“No, I can’t.”

“Why not? You’re off duty. There’s no reason you shouldn’t join us for a drink, is there?”

There was every reason. She didn’t belong. She wouldn’t fit in. She was married. She needed to get home- To what? The thoughts tumbled through her head, clearly visible in her dark eyes.

“You deserve a treat, I think,” he said softly, their shared secret warm and kind in his gaze as he tilted her chin up with a forefinger. “Don’t you?”

Samantha stared at him for a moment, feeling herself needing his attention like a parched plant needed water. Her loneliness swelled inside her. The thought of going to her empty home had tears pressing against the backs of her eyes.

“Come make some new friends,” he murmured.

She looked at the people sitting at his usual table along the back wall. Smiling, beautiful, wealthy people. Laughing. Happy. She could be a part of that for a little while. She thought of Will, feeling that she was somehow betraying him. Then she thought of Will with the blonde from the Hell and Gone… and she thought of her empty house, and her empty life. She deserved something more, didn’t she? A drink, a friend, a little time away from the aching loneliness.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding to herself. “Yes, I’d like that.”

“Good girl,” Bryce said, flashing his Robert Redford grin again as he herded her toward his table.

Mari walked toward the Mystic Moose, hands jammed in the pockets of her denim jacket. She hadn’t been able to manage the idea of dinner in the elegant dining room at the lodge. Even after a shower to wash the smoke and dust off, she felt something of the ranch lingering on her, something that made her long for simpler surroundings and country music on a jukebox. Supper at the Rainbow Cafe had seemed the perfect thing. Chicken-fried steak and white gravy. Lyle Lovett and his Large Band on the side. Nora Davis in her pink uniform and her air of world wisdom.

Replete, she strolled down the sidewalk, letting the town fill her senses, letting the tensions of the day drift away. Main Street was fairly busy. There was a line of big old pickups out in front of the Hell and Gone, lined up like horses at a hitching rail. Even from more than a block away she could hear Garth Brooks advising folks to go against the grain, the sharp clack of billiard balls breaking over his cowboy voice.

She wondered if J.D. hung out there. She told herself it didn’t matter.

The stores that serviced the common folk stood dark and silent, but the trendy shops were still lit up, their doors held open with crocks of geraniums. There wasn’t a soul going in or out of those boutiques that didn’t look like an outsider.

It seemed odd to her that she should be able to spot them. She was, after all, an outsider herself. But something within her protested the label. She felt as comfortable strolling these streets as if she had been raised here. More so. The upscale haunts of her mother and sisters back in Sacramento had never felt anything but foreign to Mari.

She stopped now in front of the post office and studied her shadowed reflection in the dark glass of the front window. Her hair was a mess. She had let it dry on its own after her shower and it made a wild cloud of waves and tangles around her head, thick strands tumbling into her face. She snatched them back behind her ears, her small hands darting out the ends of her too-long jacket sleeves and disappearing again as she dropped her arms.

She didn’t think she looked like an outsider. Certainly, she didn’t bear any resemblance to the people drifting in and out of the Latigo Boutique. Even the ones in jeans had an expensive look about them, a sleek quality. Sleek was not a word anyone had ever used to describe her.

“Marilee.” Her mother ground her name out between her beautifully capped teeth. She flapped her manicured hands at the sides of her Mark Eisen suit in a gesture of futility. “Can’t you even try to make an effort to look good? Your hair is impossible and you dress as if you shop at Goodwill.”

“I do shop at Goodwill. It’s the best place to get jeans.”

Abigail Falkner Jennings heaved a sigh of supreme motherly disgust and shook her head. Her perfect champagne-blond tresses swung just enough for effect and settled perfectly into place. “I don’t understand you, Marilee. Why can’t you be more like your sisters?”

Because I’m me, Mom, she thought to herself, her heart sinking. Mari the Misfit.

For twenty-eight years she had struggled to be a good Jennings girl like Lisbeth and Annaliese were good Jennings girls. Instead, Marilee had always been known as that Jennings girl. The one who stuck out like a bunioned big toe through a fine silk stocking.

She had felt like an outsider her whole life, but she didn’t feel that here, standing in front of the New Eden, Montana, post office.

Rafferty thought she was an outsider.

“Damned city bitches… Are you like your friend Lucy? You want to know what it’s like to tease a cowboy?”

“No,” she whispered, not wanting to remember the sensation of his body against hers or the taste of his kiss. Not wanting to wonder what Lucy had done to him or with him.

She walked on down the street and turned on impulse into a New Age shop called Selah, just for the distraction of people and lights. The store was tiny, a rough cedar cubbyhole crowded with bookshelves and displays of crystals and candles and baskets of polished stones. The spicy scent of incense filled the air like a thick perfume. From the speakers of a tape deck came the sounds of birds, running water, the wind in the trees-nature in a box. Mari’s lips quirked at the idea. Who would come to this land of paradise and settle for its sounds on so many inches of flimsy tape?

“How’s the obsidian working?”

She turned away from a display of birch twigs in a bark vase and jerked her gaze up to meet M. E. Fralick’s intense visage. She was in another of her jumpers, this one deep blue over a salmon silk T-shirt. A cameo on a strip of blue velvet circled her graceful throat.

“Excuse me?”

Behind the big lenses of her glasses, M.E. rolled her eyes with a drama that befitted her profession, propping one long hand on her hip and gesturing with the other to the heavens, invoking the attention of who knew what gods. “She’s not centered,” she said with impatient disgust. Turning her attention back to Mari, she explained as if she were speaking to the most backward of children. “The stone I gave you yesterday. Obsidian. Obsidian works wonders for blocking disturbing vibrations.”

“Oh, well…” Mari shrugged apologetically. She dug the small stone out of her jacket pocket and held it up to the light. “I probably need something more the size of a basketball. But I appreciate the thought. Thanks.”

The actress shook her head, frowning gravely. “You must get centered. Talk to Damien, darling,” she said, nodding to the enormous bald man behind the counter. “He’s a Zen master.”

Mari eyed him dubiously. He looked like a hairless version of Chef Paul Prudhomme. His bulk took up the entire space behind the counter. She couldn’t help thinking that if he got himself truly centered, small moons would go into orbit around him.

A fresh group of customers streamed into the shop, snagging M.E.’s attention, and Mari managed to escape the actress and the store without the pleasure of meeting the Zen master.

She returned to the Moose as the moon was beginning to rise over the Absarokas and went up to her room to get her guitar. Rafferty notwithstanding, she had enjoyed her time out back of the lodge the night before. Just the moon and the mountains and her music. The prospect was more soothing than a wheelbarrow of obsidian.

Kevin Bronson was standing in the hall when she stepped off the elevator. He looked up at her from the stack of reports in his hands and grinned engagingly.