What a bright, shining boy you are, Willie.

Teflon Man, shirking liability with a wink and a grin.

How you gonna get out of this one, smart boy?

What would J.D. do?

J.D. the hero. Man’s man. Man of principles. Do the right thing. Do the hard thing.

What would J.D. do if he caught Evan Bryce kissing his woman? He’d kick Evan Bryce’s ass all over Montana. That was his right, his obligation according to the code of the West. You didn’t steal another man’s horse, you didn’t kick another man’s dog, you didn’t touch another man’s woman.

If Evan Bryce was going to live in Montana, he had a few lessons to learn.

It felt good to transfer the anger. That was one thing Will knew he did with the proficiency of a great magician. He slipped out from under the weight of blame and dumped the load on Bryce’s head. It was all Bryce’s fault. Bryce was trying to steal his wife. Bryce was trying to steal his land. Never mind that Will had claimed to want neither. All he wanted now was a target for his anger that wasn’t pinned to his own chest.

As Samantha got up and went into the house, he turned the key in the ignition and flipped the headlights on. The truck roared to life. Three-quarters of a ton of power and metal rumbled beneath him. His temper growled in the core of him, fueled by Coors and the Jack.

He kept to the side streets on the edge of town, avoiding the main drag and the deputies that patrolled it. Turning out onto the ridge road at the Paradise Motel, he hit the gas and let the truck fly. Seventy came and went in a roar. He ran the windows down and cranked the radio up. Travis Tritt spelled out T-R-O-U-B-L-E at the top of his lungs. Will howled and whooped, working up adrenaline, letting it run through his mind like madness.

The road ran straight for a long way. A blessing for a man whose equilibrium was saturated with booze. He concentrated on keeping the truck between the white lines that marked the edges of the tarmac and looked out ahead for the taillights of a Mercedes ragtop. The night was a black tunnel around him. The truck was a rocket, cutting through the void, jumping up and ducking down with the flow of the flight path until he felt disembodied. He was a pair of hands on a steering wheel, a brain with eyes attached, bobbing in midair; he was a pair of boots on the floor amid the empties, pushing the pedal past the point of sanity.

He came up on the Mercedes so fast, he zoomed past it and hit the brakes. The wheels locked up and the back end of the pickup started fishtailing. Will wrestled for control, his brain unable to take in all the facts, formulate a plan, and execute it in smooth order. The information came in too quickly. The messages departed brain-central too slowly. The Mercedes sped around him, horn blaring.

“Fuck!” Will screamed. “You fucking stole my wife, you son of a bitch!”

The taillights of the Mercedes winked mockingly in the distance.

“I’m gonna kick your ass all the way back to Hollywood, shithead!”

Bellowing a rebel yell out the window, he punched the gas and gave chase with a squeal of burning rubber. The truck ate up the ground and closed on the car as the road began to climb and snake its way up the ridge. The truck swayed from side to side on the winding road. The empty beer cans rolled back and forth across the floor.

Will felt as though he were riding a bronc that had too much buck for him. In over his head. Hanging on for dear life. He tried to stay focused on the car, on the idea of ramming Bryce off the road. But the Mercedes kicked in the afterburners and was gone, and Will was left riding a rank one with no hope for anything but a wreck.

He went into a sharp switchback with too much speed, jerked the wheel too hard, then overcompensated. Then everything was tumbling, like socks in a clothes drier, end over end over end over end. And the beer cans rattled in the midst of it all like alarm bells ringing too late to save anyone.

“Are you worried about Townsend?” Sharon poured herself a scotch from the decanter on the antique Mexican sideboard and wandered barefoot across the thick sea of carpet. Bryce stood by the windows, staring out, hands steepled before him as if in prayer. The only light in the room came from the spots that glowed in the display cases of Native American artifacts and from the light bars on the paintings.

He made a moue of dismissal. “He’s nothing. He’s finished.”

“He might try to drag us down with him.”

“With what? Even if the videotape surfaces, there’s nothing that links it to us except the charges of a desperate man whose career will be going down in flames.” He shook his head. “No. I’m not worried about him.”

“What about the Jennings woman?”

“If she plans on making trouble, she’s taking her time doing anything about it. I think she would have made a move by now.” He took Sharon’s glass and sipped absently at the scotch, pressing his lips together as it slid like molten gold down his throat. He still faced the wall of windows, but his gaze turned inward, visualizing all the puzzle pieces but he couldn’t make them fit together. “She’s nothing like Lucy.”

“Disappointed?” Sharon asked, her voice sharp with irony.

Bryce swiveled a measuring look at her, a smile playing at the corners of his lips. “Still jealous? Lucy’s dead, darling.”

“Hurray.” She snatched her glass back from him and lifted it in a toast. The scotch was gone in a single gulp.

“You’re such a poor sport,” Bryce complained. “Do I complain when you’re fucking other men?”

“Only if your view becomes obstructed.”

Bryce walked away from her, not in the mood to spar. His mind was working, calculating, zooming down a new trail. The excitement was intoxicating. A bubble of euphoria grew in his chest, making it difficult to breathe.

“I keep thinking about Samantha,” he admitted, smiling the Redford smile, though there was no one there to be impressed by it. “Drew tried to warn me away from her tonight.”

Sharon glared at him. “How quaint.”

She stalked back to the sideboard for a refill, but she just stood there with one hand around the neck of the decanter and the other twisting the stopper around and around like a screw.

“She has so much potential and she doesn’t see any of it,” he said, amazed at that kind of innocence. Enchanted by it. “I could open doors for her that would lead her to the top of the world.”

The hand on the decanter tightened until Sharon could feel the cut of the crystal imprinting her flesh. “She’s a means to an end,” she reminded him, not liking the tone of his voice.

He sounded beguiled, on the brink of obsession. The idea made her nervous. Bryce obsessed was Bryce unpredictable. And frankly, she was tired of his bouts of obsession with other women. She was the one who stood by him through everything. She was his partner. They had fought their way up from poverty together. It stung to have her loyalty and her sacrifices overshadowed by the bright glow of infatuation. Bryce turned his attention away from her and she suddenly found herself demoted to chauffeur, gofer, fifth wheel.

She would have to distract him from the fixation before it went too far, as it had with Lucy.

Bryce waved a hand impatiently. “Yes, that’s all she was at first, but don’t you see the possibilities? My God, her face could be on every magazine in the country. I could get her a movie deal-”

“I’m sure she’ll jump at the chance to let you run her career after you’ve ruined her husband’s life.”

“He’s ruining his own life. Once I’ve convinced Samantha to step back away from him and take a good look at what he is and what he has to offer versus the life she could have with me-”

Sharon swung around and flung the scotch decanter at him. The missile went wide and exploded against the window frame, spitting liquor and bullets of crystal across the glass and onto the rug. As an attempt to get his attention, the action worked brilliantly. Bryce stared straight at her as she crossed the room with angry, purposeful strides. She narrowed her eyes to razor slits.