He jolted as if he had been hit with a cattle prod. The tigers. She knew about the tigers. “Is this a trick?”

“No.”

“Do you dance with the dog-boys?”

“No,” she whispered, tears crowding her throat. “Did Lucy? The dead blonde-did she?”

Del didn’t answer. His brain was cooking beneath the metal plate, bubbling and throbbing. Throbbing so hard he thought it might pop his eyeballs right out of his head. He stared at the little blonde. Her eyes were deep-set and clear as colored glass. She looked right at him. Most people didn’t. Most people looked at the deformed part of his face or looked past him as if he didn’t have a head at all.

“It’s important, Del,” she said softly. “I know you saw the tigers. I know they’re real.”

Del just stared at her.

It’s a trick. She’ll put you under the spell too.

He didn’t know what to do. He backed away a step, then turned to pace the width of the cabin, the 700 pointed at the floor. He paced hard, making military turns, as if the precise, purposeful motion would somehow direct his thoughts into some kind of order. He couldn’t trust her. She was an outsider. She was a blonde. She had come into his home uninvited. Come to take what was left of his mind, no doubt. She would lure him with talk of the tigers and pull him over the edge.

He couldn’t allow that. He had to stop the blondes and make the dog-boys go away. There couldn’t be tigers on the mountain. It was up to him. He couldn’t be a hero.

He mumbled some of this out loud, not aware that he was speaking, never thinking that the woman could hear him.

“I saw the tiger too,” she said. “I know they shot it-Bryce’s people. I think one of them might have shot Lucy too.”

His eyes cut hard to her. He did not slow his pacing. “She’s the dead one. You’re not the dead one; you’re the talker. Stop talking.”

“But, Del, we need to talk. You need to tell me-”

“Stop talking!” he roared. He wheeled on her, bringing the rifle up, and charged her, screaming at the top of his lungs. “Stop talking! Stop! I told you to stop!”

Mari stumbled backward and crashed into the counter. The back of her head smacked against a shelf, and three cans of Dr Pepper tumbled off, bouncing onto the floor. There was nowhere to go. She was leaning back as far as she could, the thin edge of the countertop biting into her back. The muzzle of Del Rafferty’s ugly black rifle bit into her right cheek in the hollow just below the bone. At the other end of the gun, Del was trembling as if he were standing on the epicenter of an earthquake. His eyes were wild, the irises swirling like liquid pewter, the pupils expanding outward like ink dropped into the mix. The muscles of his face pulled taut against the bone. His mouth tore open as if the mutilated side had been caught with an invisible fishhook.

The face of death. Somehow she had expected death to be calm and sane, as if there were some logic to the scheme. She wondered if she would feel the bullet. She wondered if she would see that same revelation that had stricken MacDonald Townsend in the instant of his death. She didn’t want to find out. The will to live pumped inside her. Her mind spun, scanning for a plan, a way out.

Jesus, Marilee, if you survive this, J.D. will kill you.

“Don’t do it, Del,” she said softly. The charged air seemed to magnify the sound a hundred times. He made an animallike growl in his throat and the muscles of his forearm contracted as he prepared to pull the trigger. Mari fought the urge to close her eyes. Her lips barely moved. The words were a breath between them. “A hero wouldn’t.”

Hero. The word pierced his pounding brain like a lance. He could be a hero. Make the family proud. Redeem himself. If he pulled the trigger? If he didn’t? The questions wrestled inside him, slamming against his ribs, jostling his aching mind. His hands were shaking on the gun, the palms sweating. He could end it. He could kill her. But that wouldn’t be the end. The dead didn’t go away. He knew. She would haunt him, and he would have to pretend she didn’t, or J.D. would be ashamed of him.

Mari watched the battle wage within him, watched his brow tighten and furrow, watched the moisture come up in his eyes and his mouth quiver. It broke her heart. Even with his gun in her face, it broke her heart. His mind was fractured. He wanted so badly to do the right thing, but he didn’t seem to know what the right thing was.

“You can be a hero, Del,” she murmured, fighting her own tears. “Help me, Del. J.D. will be so proud of you.”

She was offering everything he wanted. Small things to most men, but small things were all he dared ask for. To do the right thing. To make J.D. proud. He didn’t ask to be made whole. He didn’t ask for the kind of life other men had. Just to be a help and not a burden. To be a hero to his family, not the world. It didn’t seem too much to ask, but all the prayers had gone unanswered.

“Do the right thing, Del,” she whispered. “Put the gun down.”

She met his eyes, not blinking, not condemning, not ridiculing. She wasn’t like the other one. He knew that. She wanted him to help. She wanted him to be a hero too. The blue of her eyes was like a lake under an autumn sky, calm and deep. An angel’s eyes. Something in them reached out and touched him in a place no one had tried to enter in such a long time…

“If this is a trick, ma’am,” he said softly, stepping back, lowering the rifle, “I’ll kill you later.”

THE SOUND of dogs pulled Samantha up from the depths of unconsciousness, up through layers of dream and memory. There were always dogs at her grandfather’s place. Skinny mongrels. The old man told stories about eating dogs. When they had supper, he would whisper in her ear that they were having puppy stew and laugh at her when she didn’t eat anything but bread. She thought of Rascal and wondered if he was worried about her. She felt guilty that she’d been neglecting him. The guilt made her feel tired, and she drifted back toward the black void.

A sharp howl that ended in a sharper yelp flipped a switch inside her, and her eyes flew open. She was still in the cabin, tied to the bed. It was still daytime-or it was daytime again. She had no idea how long she had been out. All the same pains were throbbing in her body and in the base of her skull. Her hands, lashed to the headboard, had gone numb. The smell of urine and the dampness of the sheets beneath her told her her bladder had given up while she had been unconscious.

She could hear indistinct voices outside and she tried to call out, but the gag was like a cork in her mouth and there was no way to dislodge it. Hope surged like a geyser inside her. Maybe the voices belonged to hikers and they would come in and rescue her. Or hunters-with the dogs. But it wasn’t hunting season.

Hope receded with the thought that the voice might belong to her captor.

A door opened somewhere behind her. She couldn’t crane her neck around far enough to see. No one spoke. The minutes stretched on, stretching her nerves into brittle, hair-thin strands. Her head pounded. She wondered dimly if she had hallucinated the door opening, the sound of boots on the wood floor. How could she hear anything at all with this pounding in her brain? How could any of this be real? Who would want to kidnap her? She wasn’t worth anything.

The boots sounded again against the wood floor. Closer. Closer. Right behind her. She struggled to twist her head around, but couldn’t see the owner of the boots, and the pain from the movement was excruciating.

Then she felt a warm breath on the top of her head, and a pair of gloved hands slid between the bars of the headboard, one on either side of her, and she jolted hard against her bonds out of fright. The hands cupped her face, thumbs caressing her cheekbones and along the corners of her mouth, down over her jaw to her throat. The black leather was cool and fragrant, the touch bold and strangely sensual.