Dark Paradise (10 page)

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 obvious been working too hard, Samantha. Sit

down. 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 the night

he'd left she had managed to keep 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 school she had secretly pined away over him, when she had been a

lowly eighth-grader and he was 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 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 was hard as a fist.

"Can it really be all that bad?"

At the sound of the soft voice, Samantha startled ready to run, 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

moment 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 Head 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 with his long hair, fancy silver jewelry, and

custom-made, high-heeled boots.

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 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 anyway. She might have gone to

a tell-all girlfriend or 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 facade 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 around her

shoulders. "Then he's a fool."

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 Delien and his partner, Kevin Bronson, joined Marilee 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 Marilee, 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."

"They 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, Marilee. 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