheets.”

“Smart girl. No arguments now. You’re staying here as a guest of Kevin and myself. I’ll tell Raoul at the desk on my way out.”

“Thanks.”

“The Parasite,” he muttered, shuddering. “What Philistine sent you there?”

There was a crash from the vicinity of the kitchen and a sudden burst of Spanish that sounded as angry as a blast of machine-gun fire. Drew muttered a heartfelt “Bloody hell,” and rushed off.

Popping one last fry in her mouth, Mari pushed her chair back from the table and headed for the front door. She had to go find her car. Then she would check in and crash. The idea of sleep uninterrupted by the X-rated antics of Bob-Ray and Luanne brought a smile to her lips. No more nights in the Parasite Motel. As she left the Moose, though, her thoughts drifted automatically and unbidden to the Philistine who had sent her there.

Rafferty.

She told herself the uneasiness was the result of having too many encounters with the name Rafferty in one twenty-four-hour period. Her initial run-in with J.D., the awkward scene with his brother in the Rainbow Cafe, the mention of a Rafferty finding Lucy’s body. There was something about it all that struck her as bad karma.

She stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket. Her fingers found the smooth black stone M. E. Fralick had given her and began rubbing it absently. The image of J.D. lingered in her mind-a big, solid block of blatant male sexuality with eyes the color of thunderheads. Her heart beat a little harder at the memory of his fingertips brushing against her breast.

She hadn’t known whether he was friend or foe.

A tremor of realization snaked down her back.

You still don’t know, Marilee.

“Do you think she knows anything?”

“It’s difficult to say.” Bryce twined the cord of the telephone around his index finger, bored with the conversation.

He lounged on a Victorian chaise upholstered in soft mauve velvet. He detested Victoriana, but the suite he maintained at the lodge had come furnished and he preferred not to bother himself with it. He spent time in it only when he didn’t care to drive all the way to Xanadu after an evening’s entertainment or when he wanted a break from his entourage.

His attention was on the woman across the room. Sharon Russell, his cousin. She wore sheer white stockings and a virgin-white lace bustier that contrasted dramatically with her tanned skin. She was a sight to stir a man’s blood, her body long and angular with large, conical breasts and long nipples that grew out of the centers like little fingers, like small penises. The blatantly female body contrasted almost perversely with the strongly masculine features of her face. The contrast excited him further.

He took a sip of Campari and tuned back into the telephone conversation. “She gave no indication of knowing anything, but they were close friends. She has been to the ranch.”

“We’ll have to watch her.”

“Hmm.”

“You’re certain you haven’t found anything?”

“Of course I’m certain. There’s nothing to find. The house was thoroughly searched.”

The voice on the other end of the line took on a truculent tone that quivered with fear beneath the surface. “Goddammit, Bryce, I mean it. Don’t jerk me around. No more games.”

Bryce rolled his eyes at the phone on the table, derision twisting his features as he pictured the man on the other end of the line. Weakling. He had no real power and he knew it. Bryce had only to snap his fingers and he would wet himself. Without much more effort, Bryce could crush him, ruin him. He let the weight of that knowledge hang in the air as silence crackled over the phone line.

“Don’t be tedious,” Bryce said at last, the edge in his voice as fine as a tungsten blade. He didn’t wait for a reply, but cradled the receiver and turned his full attention to his cousin.

Sharon was the only person in his retinue who wasn’t at least vaguely frightened of his power, an attitude he rewarded by considering her to be his equal in many ways. They were both ambitious, ruthless, ravenous in their desires, not afraid to take or to experiment. Not afraid of anything at all.

She sauntered toward him, her stiletto heels sinking into the mauve carpet, her eyes glowing with lust. Bryce lay back on the chaise and smiled as she straddled his naked body.

“He’s afraid of this Jennings woman?” she asked, lightly raking her fingernails through his chest hair.

“He’s afraid of his own shadow.”

“Well, I admit, I don’t like her showing up here either,” Sharon said mildly. “There’s no way of knowing what Lucy might have told her or what she might suspect.”

Bryce sighed and arched into her touch. “No, there isn’t. We’ll find out soon enough.”

“What’s your game with the waitress?” she said. Her voice was nearly as masculine as her features, low and dark and warm. It set his nerve endings humming.

“Just testing the waters,” Bryce assured her, reaching up to fill his hands with her breasts. The plan was still too fresh in his head to share; he wanted to savor it a bit first. “Don’t concern yourself.”

In a swift and practiced move Sharon twisted a length of black silk around his wrists, jerking it tighter than was strictly necessary. She pushed his hands above his head and fastened the tie around a decorative wood scroll on the end of the chaise.

“No,” she growled, smiling wickedly as she positioned herself above his straining erection. “Don’t you concern yourself. Only with me. Only with this.”

“Yes,” he whispered on an urgent breath, thinking he might explode soon. Then she impaled herself on him, and he didn’t think at all.