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.
If she was fragile, it was a state of mind, and ultimately a physical condition created out of the very strength it eroded. Fragility out of strength—a paradox. A puzzle that must be solved and resolved before he would know the whole woman. The real woman.
The woman, he realized, he’d wanted to know from first glance. A challenging mystery he couldn’t send away.
As his gaze held hers, as blue and piercing as a laser, she didn’t look away. There was no nervous disquiet, no restless tension. The bedrock strength still survived, still resisted the grief and anguish of a tormented conscience. But for how long? How long before the one thing that could destroy her, would destroy her?
“You haven’t answered my question, Mr. O’Hara,” she said with a trace of mockery. “Or can you?”
“Perhaps not completely, Miss Santiago, but in part.” The only part that he understood, and was ready to admit. “Why do I want you to stay now, when I didn’t before?” His eyes strayed from hers, touching on the shadows of sleeplessness lying beneath them, tracing the paths of new lines of tension. Shadows, not so dark, and lines, not so deeply ingrained, that they couldn’t be erased. In time. If she stayed.
“The reason is simple, and as Val anticipated. Because you aren’t who I expected and what I expected. And as she knew I would, because I see the hurt that sent you to me.”
“To you?”
“To the land that can heal as nothing else, if you’ll let it.”
Turning from him, Merrill walked away. He was wise beyond his years, this man with the face of a not so faultless archangel, and the strength and manner of a gruff, but kindhearted bear. There was serenity here, the tranquility of a million years. The peace she needed to fill the dark void of her soul.
Tynan O’Hara watched and waited, sensing her conflict, tamping down the urge to take her in his arms and comfort her in her unnamed grief. Instead, wisely, he stood as he was, his hand curved at Shadow’s muzzle.
“Will you stay?” he asked in a voice that barely rippled the aloof reserve she wore like a shield. “At least for a while.”
Merrill turned to him. The shadows had not vanished, nor were the lines any less distressing, but there was a subtle ease in her manner.
A freshening breeze stirred where there had been none and in it lay a chill, a harbinger of the first snow. Catching back her hair, taming riotous curls in a natural and absent gesture, she nodded only once. As the wind nipped at her with baby teeth, she knew there was no going back. She had given her word, and her word was all she had left of the woman she’d been.
“I’ll stay.”
The wind whispered and muttered, and scratched softly at the eaves like a furtive banshee seeking crack or crevice to slip through. A warm, sunny morning had become an overcast afternoon, and in the evening hours the temperature plummeted. As the season’s first sprinkle of snow began its patter against roof and windows, the night was fathomless black and frigid. But the house was warm and comfortable, and filled with soft light. A bulwark of security and tranquility in the midst of the storm.
In the great room, a fire crackled and danced in a fireplace that was one of three on the ground floor that shared the same fieldstone chimney. One for each room of the tightly and ingeniously constructed building.
Overlooking the great room lay the gallery. Expansive, rich with dark polished wood, opening to a sweep of towering windows spanning both floors. A combination of sleeping loft, study, and workroom, if one included the small enclosure Ty considered his lair. Into which he disappeared often during the day, and always each evening. Leaving her to her own counsel and her own devices for long periods of time.
Merrill had been his guest at Land’s End for more than a week and, as he’d promised, there was no interminable togetherness, no forced companionship. In fact, none at all unless she sought it. On the rare occasions she had, he proved himself a genial host, a learned and thought provoking conversationalist. Like most men of few words, he had the gift of making those few say much.
On this night, as on most, she’d chosen to be alone. Not in her room with its own cozy fire, but the great room, with the sprawl of windows bringing the magnificence of the night and the storm to her, yet sealing her away from it, keeping her safe. As red cedars tapped against their panes, and elongated squares of light fell from her reading lamp onto a dusting of snow, Merrill didn’t question her reasons for choosing this room over her own. She simply stared into the fire, listened to the whispers of the coming of winter, and let her
