Dark Paradise (4 page)

He was being a bastard. J.D. didn't give a damn. He would either scare

her off or get the ache in his balls taken care of. Either way was fine

by him.

"How about it, Marilee?" he murmured. "I'll let you be on top."

"You son of a bitch!"

Thinking she would choke on her outrage, she 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 sauntered 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.

Marilee 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 Hotel 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."

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 x 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 . . .

"Come on, come on, you big gear-jamming son of a bitch!
 
Oh! Oh!
 
OH!"

Marilee 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

head board. 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 nightstand 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.

Marilee 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 roadweary to the Paradise Motel.

There was nothing vaguely resembling paradise here. A ghost of a cynical

smile twisted Marilee'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 Marilee'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 sixpack of Miller Lite Marilee had

hauled with her all the way from Sacramento. But Lucy wasn't here.

Marilee 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 Marilee 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, Marilee, 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?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

"I wasn't getting much here, Marilee. You're always too tired or too

stressed or-"

"You!
 
You have the gall to complain to me about our sex life?"

"What are you saying?
 
Are you saying I didn't satisfy you?"

"I'm saying I've had better orgasms by myself!"

"Fine. Reduce the conversation to a gutter level. The bottom line is we

don't have a future together, Marilee. We don't want the same things

professionally or socially. There's no point in going on with it."

"Bottom line. You want to talk bottom line?
 
Fine.

Here's a bottom line for you, Bradford. You owe me about three thousand

dollars for services rendered in my professional capacity. Would you

care to cough that up before you pack your toothbrush, or should I bill

the firm?"

She would never see a dime of it, not that she cared so much about the

money. It was the idea that burned her cookies. She felt used. He had

taken advantage of their relationship while he had been struggling to

get a toehold at the firm. I have to share a secretary, Marilee. Please,

can't You just type this up for me. Just this once (twice, three times,

eighty-five times). Don't you want me to look good?
 
Couldn't you just

help out a little with those transcripts?
 
It would make such a good

impression if I could have this done . . . He had treated her as if she

were his personal, free-of-charge legal secretary. Now that he was

moving up in the world, he wouldn't have to save pennies by literally

screwing a court reporter out of her fees.

She felt like a fool. How she had ever managed to fall for a lawyer in

the first place was beyond her. No. That was a lie. In her heart she

knew what she had been doing with the upwardly mobile Bradford Enright,

and it was so Freudian, it was depressing. Her family had approved of