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,