She crossed her arms against the chill of the evening and glared at him. “You could at least say you’re sorry,” she said bitterly.

“I’m not,” he replied, and reined his horse away.

She watched him ride off at an easy lope, away from the ranch yard, away from the road. The darkness swallowed him up long before the hollow drum of hoofbeats faded.

“Bastard,” she muttered, turning back to go inside.

The adrenaline ebbed from her system, leaving the weight of exhaustion in its wake. The last vestiges of shock lingered like novocaine, keeping the first sting of grief at bay. She tried to fix her mind on the mundane tasks of getting back to town and finding a hotel room, tried to forget the residual feel of J. D. Rafferty’s hands on her, his big body pressed against her back, his rawsilk voice murmuring indecent proposals. But the sensations lingered disturbingly, adding a vague, grimy film of guilt to the complex layers of emotion. Feeling a need to wash both physically and psychologically, she went in search of a bathroom, finding one on the second floor.

It had fared no better than the rest of the house. The lid from the toilet tank had been smashed. It looked as if someone had taken a jackhammer to the shower stall, then broke up the tile floor into rubble and dust. The faucets still worked, and she filled the sink with cold water, bending over to bathe her face with it. She pulled the bottom of her T-shirt out of her jeans and used it as a towel, then stood, staring for a moment into the cracked, gilt-framed mirror that hung above the vanity.

The woman who stared back was pale and dark-eyed with pain. She looked like the survivor of a hurricane, ravaged by wind and elements that had roared so far beyond her control that she felt as insignificant and powerless as a gnat. She had packed up her life and run to Montana, to a friend who had been dead more than a week. Lucy would have seen a bitter, ironic humor in that.

She thought of her friend, of what Lucy would have had to say about the way things had turned out, and tears swelled over her lashes and slid down her cheeks.

It started out as a bad hair day and went downhill from there.

He watched her through a Simmons Silver 3¥9 wide-angle Prohunter scope. Not his favorite, especially not for this time of night, but it was all he had with him. He came here nearly every night, not because he expected to see the blonde, but because he wanted to draw her down off his mountain. She lingered there, a pale apparition among the dark trees, a phantom carried on the wings of owls. She haunted him. Too many things did.

He never slept at night. The dead came to him anyway. There was nothing he could do to stop them, but he stayed awake and watchful, willing them to leave. An exhausting vigil that was never rewarded.

He watched her cross the yard toward a small foreign car, his heart galloping, a dozen hammers pounding against the plate in his head. The fine lines of the sight crossed her chest. His cheek rested against the stock of the Remington 700 rifle. Half a breath settled in his lungs. His heart rate slowed in conditioned response. His fingertip remained still against the trigger.

There was no killing a ghost. He knew that better than anyone. He could only pray for it to leave and not come back to his mountain.

If only there were a God to hear him…

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?”