to private and professional concerns. The last he spent in preparing dinner. The one meal for which he insisted she join him, after two days of discovering she forgot to eat without the reminder.
As with most ranchers who remained bachelors into maturity in this isolated country, he was a passable cook. Actually, better than passable. Not a gourmet, he would be first to admit, but definitely better than passable.
He could set an enticing table too. Nothing elaborate, just pleasant. When she hadn’t resisted his stipulation that they share the evening meal, to encourage her appetite and give her pleasure, he put away the battered tin he used when the summer guests were gone, and brought out unique settings of hauntingly beautiful Native American design. An odd and striking mix with the delicate Irish linen he brought from storage, and with the crystal he always favored for his wines. Odd, striking, but one that worked.
She’d sat at his table. She’d eaten meager portions of the food he put before her agreeably, but silently. And when the meal was finished, her offers to clean the kitchen kindly and firmly refused, she returned as silently to her room. With the last dish put away, and coffee readied for the morning, Ty retired as tacitly to his lair and his computer.
A routine that seemed carved in stone. Then, to his pleased wonder, she began to venture into the great room. At first, just to sit, empty-handed, empty-eyed, uninterested. Certainly not in search of company. More as if with familiarity the walls of her room had become confining, driving her to seek out a change of territory. Next came the restless wandering, an incurious pacing. Then discreet and well-mannered exploration, the quickening of an intellect that wouldn’t be denied.
And thus, another pattern evolved. Sometimes she read. Sometimes not. Sometimes she only sat, her mind far removed from this little part of her world. But it was another step toward healing.
From his desk he heard her each night, rifling through books, sighing softly and unaware, as she sat before the fire. She had taken each small step forward, yet remained as silent and withdrawn as if she were still secreted in her room. Now Shadow, with his uncanny instincts, had drawn her out. And if it was of Shadow she wished to hear, she would.
First he attended the fire, stacking logs on smoldering coals until it blazed with renewed vigor. Driven away from the hearth by the heat, he crossed to a cabinet, poured a pale cognac into two short-stemmed glasses. Palming them, he celebrated and enjoyed, again, the extraordinary communing and the deepening bond between woman and beast.
Her hair was a tumble of captured sunlight in the glow of firelight. Her body was delicate, too slender. And when she lifted her face from the wolf, she moved with the slightest easing of strain.
It was a little. It was enough, for now. It was a beginning.
Returning to her, Ty stood by her seat, anticipating the moment her amber gaze would lift to his. Her head tilted as he had come to expect, her look was solemn and steady. He saw the strength there, and the courage. Merrill Santiago wasn’t lost, only battered and bruised.
With care, bruises healed. In time.
As she took the glass from him, her fingertips brushed his, a singularly pleasant sensation accompanied by a murmur of thanks. He felt that somber study on his body and the memory of her fingers tingling his as he settled down and deep into the cushions of the sofa across from her.
“You were going to tell me about Shadow, and how he came to be your...shall I say...partner and friend?” Her words were measured and unhurried, her voice husky. The gaze as steady.
“I was, wasn’t I? My partner and friend...you make an apt assessment, one few others grasp.” He stared into the fire and listened to the storm. Judging the weakening of its force, content that tomorrow promised to be a rare and pristine day, he launched into his story.
“I’d been here only a few months, and the cabin and barns were hardly completed before winter struck. An early one. Earlier than this. On its heels a pack of wolves and wild dogs ranged over the border from Canada. They were here, there. Everywhere and nowhere. For weeks they played havoc with the cattle on ranches for miles around. Moving like phantoms, they were always a step ahead of the range hands. Sometimes a step behind, on their back trail.
“If a herd was due to be shifted to safer ground, they were there first.” Cognac swirled in the glass as he flexed and turned his wrist. “The Indians called them Ghost Wolves, saying they moved through the valleys and over the mountains, leaving no tracks, no sign, like shadows on a dark day.”
“Shadows,” Merrill murmured and looked down at their namesake.
“Wolves,” he mused, “out of nowhere. Wolves where there had been none for so long. Phantom and phenomenon. Naturally the rangers and environmentalists and all the bureaucrats imaginable were called in by the authorities. But some of the smaller stockmen were facing disaster and were far too worried and too antsy to wait for their proposed remedies to work. Taking matters into their own hands, they brought in people of their own.
“Bounty hunters.” His face was wooden, but there was contempt in his tone. “These killers who called themselves professionals hunted and slaughtered at will. Trapping, shooting and butchering, even poisoning anything on four feet that wasn’t a cow or a horse.”
A grim smile tugged at his mustache. “Even goats and sheep, and sometimes farm dogs were at risk when they were at their baiting and trigger-happy worst.
“During most of the furor, I was spared the wolves and the hunters. Then, one day I found one of them in the woods. A magnificent wolf, the biggest female I’d ever seen, and as black as night.” The glass moved, cognac swirled. “She’d been shot. I don’t know when or where, or how far she’d run before she bled out. She had pups and three of the litter were with her. When I blundered onto her body, they ran away, scattering into the woods.
“After I buried her I searched for them.” The ripple of his shoulders, as he brought the glass to his lips, called attention to their power. “No luck.”
“Yet Shadow’s here.” As she said his name again, the great creature made a pleading sound deep in his throat and nudged his nose at her knee. Both her hands were clenched around her glass. Now she eased one away to stroke the wolf, her fingers gliding comfortably now down his muzzle in the familiar caress he sought.
Ty savored the pretty picture they made, how natural it seemed in his home. He realized that, with the easy unclenching of her hands and the caress of the wolf, the fissure in the bastion that defended her heart had become a crack.
Settling deeper into the cushions of the sofa, he propped an ankle on his knee. “There were signs of the pack around for days,” he continued, picking up the thread of his narrative. “I’d never seen such tracks. Monstrous, but light, as if the Indians were right.”
“Ghost Wolves.”
“I lost a colt.” He turned pensive with the telling of it, then shrugged away the loss. “He was the last. As mysteriously as they came, the wolves were gone.”
Taking her empty glass from her, he returned it to the bar. His half smile was rueful. “As I said, long story.”
“Not so long.” Beyond her response to the wolf, Merrill had hardly moved throughout the revelation, as fascinated with his voice, his choice of words, his manner of speaking as with the story. Ghost Wolves, moving like Shadows, phantoms—he had a way with words, a nice touch. “You weave a remarkable story, but it isn’t finished.”
“Not
