Blackwolf's Redemption

by Sandra Marton

  She told him that, in precisely those words, as he pulled up in front of the house.

  “This is strictly business,” she said coldly, “and don’t you forget it.”

  She was out of the truck before he could say anything. He thought about going after her as she flounced toward the porch, of taking her in his arms and showing her that what was between them was business, all right. Unfinished business.

  But she was right.

  He’d keep his distance. She’d keep hers. It was a big ranch. And he actually did need a secretary, assuming she was competent, someone who could type his letters, sort his mail, keep the ranch’s books so his accountants wouldn’t scratch their heads and give him lectures at the end of every quarter when they came by….

  Hell.

  He wasn’t going to be here another quarter. He was selling this place; why had he forgotten that? She’d be out of a job in another couple of days….

  “Jesse?”

  He swung around as he stepped from the cab. His foreman was trotting toward him. He’d given Chuck and the rest of his men the weekend off. He’d wanted to be alone so he could figure out how to tell them he was selling the ranch, that there’d be no more work for them, and, instead, he’d spent his time first chasing after spiritual hocus-pocus and then after a woman.

  A woman.

  He was a fool, he thought grimly. Worse than a fool. He’d wasted precious time instead of dealing with reality.

  “Chuck. I’m glad to see you. We need to talk.”

  “Yeah. I saw the damage in the southeast pasture. I’ve got a couple of men out there already, fixing those fence posts, but—”

  “No. Not about that. I meant…” Jesse looked toward the front door just as Sienna opened it. He frowned and ran his hand through his hair. “Give me a half hour, then come to the office, okay?”

  His foreman looked at Sienna’s receding back, then at him. “Sure,” he said, and headed for the barn.

  Jesse stepped inside the quiet house. “Sienna?”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  His eyebrows lifted. She’d found the office without him; she was seated behind his big desk, a stack of papers before her. Not the ranch-sale documents, he saw with relief. They were untouched, safe inside a file folder. What Sienna had in front of her was his mail, all of it. It had been accumulating since his last secretary had quit a couple of weeks ago.

  She’d said he had the disposition of a rabid skunk.

  Maybe not a skunk, he’d thought, but yeah, okay, the rabid part fit.

  Mrs. Marx had worked at a small desk in the corner of the big office. Not Sienna. She’d settled in his chair, at his desk. It dwarfed her. Even the windows behind her seemed determined to do their part. Add in that she was wearing those ridiculous oversized sweats and she should have looked silly…

  She didn’t.

  She looked spectacular.

  The sun, streaming through the glass, touched her with gold. She was frowning as she studied the paper in her hands, but he knew, when she looked up, her eyes would be that deep violet….

  Violet, and filled with disdain. He saw that, too.

  “Do you ever even open your mail?”

  Damn, he could feel color rise in his face. “Of course.”

  “And your bills. Do you pay them or do you just save them until you have enough to paper a wall?”

  His mouth became a hard, thin line. “I did not ask you to critique my management style, Cummings.”

  She snorted. “Is that what you call it? Trust me, Mr. Blackwolf. You don’t need a secretary, you need a bulldozer.”

  “Look, I haven’t had the chance to get to this stuff lately, okay? And it isn’t going to matter. That’s what I have to tell you about this job. See—”

  “You had a couple of phone calls. I took the messages. Didn’t you ever hear of voice mail?”

  Jesse sighed. “I have no idea what—”

  “An answering machine. You need one.”

  “I have one. The storm must have—”

  “The call was from a Mr. Henley.”

  Jesse cocked his head. “Henley? What did he say?”

  “Something about the investment you’re interested in. He said the company might be up for grabs.” Sienna glanced at a small piece of paper. “‘Up for grabs.’ Those were his exact words. And he said, if you’re interested, you’d better be in San Francisco by late afternoon.” She looked at him. “San Francisco?”

  Jesse clasped his hands behind his back and paced from one side of the room to the other. In what he thought of as his other life, he’d put a bid on the controlling shares in a startup, a small company working in the new field of computer technology. He wanted it; he knew it had one hell of a future even if he still didn’t quite understand what it could do.

  “And you had a call from a Mr. Harper. Something about the bill of sale for Blackwolf Ranch…?”

  Damn it, this was the last thing he wanted. The two most important deals in his life, coming together at one time….

  “Jesse?” Sienna’s voice dropped. “You aren’t really going to sell it, are you? The ranch? The canyon? All those ancient, beautiful sites?”

  He swung toward her. “I’m going to do exactly what I have to do,” he said coldly.

  “But—”

  “There’s an address book in the top right-hand drawer. On the first page, you’ll see phone numbers for my pilot—”

  “Your what?”

  “My pilot.”

  “You have a pilot? And a plane?”

  He almost laughed. For once, the tables were turned. He was surprising her.

  “The two usually go together, yes. So, call him. His name is Tony. Tell him to be ready to leave in an hour. Then find the number for a woman named Hilda.”

  “Listen, pal, you want to call some woman, do it your—”

  “My San Francisco housekeeper,” he said, and wondered why watching her bristle with resentment should have pleased him. “Tell her I’m flying in today.”

  “Your San Francisco housekeeper?”

  “Yeah. I have a place there.”

  “In San Francisco,” she said, a little weakly.

  That pleased him, too.

  He eyed her with dispassion. “As for what you’re wearing…it will have to do until we get to the West Coast.”

  “Until we…” Sienna stood up. “I am not going with you.”

  “You want this job or not?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  Jesse lifted his eyebrows. “What is?”

  What? she thought. What, indeed? How about the point was that she had no idea what was going on here? Jesse Blackwolf, he of the painted face and eagle-talon amulet, was turning into someone else. When she looked him up on Google, the ranch, the canyon, the sacred stone, there’d been nothing about—

  “Answer the question. If wanting the job isn’t the point, what is?”

  Sienna swallowed hard. “Being your secretary is one thing. Going with you to San Francisco is—”

  “—is part of the job,” he said, finishing her protest with cold authority.

  “You can get someone in San Francisco. Hire a temp.”

  She was right, he could. He’d done it before. In fact, it was what he always did on his trips to the coast. He sure as hell had never taken Mrs. Marx or any of her predecessors with him. Why would he? He had a house on Russian Hill; he’d converted one room to an office, and, really, it was all he needed. On those few occasions he’d required someone to take dictation or type a letter, he called an office temps firm.

  But why go through that when he already had a secretary right here? That was the only reason for taking Sienna with him.

  Of course it was. And he told her so.

  “Make up your mind,” he said. “Do you want this job or do you intend to quit on your first day?”

  “I’m not quitting. It’s just that—that—”

  She stared at him. He was right; she knew tha
t. She’d agreed to take the position. Why was she trying so hard to avoid going with him?

  Was it because she knew her secretarial skills were lacking?

  Or was it because things were moving too fast? Because the ground was shifting under her feet so quickly that there were times she honestly felt dizzy?

  Or was it simpler than that?

  Was it because, despite how she’d been sniping at Jesse, she had only to look at him and her heartbeat quickened? She couldn’t stop remembering the feel of his arms, the taste of his mouth, the exquisite pleasure of his touch.

  She could not feel that way about a man who didn’t exist! Or a man who didn’t exist when she existed! Oh, God, she had to figure this out, figure out what would happen next—

  Sienna shot to her feet. “I’m not going with you,” she said, rushing the words together. “You don’t really need me there.”

  “Don’t tell me what I need and don’t need,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.

  She cried out as he scooped her into his arms, threaded a hand through her hair, brought her face to his and captured her mouth.

  He kissed her hard and deep, and maybe she could have dealt with that but then his kiss changed. He kissed her slowly, with tenderness, with longing, and just as she felt as if her bones might melt, he clasped her shoulders and put her from him.

  “Make those calls,” he said.

  And then he was gone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHO was Jesse Blackwolf, anyway?

  First he kissed her until she couldn’t think.

  Then he walked away.

  He rode horses, drove a truck, painted his face with a warrior’s stripes, wore an eagle amulet—and lived in a magnificent house in the middle of a gorgeous wilderness, owned a private plane and, so he said, a home in one of the world’s most sophisticated cities.

  Complex didn’t come close to describing him. Surprising might be a better word, and maybe the most surprising thing was that he thought he could take her in his arms and kiss her to silence or, at least, to acquiescence.

  Thought he could? The truth was, he’d done it. Several times. And if he could pull that off so easily, was it his fault…or hers?

  Never mind.

  His address book was right where he’d said it would be. Sienna found the phone numbers, made the calls he’d requested. Demanded, was more like it. He had an aura of command, an I-always-get-what-I-want sensibility. Was it his military background? Was it because he was a man of the 1970s? Or was it just him?

  Never mind trying to figure that out, either. Not now, anyway.

  She had never needed a job as badly as she needed this one.

  Neither his pilot nor his housekeeper seemed surprised to hear a woman’s voice relaying his instructions. Were they well trained in taking calls from a prior secretary or were they accustomed to their boss having a woman in his life? His private life. Not that she was a woman. Well, she was, of course, but she was his employee, that was all, and if he thought he could get her into his bed by taking her with him…

  Sienna laughed.

  If he’d wanted to take her to bed, he’d do it here. No need to fly her, what, eight, nine hundred miles? They both knew he could seduce her without half trying.

  But she wasn’t going to let it happen.

  She was in enough of a mess. Sleeping with him would only make things worse. The last thing she needed was to connect with a complex man. A mysterious man. Google had given her hardly any information about him. She’d found that curious.

  Now, knowing him, she found it credible.

  An empty leather briefcase lay on a small worktable. She grabbed it, tucked a steno pad into it—good grief, a steno pad!—along with some pens and pencils.

  The Internet had given her information about the canyon, the sacred stone, the tribes who’d lived on Blackwolf land a couple of hundred years ago and the people who’d inhabited it thousands of years before that. All she’d found about Jesse was his date of birth and the notation that he was “reclusive.” Wikipedia had been more direct and referred to him as a loner who’d inherited the ranch on the deaths of his parents, lived on it for a few years and then…

  Then, nothing.

  “Sienna? Are you ready?”

  She looked up, saw him in the doorway. He’d changed into close-fitting, faded jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, a tweedy light gray sport coat and what surely were hand-tooled black leather boots.

  He looked as if he’d just stepped out of GQ.

  She looked as if she’d just stepped out of a thrift shop.

  And he was so beautiful he made her ache.

  His plane was a Learjet.

  It said so on the tail.

  You could take what she knew about planes, stuff it into a walnut and have room to spare, but you didn’t have to know planes to know this one was a reflection of its owner, a sleek, magnificent combination of power and purpose.

  The pilot, Tony, was a man of few words. He greeted Jesse with a salute that Jesse ignored.

  “Lieutenant,” Tony said.

  “Tony. We good to go?”

  Tony nodded. “Absolutely.” He gave her a sidelong glance and a polite smile.

  “This is Sienna Cummings. My new secretary.”

  “His administrative assistant,” Sienna said.

  Tony’s eyebrows rose, rose again when she stuck out her hand. He looked at it as if he’d never before seen a woman’s hand extended that way, but after a second, he got the message and shook it.

  Yet another little reminder that this was the seventies.

  “You want to take the controls, Lieutenant?”

  Jesse said no, not this time; he had work to do. Tony nodded; nodding seemed to be his favored form of communication. Another quick salute and he vanished into the cockpit.

  Sienna looked at Jesse. “Lieutenant?”

  He shrugged. “We were in the service together.”

  “And you know how to fly?”

  A quick, cold smile. “Surprised?”

  “No, not really. You just never said—”

  Her tone—not just surprised but disbelieving—might have made him laugh if he hadn’t grown accustomed to that kind of reaction. All his life, people had tried to fit what they knew of him into neat little boxes.

  The Blackwolf kid, hell-bent on trouble. The scholarship student with the brilliant SAT scores who didn’t seem to give a damn about his grades. The army recruit who could shoot the eye out of a gnat, take down a man in hand-to-hand combat without breaking a sweat—and read Schopenhauer in his spare time.

  This time around, though, he’d surprised himself, first by riding out to watch the solstice before he turned his back on the nonsensical superstitions of ancestors.

  And then by bringing Sienna into his life.

  Who was she, really? What had brought her here? There was something she wasn’t telling him. Not that he cared. Sienna Cummings was just a temporary distraction and, damn it, why hadn’t he left her at the Greyhound terminal? Why had he offered her a job he didn’t need filled? Better still, why had he brought her with him on this trip?

  You know why, a mocking voice inside him said. Just take her to bed and get it over with, then she’ll be out of your system.

  He looked at Sienna, that surprised “Lieutenant?” still buzzing in his head.

  “Sienna.” She turned toward him. “To answer your question,” he said coolly, “yes, I held the rank of lieutenant. And just to get it out of the way, yes, those were medals you saw on my uniform, including the Distinguished Service Cross. And yes, I know how to fly. I know how to do a lot of things, including not bothering with small talk. Am I being clear? Because, just in case you thought otherwise, work is the sole reason I brought you along.”

  Her face turned pink. Her eyes flashed. She turned to the window but he saw her hands knot together in her lap.

  You are a gold-plated bastard, Blackwolf, he told himself.

  And a very bad liar
.

  He’d brought her with him because he wanted her near him. The sound of her laughter, the look of her, the way she stood up to him every time…

  He wanted to get out of his seat, go to her and take her in his arms.

  Instead, he dug in his pocket for a pen and a small, leather-bound notebook, opened it and began scribbling notes. That the notes were meaningless didn’t matter.

  Keeping busy was everything.

  The flight was smooth and took less than four hours.

  Sienna had never been to San Francisco before, which meant she had no way of knowing if the skyline had changed much between Jesse’s day and hers. But the taxi ride from the airport had been a revelation. The city was big and busy, its roads crowded with old cars…except they weren’t old. Not really. And the way people were dressed, all those silly bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes…

  It might have been amusing, but it wasn’t. It was, instead, a reminder—as if she needed one—that she had somehow slipped through time.

  Don’t think about that, she told herself, don’t! Instead, she took refuge in a cool cynicism, as if what awaited her here was nothing out of the ordinary, starting with the moment the taxi pulled up before a glass-and-concrete tower on Russian Hill.

  It was, she knew, some of the priciest real estate in the world.

  She focused on keeping her face free of expression as they rode a private elevator to the penthouse floor, which turned out to be all Jesse’s. Huge rooms, high ceilings, acres of glass with views of the city in all directions, including the glorious Golden Gate Bridge.

  His housekeeper had left a note. It was polite and brief. The refrigerator was fully stocked, there was a stir-fry of shrimp, bok choy and snow peas ready for heating. The bedrooms were all freshly made up, the bathrooms fully stocked with Mr. Blackwolf’s favorite supplies, though she advised against using the fourth bathroom because the tile work around the tub had not yet been completed.

  Sienna looked up, an eyebrow raised. “The fourth bathroom? How many are there?”

  “The four,” Jesse said with a gruffness that was either careless or embarrassed. She couldn’t be sure which. “And a half,” he added, and now there was no question about it, he was embarrassed. “I wanted the place for the view.”