The dusky, featureless image etched by the fire at his back was Tynan O’Hara and inescapably real.
This is Montana, she began the litany again. Montana, not...
Stop!
She didn’t want to think of that, wouldn’t think of it. Recovering from a near misstep, she managed a calm assurance. “There’s nothing to forgive, you didn’t disturb me.”
“You were deep in thought.”
“Not really.” She shook her head, not willing to explain she had retreated to a place in her mind, a small lightless void where she didn’t have to think. “I was just...” She could offer neither a logical explanation, nor a good lie. A curt jerk of her head dismissed the effort. “You didn’t disturb me.”
“Just enjoying Shadow’s company?” he supplied for her and, to give her time to recover, busied himself with the wood box.
Realizing her fingers had stolen again into the dark rich pelt of the wolf-dog, she took her hand away. Clasping one over the other in joined fists, she rested them on her knee. “I shouldn’t, I suppose.”
Halting in midmotion, a log balanced in his palm, he turned from his chore. For an instant, glinting firelight marked the look of mild surprise on the chiseled planes of his face. In another, whatever his expression might reveal was shrouded again in darkness. “Why on earth should you not?”
Her fingers flexed, tightening over the backs of her hands. “Some people would resent the interference. Consider it the corrupting of a watchdog.”
“Corrupting?” he laughed softly. “In the first place it couldn’t be done. Shadow’s too much a free thinker for that, far too much his own person. In the second, I’m not some people, Merrill, and Shadow isn’t my watchdog. He isn’t my anything. He belongs to himself, not to me.”
At her look of askance he laid the log aside, and hunkered down on the floor. With one arm braced on his knee, he leaned against the stone ledge of the hearth. “Shadow’s been with me a number of years, but I didn’t choose him. He chose me.”
Doubting as he intended she should, she commented skeptically, “In the middle of nowhere, a wolf, where wolves rarely exist, chooses you?”
“Three-quarters wolf, and a bit more,” Ty said, though he knew the teasing reminder was quite unnecessary. “Enough to be mistaken as pure wolf.”
“So you said.” It was never the wolf part Merrill questioned. No one would question that, only the ratio.
“So my sister the vet estimates.”
Searching for a name, Merrill walked the tightrope again. Selective memory served. “Patience.”
“Val has told you about her?” A small shift of his foot, a slight twist of his body and his face turned in profile. The flickering blaze again marked the stalwart features and cast a sheen of silver and gold over the blackness of his hair.
“Only that she’s the youngest, and a veterinarian.” Merrill saw a strong likeness to Valentina in him. His hair a little darker. His eyes, she remembered, were a little paler blue, yet the same. The arching brows were thicker, the chin as noble, as stubborn. She wondered if his mouth beneath the dark slash of his mustache was as generous in its masculinity.
Now that she let herself see it, the resemblance was uncanny. But Valentina was part of The Black Watch, and however strong their new friendship, she didn’t want to think of anyone or anything to do with the clandestine organization. Even Patience, the younger O’Hara, was indirectly connected. Not by profession, but by marriage and one of those unexpected coincidences proving one must always expect the unexpected. Matthew Winter Sky, half French, half Apache, the mythical and mystical tracker of The Watch, had survived a rattlesnake bite and was alive and well because of the love and care of Patience O’Hara.
Merrill shook the recollection aside. Tonight the path of all thoughts seemed determined to lead to forbidden territory. If she must think at all, she wanted it to be of snowy nights and Shadow.
“So,” she began, turning the conversation back on track. “This great, hulking sweetheart chose you.”
“You could say that.”
“How?”
“Long story.”
“We have the night, don’t we?” She cast a look at the window where snow had begun to accumulate in miniature drifts over the sill. “You aren’t expecting anyone in this blizzard, are you?”
Ty would have laughed at calling this first, early dusting a blizzard, but he saw she was utterly serious. “We have the night,” he agreed, careful to do nothing to spoil this tenuous, first thread of communication. “And no one is slated to come calling.”
Shadow had sat on his haunches at her feet, his piercing blue gaze turning from his human companions to the window and back again. Ty knew that a part of the animal wanted to be away, answering the call of his blood, running wild and free, prancing and tumbling and licking at the flying flakes like a puppy. It was always the same with the first snow.
If he’d asked, Ty would have opened the door and let him go. But he didn’t ask. He’d elected instead, to stay by Merrill. With one last look at the window, and one for Ty, Shadow sighed and laid his head in her lap.
There would be other snows.
Merrill didn’t smile. It was too soon for that. But a look of delight eased the sadness in her face. And as she bent to the wolf, her gold streaked curls mingling with the ebony pelt, Ty waited and watched.
She was a little thing. He couldn’t get past that. It was always his second thought when he thought of her, his second impression with each rare encounter. The first, each time, was of dark, grieving sadness. Sadness where there should be laughter and light.
It was that and the unexpectedness of her that touched his heart. A warrior’s heart, with a tender streak no better hidden than her sorrow. When he’d first seen her, standing fragile and vulnerable and golden in the sun, he’d known he wouldn’t turn her away from his winter sanctum. Promises to Val aside, he couldn’t turn her away.
So he watched them in his home, the wolf who was of the night, the woman who should have been sunlight. He watched her and learned.
A man should smile when he watched a beautiful woman. But he didn’t.
For eight days, a week of days and one more, she’d shared his home, and he knew her little better than on the first. In those days they’d co-existed, spending little time in the same room, exchanging fewer words. After seeing to her needs and her comfort on that first encounter, keeping to his own schedule, he’d given her a wide berth, letting her settle in as she would. Rising at dawn each morning, after a quick and solitary breakfast, he cleared out, giving her space and time to work through her troubles. Throwing himself with unnecessary vigor into the necessary check of fences and animals, he tried not to think of her. Tried not to worry.
Lunch was early. A quick sandwich or biscuits and beans on whichever part of the spread he was working. When his day brought him back to the central part of the ranch and the house, there was never evidence that she’d left her room or eaten at all.
Following an established
