She leaned toward the llama as she gently extricated her sleeve from its teeth. “You didn’t happen to be called Butt Breath in a past life, did you?”

The llama drew its head back and regarded her with what looked like offense. Mari arched a brow.

“What did Lucy do with them?” she asked as she watched J.D. pour their feed pellets into various tubs. The llamas abandoned her for their supper. They took dainty mouthfuls and chewed delicately, following her and J.D. with their eyes.

“Made money, I expect,” J.D. said, his mouth twisting. “I can grow a steer that’ll feed a family of four for a year and get next to nothing for it. Grow a llama-which is good for exactly nothing-and the whole damn world beats a path to your door.”

Mari gave him a look as they slipped back out the gate. “Not everything has to be edible to be worthwhile.”

He just grunted and headed back toward the barn, his long, powerful legs absorbing the distance so that she had to almost jog to keep up to him.

“This is all a little overwhelming,” she said, scooping her hair back behind her ear. “I just can’t picture the Lucy I knew toting feed and shoveling shit.”

“She didn’t. She had a hired hand.”

That news stopped Mari in her tracks. The ranch, the llamas, a hired hand, the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous friends. Christ, just how much had Lucy inherited in the windfall that let her move here? This all had to have cost a fortune. Check the bank balance, heiress.

“Who? Where is he now?”

Rafferty’s broad shoulders rose and fell. “Just some hand. They drift around, pick up work here and there. I imagine he took off after the accident. Guess he figured a dead woman wouldn’t pay him.”

The news he delivered so matter-of-factly rested uneasily on Mari. Lucy had been shot. Her hired hand took off immediately afterward. She caught hold of J.D.’s arm as he reached for the barn door. “Did the sheriff ever question this guy?”

“There wasn’t any call for it. The dentist or whatever the hell he was ’fessed up.”

“But he claimed he never saw Lucy.”

“Idiot shoots a woman instead of an elk. Doesn’t surprise me he claims he didn’t see her.”

He opened the door for her and closed it behind him. The feed buckets rattled as he set them down next to the bins.

“What about your uncle?” Mari asked, following him as he dumped dry cat food into half a dozen dishes and felines of all descriptions came running from every nook and cranny of the barn. “The one who found her body? Did he see anything?”

He turned around abruptly, suddenly much too close and much too large. He loomed over her, his features set in angry, uncompromising lines that were exaggerated by the shadows of the gloomy barn. “I told you last night to steer clear of him,” he said, his voice a low growl. He poked her sharply in the sternum with a forefinger, making her blink. “I meant it.”

“Why?” Mari asked, amazed she’d found the nerve. “What has he got to hide? If he didn’t do it-”

“He didn’t do it,” J.D. snarled through his teeth. “Leave him alone. He’s been through enough.”

Mari swallowed hard as he stepped around her and stalked out of the barn. She rubbed at the sore spot on her breastbone, dimly aware that her heart was knocking hard behind it. A dozen questions rushed through her mind about the mysterious Del Rafferty, about the hired man who had conveniently slipped away. She bit them all back. Rafferty’s temper was at the end of its leash, straining for an excuse to rip into her. She really didn’t feel up to giving him one.

The sun was disappearing behind the mountains to the west, casting the ranch yard into long shadows and tall silhouettes. J.D. stood beside his horse, snugging up the cinch, preparing to leave. Thoughts of drifters and faceless men with guns slid into Mari’s mind like dark, oily serpents. The eerie sense of abandonment the place had given her that first night began creeping in with the shadows.

“Rafferty, wait!” she called, trotting away from the barn.

He swung into the saddle and settled himself, resting his hands on the saddle horn, waiting.

“Look,” she said, laying her free hand against the sorrel’s warm neck. “I don’t know anything about llamas-except that they seem very… spiritual. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this place or with them. This has all happened so fast, I’m not so sure it’s even real.”

He didn’t say a word, just sat up there, staring down at her from beneath the brim of his hat.

“What I’m saying is, I need some help.”

What she wasn’t saying was that she wanted him to answer her questions. She needed answers. She needed to achieve some kind of closure concerning Lucy’s sudden departure from the present tense. What she wasn’t saying even to herself was that the idea of seeing him again held a certain attraction. Ornery, obstinate jerk that he was, he wasn’t hard to look at. And those small chinks in his armor intrigued her-his affection for animals and his reluctance to let her see it, the gentle way he had held her while she cried. Besides that, he was a link to Lucy, she reminded herself.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” she stumbled on, uncertain of the local etiquette, wishing he would simply pick up the ragged threads of the conversation and finish the thought himself, as anyone in her past life would have done. “It’s just for a week or two. I’ll pay you-”

“I don’t want your money,” he said sharply, offended. “I don’t take money from neighbors.”

A part of him was sorely tempted to turn her down all the way around. He didn’t like the feelings she shook loose inside him. He didn’t like where she came from or who her friends were. But she owned this land now, land that he wanted. If he didn’t help her, she would turn elsewhere.

She looked up at him, her dark brows tugging together in consternation. “But-”

“I’ll see to the stock,” he said, pulling down the brim of his hat. He lifted his reins and Sarge instantly brought his head up, ready for the next command. “I just won’t take money for it.”

Mari shrugged, at a loss, feeling once again like a visitor in a foreign land. “Suit yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he murmured, nodding. “I usually do.”

She watched him ride away, frustration and weariness rubbing at her temper. Something else thrummed beneath it all, something she didn’t have the patience to deal with. She didn’t have the patience to handle attraction to a man who made her want to scream and tear her hair out. Men like that, attractions like that, were good for only one thing-wild, hot, mind-numbing sex. She hadn’t come to Montana for wild, hot, mind-numbing sex. She had come for friendship and a fresh start.

But as she walked toward the house with the Mr. Peanut tin tucked in the crook of her arm, her mind drifted to a line from Lucy’s letter and a warm blush washed through her from head to toe. Ride ’im, cowgirl…

She climbed the porch steps and sat down on a bench with her back against the log wall and her eyes on the hillside where Rafferty had disappeared among the trees. She had more important things to think about, such as what she was going to do with this ranch and the llamas, and what she was going to do about the uneasiness that tightened like knots inside her when she thought of Lucy’s death.

The sun slipped farther behind the mountains. Shadows crept in from all sides. The knots twisted in her belly.

A killer who never saw his victim. A drifter who vanished. A man J. D. Rafferty didn’t want her near. A lifestyle that cost the moon. A last letter that made no sense.

“You’ve got a lot to answer for, Luce,” she muttered, her arm around the peanut tin, her eyes on the hillside that suddenly felt as though it were staring back.

He watched the woman through a Burris Signature 6-24X bench rest/varmint scope, clicking the iris adjustment to get the lighting just right. A Ruger M77 Mark II held tight into his shoulder, he rested against the trunk of a fir, silent, still, so still he blended in with his surroundings as if he were a rock or a tree. It was that quality of stillness that had made it possible for him to live as long as he had.