Bj James - Journey's End

“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.