Journey's End

“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

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.