Bj James - Journey's End

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.”