All he needed to do was turn his hand a fraction and he could fill his palm with the weight of her breast. His fingers flexed involuntarily against her rib cage.

Damn. He’d gone too long without. That was clear enough. He didn’t allow himself to indiscriminately want women. He had too many more important things to focus his attention on. He shouldn’t have even considered the possibility with this one. A friend of Lucy MacAdam’s. He didn’t have to know any more about her than that to know she was trouble.

He dropped his hand away from her belly abruptly and took a half-step back, distancing himself from temptation.

Mari turned to face him, her sneakers crunching on the kindling that had once been an end table constructed of raw twigs. Still trembling, she planted one hand on her hip and snagged back a tangled mass of hair from her eyes with the other, anchoring it at the back of her neck.

“Who are you?” she demanded, wary.

“J. D. Rafferty.” He bent to pick up the hat he’d lost in the scuffle, never taking his eyes off her. “I live up the hill a ways.”

“And you’re in the habit of just walking into people’s homes?”

“No, ma’am.”

“But you saw me come in, so you just thought ‘Hey, what the hell? I might as well go scare the shit out of her’?”

He narrowed his eyes. “No, ma’am. The lawyer asked me to look after the stock. I saw you come in, saw the lights. Didn’t want anything funny going on while I was down here.”

Mari cast a damning glance around the room, stricken anew by the utter destruction. “Looks to me like something already happened, Mr. Rafferty. And I don’t happen to think it’s particularly funny.”

“Kids,” he muttered, staring at the broken frame of a bentwood rocker. He detested waste, and that was what vandalism was-waste of time, energy, property. Waste and disrespect. “Town kids get a little tanked up. They go riding around, lookin’ for trouble. Don’t usually take ’em long to find it. This happened a week ago. I called the sheriff. A deputy came out and wrote it up, for what that’s worth.”

Putting off the inevitable, Mari went to the ficus that had foiled her escape and righted it carefully, her hands gentle as she stroked the smooth trunk and touched the dying leaves.

“I didn’t catch your name while you were kicking my shins black and blue,” Rafferty said sardonically.

“Marilee. Marilee Jennings.”

“Mary Lee-”

“No. Marilee. It’s all one word.”

He scowled at that, as if he didn’t trust anybody who had such a name. Mari almost smiled. Her mother wouldn’t like J. D. Rafferty. He was too rough. Crude, Abigail would say. Abigail Falkner Jennings thrived on pretention. She had given all her daughters pretentious names that only snooty people didn’t stumble over-Lisbeth, Annaliese, Marilee.

“She’s dead,” he declared bluntly.

She would have put the question off a while longer, would have thought of inane things for another moment or two. Her fingers tightened on the trunk of the ficus as if trying to hold something that had already slipped beyond her grasp.

“Happened about ten days ago…”

Ten days. Ten days ago she had been crying over a man she didn’t love, giving up a career she’d never wanted, breaking ties to the family she had never fit into. Lucy had been dying.

She brought a hand up to press it over her trembling lips. She shook her head in denial, desperation and tears swimming in her eyes. Lucy couldn’t be dead-she was too ornery, too cynical, too wise. Only the good die young, Marilee. She could still see the sharp gleam of certainty and caustic humor in her friend’s eyes as she’d said it. Jesus, Lucy should have lived to be a hundred.

“… hunting accident…”

Rafferty’s words penetrated the fog only dimly. He sounded as if he were talking to her from a great distance instead of just a few feet away. She stared at him, her defenses raising shields that deflected the harshness of the subject and focused her attention on unimportant things. His hair-it was sensibly short and the color of sable. He had a little cowlick in front at the edge of his high, broad forehead. His tan-it ended in a line of demarcation from his hatband. Somehow that made him seem less dangerous, more human. The paler skin looked soft and vulnerable. Stupid word for a man with a six-gun strapped to his hips-vulnerable.

“Hunting?” she mumbled as if the word were foreign.

J.D. pressed his lips together, impatience and compassion warring inside him. She looked as fragile as a china doll, as if the slightest bump or pressure would shatter her like the lamps and pots that lay scattered on the floor. Beneath the tangled fringe of flaxen bangs and the soft arcs of dark brows, her deep-set blue eyes were huge and brimming with pain and confusion.

Something in him wanted to offer comfort. He labeled it foolishness and shoved it aside. He didn’t want anything to do with her. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with Lucy, but she had drawn him into her web like a black widow spider. He wanted this place, that was true enough, but he didn’t want this. He had plainly and purely hated Lucy MacAdam. Couldn’t figure why someone hadn’t shot her on purpose years before. The woman before him was her friend, another outsider, which made her tainted by both association and circumstance. The sooner he was rid of her, the better.

He steeled himself against her tears and settled his hat firmly on his head, an insult she would probably never fathom.

“Lucy didn’t go hunting,” she mumbled stupidly.

“It was an accident. Some damned city idiot shot without looking.”

Ten days ago. It seemed impossible to Mari that she could have lived ten days oblivious of the death of a friend. Shot. God. People moved to the country to avoid getting shot, to escape city violence. Lucy had come to paradise only to be gunned down. It was ludicrous.

Mari shook her head again, trying to clear the dizziness, only making it worse. “W-where is she?”

“Six feet under, I reckon,” he said brutally. “I wouldn’t know.”

“But you were her friend-”

“No, ma’am.”

He moved toward her slowly, deliberately, his expression dark and intense. He came too close. Close enough that she had to tilt her head back to look at him.

“We had sex,” he said bluntly, his voice low and rough. “Friendship never entered into it.”

Rafferty raised a hand and traced his thumb down her cheek to the corner of her mouth. “How about you, Mary Lee?” he whispered. “You want to give a cowboy a ride?”

He knew he was being a bastard. J.D. didn’t give a damn. If he was lucky he would scare her away from this place.

“How about it, Mary Lee?” he murmured. “I’ll let you be on top.”

“You son of a bitch!”

Thinking she would choke on her outrage, Mari kicked him in the shin. He jumped back from her, swearing, his face flushing dark with pain and fury. Belatedly she questioned the wisdom of making him angry. He could take what he wanted. They were in the middle of nowhere. No one knew she had come to Montana. He could rape her and kill her and dump her body in the mountains, never to be found. Christ, for all she knew, he had killed Lucy. But the deed was done. She couldn’t cower from him now.

“Get out!” she screamed. “Get the hell out of here!”

J.D. gathered his temper with a ruthless mental fist. He moved to the front door and leaned a hand against the jamb, looking back at her from under the brim of his black hat. The door stood open to the night, inviting a swarm of bugs to buzz around the antler chandelier in the foyer. “All you had to do was say no.”

He tipped his hat in a gesture that seemed more mocking than polite. Mari followed him out and watched as he mounted a stout sorrel horse that stood waiting in the puddle of amber light that spilled from the house.

“There’s a motel on the edge of town,” he said, settling into the saddle. “Drive slow on your way down. You hit an elk with that damned Japanese car and there won’t be enough left to make a sardine can.”