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Instinct and trust in Simon McKinzie warned that she was judging wrongly and unfairly. That there was, no doubt, far more to the character of this man than a craggy and arresting face. Perhaps more than she would want.
Her bleak gaze strayed from man and beast to the land, the essence of wilderness. Depression and the first stirring of angry frustration could not blind her to its far-reaching magnificence. Within the bounds of a single glance lay a panorama of natural beauty. A vast sanctuary hewn by chaos and cataclysm and the simple wearing of the ages. Rugged, diverse, a land pristine and undisturbed. Inhabited by none but wild creatures and stalwart men, as those who waited in uncanny stillness.
Beneath the weight of twin blue gazes, she felt a sudden urge to run, and continue to run. Until those piercing eyes could not touch her, and would never see into the darkness of her soul.
But no. She would not run, would not even walk away. She’d given her word, the last remaining measure of her integrity. In a moment of mental turmoil she had succumbed first to Valentina’s gentle persuasion, then to Simon’s kind, but implacable coercion, agreeing to this sojourn into the wilderness.
She’d promised to stay...and she would.
“For the winter.” A time that seemed to stretch as endlessly before her as the sea of mountains surrounding her. “Only that.”
Catching up a small duffel bag she jerked open the door and climbed from the rented Land Rover. Standing stiffly on cramped legs, with her shoulders back and her head up, she tried not to stare at the land, the wolf, and the man. “Tynan O’Hara, I presume.”
“Yes, ma’am, presumption right on target,” Ty drawled and took a step forward to take her bag. When she refused with an impatient jerk, he smiled and hooked his thumbs in the back pockets of his jeans. Concealing his surprise that the dazzling creature who stood before him bore so little resemblance to the stevedore he expected, he continued in his own imperturbable manner. “Unless you’d taken a wrong turn nearly forty miles back, it would be hard to presume anything else.”
“Forty miles!” She stared at him then. “Forty?” In spite of her best efforts, her temper flared. “Do you mean to tell me we’re that far from civilization? Just the two of us?”
“I doubt you would call the next ranch civilization exactly.” Ty fought back a grin. It was hard not to grin when one was eternally afflicted with attention deficit when it came to anger. And especially when faced with a woman who was, maybe, a fraction more than half his size, twice as angry, and looked as if she’d stepped off the pages of a fairy tale. “But it is that far by public roads, give or take eight or ten miles and a shortcut or two.”
“Give or take? Eight or ten?” She shook her head, and curls of many hues of gold tumbled around her shoulders. “In the guise of a strong suggestion, Simon ordered me to Montana for some R and R, and peace and seclusion. He didn’t say it would be in the middle of nowhere.”
“The middle of paradise.”
Merrill was too caught up in her own tumult to notice his correction. “Valentina and Simon said I would be lodging with Valentina’s brother. But I didn’t expect he would be, ahh...you would be so...” With a fretful frown, she shrugged, a small lift of elegant shoulders. “Let’s just say, I expected you would be older. Maybe not an old coot, but still not quite so...” Biting back the word virile, she settled for half truths, “...so young!” Seizing on the word, she belabored the obvious. “I didn’t expect you to be so young.”
Ty chuckled, and then his laugh spilled out like rich, dark brandy flowing over her. The sound was heady and soothing, and if she’d been in a receptive mood, comforting. “Laugh if you will, Mr. O’Hara. But, frankly, I don’t imagine that you’re any happier about having me here than I am about being here.”
“Winter boarders are rare.” And allowing himself to enjoy this first meeting with a beguiling woman was scarcely the same as enduring a winter of confinement with her.
“How rare?” Merrill persisted, refusing to settle for his noncommittal response. “On a scale of seldom to never, for example.”
“Never.” Ty was nothing if not honest, and if togetherness was their destiny, he would begin as he intended to be.
Through narrowed eyes, she took his measure, noting the strength in the lean hard body, the calm of his pleasingly rugged face. He had the sophisticated presence of one who had lived hard and fully, and well. And yet, in his prime, he’d chosen solitude. Magnificent solitude, but solitude nevertheless, with only the wolf as his companion. She wondered why.
Curious and intrigued, as she hadn’t been for months, she searched the glittering depths of his gaze, seeking, but never fending, the true man beneath the easy charm. At the edge of their space, the wolf lurked, watchful and still, as if waiting to pounce or play. One gorgeous creature as much an enigma as the other.
“Am I to assume, then, that it’s usually just you, the wolf, the mountains?” Her voice was stilted and stiff, as if rusted from disuse. “And, of course, a hundred feet of snow.”
“Three quarters and a half.”
The laconic answer blindsided her, leaving her confounded. “Three quarters and a half? By that do you mean three quarters and a half of a mountain, three quarters and a half of a hundred feet of snow, or...”
“Neither.” A silent signal brought the wolf to his side. “This is Shadow, he’s only three quarters and a half wolf, and just so you’ll know, the snow rarely exceeds six feet,” he drawled. “In all else, you assume correctly.”
“She snookered you, didn’t she?”
It was Ty’s turn to be blindsided. “Snookered? She?”
Suddenly and for no apparent reason, for the first time in longer than she could remember, Merrill was enjoying herself. “Wrapped you around her little finger, broad shoulders, stubborn chin and all, I’d bet.”
“You think that’s possible?”
In this case, Merrill hadn’t a doubt. “If it were the right woman. Yes,” she nodded thoughtfully. “Most definitely possible.”
“And who would you suggest that woman is?”
“Your sister, my colleague and friend. Valentina Courtenay, nee O’Hara.”
Ty didn’t bother with denials that would seem foolish in the face of events. Shrugging the broad shoulders she’d described, he conceded, “I’ve never learned to say no to her, and now I’ve come to the conclusion I never will.”
“Let me guess. She let you believe I was a man when she asked that you share your winter refuge.”
“Until the last minute.”
Merrill laughed, the haunted look faded from her gaze for an instant. “If it’s any consolation, I think she only wanted what she considered best for me.”
“Peace, respite, isolation.”
The remnants of laughter lingered, stealing worry and years from her face. “Good guess.”
Ty smiled in response. The tiny quirk of his lips that in summer set the hearts of both big and little girls lurching. “Not much of a stretch, when they are the commodities this part of the country possesses in abundance.”
Merrill found her gaze drawn again to the majesty befitting the name he’d given it. Fini Terre, a description as much as a definition for a ranch lying on the far northern boundaries of his country. A tribute to its namesake, a plantation as far south, where the O’Haras had spent a happy summer long ago.
“Fini Terre, Land’s End.” A name fraught with hidden meaning for a land of tranquility. Valentina had called it Journey’s End. Perhaps it was both, or one in the same, for this man. “More than commodities,” she mused. “A gift.”
“A gift Val thinks you have need of. Will you let it heal you?”
Temper stirring again in another of the mercuric mood swings that had plagued her for weeks, Merrill reacted caustically. “I said nothing about healing, or needing to be healed.”
“No,” Ty agreed mildly, “you didn’t. But we all need repair, in one degree or another, at some time in our lives. A need even greater when we seek out the solitude of places such as this.”
“As you did when you chose the land?”
“The land chose me, claiming me for its own. As, perhaps, it will you, Merrill Santiago.” As it had begun already. He saw it in her face, and in her eyes. He had only to look past the seething brew of guilt and resentment to know she was half in love with Montana from the start.
“Perhaps,” she ventured, temper mellowing as quickly as it ignited. Sustained anger required too much effort. Sustaining any mood or thought, or expressing any desire required more emotional energy than she had to expend.
“Then you’ll stay?” And suddenly, he wanted to give her the peace and the healing Simon and Valentina had sent her to find.
“I would be a less than pleasant companion.”
“Then we needn’t be companions at all. Neither friends, nor enemies.”
“No?” His answer startled her, making her wonder again what manner of man he was that he could make her feel and think as no one else had for so long. “Sealed away from the world, alone and isolated, underfoot and tripping over each other in a small cabin? Out of human necessity we would become one or the other.”
“Not unless we both want it.”
“This is insane, you must realize that,” she declared, but with little emphasis. “You can’t have wanted anyone to disrupt your winter idyll.”
“I didn’t.” The truth, always the truth. The only way Tynan O’Hara knew.
“But now you do.” A statement, not a question, of what she heard in his words, in his voice.
“Seems so.”
“Why?”
As she faced him, not challenging so much as simply questioning, the mountains at her back had begun to catch the late afternoon sun, framing her with their red glow. He was struck again by her small stature, the slender compact body, the deceptive fragility. She was an agent of The Black Watch. More than that, one of Simon’s Marauders, the elite among the elite. Men and women singled out from all over the world, chosen by Simon for their uncanny gifts and uncommon skills. Discreetly recruited, exquisitely trained, informed. Ruthless when necessary. Moral, loyal. Dangerous.
If she was fragile, it was a state of mind, and ultimately a physical condition created out of the very strength it eroded. Fragility out of strength—a paradox. A puzzle that must be solved and resolved before he would know the whole woman. The real woman.
The woman, he realized, he’d wanted to know from first glance. A challenging mystery he couldn’t send away.
As his gaze held hers, as blue and piercing as a laser, she didn’t look away. There was no nervous disquiet, no restless tension. The bedrock strength still survived, still resisted the grief and anguish of a tormented conscience. But for how long? How long before the one thing that could destroy her, would destroy her?
“You haven’t answered my question, Mr. O’Hara,” she said with a trace of mockery. “Or can you?”
“Perhaps not completely, Miss Santiago, but in part.” The only part that he understood, and was ready to admit. “Why do I want you to stay now, when I didn’t before?” His eyes strayed from hers, touching on the shadows of sleeplessness lying beneath them, tracing the paths of new lines of tension. Shadows, not so dark, and lines, not so deeply ingrained, that they couldn’t be erased. In time. If she stayed.
“The reason is simple, and as Val anticipated. Because you aren’t who I expected and what I expected. And as she knew I would, because I see the hurt that sent you to me.”
“To you?”
“To the land that can heal as nothing else, if you’ll let it.”
Turning from him, Merrill walked away. He was wise beyond his years, this man with the face of a not so faultless archangel, and the strength and manner of a gruff, but kindhearted bear. There was serenity here, the tranquility of a million years. The peace she needed to fill the dark void of her soul.
Tynan O’Hara watched and waited, sensing her conflict, tamping down the urge to take her in his arms and comfort her in her unnamed grief. Instead, wisely, he stood as he was, his hand curved at Shadow’s muzzle.
“Will you stay?” he asked in a voice that barely rippled the aloof reserve she wore like a shield. “At least for a while.”
Merrill turned to him. The shadows had not vanished, nor were the lines any less distressing, but there was a subtle ease in her manner.
A freshening breeze stirred where there had been none and in it lay a chill, a harbinger of the first snow. Catching back her hair, taming riotous curls in a natural and absent gesture, she nodded only once. As the wind nipped at her with baby teeth, she knew there was no going back. She had given her word, and her word was all she had left of the woman she’d been.
“I’ll stay.”
The wind whispered and muttered, and scratched softly at the eaves like a furtive banshee seeking crack or crevice to slip through. A warm, sunny morning had become an overcast afternoon, and in the evening hours the temperature plummeted. As the season’s first sprinkle of snow began its patter against roof and windows, the night was fathomless black and frigid. But the house was warm and comfortable, and filled with soft light. A bulwark of security and tranquility in the midst of the storm.
In the great room, a fire crackled and danced in a fireplace that was one of three on the ground floor that shared the same fieldstone chimney. One for each room of the tightly and ingeniously constructed building.
Overlooking the great room lay the gallery. Expansive, rich with dark polished wood, opening to a sweep of towering windows spanning both floors. A combination of sleeping loft, study, and workroom, if one included the small enclosure Ty considered his lair. Into which he disappeared often during the day, and always each evening. Leaving her to her own counsel and her own devices for long periods of time.
Merrill had been his guest at Land’s End for more than a week and, as he’d promised, there was no interminable togetherness, no forced companionship. In fact, none at all unless she sought it. On the rare occasions she had, he proved himself a genial host, a learned and thought provoking conversationalist. Like most men of few words, he had the gift of making those few say much.
On this night, as on most, she’d chosen to be alone. Not in her room with its own cozy fire, but the great room, with the sprawl of windows bringing the magnificence of the night and the storm to her, yet sealing her away from it, keeping her safe. As red cedars tapped against their panes, and elongated squares of light fell from her reading lamp onto a dusting of snow, Merrill didn’t question her reasons for choosing this room over her own. She simply stared into the fire, listened to the whispers of the coming of winter, and let her mind go blessedly blank.
From the gallery, where he’d begun spending most of his evenings, leaning quietly against the handrail Ty watched her. As she sat in a small circle of light, feet tucked by her on the leather sofa, one finger marking a place in the book she never read, he wondered what solace she sought in the fire.
Were there demons there, dancing in an inferno? Or had she begun to find soothing magic in the ever changing flame as he did? Was this the first of common grounds? Could there be more?
Would she discover the same beauty, the same mesmerizing enchantment he found in the ebb and flow of the sky? Would she learn to read the billowing clouds hovering over mountains and valleys, and predict their message? On rainy days, would she hear the haunting music in the call of a crow echoing through the mist? Or, as he, with each first snowfall on a quiet night, would she feel a sense of waiting in the utter stillness of the land? Would she welcome the underlying peace deepening and growing beneath the lacy pattern of each windblown flake?
Would she know, then, why he found this place riveting and captivating? And understand that he felt Montana had chosen him by answering his needs above all, as no other place in the world?
Ty wondered, and he questioned. Eight days and he hadn’t a clue to what she felt, or thought, or wanted. Eight days and she was as much a paradox as from the first. As mysterious, as fascinating, intruding on his thoughts, but never the routine of his life.
She was such a silent little thing, there were times he almost convinced himself he could put her from his mind. Then, with the soft drift of her perfume and the silky rustle of her clothing, or a rare, quiet sigh and the pad of an even quieter footstep, she was there—in his thoughts. Consuming, captivating, drawing him ever deeper into the spell of her allure.
It wasn’t that she crept or scuttled about avoiding him. She was simply subdued and unobtrusive. He wondered how much of her behavior was inherent, how much was her training, how much the product of the grief that tarnished her world.
“Who are you really, Merrill Santiago? What are you? What about you intrigues me?” he mused in an undertone she could not hear. For days, as he’d gone about his chores and obligations, he’d found himself asking these same questions. With never any explanation.
Nor had he any explanation for his own behavior. Why had he reversed himself so quickly and so completely? What had she touched in him that he would want so much to help her? And why did he so often find himself watching her, as he did now, puzzling about her, seeking the key to unraveling the mystery?
A log on the fire shifted, sending a shower of sparks over the hearth, and for a moment the fire burned brighter. In the radiance of the spitting roar of flames, she seemed smaller and so fragile he wanted to wrap himself around her, to hold her and guard her, fending off her demons.
Shadow must have felt as concerned as his master, Ty concluded, for as the furor of the fire calmed, the wolf rose from his place by the hearth and padded to her. Laying his great head on her knee, his eyes turned to her face, he waited for her caress.
“Well, hello,” she said with a tremor of surprise. “Feeling lonely, are you?”
The timbre of her voice was low, a pleasing contralto. Her words, usually almost lifeless, were gently teasing as she stroked the huge head tentatively at first, and then with delight. “Ahh, you like that, do you?”
Shadow shivered, as excited as a puppy. His tail bludgeoned the edge of the sofa as he nudged at her hand begging that she continue.
“You want more, huh?” Her fingers raked through the heavy, dark coat, and scratched at his ears and nose. Her short trill of laughter sent another shiver of puppylike delight rushing through this creature who looked as if he should be ranging the hills, leading his pack. “Some great, terrible brute you are. Better mind your p’s and q’s or someone will find out your secret. Then all the world will know you’re a teddy bear, not a devil dog.”
Shadow rumbled a shameless agreement, and closed his eyes as he gave himself up to her loving touch.
As easily and simply as that, Ty realized Shadow had done what he could not. Not yet. It was far too soon for any but the most careful overture. She was too withdrawn to allow more than the slightest human trespass of the walls with which she guarded her thoughts and herself.
But Shadow hadn’t cared about walls or trespass. As was his way with all hurt and wounded humans, he’d bided his time, waited for a dreamy, tranquil moment, then he’d simply stormed her bastion and wriggled his way into her heart.
From his separate and lofty vantage, Ty listened as she murmured teasing, loving words of sense and nonsense to a wild beast that was tame only because he chose to be, outweighed her by half again, and could snap the fingers that stroked his muzzle with a single clench of razor-sharp teeth. And when she dropped her book to wrap her arms around the massive neck and bury her face in the gleaming midnight fur, he smiled.
“Good boy,” he murmured only to himself. With Shadow’s help, this small, tormented woman with the heart and mane of a lioness bad taken one minute step toward healing. But there was more to come, and it would be more difficult. More pain filled.
The wind whispered and muttered, and scratched at the eaves. The night was fathomless and frigid. The snow fell.
A fire smoldered and began to burn low beyond a hearth of stone. And a great wolf worked his magic. Little changed, but in a heartbeat, nothing was the same.
“It’s time, Val,” a brother said to his sister who was twenty-five hundred miles away. As far south as he was north. “Time to begin what you intended when you sent your bruised and grieving friend to the mountain wilderness. When you sent her to me.”
The wind whispered, the fire smoldered, the snow continued to fall. And Tynan O’Hara descended from his lair.
Two
