Tami Hoag - Dark Paradise

“Quinn arrested Evan Bryce yesterday,” he said, turning his attention back to her. “The district attorney and a federal prosecutor are going through the evidence now-what Lucy left and what they got out of Bryce’s house. Turns out he had tapes of two dozen or more hunts. Some big people are gonna take big falls. Quinn thinks they’ll have enough indictments to fill a wheelbarrow. He sends his apologies for not believing you sooner.”

“Yeah, well, there was a lot of that going around. I can’t really blame him for choosing the path of least resistance. I probably would have done that too in my past life.

“Come pull up a chair, Rafferty,” she said, nodding to the stool Nora had vacated.

Her hair was its usual mess, and it tumbled across her face with the gesture. She swept it back with her right hand. Through the thin fabric of her hospital gown J.D. could see the bandages that swathed her left shoulder and banded across her chest. He felt sick at the memory of her lying on the ground, her blood oozing out between his fingers.

“I should have listened too,” he said, easing himself down on the seat.

Mari gave him a wry look. “I was under the impression cowboys are anatomically incapable of listening to women. Tuned in to a different wavelength or something.”

He didn’t smile. He stared at his old boots and sighed.

“Look, J.D., you had no reason to suspect what was going on. No one could have guessed.”

“I knew Lucy was into something,” he admitted. “She was always making sly remarks, then watching me, like she was waiting to see if I could figure them out. I ignored her because I didn’t want to believe her world had anything to do with mine. And then when she was killed, I just kept thinking-Jesus, what if Del did it? What would I do? How could I turn him in?”

The questions tormented him still. He stared straight ahead as he searched for answers within himself, the muscles in his jaw working, his short thick lashes beating down hard. “After all I said about outsiders coming up here, it would have been my finger on the trigger as much as his. What does that make me?”

“Don’t beat yourself up, cowboy. Nobody can blame you for wanting to protect what’s yours.”

She reached out and stroked her fingers along the back of the hand that gripped his thigh. A strong hand. Work and weather-rough. Slowly he turned it palm up and laced his fingers between hers and held her tight. In many ways it was the most intimate act they had shared.

Emotion swelled in her chest and filled her eyes. I love you . The words were bittersweet on her tongue. She would not say them. He would not want them any more than he would want her sympathy. Too bad, because after living in a dormant state for so long, she finally felt alive, brimming with life, full of feeling. She needed to give. She needed someone who wanted her love. No more half-life, no more half-love. No more clinging to the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

J.D. looked down at the pale hand twined with his and felt unworthy. He had set out to use her. He had hurt her a dozen times. All in the name of a higher purpose-a clever guise for his own fear. He had accused her of much and given her little, and he was the guilty one. He boasted a code of honor; Mary Lee had lived it. She had risked her life for the truth, for her friend. She had stood up to him and stood up for herself and for justice. She lay in a hospital bed, an escapee from death’s door, and yet she reached out to offer him comfort.

He had never felt so ashamed of himself.

How long had he told himself he didn’t want a woman’s love, that it was a burden and a curse, a pernicious thing that fed on a man’s weakness and left him less than whole? When the truth of it was, he didn’t deserve it. He had spent so long hardening himself against it, he wouldn’t have known how to accept it had she offered. And so he let the moment and the opportunity slip past and told himself it was just as well for both of them.

“Well,” he murmured after a long while. “There’s chores need doing.”

He looked up at Mary Lee, his heart squeezing in his chest. She had fallen asleep, her face turned toward him, tears on her cheeks.

Gently, he tucked her hand beneath the covers, leaned down, and kissed her. Then he walked out of her life.

DARLING,are you certain you’re feeling up to this?” Drew asked for the ninth time. He slid Mari’s guitar case carefully in the back of the Mystic Moose courtesy van and turned to her with one of his concerned-brother looks.

In spite of the tension that lingered between them, Kevin joined forces with Drew in this effort, his brown eyes as hopeful as a spaniel’s. “Really, Mari, you can stay as long as you need to. We hate thinking of you way out on that ranch all alone.”

In a symbolic gesture, Mari swung the van door shut and gave them both a wry look. “Then you’ll have to come out and visit me, guys. It’s only nine miles. Besides, I won’t be alone. I’ll have Spike with me.”

At the mention of his name, the black and white rat terrier she had adopted from the Eden Valley Veterinary Clinic jumped out from beneath the shade of the van and set up a yowling that made Drew and Kevin cringe. Mari grinned at him and praised him, leaning down to rub his head with her good hand. Her left arm was still immobilized, though she was due to begin physical therapy soon to rehabilitate the damaged muscles.

Two weeks had passed since that terrible day on the mountain. In that time, she had been visited and pampered and fussed over by her new friends and bullied by Doc Larimer. She had spoken at length with the district attorney and the federal prosecutor and Sheriff Quinn, who brought her a plate piled high with his wife’s caramel-fudge brownies as a gesture of apology. She had declined interviews with no less than a dozen newspapers and broadcast news people.

She had spent time with both Will and Samantha, who were working hard at starting their young marriage over. Samantha had a lot of healing to do-emotional as well as physical, and Will had a tough row to hoe beating his drinking problem, but at the heart of the matter their love was real and sweet and tender. Mari wasn’t going to bet against them. As far as she was concerned, true love needed all the backers it could get. Too much of what passed for love wasn’t real, and too much that was died on the vine. And too many people never got the chance to find out one way or the other.

She had not seen J.D. once since the day they had held hands in silence in her room.

Tucker had come to pay his respects. Chaske came with him and presented her with a Ziploc bag full of powdered rattlesnake skin that was supposed to give her body strength. He told her the recipe was handed down to him from a Sioux medicine man, a claim that made Tucker roll his eyes. The two had entertained her for nearly two hours bickering with each other and telling stories. They had offered her small glimpses of J.D. as a boy, as a teenager, as a young man shouldering the burden of running the ranch after his father died.

Mari had pictured in her mind’s eye the events that shaped him into the man he was today, and she felt she understood him a little better than she had, but she couldn’t see that the knowledge was going to be of any use to her. J.D. himself didn’t come, he didn’t call. Nor did she go to him. As much as she ached to see him, to touch him, to have him hold her, she wasn’t so sure they weren’t better off apart. She had a new life to begin. J.D. had an old way of life that was shifting and changing, leaving him on uncertain ground.

Maybe in time… or not. She had to keep reminding herself that J. D. Rafferty was not the reason she had come to Montana in the first place.