“Me-? Your-? Oh, that’s rich! Like I asked you to get up close and personal with my tonsils! Who the hell do you think you are-”

“J. D. Rafferty,” he growled, jamming his hat down and tipping the brim in a mocking salute. “Del Rafferty is my uncle. He doesn’t like strangers, he doesn’t like blondes, and he can shoot the balls off a mouse at two hundred yards. Stay away from him too.”

“Yeah, he sounds about as charming as you,” Mari tossed after him as he strode away with his dog at his heels. “How will I ever control myself?”

He didn’t even give her the satisfaction of looking back, but climbed into the cab of his pickup, fired the engine, and drove away. The dog stood in the back of the box, staring after her until they turned onto Main Street. Mari watched them drive away and then she just stood there in the moonlight with a hand across her mouth.

How will I ever control myself…

He crouched among the trees, waiting. The moon glowed down on the meadow. Coyotes crooned mournfully, unseen, their hollow cries drifting down the valleys. The silvery pall of death lingered like a sticky mist above the ground. He watched it, hidden among the trees on the hillside, and waited. From the mist the bodies would materialize-the blonde, the dog-boys, the tigers. They would take shape and dance their gruesome dance beneath the half-light of the moon, tormenting him, luring him.

He sat among the ranks of limber pine and Douglas fir, his hands slick with sweat on the stock of his rifle, and he waited.

I’LL TELL you how the sun rose,’ ” Mari murmured, the words slipping out of her almost without her awareness.

She sat on the same rock she had chosen the night before to watch the moon rise over the mountains. Now dawn was streaking the sky behind those same peaks in pastel shades that were at once as soft as mist and strong enough to take her breath away. The experience was new, and yet she felt strangely as if she had seen it a hundred times in some other existence. She felt as if she had been waiting forever to see it again. The beauty of it renewed her as six hours of fitful sleep had not. Something essential in her soul drank it in as if it were the elixir of life, and a deep sense of peace flowed in her veins.

“‘I’ll tell you how the sun rose,’ ” she murmured.

“‘A ribbon at a time,’ ” Drew finished the line from Emily Dickinson, his voice soft so as not to break the spell of the moment.

Mari turned to find him standing beside her rock. He was dressed for a workout in second-skin black spandex bike pants and a sweatshirt heralding the Oxford Cricket Club. A mountain bike leaned against his right hip.

“I used to enjoy sleeping in,” he said. “Then I saw this sunrise. I vowed to never miss another.”

Mari pulled her denim jacket closer around her to fend off the morning chill and swiveled around to face him. “Do you ever miss England?”

“Now and again,” he admitted with a candid smile. “But I visit often enough. There will always be an England, as the song goes. This is home now. I love it here.”

“It’s not hard to see why,” Mari said, glancing around, soaking it up. She felt it herself, that tickle and tingle of new love. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel that kind of rush for a place instead of a person. She tried to imagine Lucy feeling it, but couldn’t see her friend falling for something that sounded so corny.

“I always wondered what drew Lucy here,” she said, her gaze sweeping the dew-drenched meadow as she swept a strand of hair behind her ear. “I mean, she always liked to be in the eye of the storm. She had to be in on all the hottest trends and first to know the gossip. I couldn’t see her moving to the outback and growing vegetables… watching the sun rise. When I knew her, if she saw the sun rise, it was because she hadn’t gone to bed yet.”

“She wasn’t so different here.” Drew propped his bike on its kickstand and moved to lean against the boulder, his shoulder half a foot from her hiking boots. “Don’t let all the natural splendor fool you. New Eden has its secrets and its conflicts. Lucy was always in the thick of it, stirring things up.”

“With Evan Bryce’s crowd?”

“Hmm. I dare say, that’s a set that runs as fast and flashy as any from her days in Sacramento. Evan Bryce is a powerful man. Powerful men have powerful friends. He always has a host of celebrities of one variety or another tagging after him. Actors, directors, models, politicians, lawyers. Many of them have second homes here as well.”

“What you’re saying is that Lucy didn’t leave the world behind; she was actually on the cutting edge moving here?”

“Montana is the trendy place to be. Much to the dismay of the local ranchers. One has to sympathize with their plight. Escalating land prices, skyrocketing taxes.” He sighed, his shoulders sagging as if the weight of the moral dilemma were pressing down on them. “But then, Kevin and I are part of the problem, aren’t we? We may feel sorry for the poor buggers, but we’re not about to leave.”

“Where did Lucy stand?”

The look Drew gave her was knowing and honest. “For herself.”

An ache echoed through her, leaving behind the useless regret that her friend hadn’t been a better person.

“You don’t seem much like her, luv,” Drew said gently.

A sad smile pulled at the corners of her mouth as she slid down off the rock. “No. We didn’t have much in common… except that we were friends. That doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

He slid a brotherly arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “It makes as much sense as relationships ever do. I can’t say that I found Lucy to be of sterling character, but I liked her as well. She had a rare sense of humor and if she found you worthy of friendship, she would fight to the finish for you.”

“She was just… well, she was just Lucy. And now she’s gone.”

For several moments, they stayed side by side, leaning against each other as if they had been friends forever instead of a day. The sunlight spilled over the shoulders of the Absarokas like liquid gold, and the valley began to come to life. A meadowlark trilled. Halfway up the side of the mountain an eagle soared above the tops of the Douglas fir and lodgepole pine, wings outstretched to catch the updrafts.

Mari watched in silence, letting the peace seep into her and wash the rest away. She took a deep breath of cool, clean air that was scented with pine and cedar and the soft perfumes of a dozen wildflowers, and let it soothe her as the line from the poem soothed her. I’ll tell you how the sun rose-a ribbon at a time.

She was eating breakfast when Miller Daggrepont descended on her. She saw him coming across the dining room and knew with a sense of fatalism that he was homing in on her. Everyone in the dining room paused with forks and spoons in midair as he passed, their expressions ranging from horror to amusement.

He was as wide as he was tall, a virtual cube of a man, with a face like a bulldog’s and a shock of ratty gray hair that stood straight up from his head in a style reminiscent of fight promoter Don King. A gold and black brocade vest stretched around his rotund frame over a white shirt, and a black string tie lurked beneath the folds of his wattle. A huge silver belt buckle set with nuggets of turquoise perched at the forefront of his belly like a hood ornament on a Mack truck. The legs of his black trousers were tucked into a pair of snakeskin boots that looked ridiculously tiny beneath his enormous bulk.

Mari froze with a slice of cantaloupe halfway to her mouth, the juice running down her fingertips, as he rumbled up to her table and stopped straight across from her. There was a cigar stub jammed into the corner of his mouth. He looked down on her through Coke-bottle lenses, his dark eyes weirdly magnified behind them.