She would have put the question off a while longer, would have thought of inane things for another moment or two. Her fingers tightened on the trunk of the ficus as if trying to hold something that had already slipped beyond her grasp.

“Happened about ten days ago…”

Ten days. Ten days ago she had been crying over a man she didn’t love, giving up a career she’d never wanted, breaking ties to the family she had never fit into. Lucy had been dying.

She brought a hand up to press it over her trembling lips. She shook her head in denial, desperation and tears swimming in her eyes. Lucy couldn’t be dead-she was too ornery, too cynical, too wise. Only the good die young, Marilee. She could still see the sharp gleam of certainty and caustic humor in her friend’s eyes as she’d said it. Jesus, Lucy should have lived to be a hundred.

“… hunting accident…”

Rafferty’s words penetrated the fog only dimly. He sounded as if he were talking to her from a great distance instead of just a few feet away. She stared at him, her defenses raising shields that deflected the harshness of the subject and focused her attention on unimportant things. His hair-it was sensibly short and the color of sable. He had a little cowlick in front at the edge of his high, broad forehead. His tan-it ended in a line of demarcation from his hatband. Somehow that made him seem less dangerous, more human. The paler skin looked soft and vulnerable. Stupid word for a man with a six-gun strapped to his hips-vulnerable.

“Hunting?” she mumbled as if the word were foreign.

J.D. pressed his lips together, impatience and compassion warring inside him. She looked as fragile as a china doll, as if the slightest bump or pressure would shatter her like the lamps and pots that lay scattered on the floor. Beneath the tangled fringe of flaxen bangs and the soft arcs of dark brows, her deep-set blue eyes were huge and brimming with pain and confusion.