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The muffled tap of his boot heels on the winding staircase was lost in the lowing of the wind. For a man who topped six feet two, and carried most of his weight in the brawn of chest and arms, he moved with startling ease. Narrow hips and waist and lean, hard muscled thighs bespoke more the physique of a born horseman and a working cowboy than one so comfortable afoot.
He reached the landing slowly, his light, unhurried step once more belying his size. His stride, when he crossed the room to the fireplace, was long and sure with fluid grace. Handsome, masculine grace, as quiet as a peaceful dream. Beneath the sheltering ruffle of lowered lashes, with her cheek resting against Shadow’s furry neck, Merrill watched with somnolent, unseeing eyes as he knelt to the dying fire.
As if only waiting his attendance another log burned through, tumbling into ash. A burst of blue tipped flame leapt and danced in a weaving column. Embers shattering into tiny sparks scattered in a spangled shower of shooting stars.
The minor chaos of this scintillating display drew her from the drifting, pain numbing retreat of her mind. Wrenching away from Shadow, she turned her bewildered, unfocused regard to Ty, the fire, then Ty again.
For a surreal instant this was part of a dream. This striking figure who moved more quietly than the wind was an illusion. Not flesh and blood. Not real.
“Forgive me.” The apology spilled through the careful guard of a tender heart as he absorbed the lost look on her face. “I shouldn’t have disturbed you.”
Dismayed, she drew a long, hard breath. Exhaling slowly, walking a precarious tightrope between past and present, skirting memories hovering forever at the edge of her mind, she oriented herself. This was Montana. The tap at the window was wind driven snow. The dusky, featureless image etched by the fire at his back was Tynan O’Hara and inescapably real.
This is Montana, she began the litany again. Montana, not...
Stop!
She didn’t want to think of that, wouldn’t think of it. Recovering from a near misstep, she managed a calm assurance. “There’s nothing to forgive, you didn’t disturb me.”
“You were deep in thought.”
“Not really.” She shook her head, not willing to explain she had retreated to a place in her mind, a small lightless void where she didn’t have to think. “I was just...” She could offer neither a logical explanation, nor a good lie. A curt jerk of her head dismissed the effort. “You didn’t disturb me.”
“Just enjoying Shadow’s company?” he supplied for her and, to give her time to recover, busied himself with the wood box.
Realizing her fingers had stolen again into the dark rich pelt of the wolf-dog, she took her hand away. Clasping one over the other in joined fists, she rested them on her knee. “I shouldn’t, I suppose.”
Halting in midmotion, a log balanced in his palm, he turned from his chore. For an instant, glinting firelight marked the look of mild surprise on the chiseled planes of his face. In another, whatever his expression might reveal was shrouded again in darkness. “Why on earth should you not?”
Her fingers flexed, tightening over the backs of her hands. “Some people would resent the interference. Consider it the corrupting of a watchdog.”
“Corrupting?” he laughed softly. “In the first place it couldn’t be done. Shadow’s too much a free thinker for that, far too much his own person. In the second, I’m not some people, Merrill, and Shadow isn’t my watchdog. He isn’t my anything. He belongs to himself, not to me.”
At her look of askance he laid the log aside, and hunkered down on the floor. With one arm braced on his knee, he leaned against the stone ledge of the hearth. “Shadow’s been with me a number of years, but I didn’t choose him. He chose me.”
Doubting as he intended she should, she commented skeptically, “In the middle of nowhere, a wolf, where wolves rarely exist, chooses you?”
“Three-quarters wolf, and a bit more,” Ty said, though he knew the teasing reminder was quite unnecessary. “Enough to be mistaken as pure wolf.”
“So you said.” It was never the wolf part Merrill questioned. No one would question that, only the ratio.
“So my sister the vet estimates.”
Searching for a name, Merrill walked the tightrope again. Selective memory served. “Patience.”
“Val has told you about her?” A small shift of his foot, a slight twist of his body and his face turned in profile. The flickering blaze again marked the stalwart features and cast a sheen of silver and gold over the blackness of his hair.
“Only that she’s the youngest, and a veterinarian.” Merrill saw a strong likeness to Valentina in him. His hair a little darker. His eyes, she remembered, were a little paler blue, yet the same. The arching brows were thicker, the chin as noble, as stubborn. She wondered if his mouth beneath the dark slash of his mustache was as generous in its masculinity.
Now that she let herself see it, the resemblance was uncanny. But Valentina was part of The Black Watch, and however strong their new friendship, she didn’t want to think of anyone or anything to do with the clandestine organization. Even Patience, the younger O’Hara, was indirectly connected. Not by profession, but by marriage and one of those unexpected coincidences proving one must always expect the unexpected. Matthew Winter Sky, half French, half Apache, the mythical and mystical tracker of The Watch, had survived a rattlesnake bite and was alive and well because of the love and care of Patience O’Hara.
Merrill shook the recollection aside. Tonight the path of all thoughts seemed determined to lead to forbidden territory. If she must think at all, she wanted it to be of snowy nights and Shadow.
“So,” she began, turning the conversation back on track. “This great, hulking sweetheart chose you.”
“You could say that.”
“How?”
“Long story.”
“We have the night, don’t we?” She cast a look at the window where snow had begun to accumulate in miniature drifts over the sill. “You aren’t expecting anyone in this blizzard, are you?”
Ty would have laughed at calling this first, early dusting a blizzard, but he saw she was utterly serious. “We have the night,” he agreed, careful to do nothing to spoil this tenuous, first thread of communication. “And no one is slated to come calling.”
Shadow had sat on his haunches at her feet, his piercing blue gaze turning from his human companions to the window and back again. Ty knew that a part of the animal wanted to be away, answering the call of his blood, running wild and free, prancing and tumbling and licking at the flying flakes like a puppy. It was always the same with the first snow.
If he’d asked, Ty would have opened the door and let him go. But he didn’t ask. He’d elected instead, to stay by Merrill. With one last look at the window, and one for Ty, Shadow sighed and laid his head in her lap.
There would be other snows.
Merrill didn’t smile. It was too soon for that. But a look of delight eased the sadness in her face. And as she bent to the wolf, her gold streaked curls mingling with the ebony pelt, Ty waited and watched.
She was a little thing. He couldn’t get past that. It was always his second thought when he thought of her, his second impression with each rare encounter. The first, each time, was of dark, grieving sadness. Sadness where there should be laughter and light.
It was that and the unexpectedness of her that touched his heart. A warrior’s heart, with a tender streak no better hidden than her sorrow. When he’d first seen her, standing fragile and vulnerable and golden in the sun, he’d known he wouldn’t turn her away from his winter sanctum. Promises to Val aside, he couldn’t turn her away.
So he watched them in his home, the wolf who was of the night, the woman who should have been sunlight. He watched her and learned.
A man should smile when he watched a beautiful woman. But he didn’t.
For eight days, a week of days and one more, she’d shared his home, and he knew her little better than on the first. In those days they’d co-existed, spending little time in the same room, exchanging fewer words. After seeing to her needs and her comfort on that first encounter, keeping to his own schedule, he’d given her a wide berth, letting her settle in as she would. Rising at dawn each morning, after a quick and solitary breakfast, he cleared out, giving her space and time to work through her troubles. Throwing himself with unnecessary vigor into the necessary check of fences and animals, he tried not to think of her. Tried not to worry.
Lunch was early. A quick sandwich or biscuits and beans on whichever part of the spread he was working. When his day brought him back to the central part of the ranch and the house, there was never evidence that she’d left her room or eaten at all.
Following an established pattern, the first of the afternoon he devoted to exercising the horses he’d kept for the winter. Midafternoon was devoted to private and professional concerns. The last he spent in preparing dinner. The one meal for which he insisted she join him, after two days of discovering she forgot to eat without the reminder.
As with most ranchers who remained bachelors into maturity in this isolated country, he was a passable cook. Actually, better than passable. Not a gourmet, he would be first to admit, but definitely better than passable.
He could set an enticing table too. Nothing elaborate, just pleasant. When she hadn’t resisted his stipulation that they share the evening meal, to encourage her appetite and give her pleasure, he put away the battered tin he used when the summer guests were gone, and brought out unique settings of hauntingly beautiful Native American design. An odd and striking mix with the delicate Irish linen he brought from storage, and with the crystal he always favored for his wines. Odd, striking, but one that worked.
She’d sat at his table. She’d eaten meager portions of the food he put before her agreeably, but silently. And when the meal was finished, her offers to clean the kitchen kindly and firmly refused, she returned as silently to her room. With the last dish put away, and coffee readied for the morning, Ty retired as tacitly to his lair and his computer.
A routine that seemed carved in stone. Then, to his pleased wonder, she began to venture into the great room. At first, just to sit, empty-handed, empty-eyed, uninterested. Certainly not in search of company. More as if with familiarity the walls of her room had become confining, driving her to seek out a change of territory. Next came the restless wandering, an incurious pacing. Then discreet and well-mannered exploration, the quickening of an intellect that wouldn’t be denied.
And thus, another pattern evolved. Sometimes she read. Sometimes not. Sometimes she only sat, her mind far removed from this little part of her world. But it was another step toward healing.
From his desk he heard her each night, rifling through books, sighing softly and unaware, as she sat before the fire. She had taken each small step forward, yet remained as silent and withdrawn as if she were still secreted in her room. Now Shadow, with his uncanny instincts, had drawn her out. And if it was of Shadow she wished to hear, she would.
First he attended the fire, stacking logs on smoldering coals until it blazed with renewed vigor. Driven away from the hearth by the heat, he crossed to a cabinet, poured a pale cognac into two short-stemmed glasses. Palming them, he celebrated and enjoyed, again, the extraordinary communing and the deepening bond between woman and beast.
Her hair was a tumble of captured sunlight in the glow of firelight. Her body was delicate, too slender. And when she lifted her face from the wolf, she moved with the slightest easing of strain.
It was a little. It was enough, for now. It was a beginning.
Returning to her, Ty stood by her seat, anticipating the moment her amber gaze would lift to his. Her head tilted as he had come to expect, her look was solemn and steady. He saw the strength there, and the courage. Merrill Santiago wasn’t lost, only battered and bruised.
With care, bruises healed. In time.
As she took the glass from him, her fingertips brushed his, a singularly pleasant sensation accompanied by a murmur of thanks. He felt that somber study on his body and the memory of her fingers tingling his as he settled down and deep into the cushions of the sofa across from her.
“You were going to tell me about Shadow, and how he came to be your...shall I say...partner and friend?” Her words were measured and unhurried, her voice husky. The gaze as steady.
“I was, wasn’t I? My partner and friend...you make an apt assessment, one few others grasp.” He stared into the fire and listened to the storm. Judging the weakening of its force, content that tomorrow promised to be a rare and pristine day, he launched into his story.
“I’d been here only a few months, and the cabin and barns were hardly completed before winter struck. An early one. Earlier than this. On its heels a pack of wolves and wild dogs ranged over the border from Canada. They were here, there. Everywhere and nowhere. For weeks they played havoc with the cattle on ranches for miles around. Moving like phantoms, they were always a step ahead of the range hands. Sometimes a step behind, on their back trail.
“If a herd was due to be shifted to safer ground, they were there first.” Cognac swirled in the glass as he flexed and turned his wrist. “The Indians called them Ghost Wolves, saying they moved through the valleys and over the mountains, leaving no tracks, no sign, like shadows on a dark day.”
“Shadows,” Merrill murmured and looked down at their namesake.
“Wolves,” he mused, “out of nowhere. Wolves where there had been none for so long. Phantom and phenomenon. Naturally the rangers and environmentalists and all the bureaucrats imaginable were called in by the authorities. But some of the smaller stockmen were facing disaster and were far too worried and too antsy to wait for their proposed remedies to work. Taking matters into their own hands, they brought in people of their own.
“Bounty hunters.” His face was wooden, but there was contempt in his tone. “These killers who called themselves professionals hunted and slaughtered at will. Trapping, shooting and butchering, even poisoning anything on four feet that wasn’t a cow or a horse.”
A grim smile tugged at his mustache. “Even goats and sheep, and sometimes farm dogs were at risk when they were at their baiting and trigger-happy worst.
“During most of the furor, I was spared the wolves and the hunters. Then, one day I found one of them in the woods. A magnificent wolf, the biggest female I’d ever seen, and as black as night.” The glass moved, cognac swirled. “She’d been shot. I don’t know when or where, or how far she’d run before she bled out. She had pups and three of the litter were with her. When I blundered onto her body, they ran away, scattering into the woods.
“After I buried her I searched for them.” The ripple of his shoulders, as he brought the glass to his lips, called attention to their power. “No luck.”
“Yet Shadow’s here.” As she said his name again, the great creature made a pleading sound deep in his throat and nudged his nose at her knee. Both her hands were clenched around her glass. Now she eased one away to stroke the wolf, her fingers gliding comfortably now down his muzzle in the familiar caress he sought.
Ty savored the pretty picture they made, how natural it seemed in his home. He realized that, with the easy unclenching of her hands and the caress of the wolf, the fissure in the bastion that defended her heart had become a crack.
Settling deeper into the cushions of the sofa, he propped an ankle on his knee. “There were signs of the pack around for days,” he continued, picking up the thread of his narrative. “I’d never seen such tracks. Monstrous, but light, as if the Indians were right.”
“Ghost Wolves.”
“I lost a colt.” He turned pensive with the telling of it, then shrugged away the loss. “He was the last. As mysteriously as they came, the wolves were gone.”
Taking her empty glass from her, he returned it to the bar. His half smile was rueful. “As I said, long story.”
“Not so long.” Beyond her response to the wolf, Merrill had hardly moved throughout the revelation, as fascinated with his voice, his choice of words, his manner of speaking as with the story. Ghost Wolves, moving like Shadows, phantoms—he had a way with words, a nice touch. “You weave a remarkable story, but it isn’t finished.”
“Not yet.” Ty swung about, by habit gauging the drift of snow accumulating in the corners of windowpanes. He was quiet for the space of a heartbeat, remembering the tiny ball of fur stumbling and tumbling after him on legs too short and feet too large. A pup attached to a boot heel as firmly as the name he’d been given.
Fate? Providence? One creature sensing the need of another? More than coincidence, or only that? Ty would never know.
It didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that the tiny pup that became the great wolf, had come to him. When he turned again, Ty’s lips softened into a fond smile. “Five days later, when the bounty hunters were gone, as if he knew by instinct he was safe, a pup walked out of the woods. He never left.”
“Shadow, choosing you.”
“After a fashion. His fashion.”
“Safe,” she mused. “Yet Valentina says you’re a hunter.”
He hesitated so long she thought he wouldn’t answer. Taking his glass from the table, he drained a final, clinging drop from it. His blue gaze pierced her like a shard of ice. “I was. Once. But not for bounty.” Setting the glass down on the bar with exaggerated care, he said with a calm that sent shivers down a wary spine, “Never for bounty.”
Merrill held his fierce stare. There was darkness in his eyes. More than anger, more than loathing. Had she hit a nerve? Was there more reason for Fini Terre than a man seeking his livelihood in a land as beautiful as paradise?
Valentina called it his Journey’s End.
Journey from where? From what?
“My turn to apologize,” she managed, and was surprised to find she meant it.
“There’s no need to apologize for the truth.”
“You make it sound as if you were more than a casual hunter?”
“I have been. I was. A long time ago.” He moved away from the bar, returning to the hearth. Subject closed.
His broad back brooked no questions as he banked smoldering coals and readied the fire for the night. Rising from the completed task, he turned again to her. The hard edges had eased from his face, the darkness from his eyes. “It’s late.” His gaze flicked to the book she’d laid aside, lingered, then slid away. “I’ll leave you to your reading.”
As silently as he’d come, he left her.
Listening as the tap of his step faded from the stairs, she glanced down at the book. A mystery with a provocative theme that on a glance promised to pass the time that lay heavy on heart and mind. A temporary escape within the reach of her fingertips, but she didn’t pick it up.
Snow fell thinly now, clinging wetly to the window with its soft patter. The fire leapt and weaved in twining columns. Shadow sighed and lay at her feet.
Merrill thought only of the man who had given her sanctuary from the demons that plagued her. She thought and she wondered. The spirited curiosity lying dulled and dormant for weeks and months began to kindle.
Ty stopped short in the kitchen doorway, discovering Merrill Santiago was as lovely at dawn as any other hour.
When he’d first heard her stirring, a sixth sense that never rested drawing him from a light sleep, he’d been alarmed. Was she ill? Hurt? Had she decided she must leave?
That brought him lurching from his bed, reaching for clothing thrown over a chair the night before. His hands had been clumsy with zippers and buttons in his urgency. A rare circumstance for Tynan O’Hara. Sucking in a long, harsh breath, he’d forced himself to slow down, to calm down. To listen and think, attuning again to the instinct that had awakened him. Instincts that had always served him well.
The sounds he heard were politely guarded, not furtive. Little more than a rustle, a tiny disturbance of the air that would have gone unnoticed except at an hour when the house was a well of unbroken calm. The fragrance of brewing coffee had drifted to the gallery and with another long breath he had smiled. One who was hurt, or ill, or absconding wouldn’t take the time to make coffee.
He’d given her a half hour before coming down from his lair. Letting her immerse herself in the solitude of the morning, the glory of first light on virgin snow. It was a time he found most peaceful. A time that brought peace to him. When he’d gone to her at last, he’d moved quietly down the stairs, hoping without shame for this moment.
Leaning a shoulder against the smooth planed arch of the door, he let himself be charmed by the glory of a golden woman captured in the golden reflections of sunrise. Yes, she was truly lovely and, for a rare moment, at peace.
Merrill sat before the kitchen windows marveling at the utter beauty of the beginning day. Her face, in profile, was dreamy, even serene. Coffee steamed from a cup on the table. Shadow sat by her side, a flick of his ears the only acknowledgment of Ty.
