She supposed he was about the same age as her father, though all similarities stopped there. Her father was a hulking brute of a man, coarse and dark. Bryce was small. Catlike, she thought; lean, wiry, and graceful. His forehead was very high and broad, and beneath a ledge of brow, his eyes were a pale, startling shade of blue, his mouth a wide, thin line above a small chin. He wore his shoulder-length sun-streaked blond hair swept back, emphasizing his forehead.

She had seen him in the Moose many times. He came to hold court. The people he brought with him treated him like royalty. Sometimes he came in looking like something out of Gentleman’s Quarterly. Most of the time he was dressed as he was now-in faded jeans that fit him like a glove and a loose, faded chambray shirt, which he wore with the sleeves neatly rolled up and the front open halfway to his belly button, exposing a thick pelt of dark chest hair. It was his version of cowboy dress, she supposed, though anyone who had ever known a cowboy would never mistake him for one.

He turned toward her then, catching her looking at him. Samantha thrust his handkerchief out to him and turned toward the mountains. She could feel him staring at her for a long while before he spoke.

“I’m sorry if my friends embarrassed you, Samantha. They didn’t mean to.”

“It wasn’t them.”

“What then?” he asked softly. “A young woman as lovely as you should never have to cry so hard.”

Samantha sniffed, her full lips twitching upward at one corner. She never thought of herself as lovely. She was tall and slender with almost boyish hips and no breasts to speak of-something that had never bothered her in her tomboy days, something that bothered her a great deal when she thought of Will and the buxom blonde coming out of the Hell and Gone. As far as her face went, she had always found it an odd mix of white and Indian, a jumble of oversize features that didn’t quite go together.

“Boyfriend trouble?” Bryce ventured.

Glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, she weighed the wisdom of confiding in this man. She couldn’t imagine why he should care what went on in her life. She was just a nobody cocktail waitress. But the kindness and concern she read in his tanned face touched a very tender spot inside.

She didn’t have anyone else to turn to. Her parents were no shining example of wedded bliss. When her father wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t home. Her mother had six kids to raise and no energy or enthusiasm for the job. Samantha didn’t have many friends who hadn’t been Will’s friends first. And she had always been too reticent for a tell-all girlfriend anyway. She might have gone to Will’s brother for support, because she trusted him, but she had always felt J.D. didn’t approve of the marriage. She had always felt he’d somehow known exactly what was what between her and Will, that he had seen past the façade of newlywed bliss from the first.

But here was this kind man, taking an interest, offering her a chance to unburden herself a little.

“My husband,” she said in a small voice, looking down at a cluster of pink bitterroot that grew in a rock garden beyond the fence. “We’re having some problems… He moved out.”

Bryce made a sound of understanding and slipped an arm companionably around her shoulders. “Then he’s a fool, isn’t he?”

Will was a lot of things. Samantha couldn’t find it in her to voice a single one of them. Her throat closed up with misery, and scalding tears squeezed out of her tightly closed eyes. Needing nothing so badly as a shoulder to cry on, she turned and pressed her face against the one being offered to her.

They drank a toast to Lucy.

Andrew Van Dellen and his partner, Kevin Bronson, joined Mari at her table. Kevin was tall and rangy with an Ivy League look about him. He hadn’t seen thirty yet. Tears glazed his eyes when he raised his glass in Lucy’s memory.

“It was so senseless,” he murmured.

“Death often is,” Drew commented impatiently. The look they exchanged said they had already had this conversation at least once. “There’s no use contemplating it. People live their lives until fate intervenes, that’s all.”

Kevin set his handsome jaw. “You can’t say it couldn’t have been prevented, Drew. Why should Sheffield have been up there with a gun in the first place? Lucy’s dead because he had to go tramping through the woods like Rambo and try to prove his manhood by killing some poor dumb animal.”

“He wasn’t doing anything illegal.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t immoral or that it wasn’t preventable. If Bryce-”

Drew cut him off with one gently raised finger and a tip of his head. “Don’t speak ill of the customers, dear boy. It’s bad form.”

Kevin leaned back in his chair and stared up at the moose head above the fireplace, visibly struggling to rein in his temper. Drew shifted toward Mari, who had watched their exchange with avid interest while she ate. She had already devoured half a breast-of-chicken sandwich and most of the accompanying herbed fries. The food was rejuvenating her, sending fuel to a brain that had been running on empty. The drink was taking the edge off her nerves. Kevin and Drew were giving her mind something solid and real to focus on.

“Kev thinks the NRA will destroy civilization as we know it,” Drew said with a touch of humor. Kevin’s frown only tightened. “The truth is that Bryce is well within his rights to offer those elk for hunting. Hunting is a time-honored sport. And if one wants to get terribly deep, we are, after all, a species of hunters. It’s gone on for eons.”

“Men used to hit women over the head with mastodon bones and drag them off by the hair. We don’t still do that.”

“Some do.”

“It isn’t funny.”

Their eyes held for a brittle moment, then Drew cupped a hand over his partner’s shoulder. “Don’t let’s fight about it,” he murmured tiredly. “At least not in front of a guest.”

Kevin looked across the table. “I’m sorry, Mari. The whole subject just makes me crazy.”

“I don’t exactly like the thought of my friend getting killed in place of an elk, myself,” she said, setting aside the last bite of her sandwich. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and fiddled with the bauble that dangled from the lobe.

“What makes me so angry is the hypocrisy,” Kevin said, his voice lowered to keep it from traveling to the wrong ears. “Bryce pledges money and land to the Nature Conservancy and then runs around killing everything on the planet.”

“It’s not at all unusual for hunters to support conservation efforts,” Drew argued. “Their purpose is sport, not annihilation.”

“I fail to see how anyone can derive pleasure from denying another living creature its life.”

“Oh, bloody hell, here we go again.”

“No.” Kevin jerked his chair back from the table and rose. “Here I go again.” Drew rolled his eyes and dropped his head against one hand. Kevin ignored him. “Mari, I’m sorry we couldn’t have met under better circumstances.”

He shot a look at the blond man approaching the table, his lips thinning, then turned and headed for the lobby.

“Kevin still has his nose out of joint, I see,” Bryce commented mildly.

Drew rose from his chair, looking as if the effort were physically taxing. “Do forgive him, Mr. Bryce. It’s easier for him to blame someone than to believe life can be so randomly senseless.”

“He’s forgetting that Lucy was a friend of mine as well as his.”

“Yes, well, Kevin is young; he tends to think in absolutes.”

Bryce’s attention had already moved on from Kevin Bronson to Mari. She met his gaze, finding the Nordic blue of his eyes almost chilling, but his smile was warm as he offered her his hand. She wiped the smear of dill-speckled crème fraiche from her hand onto the bottom of her jacket and accepted the gesture.