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 you brought me here as a young girl. When we rode like Cossacks over the plain.”
“In the days when you wanted to be a real gaucho and wander the land?” Juan chuckled. “Before your mother and father sent you to the United States to become a Southern lady.”
“Does growing up tarnish everything, Juan?”
He stopped her then. A touch at her cheek turned her to him. The sun was just lifting over the crest of a hill, in the sudden sliver of light his Native American heritage was visible in a face that had gown more handsome with time. “Death and guilt have tarnished this land for you. Deaths you couldn’t prevent. Guilt you shouldn’t bear.”
“I was supposed to be on that plane.”
“But, because of a sick child, my child, you weren’t. You didn’t send your mother and your father and your husband to their deaths, querida. Whoever planted the bomb did that.”
“Because the plane disappeared off radar so abruptly doesn’t mean it was a bomb.” Marissa didn’t want to believe explosives had blasted her husband’s plane from the sky. Believing would lay the blame even more irrevocably at her door.
“I know,” Juan said adamantly. “Just as I know who.” Softly, he added, “As I know why.”
“No.” Marissa tried to turn away. Juan wouldn’t let her.
“This is no more your fault than any of the rest. You were married to a man more than twice your age. If love was lacking, loyalty was not. You have no reason to accuse yourself.
“If a man of power covets all your husband has, his business, his land, his wife, the sin isn’t yours. If he tries to coerce your husband to become a part of something evil, it isn’t your fault. If this man decrees all you love and you must be punished for being honorable and loyal to the principles of a lifetime, it isn’t your dishonor. If he carries out his threat in a way most horrible, the crime is his, not yours.
“My child lives because of your goodness. Your family died at the hand of an evil man. There is no connection.”
“That a bomb caused the crash was a passing speculation, dismissed as quickly,” Marissa reminded him.
“Yes,” Juan admitted. “But there was the threat. And all who knew have been silenced. Or so he believes.”
“Then, if Menendez should discover I’m alive, that would mean he would also have discovered you’ve hidden me and given me shelter. What more proof would he need to suspect you know everything? Then, my dear friend, your life would be at risk, as well.” Fear trembled in her voice for this trusted man who was more like a cherished brother than a friend.
“No, querida,” Juan soothed. “To the world, I am merely a gaucho who lived and worked on your father’s estancia. Who would suspect an enduring friendship begun between a girl of five and a boy of sixteen? Who would believe such a grand lady as Señora Rei helped to bring my long-awaited first child into the world. Or that
