Tami Hoag - Dark Paradise

“Champagne? Compliments of the Mystic Moose.”

“You’re staying here?”

She gave him a look. “While the place you sent me to had an undeniably unique ambience, I prefer not to listen while the trucker in the next room gets a lube job.”

He almost smiled at that. Dangerous thinking, letting her charm him. He focused on the bottle she held by the neck. “You always offer drinks to men you consider jerks?”

Mari had the grace to wince, though more for what she was about to do than for anything she’d said before. She needed information from J. D. Rafferty. It seemed only politic not to antagonize him, even if it did make her feel like a hypocrite, even if he deserved to be antagonized.

She slid down off the rock, holding both the champagne bottle and her guitar out away from her. The guitar she propped carefully against the boulder. The champagne she took with her as she moved toward him, holding it out as a peace offering. “Look, we got off to a bad start. Maybe we should just take it from the top, huh?”

J.D. narrowed his eyes, assessing her from head to toe. She wore a pair of old black leggings, a T-shirt from a Cajun bar in New Orleans, and a blue cotton shirt five sizes too big for her. She hardly looked dangerous, but his guard stayed up just the same. “Why? What do you want from me?”

“Civility?” Mari ventured, swallowing back the question she had held inside her most of the afternoon and evening. When he only went on watching her, she forced a laugh and shook her head. “Christ, you’re a suspicious son of a gun.”

“I’ve got reason to be. I knew your friend Lucy, remember? She never offered a damn thing that didn’t have strings attached. Why should I think you’re any different?”

She put her head on one side and hummed a note of consideration, the champagne dulling the edges of her temper. “This is a first. I’ve never posed a threat to anyone before. Unless you count social embarrassment. My family has always lived in fear of me eating with the wrong fork at dinner parties-to say nothing of eating with my fingers, which I have an uncontrollable urge to do. My mother considered my lack of social grace a birth defect. I’m sure she would have organized a telethon for the cause if the shame hadn’t been too much for her.”

He just stared at her for several moments until she began to wonder if she hadn’t suddenly begun speaking in a language he didn’t understand. A blush of embarrassment and champagne fizzies warmed her cheeks, and she anxiously shifted her weight from one sneaker to the other. Finally he said, “You always talk this much?”

“No. I am capable of deep and abiding silences. But not after half a bottle of champagne,” she confessed. “I tend to wax poetic and bay at the moon.”

He gave a snort that might have been disgust or a sinus condition, and started to turn away, motioning the dog to follow him.

“Wait!” Mari rushed to catch up, the grass and the lethargy of alcohol pulling at her feet. “I have to ask you something.”

He stopped, but didn’t turn around, forcing her to step in front of him. His expression was inscrutable, but she could feel tension emanating from him. She wondered where the wariness came from, wondered if Lucy had been the one who jaded him. She thought of chickening out, but forced the words past the knot in her tongue before she could. “Who is Del Rafferty?”

“Why?”

“He found Lucy’s body. Is he a relative of yours?”

“You thought you had to ply me with liquor for that?” J.D. sneered, letting his temper run freely through him and heat the blood in his veins. He welcomed it. This was the face of femininity he knew best-deceit.

She wanted something from him. Plain and simple. Like every other leech who had come into his domain from the outside world. They all wanted something-a piece of this, a scrap of that, a chunk, a rock, an acre, a ranch, a pound of flesh. They wormed their way in with smiles and platitudes and stroked with one hand while they stole with the other. They insulted his intelligence and mocked his basic honesty, and suddenly he wanted very badly that someone pay.

“Damned city bitches,” he snarled. “You don’t know how to ask a straight question, do you? Everything has to be wrapped in some kind of disguise. Why didn’t you just ask?”

“I did just ask!” Mari said, feeling at once both wrongly accused and justly convicted.

His lip curled in derision, he took a step toward her, looming over her. “‘Sorry, J.D., we got off on the wrong foot. Can we start again? Do 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, Mary Lee?” 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-”

“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.”

Mari 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, Mary Lee?” he whispered, his gaze boring into hers, penetrating in a way that was disturbingly intimate.

His breath came in warm, whiskey-scented puffs that seemed to go directly into her mouth. 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.

“Liar,” he growled.

He didn’t assault. He didn’t attack. He lowered his mouth to hers slowly, but Mari did nothing to stop him. She gasped a little at the first touch of flesh to flesh, and he took advantage, easing his tongue into her mouth slowly, 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 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.

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.