Marissa, the innocent, teaching him what love should be. Wishing he couldn’t forget her, and that they would meet again. Leaving with a wish unspoken, a secret he would never know.
Marissa, her hand raised in farewell, disappearing in the blinding furor of a storm.
“Dear God.” Jefferson clutched the scarf. Every moment he’d locked away in the back of his mind was as fresh, as real as the day it happened. Though he truly couldn’t forget on a subconscious level, he’d thought time had eased the bittersweet ache of mingled pain and joy. Proof in point, the portrait of Marissa hanging over the cabin’s single fireplace.
The painting had been a satisfying exercise, one he believed had leeched away regrets, pain, longing.
“Fool.” It would never end. Cristal’s shot in the dark was more intuitive than he’d let himself admit. No matter the games he played, no matter how deeply he hid his head in the sand, what he felt for Marissa was too vibrant to tame into memory.
As the guilt that plagued him for his part in sending his brother Adams to prison, never truly eased. Guilt that ruled and changed his life. Because of his teenage folly and what it had taken from Adams, he was never quite at home with his own family. His peace and refuge was the swamp. Then came the hurt of losing Marissa, and even the swamp was no longer a place of peace.
“Losing her made it all too…” Jefferson didn’t have the right word. Nothing was quite enough. Lashes drifting briefly to his cheeks, he stood remembering regret, helplessness. Pain.
“Too much,” he whispered, understanding at last. He’d never analyzed the truth of why he’d fled the lowcountry the second time. He knew now it had been because of a morass of unresolved guilt and loss and grief. Arizona offered solitude, a different sort of peace. Here there was no one to hurt. No one to lose. No one he might fail. “Until now,” he said softly. “If this is Marissa.”
It was. He knew it in his very soul. But an expert second opinion wouldn’t hurt. “Come, Satan.”
With a surge of impatience, he barely waited for the dog to stand obediently by his side. Bending down, he held the scarf before the sensitive black nose. “Fetch.”
The Doberman bounded away. Jefferson had barely moved to the doorway, when Satan returned. The page from a tablet was clasped in his mouth. Taking it from the sharp teeth, praising the dog with a stroking touch, Jefferson knew Satan’s instincts, and his, had been vindicated. The scent that lingered on the scarf and the message was the same.
Marissa was alive.
Stunned, his mind a morass of grief and relief—relief that she was alive, grief for all she’d been through, all she’d lost—he couldn’t think. Like a sleepwalker, he returned to the table and sat down. How long he sat there, staring up at Marissa’s portrait, he would never know. Time had no meaning. Nothing mattered but that Marissa was alive.
“Why contact me, sweetheart? Why in such troubled times?” The sound of his own voice was a wake-up call. Suddenly, as with a man who lived by his wits, his mind was keen, perceptive, and considering each point and question. The most important was answered by his own promise. This was more than the call of grief.
If ever you need me… “I’ll come for you,” he finished. A promise recalled, but deliberately left unsaid.
Marissa was alive. Given the subterfuge of the message, she was in danger. She needed help. She needed Jefferson Cade. “But where are you, sweetheart? What clue did you…” His voice stumbled as he remembered the scrap of newspaper falling to the floor. Instinct told him he would find the answers there.
Minutes later, Jefferson was on the telephone that had gathered dust during his tenure at the Broken Spur. In rare impatience, he paced back and forth as far as the cord would allow while he waited for his call to be put through.
When Jericho Rivers, sheriff of Belle Terre, responded, Jefferson spoke tersely. “I’m coming to the lowcountry, to Belle Terre. I need to meet with you and Yancey Hamilton.”
Jericho was known for his instincts and Jefferson was grateful for them now. Perhaps it was his tone, that he had called the sheriff rather than his own brothers, or simply that he was returning to Belle Terre, but for whatever reason, the sheriff only asked the particulars—when, where, how soon—and no more.
One step had been taken, leaving two more in the form of local calls. One to Sandy Gannon that would elicit no more questions than the call to Jericho. Jefferson trusted both men to do what was needed, when, and for however long.
The final call was to the airlines. The first stage of his arrangements was complete when he sat before a fireplace without fire. A letter had changed his brother Lincoln’s life. Now a letter had done the same for his. Laying a hand on the Doberman’s dark head, he muttered, “Sandy’s sending someone to look after the ranch and you. But I’ll be back, Satan. I don’t know when, or what will have changed, but I’ll be back.”
On a windswept plain, a solitary woman walked through a waking world. Wind tore at her clothes and tangled in her hair, but she didn’t notice. Had she noticed, she wouldn’t care.
Once she’d been at home and happy in this sparsely populated land. A place of towering mountains and endless deserts, of sprawling plains and rocky coastlines. Once she’d loved the still beauty of wild places sheltered from the wind. Once she’d waited in wonder for that moment when birdsong heralded the incipient day, then fell silent in the breathless trembling time when the sun lifted above distant, wind-scoured hills and bathed the world in a shower of light.
Once she’d loved so many things about this land. Now as she walked, cloaked in a mantle of solitude, waiting for another day that would be no more to her than simply another day, her sense of aloneness intensified. There was no beauty for her grief-stricken eyes. No serenity in a serene world. Not for her.
Never again for Marissa Claire Alexandre Rei in this land called Silver by the first conquistadores.
“Argentina,” she whispered as she paused in this sleepless hour, to stare at an untamed plain that in the half light had no beginning, no end. “A land of grief and loss.”
A hand closed over her shoulder, its warmth driving away the chill of the wind. “Are you all right, little Rissa?”
His voice was deep and quiet, his English excellent and only a little accented by the speech patterns of Spanish, his first language. His touch hadn’t startled her. Before he’d spoken, she’d known he had come to join her. “I’m fine, Juan.” Her brown eyes, turned black in the paling of dawn, met eyes as black. “Fine.”
“Who do you convince, querida?” he asked gently as his hand moved from her shoulder. “Yourself, or me?”
She laughed, a bleak sound. “Obviously no one.”
“You walk now because you don’t sleep,” Juan suggested, moving with her as she began to walk again. “Not because you love the land at dawn as you once did.”
Marissa didn’t speak. She didn’t look at this man she’d known all her life. The first to take her up on a horse, when he was in his teens and she was five. He was the first to instill in her a love of horses and riding. Juan Elia was a modern-day gaucho. A true descendant of Argentina’s famed, wandering horsemen. With the coming of the estancias, the ranches, the wandering had ceased. Gauchos had settled down to work for the families of the estancias, as the Elia family had worked for countless years for her father’s family. The life of the gaucho had changed, but the indomitable spirit hadn’t been lost, nor the horsemanship.
Nor the loyalty that kept him here in a secret camp on the plain, rather than at home with his wife and three-year-old son.
“It isn’t the same,” she answered at last. “Nothing is as it was in the days when