Dark Paradise (15 page)

you want some champagne?'"

He snatched the bottle out of her hand and flung it aside, sadistically

gratified by the way she jumped back, eyes wide. He wanted her scared of

him.

"What else do you want to know, Marilee?" he demanded, backing her

toward a cottonwood tree that grew at the edge of the parking lot. "What

else?"

"N-nothing," she stammered, stumbling back.

"Are you like your friend Lucy?
 
You want to know what it's like to

tease a cowboy?"

"No."

"You want to know what it's like to fuck a cowboy?"

"No!"

"I'm more than willing to accommodate you. Or did Lucy already tell you

all about it?
 
Huh?"

"No, she never-"

He gave a rough laugh that held no humor. "Never was not a word in her

vocabulary."

Marilee collided with the trunk of the tree, hitting her head hard

enough to snap her teeth together. The rough bark bit into her through

the fabric of her cotton shirt as she pressed back against it, as J.D.

pinned her against it.

There was nothing about his body that was softer than the tree. His

thighs were like pillars flanking hers. His fingers were like bands of

steel as they wrapped around her upper arms. He leaned down close, until

she could see the glitter of anger in his eyes. Her pulse fluttered in

her throat like a trapped bird.

"You want to find out, Marilee?" he whispered, his gaze boring into

hers, penetrating in a way that was disturbingly intimate.

His lips were parted slightly, slick and moist. The lower one was fuller

than she had first thought, sexier.

His breath came in warm, whiskey-scented puffs that seemed to go

directly into her mouth. She felt something tingle through her that was

the same confusing, unsettling mix of anxiety and arousal she had felt

with him the night before. It pooled in her breasts and swirled lower.

She wanted to slap him, but he had hold of her arms.

She might have kneed him, but he was too close. And then there was the

fact that she didn't feel as if she had an ounce of strength left in her

body.

She managed to form the word no with her lips. It came out on a gossamer

breath.

J.D. heard it as clearly as if she had shouted it. Everything male in

him rejected it. She was soft and trembling against him, her eyes as

wide and dark as a new moon.

As he stared at her, she moistened her upper lip with the tip of her

tongue, and raw need bolted through him like a wild horse.

"Liar," he growled.

He didn't assault. He didn't attack. He lowered his mouth to hers

slowly, but Marilee did nothing to stop him, gasped a little at the

first touch of flesh to flesh, and he took advantage, easing his tongue

into her mouth , deeply. She shuddered at the blatant carnality of it,

but did nothing to stop him. She felt caught in the pull of some incredible

magnet, unable to draw away,unable to stop her body from responding as

he stroked and explored and tasted her.

This is crazy, Marilee. He's a large, angry cowboy. You don't even like

him.

The internal monologue fogged out as he slanted his mouth across hers

and increased the pressure and the hunger of the kiss. He was heavy and

solid against her, and impressively, undeniably male. His erection

throbbed against her belly.

Hunger. God, he was hungry for this. Ravenous. Wild for the taste of

her. He crushed her against the tree, wanting to sink into her, wanting

to pull her down to the ground with him and into oblivion. He slipped a

hand between their bodies and found her small, plump breast.

His thumb brushed across the nipple that budded hard and tight beneath

the soft cotton of her T-shirt. Need thundered through him neck and neck

with anger and frustration, led on by the lure of sweetness and

champagne.

He wanted her. Badly. Damn near beyond reason. Another woman he didn't

trust or respect. Another outsider.

Another of the jackals who had come to scavenge at his life.

The taste of desire soured in his mouth.

As he eased away from her marginally, Marilee's senses came rushing back

like a chill wind. In their short acquaintance, J.D. Rafferty had

frightened her, offended her, embarrassed her, and now this. This went

beyond assault, beyond humiliation. He had invaded her, robbed her of

her sanity, stripped her of her good judgment.

Locating the hands she had wound into his shirtfront, she balled them

into fists and hit him in the chest as hard as she could. She may as

well have hit an elephant with a tennis ball. All she managed to do was

annoy him.

"How dare you!" she demanded, breathless.

He looked down at her with slit-eyed disgust. "Don't pretend you didn't

want it, Marilee. You didn't exactly try to fight me off."

He was right, but that didn't lessen her outrage. He had no business

touching her in the first place. "Those are your rules of dating

etiquette?
 
Screw anything that doesn't hit you in the head with a brick

first?
 
Where I come from, that's called rape. This is the nineties,

Rafferty. In the civilized world men ask permission."

"Then maybe you ought to go back to the civilized world," he sneered. "I

sure as hell don't want you here. Go back to California. Stay the hell out

of my life."

Marilee gaped at him as he moved away from her to pick up the hat he had

lost in the heat of the moment. She blew out three hard breaths, trying

to jump-start her tongue.

"Me-?
 
Your-?
 
Oh, that's rich!
 
Like I asked you to get up close and

personal with my tonsils! Who the hell do you think you are?"

"J.D. Rafferty," he growled, jamming his hat down and tipping the brim

in a mocking salute. "Del Rafferty is my uncle. He doesn't like

strangers, he doesn't like blondes, and he can shoot the balls off a

mouse at two hundred yards. Stay away from him too."

"Yeah, he sounds about as charming as you," Marilee tossed after him as

he strode away with his dog at his heels. "How will I ever control

myself?"

He didn't even give her the satisfaction of looking back, but climbed

into the cab of his pickup, fired the engine, and drove away. The dog

stood in the back of the box, staring after her until they turned onto

Main Street.

Marilee watched them drive away and then she just stood there in the

moonlight with a hand across her mouth, her body humming, her heart

racing. He made her furious.

He made her crazy. He made her want him.

How will I ever control myself . . .

He crouched among the trees, waiting. The moon glowed down on the

meadow. Coyotes crooned mournfully, their hollow cries drifting down

the valleys. The pall of death lingered like a sticky mist above ground.

He watched it, hidden among the trees on the hillside, and waited. From

the mist the bodies would materialize. The blonde, the dog-boys, the

tigers. They would take shape and dance their gruesome dance beneath the

half-light of the moon, tormenting him, luring him.

He sat among the ranks of limber pine and Douglas fir, his hands slick

with sweat on the stock of his rifle, and he waited.

As the sun rose, Marilee watched in fascination, sitting on the rock

where she had sat the night before to watch the moon rise over the

mountains. Now dawn was streaking the sky behind those same peaks in

pastel shades that were at once as soft as mist an strong enough to take

her breath away. The experience was new, and yet she felt strangely as

if she had seen it a hundred times in some other existence. She felt as

if she had been waiting forever to see it again. The beauty of it

renewed her as six hours of fitful sleep had not. Something essential in

her soul drank it in as if it were the elixir of life, and a deep sense

of peace flowed in her veins.

"'I'll tell you how the sun rose,"' she murmured.

"A ribbon at a time,"' Drew finished the line from Emily Dickinson, his

voice soft so as not to break the spell of the moment.

Marilee turned to find him standing beside her rock. He was dressed for

a workout in second-skin black spandex bike pants and a sweatshirt

heralding the Oxford Cricket Club. A mountain bike leaned against his

right hip.

"I used to enjoy sleeping in," he said. "Then I saw this sunrise. I

vowed to never miss another."

Marilee pulled her denim jacket closer around her to fend off the

morning chill and swiveled around to face him.

"Do you ever miss England?"

"Now and again," he admitted with a candid smile. But I visit often

enough. There will always be an End, as the song goes. This is home

now. I love it here."

"It's not hard to see why," Marilee said, glancing around, soaking it

up. She felt it herself, that tickle and tingle of new love. She hadn't

known it was possible to feel that kind of rush for a place instead of a

person. She tried to imagine Lucy feeling it, but couldn't see her

friend falling for something that sounded so corny.

"I always wondered what drew Lucy here," she said, her gaze sweeping the

dew-drenched meadow as she swept a strand of hair behind her ear. "I

mean, she always liked to be in the eye of the storm. She had to be in

on all the hottest trends and first to know the gossip. I couldn't see

her moving to the outback and growing vegetables . . . watching the sun

rise. When I knew her, if she saw the sun rise, it was because she

hadn't gone to bed yet."

"She wasn't so different here." Drew propped his bike on its kickstand

and moved to lean against the boulder, his shoulder half a foot from her

hiking boots. "Don't let all the natural splendor fool you. New Eden has

its secrets and its conflicts. Lucy was always in the thick of it,

stirring things up."

"With Evan Bryce's crowd?"

"Hmm. I dare say, that's a set that runs as fast and flashy as any from

her days in Sacramento. Evan Bryce is a powerful man. Powerful men have

powerful friends.He always has a host of celebrities of one variety or

another tagging after him. Actors, directors, models, politicians,

lawyers. Many of them have second homes here as well."

"What you're saying is that Lucy didn't leave the world behind; she was

actually on the cutting edge moving here?"

"Montana is the trendy place to be. Much to the dismay of the local

ranchers."

Automatically, Rafferty came to mind. His anger, his open hostility

toward outsiders . . . his kiss. The heat of it had kept her awake half

the night. The memory of it set off a restless stirring inside she

labeled as annoyance.

A small inner voice called her a liar.

"One has to sympathize with their plight," Drew went on. "Escalating

land prices, skyrocketing taxes." He sighed, his shoulders sagging as if

the weight of the moral dilemma were pressing down on them. "But then,

Kevin and I are part of the problem, aren't we?
 
We may feel sorry for

the poor buggers, but we're not about to leave."

"Where did Lucy stand?" she asked, J.D.'s taunts coming back to her

like the remnants of a bad dream. He was so bitter, so angry. How much

of that was Lucy's doing?

The look Drew gave her was knowing and honest, telling her without words

she should know full well where Lucy's loyalties would have lain. "For

herself."

An ache echoed through her, leaving behind the useless regret that her