Blackwolf's Redemption

by Sandra Marton

  “Sienna. There’s nothing you could tell me that would change how I feel about you.”

  “I know you believe that, Jesse. But it’s not true.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “There are things—there are things about me that would—would change everything.”

  “No,” he said emphatically. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Jesse.” Gently, she put her fingers over his lips. “Either you wouldn’t believe me or you’d—you’d see me differently, see me as someone else, someone you thought you knew but didn’t, and—and—”

  He kissed her. Kissed her until her mouth softened under his, until she was clinging to him. Then he rose to his feet with her still in his arms, carried her back to the bedroom, pulled the duvet from the bed and wrapped them both in its voluminous folds. French doors opened onto a terrace. He opened the doors, carried her outside, sat in a wicker chair with her in his arms.

  “Warm enough?”

  She nodded. How could she not be warm in Jesse’s arms? The cold would come soon enough, when she told him what she should have told him much, much sooner. That she wasn’t of this time, of his time. That somehow she had stumbled backward more than three decades.

  And delaying things wouldn’t make the telling any easier.

  Sienna looked at her lover’s face, so strong and proud and beautiful in the moonlight.

  “All right.” Her voice was low. She took his hand, clasped it tightly in hers. “Here’s what you need to know about me. And—and it really will change what you think you feel about—”

  He kissed her to silence. When he lifted his head, he looked deep into her eyes.

  “I know what I feel about you,” he said softly. “And nothing can change it.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m not—I’m not who, I’m not what you think I am.”

  “I don’t give a damn about that,” he said, almost angrily. “Whatever you’ve done, why you were in the canyon…” He brought her hand to his lips. “It’s history.”

  She laughed, even as she wept. “No. It isn’t history. It’s just the opposite. But you have to know the truth, and—and the truth can change things.”

  “Yes. You’re right.” He took a long breath, slowly expelled it. “And that’s why you need to know the truth about me.”

  “No. Jesse—”

  A muscle flexed in his jaw. He lifted her from his lap, carefully tucked the duvet around her, got to his feet and walked to the terrace railing, his strong, half-naked body outlined by the lights of the city far below.

  “I told you that I was in Special Forces. You know what that means?”

  She nodded. Of course she knew. Even in her world, people spoke with awe of the Green Berets, soldiers who fought clandestine battles. They were the bravest of the brave.

  “And you know about this war.” His mouth twisted as he turned toward her. “This goddamned war that’s finally come to an end.”

  Bewildered, she stared at him. The wars in the desert kingdoms? He couldn’t be talking about—

  “Vietnam,” he said, almost spitting out the word. “A politicians’ war—paid for with the blood of men like the ones with whom I served.”

  Vietnam. Of course. She knew of it, that it had been unpopular, that in her time, not his, the men in suits who had directed it from the safety of their comfortable offices had finally acknowledged it had been fought wrong.

  “They died because of me,” Jesse said, his voice so low she could hardly hear it. “Because I was fool enough to order them to do things when I knew it was all wrong, that what we did didn’t really mean a damn, that there was no way to win.”

  “No! Jesse, you did what you were ordered to do—”

  “Men died because of me. Soldiers. Warriors. Men? Damn it, they were kids! I didn’t stop it, couldn’t stop it—”

  Sienna rose in one fluid motion and went to him.

  “Jesse. Sweetheart, listen to me—”

  “You think it’s okay. But it isn’t. It changed everything. I’ve seen how some people look at me. I’ve heard their whispers.” A long, deep breath. “My wife laid it all out.”

  Sienna went rigid. “You have a wife?”

  “I had a wife. She left me, we got a divorce. The marriage wouldn’t have lasted, anyway—it was one of those things, a mistake, from the beginning. We’d dated in high school. I came home from college, we went out a couple of times…And I enlisted.”

  “You enlisted,” Sienna said softly. She put her hand lightly on his arm, felt the terrible tension in his muscles. “Jesse. Whatever you did in the war… You were a hero.”

  He shook his head. “I was a fool,” he said bitterly, “all fired up on nonsense about warriors and honor and fighting for what was right.”

  She moved in front of him, rose on her tiptoes and kissed him. “You are a warrior, Jesse, and a man of honor who fought for the men beside you.”

  He looked at her then, saw the glitter of tears in her eyes. They were for him, and though he had shoved away Linda’s initial offerings of polite sympathy, he knew Sienna’s tears were more than that. They were tears of compassion, of caring…

  Of caring, he thought, and his heart seemed to lift inside him.

  “It’s cool out here,” he said softly. He put his arm around her, plucked the duvet from the terrace floor where it had fallen and led her into the bedroom. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s see if this place has the fixings for tea. Okay?”

  She nodded. “Okay,” she said as she burrowed against him.

  In the kitchen again, he found a kettle, tea bags, mugs, spoons… He kept busy, fidgeting with them, arranging them, and then, when there was no arranging left to do, he turned to Sienna, sitting at the counter.

  “We got married for all the wrong reasons.” The kettle whistled. He unplugged it, poured the boiling water into the mugs. “She, because she thought I was somebody I’d never wanted to be. Me because, I don’t know, it seemed the right thing to do.” Jesse put a steaming mug in front of Sienna. “It didn’t take long to know we’d screwed up. We tried, for a while. She wanted a bigger house. I tore down the old one and built a new one. It didn’t matter. She said I was a stranger.” He gave a hollow laugh. “Hell, I was. To her, to myself.”

  Sienna waited. When he said nothing, she touched his hand. “And?”

  “And, my marriage was finished, my folks were gone, everything I’d believed in seemed meaningless. I decided to start over. Numbers had always been my thing. When I was a kid, math was the only subject I bothered with. When I got older, it was poker.” A quick smile tilted his lips. “I’d played cards in Saigon and Tokyo and what seemed like half the army bases in the civilized world, came home with a lot of money, decided stocks were more interesting than poker.” His jaw tightened, his voice went flat. “I made even more money, bought this place. But it didn’t change anything. I was still me, inside.”

  “And that’s why you’re going to sell your land,” Sienna said softly.

  He nodded. “It’s not a good place anymore. Too many memories, you know? The nonsense my old man fed me about a warrior’s vows, a warrior’s obligations…” Silence. Jesse put down his untouched mug of tea and took Sienna’s hands in his. “Then, one night, I rode out into Blackwolf Canyon. I told myself it was so I could say a mocking goodbye to the past.” He reached for her hands and brought them to his lips. “And,” he said, with a simplicity that brought tears to her eyes, “I found you. A miracle, waiting just for me.”

  Sienna wanted to put her arms around him, this brave, wounded hero, this amazing man, this lover who had stolen her heart. But she couldn’t, not until he knew everything.

  “Jesse. What you said about how the truth can change things…”

  His eyes grew dark. She could see him withdrawing from her emotionally even as he let go of her hands.

  “It’s all right. I understand. You don’t have to ex—”

  “Damn it,” she said, her voice ragged, “do you think anything
you just told me could change what I feel for you?” She grabbed his hands, held on tight. “It’s the truth about me that will change everything.” She drew a deep breath, expelled it, then looked directly into his eyes. “I’m not a thief. I’m not some leftover sixties flower child.”

  “I know that, baby. Besides, I told you, whatever, whoever you are—”

  “I’m Sienna Cummings,” she said, hurrying the words because if she didn’t, she knew she’d lose courage. “I live in Brooklyn, go to school in New York City. I’m a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University.” She stopped, voice and body shaking. “And two days ago, when I first set foot in Blackwolf Canyon…”

  Oh, God! She couldn’t do this but she had to, it was time, it was past time….

  “Sweetheart?”

  Sienna wound her fingers tightly through his.

  “Two days ago, when we met… Two days ago, Jesse, the year wasn’t 1975. Not for me. For me, it was—it was the year 2010.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SHE’D stunned him.

  No surprise there.

  How else could she expect him to react when she’d pretty much said, I’m not a thief, not a late-model hippie, what I am is a woman from the future.

  Maybe a better description was that Jesse looked like a man waiting for the punch line to a bad joke.

  “The year 2010,” she said. “That’s thirty-five years from now. Well, thirty-five years, fourteen hours and—and—” She looked at the face of the small clock on the wall. “And I’m not really sure how many minutes. Unless you figure in the time difference between here and Mont—”

  “We need to get you to a doctor.”

  “No!”

  “Yeah. We do.” Jesse’s voice was rough, filled with urgency. “Which is better? To see someone here or in Montana? Montana. I know people there—but this is a big city. Lots of hospitals and doctors and—”

  Sienna shot to her feet. “A doctor will put me away! And I’m not crazy. I’m not, I’m not, I’m—”

  Jesse cursed. Grabbed her. And kissed her. Kissed her hard, kissed her deep, as if the force, the power of his kiss could chase away demons.

  Or could, at last, finally force him to acknowledge the truth.

  He had refused to admit that truth these past years. Hell, he’d denied it much of his life. Now he had to face what he’d always somehow known.

  For all his anger, all his defiance, some of the old ways were true.

  Why hadn’t he seen it from the start? The ledge. The sacred stone. The solstice. The green lightning. And Sienna, suddenly appearing where nobody had been before. The truth had been staring him in the face, but he’d been too pig-headed to see it.

  “I’m not crazy,” she said in a shaky whisper when he took his lips from hers, and he gave a gruff laugh and drew her against him.

  “No, baby. You’re not.”

  She raised her head and looked up at him. There was such certainty in his voice….

  “I should have known,” he said. “Right from the minute I first saw you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The sacred stone…” He framed her face with his strong, work-roughened hands. “My father told me stories, sweetheart. Ancient stories about what could happen on that ledge when the sun or the moon was just right.”

  She stared at him. “You mean—you mean, others have—have…?”

  Her knees turned to rubber. It was one thing to assume you’d traveled through time and another to hear someone say that you had. She felt herself falling, heard Jesse say her name. Then she was in his arms and he was carrying her through the suite, to the bed where he lay her gently back against the pillows.

  “I was right,” he said, sitting beside her, taking her icy hands in his. “You do need a doctor.”

  “No! Please, no doctor. Didn’t you just say that I’m not—I’m not—”

  He kissed her. Tenderly. Sweetly. A sigh trembled on her lips as he drew her head against his shoulder and enfolded her in his strong arms.

  “You’re not, sweetheart. But you’ve been through one hell of an experience. I just want to be sure you’re all right.”

  “I will be,” she said, drawing back and meeting his eyes, “once I understand what happened.”

  Jesse looked at her lovely face. How could he have known her for, what, just a couple of days? He felt as if he’d known her all his life. As if he’d known her forever.

  And maybe he had. Maybe the old stories weren’t stories at all.

  “Jesse. Please, tell me about the ledge.”

  “I don’t know all that much.”

  “Whatever you do know, then. Tell me.”

  Eyes steady on hers, he told her some of the stories he’d been raised on. “Fairy tales, you know?” he said, smiling a little. “The Rabbit and the Elk. Unktomi—the Spider—and the Arrowheads. An Indian kid’s version of Hans Christian Andersen.”

  She nodded. “Legends. Myths. Ancient tales passed from generation to generation.”

  “My beautiful anthropologist,” he said softly.

  That made her smile. At least some of the wild darkness was fading from her eyes.

  “My dad was a scholar, as well as a rancher. He taught me all kinds of stuff about his people.”

  “Your people,” Sienna said softly, touching a hand to his cheek.

  He caught her hand and kissed it. “That’s what my mother would say, when I got into my teens and began scoffing at the stories. ‘These are your people, too, Jesse,’ she’d tell me. And the truth was, I loved the stories—especially the ones that were really outrageous. Stories about that ledge. The sacred stone. And shamans.”

  “Wise men who could perform feats of magic.”

  “So the stories claim.”

  His tone was cynical, but Sienna understood. She’d always held such beliefs in great respect, but to believe in them, to believe in the supernatural…

  “Go on,” she said softly.

  “The stories hinted at a kind of hole in time, an emptiness that could draw life in.”

  “And?”

  Jesse shook his head. “That’s all I know,” he said softly.

  Sienna nodded. She bowed her head. Her shoulders slumped. He cursed, reached for her and drew her into his lap.

  “I wish I knew more,” he said, “but I don’t.”

  “That must be what happened to me.” Her voice wobbled. “It sounds impossible, but there’s no other explanation.”

  “No,” he said gruffly, “there isn’t.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. His arms tightened around her. He was a man of action. A soldier. You saw something happening, you reacted. You did what needed to be done.

  Except for this.

  What did a man do to comfort a distraught woman? He’d have moved mountains if it would have taken away his Sienna’s tears. He’d never felt so helpless in his life.

  “You must feel lost,” he said softly, and then an awful thought struck him. “Sienna? Is there somebody—would someone be looking for you back in your time?”

  She shook her head. “My parents are both gone. I have a couple of cousins somewhere, but I haven’t seen them in years.”

  “Nobody else?”

  This time, she heard the hidden question behind the simple words and she put her hand against his cheek.

  “Nobody else,” she said softly.

  Jesse drew Sienna closer and rocked her in his arms.

  “Everything will be okay,” he said. “I’ll take care of you, I promise.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to be a burden to you. You didn’t ask for this mess—”

  “Is that what you call it when a miracle drops into your life?” Slowly, he raised her face to his, kissed her eyes, her lips. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, sweetheart. I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy.”

  “You’re what makes me happy,” she whispered, and knew, with all her heart, that was the truth.<
br />
  Only a son of a bitch would feel good, hearing something like that, but if that was what he was, so be it. Jesse drew Sienna closer and rocked her in his arms.

  They went back to his apartment in early morning, stopping first to buy fresh sourdough rolls and freshly ground coffee from a little shop nearby.

  “I’ll show you the city after we have some breakfast,” Jesse said…but somehow, they never made it out the door. They never even made it to breakfast. Instead, as soon as they were alone in his place, Jesse phoned his housekeeper, told her to take a few days off…

  And carried Sienna to bed.

  But, as she laughingly pointed out, food was also one of life’s necessities. So, in the late afternoon, they showered, dressed and went out to see San Francisco.

  Day after day, the city showed itself to be a lovers’ paradise.

  The charming little restaurants. The steep hills. The cable cars. Little places that served dim sum in Chinatown, the smoky coffee houses of North Beach…

  It was almost enough to make a man and a woman forget that she had come here in a way neither of them understood. And when that wasn’t quite enough to keep the truth at bay, being alone together in Jesse’s big, wide bed surely was.

  It was, Sienna was certain, the most perfect place in the world to lie in your lover’s arms. To tremble with passion as he entered you. To fall into dreamless sleep and then come awake to his slow, deep moonlit kisses or to the hot, sun-tinged stroke of his hands.

  She had never been this happy in her life. Jesse was—he was wonderful. Good and kind. Exciting and sexy. He was everything she’d ever hoped a man could be, a complex mass of contradictions and juxtapositions that were absolutely amazing. He knew how to leave a mass of salesclerks swooning in his wake after an afternoon of nonstop, far-too-expensive shopping and then cap it off by buying her a tacky and adorable stuffed toy from a street vendor whose pitch made her laugh. He could confer with the snootiest sommelier as easily as he could get lunch at a hot-dog stand. And, as she quickly learned, he was fine with letting her choose what she wanted to drink and eat, and in ordering them without his help.