by BJ James
Lamps from another century lined the narrow side street as he turned the horses into it Iron-clad wheels trundled over uneven pavement, leaving the marvelous mansions of Charleston and The Battery, with waves of a tranquil sea washing endlessly against its protecting walls, behind.
On this route rarely traveled by carriages for hire, beneath the massive branches of an avenue of oaks, houses constructed on a scale far less grand marched in imperfect lines. In the quaintly repetitious style unique to Charleston, each differed only in the mark of the personalities and distinctive individuality of those who lived and played, sequestered within their bounds.
The home that had once been a pied-à-terre for Nicole Callison on days when business at the gallery kept her late in the city was no different, and no less exceptional. The same ingenious talent that made the gallery riveting and exciting had transformed it from temporary lodgings to a home possessed of welcoming grace and comfortable charm.
But as Jase called a soft good evening, and the horses clopped slowly away, neither welcoming grace nor comfortable charm could quiet the anxious flutters in Valentina’s throat.
“Nervous?” Rafe asked quietly in her ear, the heat of his body touching her, reassuring her.
“Some,” she admitted. “Jeb Tanner is a man of heroic achievements, an example given to all of us. I never expected to meet him.” That fledgling recruits who followed in Jeb’s footsteps were in awe of him was quite the truth. But not the total reason for Valentina’s malaise. In her travels with her family she’d met the great and near great often enough to be skilled and practiced in whatever protocol or formality each required. But these were Rafe’s friends. People to whom he was special, and were special to him. It was that, as much as Jeb Tanner’s celebrity among the clandestine Watch, that caused her disquiet.
“Don’t get cold feet on me now. You passed Jase’s inspection, and Annabelle’s. And, believe it, she’s one tough lady. Sure, Jeb’s all you’ve been taught he is, and all you’ve heard. Even more. But when the last is said and done, he’s simply a man. As Nicky, for all her talents and her strengths, is simply a woman. You’ll like them both, I promise.”
Biting her lip, Valentina held back a tremor and tried for a smile. “The question is, will they like me?”
“That, my love, is guaranteed.” Rafe smiled back at her. In this vulnerable moment, with the endearment shimmering in the night between them, he ached to take her in his arms and hold her. But Jeb and Nicole were waiting, and the moment passed. Taking her hand to forestall any more angst and delay, without ringing or knocking, with the assurance of one who had visited many times, he led her from the street.
Beyond delicately ornate gates of iron, lay a courtyard and garden, exquisitely planned, meticulously tended. The night was humid and heavy with the fragrance of flowers scattered along ancient walls and patterned walks. The glow of a coach lamp fell on waxy leaves of evergreens, painting them with the patina of antique velvet. In this rectangular corridor of garden and lawn, Charleston stepped firmly back into the past, becoming a magical place of stately gentility and quiet majesty. The perfect setting for the lovely woman who rushed across the veranda to greet them.
“Valentina.” From the flowing sleeves of a gown that was the summation of understated, casual chic, the hands of a gardener reached out to her. Their strong grip belying the fragile elegance both the gown and Nicky Tanner projected. “I’m so glad you could come, I’ve hoped so much that someday we could meet. We’re sure to be friends.” A mischievous smile swept from Rafe to Jeb. “With so much in common, and considering that the ever elusive Rafe Courtenay is so smitten he would bring you to dinner, how could we not?”
Letting a laughing Jeb and a smiling but quiet Rafe trail in her wake, Nicky swept Valentina into the house and to dinner.
Dinner was a pleasant affair, complete with silver and china and crystal and lace. The table was small and intimate and complemented by lively conversation. There was never a hint of the stilted reserve Valentina expected as an outsider. Though the certainty of Nicky’s logic escaped her, Valentina did, indeed, feel that she and her vivacious hostess might have been friends.
Jeb was quieter, but no less genial, and obviously deeply in love with his wife.
After a meal of low country delicacies, over coffee and dessert, conversation turned to old times and old acquaintances. The list read like who’s who in Valentina’s world. Some she knew, some she’d only heard of, some not even that. And though The Black Watch was never mentioned, all of them seemed interconnected. Part of a far-ranging brotherhood, if not The Watch, itself.
Even Rafe.
As she watched him from her place across the table, she wondered how a “civilian” had become and remained closely tied with an organization so cautiously circumspect. She wondered, but did not ask, filing her questions away for another time as conversation rippled and eddied, moving swiftly over a variety of subjects.
“Jase tells us Jordana is recovering so miraculously that Randy will be coming home soon.” Jeb set down his empty wineglass and pushed it away. “We spent an evening with Patrick and Jordana during the Games at Grandfather recently.”
“Jeb speaks of the Highland Games,” Nicky interpreted in an aside for Valentina’s benefit. “Grandfather is a mountain in North Carolina, not a man.” Then, answering questions she could only surmise Valentina must wonder about, she clarified and elaborated. “I would imagine you know, or have heard, the Scottish Games are Simon’s favorite spectator sport. Perhaps you don’t know they are often fertile ground for recruiting.” With dark, winged brows lifting beneath the bangs of her short-cropped mane, she added, drolly, “Recruiting of one sort or another.
“Understanding that, and his love for the games, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Simon met Patrick there long ago. And as night follows day, through Patrick, he met Rafe. Over the years they’ve shared both friendships and adventures. Each calling on the other in time of need...as friends should.”
Jeb flashed a smile of apology at Valentina for his oblique reference. Another of fond gratitude at Nicky for the explanation. “In any case,” he continued, “the McCallum clan is a beautiful family. It would be tragic if anything happened to them.”
“But nothing did.” Stroking Valentina’s cheek, then the path of a curl that drifted to her shoulder, Rafe assured, “Nothing Courtney can’t deal with.”
Into a thoughtful moment, while a rush of color subsided from Valentina’s throat and cheeks, in the manner of a considerate and accomplished hostess, Nicky blithely announced a tidbit of good news. “Cassie will be studying art with a private instructor after Thanksgiving.”
“Will she, now?” Taking his hand from Valentina’s shoulder, Rafe chuckled, remembering gaudy pictures of an elephant called Humphrey taped to a refrigerator door in Jordana’s kitchen. “Her talent was evident years ago.”
On that remark, discussion turned to lighter and far ranging subjects.
As the pleasant evening drew near its end, when the last drop of coffee had been drunk and the last sliver of pecan pie put away, Nicole issued Rafe an invitation he couldn’t refuse. While the two of them cleared the table and retreated to the kitchen in a rush of delighted banter, Jeb volunteered for what he deemed the pleasure of showing Valentina the garden.
“Shall we, my dear?” he asked with a bow as courtly as any gentleman from any century who might have ever lived in his home. “The garden is nearing the end of its best blooming season, but it’s still quite pleasant.”
“I imagine it’s always so,” Valentina replied with the same old-fashioned decorum as she accepted his invitation.
Leaving laughter and conversation behind, they walked together in the moonlight, with Jeb letting her wander as she would and he only a half pace behind. In a subtle shift of moods, in a natural closing of ranks, they were the old guard and the new. Simon’s chosen.
Sights and sounds of the Southern city were locked far away beyond thick, towe
ring walls. The world, for a little while, was this lush garden. There was no small talk between them. No narration identifying and explaining this flower or that. Jeb simply strolled with her through the paths, letting her reflect and absorb and, perhaps, share its peace.
Their footsteps were slow and meandering, and almost soundless. Only the oaks whispered in a random breeze. A natural accompaniment for the splash and burble of a miniature fountain.
“A penny,” Jeb spoke as she halted by the glittering fall, tumbling into a small pool.
“I beg your pardon?” Valentina turned to him, not quite certain what he’d said, or what he meant.
“I offered you a penny.” The man of legend answered gently, a penny lying in the hollow of his palm. “To make a wish.”
“Then this is a wishing well.”
Tall and dark, with eyes as silver as the moon, Jeb nodded. With the composure that marked the man he’d been, the man he was, he watched as she tossed the penny and bowed her head.
The muted sound of the splash had faded, the ripples disappeared, before she moved away.
As calmly as he’d waited, as thoughtfully as he’d observed, Jeb bridged a chasm of silence. “Nicky says the fountain must be a wishing well, for it’s a wish come true. Something she always wanted, to make the garden complete.” He trailed a fingertip over weathered coping and, catching up a flower at its edge, scattered tender petals like crimson snowflakes over reflected moonlight. “It was my gift to her when we were married.”
A wonderfully romantic thought that once she would have considered quite out of character. “You knew she wanted it?”
“No.” Those who had called him rigid and saturnine, the dedicated, disciplined hunter, would not now. There was a softness in him. Tenderness. “It seemed...” he paused, searching for the word, choosing the simplest. “It seemed right.”
Valentina nodded. Some things needed no more explanation.
“Come.” Jeb offered a hand callused with the rigors of the labors of his new life. “Let me show you our favorite place.”
As she went with him, her hand in his, Valentina recalled a rumor whispered among The Black Watch. Jeb Tanner, man-hunter without peer, had traded “spyhood” for apron strings and a hammer. Over dinner, when the conversation had turned from people and distant places and moved closer home, in bits and pieces she learned he had become expert in the rescue and restoration of some of Charleston’s oldest buildings. If his intuition and the rightness of his choice of the fountain was any indication, then, she decided, he must be even more brilliant in his second profession.
As she mused over gossip and fact, he led her toward a far corner, to a park bench. A relic from another era in flawless repair. One, she suspected, rescued and restored by Jeb to enhance and complete this favored space. From her seat beneath gnarled branches of a crape myrtle as venerable, her view encompassed the whole of the garden. And with it, the worn service walk, then the gate shutting away the traffic of the street. The latter, flanked by cloistering shrubs, shielding the softly lighted windows of the tiny, but elegant Charleston single. The haven Jeb and Nicole Tanner called home.
For a moment she was contented there in the shadows, the silent man at her side. For a moment she could suspend thought and doubt, believing in wishes in the peaceful refuge two lovers had created.
But reality could never be far away, and never truly forgotten.
It was Jeb who spoke of it first. Taking her hand, he folded it in both of his as he turned her to face him. “There’s something you need to ask me, isn’t there, Valentina?”
There it was. Straight for the jugular, no matter how kindly asked, as the Jeb Tanner of old would do.
Drawn from a pensive reverie, for the space of a fleeting frown she was bewildered, her thoughts scattered. Then her heart plummeted. “This is about David. Rafe told you. That’s why he brought me here, to force the issue. That’s what this little walk in the garden is all about, isn’t it?”
“No, my dear, it isn’t. And you’re wrong on every count. What Rafe has told us of you had nothing to do with David. Neither you nor I can deny that in many tragic ways our lives parallel each other, but that’s simply ironic coincidence and nothing to do with his purpose. Rafe brought you here to give you the chance to witness for yourself that there is and can be life after The Black Watch.” Squeezing her hand gently, he assured her, “There is no other reason, Valentina.”
She wanted to believe as Jeb did. Her need to believe was written on her face. “How can you be so certain?”
“Rafe, and the sort of man he is, is my certainty. Granted, he knows you and David were partners, members of the same police force, the same SWAT team. He knows David died in the line of duty. And he knows you were involved in some way. He wouldn’t be human if he hadn’t drawn his own conclusions from the dreams. But even they had nothing to do with this evening.”
Jeb grinned, then, not in humor, but self-deprecation. “You realize, I hope, that all of this is sheer supposition and deduction drawn from my great trove of wisdom. But, to reiterate the important point, Rafe has said nothing.”
Tilting her head slowly from side to side, Valentina muttered, “Then how?”
“How do I know?” The grin became a grimace. “The same way you know my history, I imagine.”
That she knew was an assumption, never a question. “The grapevine,” she acknowledged. “Of course.”
“Of course.” Jeb sighed. “A cliché, but a fact. For a supersecret organization, little is truly secret within the bounds of The Black Watch. While I may not take an active part any longer, I’m not completely out of touch. I have my contacts and another particularly reliable source, as well.”
“Simon!” she blurted.
“Naturally.” The admission was swiftly qualified. “But only because he was concerned about you and thought I would understand better than most.”
“Then you know more than the grapevine could ever supply. You know what I did.” Valentina was unaware that her nails scored the back of his hand, leaving marks that would be no little time in fading. “You know what I couldn’t do.”
“I know.”
Dragging in a shuddering breath, she asked the question he had anticipated from the first. “Could you? Years ago, when a madman held a gun to Nicole’s head, if your partner hadn’t been there, what would you have done?”
Jeb went still, considering, weighing. Affording her query the soul searching it merited. When he spoke, his voice was strong, ringing with conviction. “Could I have shot Tony Callison, even when he had been my best friend?” Pausing, his head inclined once, abruptly. “The answer is, yes.
“Could I have shot him knowing that no matter what he’d become, Tony was still Nicky’s brother?” His hand was hard and steady over Valentina’s. “Yes. For what he had done, for what he might do, unequivocally, yes!
“But could I have fired a shot with the knowledge that if my aim veered off target by even an inch it would be my bullet that killed Nicole?”
Releasing her, Jeb stood up to pace. The tranquility of the garden was suddenly effaced. A hand at his nape kneaded taut muscles. Turning, he stared at moving figures silhouetted against the dining room window. One was Nicole, vibrant and alive, and safe. Thanks to Mitch Ryan, more than Jeb Tanner.
The scene that had played thousands of times through his mind in flashing vignettes was as vivid tonight as then. The players as real as if they stood before him now.
Nicole and the hulking man-child, Ashley Blakemond. Innocent hostages.
Mitch Ryan, Matthew Winter Sky. His partners, men of The Black Watch.
And Tony Callison. Friend, brother. Killer of children.
A struggle.
Gunshots. Tony’s Mitch’s.
Blood. Everywhere, blood.
One Callison died
One lived.
“Nicole.”
Jeb watched her move beyond the windows, he heard the drift of her laughter. Bowing his head, h
e studied the ground as if the grass kept the secret of his quandary. After a while, he straightened, his gaze returning to the windows. His voice was only a husk of itself. “Would I have taken that shot?”
Callused hands clenched into fists. Distended veins throbbed beneath the upturned sleeve of his shirt. “I don’t know. God help me! I don’t know.”
Valentina felt his hurt, the painful indecision. She had lived it. Yet, she had to ask, “Even after all these years?”
Wheeling away from his view of the windows, he looked long and hard at his troubled guest. No matter that she needed and wanted it, there was no pat response. “If I live to be a hundred I won’t know, Valentina.”
“If there had been no one else, if you’d had no choice...”
“Would I have hesitated?” Moving to her, with a knuckle at her chin he raised her dark gaze to his. “Wouldn’t anyone?”
“I don’t.” Her tone was without inflection, lifeless. “Not now. Not anymore.”
“Quick-draw O’Hara? Shoot without a thought or a qualm?” Jeb paused, drew a long considering breath. “I don’t think so,” he said with utter conviction. “Only when there’s no other choice.”
“A deduction drawn from your great trove of wisdom, I suppose.” There was no rancor in her remark.
“Better than that. Proven fact.”
“You speak of Courtney McCallum.”
“For her sake, you waited. And you were right to wait.”
“This time.”
“Perhaps every time,” Jeb suggested. “I suspect, especially with David.”
“What you suspect and change will buy a cup of coffee.”
A small smile ghosted over his mouth for only a second before his handsome features turned somber once more. “Let it go, O’Hara.”
It was chance that he chose that moment to use one of Rafe’s favorite names for her. But it got her attention, made her listen, shaking her to her toes.
“Let it go, dammit. You took a monster’s life to save a child. When it was your lover, you couldn’t. Not the same circumstances, I suspect not even the same woman, but the outcome is still the same. Nothing can change that. Nothing! So, accept it, learn from it, live with it.” He grasped her cheeks between thumb and forefinger, cradling her chin in his palm, refusing to let her look away. “Live. Not even David Flynn would want you to crawl in the grave with him.”