Steven knew with utter certainty that his ten-thousand-year hell was soon to end. The longings would end, the aching would fade away forever, no matter if he was victor or vanquished.
The autumnal equinox was only two weeks in the future, and the final battle would be waged on that night. With only two of them remaining, and so much hanging in the proverbial balance, no stalemates would occur this time. This one battle would end the war once and for all. Forever and, hopefully, for good. And only one could be deemed a victor.
In reviewing those ten thousand years, Steven decided he felt only two regrets. One was that he could never experience the single perfect moment he granted those unfortunate mortals who gave their lives for his war. He would never be able to snatch one day, one hour, from his ten thousand years and say, “Here it is, this is my finest hour.” Because for him there were only endless days and nights, all stretching together, links in a hellish chain, moments spent waiting for battle, fighting, only to wait again.
His only other regret focused on the woman inside the house, the carrier of the portals. In two weeks’ time, she would have to die—and with her final gasp, he would give her back her finest hour, her perfect moment. It was his one magic, his one gift. A cosmic consolation prize.
But Steven didn’t want to grant that moment to Jillian Stewart. She didn’t deserve it.
CHAPTER ONE
Jillian Stewart leaned her forehead against the cool glass panes of the French doors leading to the side courtyard. She felt grateful for the support and irritated at the aching need for it.
She could hear the slightly rasped voice of her friend, but wasn’t really listening to what Elise was saying. She heard the soft clink of the china coffee cup more clearly than any words.
Would the hurt of losing Dave ever go away? she wondered. Would the pain ever become just another of life’s more uncomfortable memories? A full year had slipped by in a time-warped blur, and grief still crawled into bed with her at night. Pain still taunted her in the early morning when she stretched her hand to feel her husband’s warmth and found a cold, empty pillow instead.
Too often she’d found herself standing beside the empty hammock, a soft drink in her hand, staring vacantly at the leaves caught in the now-frayed webbing. She couldn’t count the times she’d passed the den sofa on a Saturday afternoon and reached out to pat feet that would never again scuff the hand-carved armrests. And the silence from his studio still seemed deafening, Dave’s unplayed Steinway a constant reminder that more than her husband had been buried with him that stormy autumn morning.
Even the world outside their rambling adobe home seemed to tease her, mocking her efforts to maintain a semblance of normality. Everything about Santa Fe seemed to whisper Dave’s name, conjure his image. He had loved the city so, delighting in the sharp seasonal changes, the deep snows—Jillian, Allie, find your skis, grab your mittens, there’s a slope with our names on it— the lazy summer afternoons—Let’s skip your gallery opening and open a bottle of champagne instead—the biting chill of a spring evening—Do you need a jacket, hon? Or are my arms enough?—and the long, golden Indian summers, brisk and beautiful autumn days…days like today.
How many times in the past, when Dave was still alive, had she chastised herself for feeling that his love was tempered somehow, that he couldn’t reach the inner part of her, touch that well of love she had to give? How many times had she felt empty, longing for some undefined magic that he’d never touched?
Until he was gone.
Until days like today, when the sun would have beckoned him, would have made him call her name.
But now, this afternoon, another man held her attention. The man raking leaves outside had green eyes, not honeyed brown, and his chiseled face carried none of Dave’s softness, nor a hint of Dave’s tenderness. Somehow that made her feel easier about him, as though the sheer magnitude of the contrast to Dave distanced him, made him safe.
“Jillian—”
She didn’t answer, didn’t turn to look at Elise Jacobson. She scarcely even heard the question inherent in the inflection of her name.
“Jillian? Hey, do you hear me?” Elise asked. Her voice seemed to come from a thousand miles away.
Several times during the past year, she had forced herself to meet Elise at one of the sidewalk cafés that Dave had frequented, and had been unable to meet her friend’s sympathetic gaze, and her hands had trembled too much to lift the cappuccino to her lips. And how much of that trembling had come from guilt, from knowing that, like him, she’d kept some vital part of herself blocked from him?
Elise said now, “I was thinking we might go to Hyde Park this weekend, let Allie get dirty in the woods…You know, all that sort of females-communing-with-nature stuff. We could even play out some kind of welcome-to-autumn ceremony, kind of an equinox ritual.”
Jillian still didn’t turn around. She continued to watch the green-eyed stranger working with such intimate knowledge of her property, her land. Not for the first time, she found herself lulled by his steady progress, even as she tensed at some scarcely recognized power that seemed to emanate from him.
“Just think about Hyde Park…the sound of Stellar’s jays in the pines, the mushrooms and toadstools hiding underneath the brown needles…” Elise said. “Don’t you want to go?”
She didn’t know how to answer Elise, because no matter how much time had passed, no matter how many times she might take her daughter to Hyde Park to stroll in the pines at the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest, once she found the narrow creek that meandered through the canyon, she would inevitably hear Dave’s exuberant laughter, his lilting call, as she heard it for the entire span of their marriage. And she would turn to look for him through the pine branches, only to discover he wasn’t there. Again. As usual. And she’d have to once more realize that now he would never be anywhere, anymore.
God, how she missed his laughter.
The muscled man carefully drawing the golden aspen leaves into a perfect circle never laughed. At least she had never seen him do so in the two weeks he’d been with her. She was glad of that, too. She didn’t want to hear a man’s deep, rumbling mirth, no matter how she had once craved Dave’s, no matter how much she ached for it still.
In fact, she thought, Steven’s very silence, his seemingly innate sadness, soothed her. It kept him distanced from her, separate. And let her feel easier about his presence, because she recognized in him that need for solitude, a need almost as deep as her own.
Or would she be wiser to acknowledge the simple, undeniable fact that he intrigued her, and had from the first moment he’d shown up on her doorstep two weeks ago, telling her—not asking—that he would do odd jobs around her property in exchange for a place to stay.
Two weeks later, she still recalled that feeling of holding her breath when he spoke, of her heart pounding too furiously in her chest, not in fear of him, exactly, but perhaps in acute, nearly painful awareness.
She hadn’t been able to place his unusual accent, an odd combination of old-world courtliness and a hint of foreign parts, and while showing him the various courtyards and niches on her grounds, she had asked him where he was from.
His short “All over” hadn’t allowed her any clues to go on. Nor did his looks. His hair was a rich golden blonde, almost Nordic in its wheaten, honeyed color, and was longish
