“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.