# Journey's End

Bj James

THE LONERBrooding Ty O'Hara was not looking forward to being saddled with a mysterious, alluring woman as a houseguest at his isolated Montana ranch. But Ty could sense Black Watch agent Merrill Santiago needed healing and comfort… and much more.THE LADYHoping to drive away the painful demons of her past, Merrill retreated to Ty's ranch for a winter of peace and quiet - only to discover the most dangerous man she'd ever met. Because she was falling for a man who threatened to tear down her protective walls… .THE BLACK WATCH: Men and women sworn to live - and love - by a code of honor.

“I’ve Decided Your Fate.” Letter to Reader Title Page About the Author FORWARD Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Copyright

“I’ve Decided Your Fate.”

“And?” He was so close, his lips nearly brushed hers. The clean familiar scent of him tantalized and beguiled as he took her in his arms.

“And this,” he whispered as his lips touched hers.

He meant to keep it brief. But something in her, the soft yielding of her mouth, drew him nearer, holding him closer. She was too sweet. Dear heaven!

The beat of his heart roughened in answer to the enchanting pleasure of her yielding, his kiss deepening, even as his mind said no. Slowly his mouth gentled on hers, and slowly drew away. Looking down at her, he knew he wanted her more than anything. But she was too vulnerable, her emotion in her shadowed eyes too naked.

“One day,” he said with a tenderness he’d never known was in him. “But not this day.”

Dear Reader,

The celebration of Silhouette Desire’s 15th anniversary continues this month! First, there’s a wonderful treat in store for you as Ann Major continues her fantastic CHILDREN OF DESTINY series with November’s MAN OF THE MONTH, Nobody’s Child. Not only is this the latest volume in this popular miniseries, but Ann will have a Silhouette Single Title, also part of CHILDREN OF DESTINY, in February 1998, called Secret Child. Don’t miss either one of these unforgettable love stories.

BJ James’s popular BLACK WATCH series also continues with Journey’s End, the latest installment in the stories of the men—and the women—of the secret agency. This wonderful lineup is completed with delicious love stories by Lass Small, Susan Crosby, Eileen Wilks and Shawna Delacorte. And next month, look for six more Silhouette Desire books, including a MAN OF THE MONTH by Dixie Browning!

Desire...it’s the name you can trust for dramatic, sensuous, engrossing stories written by your bestselling favorites and terrific newcomers. We guarantee handsome heroes, likable heroines...and happily-ever-after endings. So read, and enjoy!


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Journey’s End

BJ James

www.millsandboon.co.uk

BJ JAMES married her high school sweetheart straight out of college and soon found that books were delightful companions during her lonely nights as a doctor’s wife. But she never dreamed she would be more than a reader, never expected to be one of the blessed, letting her imagination soar, weaving magic of her own.

BJ has twice been honored by the Georgia Romance Writers with their prestigious Maggie Award for Best Short Contemporary Romance. She has also received the following awards from Romantic Times: Critic’s Choice Award of 1994-1995, Career Achievement Award for Series Storyteller of the Year, and Best Desire of 1994-1995 for The Saint of Bourbon Street.

FORWARD

In desperate answer to a need prompted by changing times and mores, Simon McKinzie, dedicated and uncompromising leader of The Black Watch, has been called upon by the president of the United States to form a more covert and more dangerous division of his most clandestine clan. Ranging the world in ongoing assembly of this unique unit, he has gathered and will gather in the elite among the elite—those born with the gift or the curse of skills transcending the norm. Men and women who bring extraordinary and uncommon talents in answer to extraordinary and uncommon demands.

They are, in most cases, men and women who have plummeted to the brink of hell because of their talents. Tortured souls who have stared down into the maw of destruction, been burned by its fires, yet have come back, better, surer, stronger. Driven and Colder.

As officially nameless as The Black Watch, to those few who have had the misfortune and need of calling on their dark service, they are known as Simon’s chosen... Simon’s marauders.

Prologue

“No!”

Boot heels thudding on the bare wood floor, Ty O’Hara scowled and paced and listened.

“No,” he declared again into the telephone. “There have been guests here from early spring into early August. I can’t have any over the winter. I won’t.”

In rare impatience, he whipped his Stetson from his head, sailing it across the room. Any other time he would have been mildly pleased when he scored a bull’s-eye, with the stained and worn hat settling perfectly onto the peg by the door. Another time, but not today. Not when he had the sinking, drowning feeling he was waging a losing battle.

“I said no. N, period. O, period. A short, simple word an intelligent woman such as yourself should have no trouble comprehending.”

He stopped his pacing abruptly, his fingers raked through sweat flattened hair. “Of course I love you. Of course I trust you. Of course I know what you’re asking is exactly the sort of thing that saved you. And of course I know you wouldn’t ask unless this was of the direst importance.

“But,” he turned to face a bank of windows and the mountainous vista they offered, “the answer is still no.”

He found no pleasure in the view. None in his refusal. Sighing, he grumbled, “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

There was silence in the cabin, then, interrupting the coaxing voice whispering in his ear, he demanded, “Why? Why is it so important this Santiago comes here? With the resources Simon McKinzie has at his command, why send his walking wounded to me?”

Finding no resolution in the mountains, Ty turned his back on them. “It was your suggestion?” Closing his eyes he thought of a much loved face with a stubborn chin framed by a wealth of hair only a shade lighter than his own black mane. Of a level gaze a shade darker, descending from deep blue to navy in solemn resolve. Of a mouth that trembled in tenderhearted concern. “Because this is your friend, you promised I would help?”

He began to pace again. “No, I wouldn’t want you to break your promise. Yes, I remember our promise to each other. We are blood brothers and sisters, Val. We were born that way,” he reminded drolly. “No, I haven’t forgotten cutting our palms when you were eight and I was ten, then bleeding all over each other to make the bond stronger.”

Once he would have smiled at the memory: The five of them, descending in age by one year or two from Devlin, to Kieran, to himself, then Valentina and the youngest, Patience. Five O’Haras huddled together on a summer day, swearing secret and eternal fidelity, biting back pain, dripping O’Hara blood.

A kid’s stunt and Dev’s idea, but Tynan had decided more than once over the years that the ritual had succeeded. Why else had he always been such a soft touch for his sisters? Why now, he wondered as he went down in flames. Crashing, burning, sighing in defeat, he agreed, “All right.”

Pausing, he waited for the long distance jubilation to subside. “That’s what I said. Yes, I promise.” His brows plummeted in a deepening frown. “When? When will this Merrill Santiago come?”

Gripping the telephone, he squinted and nodded. “You were so certain I would agree, he’s already on his way?”

“She?”

His eyes blinked open, the telephone crackled under his grasp. “She! Tell me this is a joke, Val. I need for you to tell me this is a joke.”

The open phone line hummed hollowly in his ear.

“Val! No! Don’t you dare.”

With the sounding of a pleased and wicked chuckle, the line went dead. Valentina had seized her victory and signed off. Leaving her brother with a broken connection and a growing sense of dismay.

“A woman!” Ty muttered to the four walls, to the mountains, to the darkening Montana sky. “Merrill Santiago is a woman.” The receiver clattered into its cradle. “What the hell have you done? Why, Valentina?”

Brooding in the gathering of twilight, Tynan knew with dreadful certainty there was no help for his sister’s coup. No remedy for an O’Hara fait accompli.

“Caged with a wounded kitten for the winter. A female kitten! God help me. God help us both.” Teeth clenched, he scowled into the first fall of night. “Beginning with tomorrow.”

One

Snow!

Tynan O’Hara looked into a cloudless Montana sky and offered another silent plea. He cajoled. He implored. Before that he’d commanded, demanded. And he’d cursed.

But Mother Nature, that fickle and wily lady, hadn’t listened. No more than Valentina had listened.

“When will I learn to say no, and mean it?” he asked the wolf sitting patiently at his feet.

As it echoed through the comfortable, but spartan room, the sound of his deep voice would have been startling if there had been ears other than his own and the wolf’s to hear. He spoke softly for a man so large, his words filled with unshakable, ironic calm even in anger. Anger directed at himself, destined to be short lived as his anger always was.

Leaving the window and its ever changing view, he crossed to a woodstove. The scarred and monstrously ugly antique, more than thrice his thirty-five years, had proven more than thrice as practical for his needs than one less ugly and more modern. Lifting a battered tin pot from the iron top, he refilled a tin cup nearly as battered. Sipping the brew that would have grown hair on his chest if it weren’t there already, he returned to his study of sprawling pastures and silent mountains. The latter, riddled with deep gashes of chasms carved by the great rivers of ice called down by the unheeding Mother Nature aeons before, forever fascinating.

Ty moved with an easy grace, walked with an agile step. Attentive and poised as he was in everything.

Given his manner, his coal black hair, his chiseled cheeks and darkly weathered skin, were it not for his eyes, he might have been mistaken for a member of the nearby Indian tribe. But as there were no ears to hear the soft, deep voice, neither were there eyes to see the eyes that were as blue as a Montana lake, bluer than its sky. Irish eyes, an arresting reminder of his black Irish heritage, in a thoroughly American face.

The quietude with which he surrounded himself, with which he unfailingly reacted, told less of his share of the fabled Irish temper than of a remarkable control. Which, now, as he looked out over the rugged land, was sorely tested.

This was his home, his time. The season of the tourist, the interim when he served as guide and outfitter for the temporary guest, was over. The season purposely cut short, with most of the horses moved to more temperate pastures; the summer hands decamped, scattered, taking up their winter’s work.

And Tynan O’Hara had returned to the small cabin no tourist and few ranch hands had ever entered.

He wasn’t misanthropic. Far from it. He truly enjoyed these people he called summer folk, enchanting the ladies with his easygoing charm, engaging the gentlemen with his down-to-earth approach to life and living. And all of it easily, naturally done, with Ty hardly realizing that he had. He was always glad to see them come, the wide-eyed and eager adventurers with childhood dreams of the West tucked in their hearts and shining on their faces. He delighted in sharing with them this land, the land that had chosen him, the wilderness that fulfilled his own dream and halted his restless wandering.

Yet when summer was done, and the mildest of autumn past, he was equally as glad to see them go. As delighted to have the land he called Fini Terre to himself once again.

Now winter loomed and, with no respect for the calendar, could arrive at any minute. When it came, born on westerly winds created by the ever changing Pacific Coast weather, like all survivors of this challenging parcel of earth, he would be ready.

In a barn divided into both stable and garage, there was a truck, a snowmobile, and a snowplow. Stored in sheds set apart were gasoline and hay to fuel whatever form of transportation he wished or would need.

A plentiful supply of wood was chopped, split and stacked in a shed attached to the small cabin. An ample reserve of food and medical supplies had been laid down in the cellar, along with a selection of his favorite wines. Just in case, though he didn’t know what case, there were kegs of water, as well. In this place of clean streams, lakes, and snow, it required a stretch of the imagination to envision the lack of water becoming a problem. Within the cabin, itself, there were lamps and oil, candles, and books. Even snowshoes and skis, and every other conceivable supply, from flashlights to extra buttons.

As efficiently as the ever busy red squirrel, he had prepared. And like an old bear he looked forward to the six foot snows and was ready to hibernate. Like an old bear in a tuxedo, he admitted ruefully when he thought of the generator, waiting and ready for when the electricity would inevitably fail; the sophisticated radio he would use only in the event of an emergency; and a state-of-the-art computer residing in the small, anterior room off the gallery that he called his lair.

“What the hell happens now when the snows cover the windows and seal the doors?” he asked the wolf as he regarded a sky that showed no sign of granting the very weather of which he spoke. “What will I do when the electricity stops and the generator dies, and the lonelies creep in?”

The lonelies.

His name for a very integral part of living as he did. That endless interval when Spring is nearly a dream realized, yet Winter lingers arrogantly, behaving its worst, its mood most capricious. A condition perfect for sending one plummeting into depression and the madness of cabin fever, or for strengthening one’s resolve and renewing one’s soul as it did for Ty.

“What will it do to Simon McKinzie’s walking wounded? What miracle does he expect of me?”

The wolf grinned, thumped his tail once on the bare floor, and kept his own counsel. Tilting his head, he presented the soft, vulnerable underside of his ebony throat to be scratched.

“No answer, huh?” Without interrupting his vigil, Ty stroked the wolf. “I guess you’re thinking it’s my own fault, that we wouldn’t be in this predicament if I’d only said no to Valentina. But could you say no to your sister? Wait!” In a forestalling motion he lifted his hand from the wolfs throat. “Don’t tell me, I know. But I promise you, sport, you’d be as big a sucker as I’ve always been if your sisters were like Val. Or Patience.”

The wolf turned an uncertain look at him.

“You don’t think so, I take it?” A nearly silent rumble drew taut the furry black throat as the wolf turned to stare again out the window. “Better think again. You’d understand if you knew their history with me. No,” he corrected. “You’d understand better if you knew my slavish history with them.”

With a self mocking shake of his head, Tynan O’Hara murmured, “I keep telling myself the day will come when I won’t be such an easy mark for either of my sisters. But, in my heart, I know that will also be the proverbial cold day in Hell.”

The rumble became a soft growl, as the wolf grew uncommonly impatient with his master’s uncommon monologue.

“I know, sport,” he soothed the wolf. “I’m not completely blinded, I see it, too.”

A flash of light where there should be only grass and rolling hills had caught human as well as canine attention. Setting the cup aside, with hands shoved abruptly into the hip pockets of his jeans, his mouth drawn into a stark line and eyes narrowed against the brilliant unsullied sky, Ty waited with the wolf for a second flash.

“There,” he muttered. A sound not unlike a growl itself.

As if needing only this cue, the wolf drew himself to attention. Ears perked and acutely tuned. Eyes, no less blue than any fourth generation Irishman’s, riveted. As the ridge of fur bristled the length of his spine, he stood like a shadowy sentinel by the side of the human he’d chosen as his own.

The light flashed, then again in another place, drawing ever closer to the cabin. “And there,” Ty confirmed grimly. “Coming too fast.”

The flash, light glinting off the windshield of a vehicle approaching as if it expressed the turbulent mood of its driver, became constant. In a matter of minutes, if it made the grade that dipped, then rose to the cabin, the Land Rover would be in his yard.

The vexing winter boarder would have arrived.

“Easy, easy,” Ty said as much to himself as the wolf. A plume of dust heralded the threatened advent. Sighing, he groused again under his breath, “It looks like there will be three of us for the winter after all.”

Curious at the strange mood of his human, or perhaps in commiseration, the wolf nipped gently at the corded seam of Ty’s jeans.

“Are you wondering why I don’t stop grumbling and live up to my word?” In a stroke of his finger under the animal’s throat, Ty lifted its gaze to his. “Are you thinking a promise is a promise, especially to Valentina? Is that it? Well, you’re right. So, I suppose we’d best go make like a welcoming committee.”

With the wolf at his heels, he stepped to the door and opened it. At the edge of the porch he paused, breathing in deeply, savoring what he feared might be his last comfortable breath for a while. “Just one more question, Shadow.” He addressed the wolf by its name for the first time. “What the hell are we going to do with a woman in our all male sanctum for eight long, cold months?”

The wolf gave him another slow, considering look.

Lifting a sardonic brow, Ty laughed, “Spare me the ‘if you don’t know, Buster, I’m not going to tell you’ looks. Believe me, that’s a complication I don’t need and don’t want.”

The wolf only looked at him, silent and still, hackles at half mast.

“If we’re lucky, maybe she’ll hate us on sight. Hopefully, in time to hightail it back to the train crossing tonight and the airport tomorrow.”

Descending the steps, man and wolf crossed the small lawn. At the edge of the drive they waited. With no appreciable sign of caution, the approaching vehicle disappeared into the declension that set Tynan O’Hara’s world apart. “There’s still hope, Shadow. Until the very last, there’s hope. Who knows?” Ty shrugged heavy shoulders clad in a dark woolen shirt. “Maybe two ugly guys won’t be her idea of winter companions.”

The Land Rover topped the rise, skidded to a halt, obscuring car and driver in a cloud of dust. A shower of loose stone pelted Ty’s shins and boots. The wolf took a discreet step back as if disassociating himself from the man as much as avoiding the flying debris, Ty coughed and blinked, observing the desertion wryly.

“Okay, have it your way, traitor,” he said softly, without rancor. “One ugly guy and a conceited mutt.”

“A good-looking guy and man’s best friend,” Merrill Santiago sputtered through clenched teeth as she glared through the sifting haze her protesting tires had created.

“A good-looking guy and a wolf,” she reassessed her opinion as the furor of her arrival settled, permitting a better view. “The first probably not an iota different from the latter, when one gets past the mustache of one and the fur coat of the other.

“Just what I need!” Gripping the steering wheel as if it were her lifeline with the world she’d left behind, she shivered in distaste. “A winter in exile, fending off mister wonderful, while his wild beast chews off my leg.” Fingertips tapping in a fast paced rhythm that matched her mounting dismay, she exhaled wearily, dispatching a tangle of gold streaked bangs from her eyes.

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

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.

Dawn was brighter for the snow. The red-gold hues of the sky glinting over it painted the world in a fiery rainbow of color. The chill of night lingered, lightly frosting the windows. But with the advent of the sun the temperatures would rise, and the day promised to be pleasing. Later there might be snow so deep he would have to dig through it to clear a path from the house to the barns and storage buildings. But for now, for today, this small part of Montana was a fairyland dusted with glittering, sun spangled white.

Merrill couldn’t have chosen better for the next step of her return to the world. Nor, in his judgment, a better world.

“Good morning.” He kept his voice quiet. As quiet as his step as he joined her by the window.

“Mr. O’Hara.” Surprise showed only in her eyes as she tilted her head toward him. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“No problem.” Dragging a chair from the table, he spun it around and sat across it as if it were a saddle. Folding his arms over the back, he grinned at her. “It’s an easy thing to lose oneself in a Montana morning. Though there is a problem.”

“I’m sorry,” Merrill rushed in. “I saw the coffee was ready and I didn’t think you’d mind.” She started to rise. “I can make a fresh pot, if you like.”

“No, Miss Santiago.” He stopped her with a hand on her forearm. “I don’t mind and I don’t need a fresh pot.” He grinned again. “You can’t corrupt my kitchen or my coffee any more than you can Shadow. You’re welcome to anything, anytime. So sit.”

“I could pour you a cup, at least.” She sat on the edge of her chair, waiting to jump up the minute he released her.

“Sit. Stay,” he said firmly as he swung out of his seat. “I can do that as well. I wouldn’t know how to behave with someone serving me.”

Merrill waited until he returned to the table before she spoke her concern. “You said there was a problem.”

“There is.” His sobering gaze met hers over the rim of his cup. He drank deeply, savoring the first cup of the day. The best cup of the day. Setting it aside, he refolded his hands over the chair. “A most serious problem.”

“If you’ve changed your mind... If you’d like for me to leave...” Her hands curled tensely on the table. “I know I haven’t been a model guest. It can’t have been comfortable for you to have a strange woman intruding on your solitude.” A week ago she would have been eager to go. Now she realized to her own amazement that she wanted to stay. For a while longer.

“Hey.” Stroking a finger along the line of her jaw, Ty turned her face to his. A frisson of emotion he didn’t stop to identify fluttered in his chest as he saw her disappointment. “I haven’t changed my mind. I haven’t been uncomfortable. And I don’t want you to leave.”

“But I’ve been...”

“You’ve been fine. Healing as you came here to do, in your own way. In your own time, Miss Santiago. Miss Santiago.” With the repetition of the name he sighed heavily and moved his hand down her throat and away. “That’s the problem.”

She looked at him blankly, not understanding. But he had her complete attention.

“The formality,” he explained gently. “This mister and miss stuff is going be a waste of effort and breath if we’re to be housemates for the winter.”

“You want me to call you Tynan?”

“If you like. Tynan is fine, but Ty would be better. It’s what my family and friends call me, and I’d like to think that considering the time we’ll be together, we’ll be friends.”

“A nickname,” Merrill said thoughtfully. “I’ve never had a nickname.”

“You’re joking.” The smile that had begun to curl again beneath his mustache faded when he read his mistake in her expression. “You aren’t joking.”

“There were never nicknames in our family. At least not the sort that were called to our faces, nor that one would want repeated.”

“A formal family, I take it.” With no show of the affection pet names often revealed? he wondered.

“Military and male, for nearly a century. An attitude, a way of life at home, as much as a profession.” She could have added an almost brutal adhering to the military formality that spilled over to childhood friendships. Affecting them, keeping them distant and virtually impossible.

“Military and male?” He asked to encourage her to continue. Last night she’d listened. Today he hoped she would speak and grow comfortable with him, establishing stronger lines of communication.

“Very military. Very male. I was the first girl child born in a long line of male progeny. Before the fact, my birth was heralded as cause for great celebration. I was to be that special child, the son who would mark a century for the Santiagos at West Point. For the space of a bitter and disappointed week, no one knew what to do with me.

“A female! Females were hand picked and accepted into the family by marriage, never born to it.” Merrill bowed her head as if imagining that shocking day. “Yet there I was, born and bred, a Santiago.”

“A beautiful disaster,” Ty observed, with pity for the unexpected child fervent in his heart.

“Beautiful? Maybe, as all babies are. Disaster? Beyond a doubt. Then, recovering from his shock, if never his bitter disappointment, my father took charge. He decided, that with some minor adjustments, the family would go on as before. Tradition would be upheld. From that moment, on the strength of that decision, I was groomed for the day I would fulfill his dream.”

“Another Santiago fed like fodder to the military.” Ty very carefully kept his escalating distaste for a man he’d never met from his voice.

Her stare was distant, looking into the past. Softly, her words more than a breath, less than a whisper, Merrill said, “My father never forgave me for refusing to go to The Point.”

“You chose Duke University and languages instead.” This he knew from the little Valentina had told him when she’d called to make certain Merrill had arrived safely, and to wheedle herself back into his good graces. “I’ve been told you have an astonishing gift for languages.”

“I suppose you could call it that, or simply an affinity that came with exposure. My father moved around quite a lot, from base to base and country to country. Because not even he could bully the all male boarding school Santiagos have attended from time immemorial to ease the regulations and accept me, I stayed and traveled with the family. And, yes, I discovered first that languages were fascinating, then that they came easily for me, almost instinctively.”

Shadow sighed and lay down at Merrill’s feet Ty knew the wolf had been hoping for a romp in the snow before it disappeared. But he knew, as well, that now that the furry protector had taken Merrill to his untamed heart, the loyal creature wouldn’t leave her side.

“Your mother was supportive?”

Her hands were folded now in her lap. She looked down at them. “As much as she could be. It was difficult for her because she shared my fathers view as strongly.”

“Ahh, yes,” Ty drawled drolly. “Of course she would. Because she’d been one of the chosen, no doubt.” A woman as suited to the military as her man. No doubt there either. Ty had crossed paths with such men and women, and such famlies before. He was as well traveled as Merrill, but there the similarity stopped. Though he had little difficulty imagining the discipline, the unreasonable expectations of a martial martinet, nothing could have been more disparate than his own sprawling, comfortable family. As far as nicknames went, he’d had more than he could remember, ranging from professor to jughead. And finally settling in adulthood to Ty. “I can see that you must have been a shock to your family.”

“A shock and a disappointment,” she repeated. “From the day of my birth, and now.”

She said it lightly, too lightly. Ty saw through the nonchalance to the little girl who first and last had been a failure. Damn them! he raged in heated silence, and wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her—the little girl and the woman—for past and present hurts. Instead he caught a rippling curl and wrapped it briefly around his finger, then watched it drift back to her shoulder.

“And no one ever called you Merry?” he murmured in a voice that had suddenly grown husky.

“Nicknames, loving names, should fit. Merry wouldn’t have suited me as a child.” she said with unconscious gravity. “It wouldn’t now.”

Ty let his look wander over her. Her hair was a tumble of rivulets in scintillating hues. Her eyes reminded of the darkened sand of a storm swept beach. Just now, with her solemn gaze on him, in the light of dawn, he could think of any number of endearing names that would describe her.

“Hey.” Sliding from the chair he wheeled it about and put it back in place. “Are you hungry?”

Taken by surprise at the sudden switch, Merrill thought for a moment and discovered that she was. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

“Famished?” He waggled his hand, his thumb and little finger tilting up and down. “Or only moderately?”

This time her answer came promptly. “Moderately.”

“Good. How about a ride, then breakfast by a stream?”

“Breakfast by a stream?” She glanced out the window as if she might have missed something in the course of their conversation. “In case you haven’t noticed, this is Montana and there’s snow out there.”

“For now,” he agreed. “But it will be gone by the time we reach the stream.” When her expression turned skeptical, he laughed and couldn’t keep himself from touching her cheek with the back of his hand. “Trust me in this. I know Montana.”

“Maybe you know Montana, but you don’t know if I ride.”

Ty gazed down at her through narrowed eyes. He would almost swear he saw the beginnings of laughter on her face. “Do you?”

“Not well enough for the rodeo, but enough to know the front of a horse from the rear. I can manage to stay in the saddle on a sedate ride.”

“Sedate, and you manage, huh?” She was leading him down the garden path, he was sure of it. A subtle tease, hinting at a wealth of humor temporarily weighted down by her troubles. Another step. Another beginning. “We ship most of the horses to lower pastures once the season’s over, but I think I can find you a mount that fits the bill.

“You brought boots, I hope.” He gave his approval of the full, comfortable shirt she wore, as well as the jeans belted snugly at her waist. With a jacket, both would do nicely. The delicate footwear, some sort of house slippers he deduced, left much to be desired.

“I have something that will suffice,” she returned casually.

“Terrific. I can have the supplies we need assembled and meet you in the barn in five minutes. Will you need more than that?”

“You’re sure about this?” Merrill cast another doubtful glance at the window. “We aren’t going to get lost in a blizzard and go snow blind, are we?”

“This is hardly a blizzard, as you’ll see later in the winter. We aren’t going to be lost. And I assure you, sweetheart, I won’t let anything happen to your enchanting eyes.” The endearment, one he’d imagined only moments before, had been a simple slip of the tongue. He wasn’t a man who normally went about calling virtual strangers familiar names, but it had seemed natural to think of her in those terms. It still seemed natural. Though, if she was as modern and as progressive in her thinking as her skills, she would very probably have his bloody scalp hanging from her belt for the diminution.

Yeah, maybe he should apologize. Should, he thought with little remorse, but wouldn’t.

Merrill was far less concerned with the slip than with her reaction to it. If this was a bar and he a stranger, he would be agonizing over his tenderest parts. But on a snowy morning at Fini Terre, and coming from Ty who looked at her through caring eyes, the casual endearment filled her with a warm, blushing glow.

Suddenly, it was wonderful to feel something more than the cold emptiness of guilt. And the wonder of it was there for Ty to see in the muted animation in her manner when she stepped away from the table. “Five minutes?” she considered. “That should be quite enough.”

When she would have gone to her room, his hand closing over her shoulder detained her. Her face was flushed and luminous, her mouth soft and dewy. For a mad moment he wondered if she would taste as delicious as he imagined.

A gold tipped brow arched in question as she stood motionless beneath his hand.

“I suppose this means you’ve decided to trust me after all.” His voice was hoarse from the sudden need to take her in his arms, to steal the kiss he wanted so badly.

Her smile was slow, and real, but with the ever present sadness lurking beneath it. She was conscious of the weight of his hand. The warmth, the strength, hers for the taking. For her to trust. For the winter.

“Yes, Ty,” she murmured, lingering a heartbeat over his name as she lifted her gaze to his. “I suppose it does.”

Three

He’d been snookered. Hoodwinked. Hustled and had.

Led down the garden path would be putting it mildly.

He knew it when he looked over the back of the horse he was saddling and found her watching him from the corral fence. Her jeans were the same, and the shirt. The jacket was of a matching denim. Not as faded, but enough that he knew it was a working jacket, not purely the decorative complement of a tenderfoot’s idea of ranch wear.

Sensible, practical, but the real giveaway was her boots. Or rather not boots. She wore moccasins, wrapped and laced, and tied at the knee. The same footwear favored by some of the Indians who worked with him as guides and wranglers through the short tourist season. Not as an affectation, nor for show, but comfortable, practical footwear for the skilled and intuitive nder.

His arms folded across the saddle, his hat tilted back a notch, he studied her from the Stetson that was far from new, to moccasins that were at least as old. A wry smile crinkled in fanning lines about his eyes. A flip of his finger moved the hat brim back another notch. “Sedate, huh?”

Merrill only nodded. The sun was at her shoulder, its muted fire casting provocative shadows beneath her cheekbones and turning her skin luminous. She’d taken a minute to braid her hair. But a minute was never enough to completely tame her curling mane. Tendrils escaped and drifted like mists about her face.

Ty wondered what it would be like to paint, to be able to capture on canvas the time, the place, this woman, forever.

The horse, a small, pretty mare, stamped a hoof and flicked an ear signaling an eagerness to be away. “Ho, girl.” Ty tapped her neck and stroked her, but kept his gaze on Merrill. A gaze that swept over her again, taking in every detail, the gear, the posture, the lithe, agile body. The mischief he couldn’t see, but knew was lurking there. He hoped was lurking there.

“You know one end of a horse from another, do you?” he asked soberly, picking up the threads of the conversation they’d had in the kitchen as if it had never been interrupted.

“The tall end is the front.” The reply was given just as soberly, without a ripple of change in her expression.

“And which side to mount from?” He continued the unnecessary catechism.

“Your side, if you’re a cowboy.”

“And if you’re not a cowboy or a cowgirl?”

“My side.” Merrill stayed by the fence. Her expression never altering.

“Indian fashion?”

“My first riding lesson was in Argentina.” A comment that might have been apropos of nothing, a digression, per chance a convoluted diversion. But not when it came from Merrill.

As she paused, his head angled and a brow lofted as he tried to make the connection. “Argentina.”