Journey's End

by BJ James

  “Yes, she will, without a doubt, but not right now.”

  “What if she needs a doctor? Do you know how far she walked, how long she was in the cold, with her coat holding Shadow together?”

  “I know.” Cat held on to her composure as she walked Ty to the door. The last thing any of them needed now was panic. “If she needs a doctor, we’ll call one.”

  “What if she’s bad?”

  “Then we’ll call a helicopter.”

  “Cat...”

  “Go, Tynan,” the tall woman said firmly. “Leave me to do what she needs. Don’t you understand she wouldn’t want you to see her as she is. Nor as she will be when the pain of thawing tissues starts.”

  “Why?” He was truly puzzled.

  “Because she loves you and would spare you, you silly fool. Which is something all of us but you seems to know.”

  But he did know. He had for a long time. If there had ever been any doubt of it, she’d swept them away by risking herself to bring his wolf back to him. “I’ll go,” he heard himself saying. “But you’ll call if she needs me?”

  “Merrill will call you, when she needs you. Never doubt it,” Cat said firmly and shut the door in his face.

  The house was quiet again. And for the first time in days, at peace. Once the doctor Tynan insisted must be called for Merrill departed, and Shadow’s perilous condition stabilized, Carl and Cat left as well. Casey stayed a day longer, seeing to the livestock while Tynan tended the sleeping wounded.

  Carl, who possessed the gift of healing hurt creatures, had warned that the wolf would be virtually comatose while its body replenished its losses. He was adamant that Merrill’s quick action contributed as much to Shadow’s survival as the refrigerated temperature that slowed and depressed the bleeding and vital signs. With care and rest, and God willing, he predicted Shadow would enjoy a few more good years.

  As the days passed and Casey said his goodbyes, Tynan found himself in an eerily quiet house. Alone, yet not alone. With Shadow waking only to lap at the broth Cat had left. And Merrill only to drink a little, eat less, and soak in the tub as if she would never be warm again. Then it was back to sleep for both.

  The only interruption of his days was the arrival of rangers and officials come to investigate the killing of one of an endangered species. Just cause was easily established and corroborated by Casey. And the grave eyed men took their questions away without disturbing Merrill.

  She slept deeply, the sleep of the exhausted. And, Ty thought, of one who had come to terms with herself, with mind and spirit healing at last.

  Though she thrived, her color normal, appetite returning, he could not bring himself to leave her alone in the darkness. His nights were spent sitting in a chair by her bed, watching over her as she slept. The little ease he allowed himself was quite simply when sleep overtook him, there in his chair in the small hours of the morning, demanding rest for a weary body.

  He was sleeping, as always by her bedside, when she woke. Finished with the somnolence of healing, ready to accept and face what she must, she called to him softly, waking him gently.

  He was instantly alert, surprised only that she was half sitting, half reclining, as she regarded him from her bed. “Merrill, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing with me.” She shook her head, letting the tousled mass of her hair fall over her shoulder. “But you’re another matter.” In a shaft of moonlight made more brilliant by a new fall of snow, he was drawn and haggard, with worry etched deeply in the bracketing lines around his mouth and mustache. “What are you doing here?”

  “Watching you sleep.”

  “Watching me? How long?”

  Even with a frown drawing fine lines across her face, she had never been more appealing or seductive than in the flannel shirt Cat had found while rummaging in the back of his closet. Declaring it the very thing one should wear while thawing, she had promptly buttoned Merrill into it. The shirt was far too large, and should have dwarfed her. But, worn soft and thin by age and wear, it clung and conformed to the lines and curves of her body. Even as the shoulders drooped to her elbows, the sleeves spilled beyond her fingertips, and the hem brushed her knees. In the days that followed, as she found it most comfortable, it had become ritual that it would be worn and washed, then worn again.

  Once the flannel had been darkest green. But, with time and age, had faded to a softer shade, in perfect compliment to her skin. The picture she made, disheveled and vulnerable in something of his, made him ache to touch her. As desire flowed like a wellspring within him, he had to struggle to keep his voice level, his tone composed. “This is the fourth night.”

  “Shadow?” The sheet that had fallen in a puddle at her waist, crumpled in her fist.

  “He sleeps by the fire in the great room, and grows stronger every day. Thanks to you.”

  “Not just me.” Merrill had a vague recollection of Cat and Carl and Casey moving around her. But now the house had the feel of emptiness. She sensed on some level she didn’t understand and couldn’t explain, that she and Tynan and Shadow were alone.

  “You look tired.” Letting her gaze range over him, she noted his only concession to his own comfort was a pair of faded sweats he wore when he worked at the computer long into the night. “Have you slept at all?”

  “Enough.”

  “I don’t think so.” Shaking back her hair, as moonlight struck gold, she lifted her arms. “Come here, Tynan. You’ve watched over me while I found the peace and rest I needed. Now let me do the same for you.”

  Ty hesitated, not certain that either of them knew what she was asking. “Merrill.” His voice was husky and not nearly as composed as he wished. “You don’t understand.”

  “I’m a woman, Ty, not a child. And I understand. The troubles I brought to Fini Terre haven’t blinded me to your needs nor to my own. But first things first. You’ve exhausted yourself for me. All I’m asking is that you allow me the pleasure of returning some small measure of the same tenderness and compassion.”

  “Sweetheart, you don’t owe me anything. There was never any price tag for...”

  “For caring?”

  “Yes.” For loving you. For wanting you more than I’ve ever wanted anyone or anything. For dying a little inside, each time I think of losing you. “Yes,” he said again, putting his thoughts aside. “For caring.”

  “This isn’t payment or any debt. It’s something for me, something I need.” Her hands dropped to the sheet, her gaze was unwavering, her voice soft in the moonlight. “Four days ago, you came tearing up the trail to me. You took me in your arms. You comforted me and warmed me. What did you feel?”

  “Relief.” Tynan had sat unmoving, listening. Now he rose from his seat, approaching her bedside. Taking her hand, lacing his fingers through hers, he brushed her knuckles with the pad of his thumb. “As if a great void had been filled, the anguish of it eased.”

  “Yes,” she murmured. Drawing him down to sit at the edge of her bed, she combed a shaggy curl from his forehead. “You’re tired.” Her fingers slipped from his forehead to his nape, bringing his mouth to hers. Her kiss was light and slow, and more passionate in its tenderness than he’d ever known. “You need to sleep.” She didn’t speak of anguish, but it was there as she whispered against his lips, “And I need to hold you.”

  Lying back, she drew his unresisting body to her. Cradling his head on her breast, she stroked his hair and breathed in the seductive male scent of him. “Rest,” she crooned in an undertone. “Sleep. Then whatever happens, we’ll deal with it. And rejoice.”

  Tynan’s mind drifted. His body relaxed. As her hands and her voice soothed him and caressed him, he slept.

  When the moon was setting, he woke. In the first light before the dawn, it seemed natural and right that he make love to her. Once more there was untold passion in tenderness.

  Then the rising sun blazed down on them, filling their world with spangled sundust. And as Merrill promised, it was a time of joy.

/>   Nine

  It was morning when he woke again. The sun was fully risen and the day well begun. Merrill stood at the window, his open shirt nearly falling from her shoulders as she stared out at the land. The sky was an endless, soul searing blue rising into forever above the relentless silence of winter-clad peaks. A canvas worthy of all of Casey’s unique talents, commanding attention and never to be forgotten. Yet she was so deeply riveted in thought he wondered if she saw anything at all.

  Sliding from the bed, with the hushed step of bare feet, he went to her. Lacing his fingers at her waist, his palms lying against the naked curve of midriff and abdomen, he drew her back against him. “Good morning.” His tips brushed her temple in a kiss as delicate as the sweep of an eyelash. “Did you sleep well?”

  Hugging his arms closer to her, Merrill leaned back against his shoulder. “The best I have in years.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “About this? About us?” Turning her head, she kissed the tanned and weathered flesh of his throat. “Never.”

  “Sure?”

  “As sure as I will ever be of anything in my life.”

  “You were awfully involved in something when I interrupted.”

  “Just taking stock. Facing the past and the truth as it was, not as I saw it. Making myself recognize that Guiterrez is and was exactly what you said he’d become. Slick, slimy, a monster. Then, admitting that my sin was in being too trusting, too naive, too gullible. And, tragically for those who depended on me, far too easily manipulated.” As the litany of her shortcomings grew long, she lifted a shoulder, a tiny expression of great contempt. “Everything it was my job not to be. Making me Guiterrez’s puppet and his dupe.”

  “As I was,” Ty reminded, with no trace of past bitterness malingering.

  “You were blinded by an old friendship.”

  “All the more reason to see the change in him.” He would allow himself no more excuse than she. Yet, perhaps he could now, judging himself in light of another. For another. “We weren’t the first he’d fooled and we won’t be the last. Ramon Guiterrez is a master at creating illusions, at letting people see in him what they think he is. Even what they want him to be.

  “There have been others like him, and others like us. There will be again. Despots, tyrants, misogynists. All of them monsters who will use, abuse, and destroy any in their path. Theirs is an endless list, but none will ever be better, or worse, at the game Guiterrez plays.”

  Merrill shivered, and was grateful for the solace of his embrace. “The innocents, the women, old and young, and even the children were nothing to him. They were a bargaining chip, a ploy, his means to an end. And when he was done with them, useless chaff to be discarded without a care.”

  Her voice trembled, her throat constricted with the ache of grief, as she spoke the thoughts that had drawn her from her bed. “Mothers and grandmothers, daughters and small sons, all of them doomed from the minute he made them captive.

  “I will always mourn them.” Her nails scored Ty’s arms, but she didn’t know. “And, God help me, I’ll always wonder if I’d seen through him, used better judgment, made better choices...”

  As her voice faded to a broken whisper and then ceased, his cheek lay against her head, his lips touched her forehead. “I would stake my life that you made the best choices you could.” A flex of his arms pressed his naked chest closer against her, his grasp tensed as if he fought not to shake her, make her believe. “Remember, murderers couldn’t murder if they looked and acted like murderers. Con men couldn’t con. Thieves couldn’t steal. The perverted couldn’t molest. In a perfect world all evil would wear the mark of evil and be locked away on sight.”

  “And no one would be hurt, ever.” Pausing, she sank deeper into his embrace.

  Ty held her as the magnificence of an imperfect world sprawled within their sight, and thoughtful silence spun a pensive truth about them.

  “In a perfect world,” Merrill said wistfully at last. “But ours isn’t. And as beautiful as it is, it will never be. There will always be evil, and always the charlatans and the monsters. The pretenders, who will never be what they seem.” She turned her head from Ty, her unseeing gaze on the land he called Fini Terre. “Still, if I’d been wiser, if just this once...”

  “The world had been a little closer to perfect?” Ty suggested, going where she led.

  Merrill closed her eyes, her chin dipped, just once, barely.

  “Too much had come before you, sweetheart. Too much had been set into motion. If you possessed all the wisdom of all the sages, nothing would have changed.” He was fierce and immutable, even as his voice roughened with anguish. “And, in the end, another name would have been added to the list of those Guiterrez has, and will, destroy in his quest for power.”

  “Merrill Santiago.” She said her own name dispassionately, as if the chance she could have been among those lost was not new.

  “Yes! Dammit!” There was no dispassion in Ty. There could never be with the unthinkable. “Merrill Santiago. A name on a gory list, instead of a kind and giving woman, alive, and here in my arms.” He rocked her in his embrace, acknowledging completely how meaningless his life would be without her. “I don’t think I could bear any sort of world without you.”

  Merrill sighed softly. “You couldn’t miss what you never knew.”

  “I would know my life was emptier. That the woman who was meant to be mine had never come to me.”

  “There would have been someone else. Someday.”

  “No.” Ty said no more. A single disputing word making his case far more eloquently than the greatest argument.

  Something softened inside her, eased. Brightened. “Then you think this was destined to be? That I was and I am meant for you?”

  His lips touched her hair, as he savored the clean scent. “No more and no less than I was meant for you.”

  “Fate, Mr. O’Hara?”

  Turning her in his arms, he lifted her chin with the touch of a finger. “Truth, Miss Santiago.”

  Rising on tiptoe, she kissed him, letting the taste of him warm her lips. Feeling the steady, assuring beat of his heart against her breast. At the touch of her mouth, his responded, molding, teasing. Taking all she was, all that she offered. Giving back a sweet familiar pleasure. Her pulse leapt, raced, then slowed to a sultry throb. As she drank in the hot and heady sensation, as she reveled in his powerful masculinity, the smoldering desire he had tantalized and taunted so wonderfully wickedly, so maddeningly through the night, burst into sanity destroying tenacity.

  When his hands slipped beneath her shirt to stroke and caress her, gliding over her back and her ribs, brushing the sides of her breasts, her sigh was low and hushed. The first and last of soul cleansing tears shimmered in her eyes and on her gold tipped lashes, while his lips moved over hers. An exploration as tender as his caress, stirring mysterious and unnamed sentiments.

  “Ty,” she whispered softly into his kiss. A name for the mysterious, for the unnamed, for the light in the darkness of her heart.

  “Yes. Ty.” And even as it cherished, his mouth became a brand, burning deeper, harder. Marking her as his, and himself as hers. He wanted her with consuming desperation. He needed her with the shamelessness of a virile man who believed in his own strength and accepted his needs. And from this day forward, he knew with the surety of his strength and the power of his need, he would never be complete without her.

  Shaken, needing to think, to regain some sense of order and balance and truth, he lifted his mouth from the sweet enticement of hers. Yet in the small separation, he discovered there was no order, no balance, no truth, except that which she’d brought to his life. “Merrill...”

  “No.” Her lips sealed his, stopping the words she wanted to hear, wanted to say. When she moved away only enough to look at him, her gaze was radiant and unwavering. “One day we’ll both say what’s in our hearts.”

  Searching her face, Ty saw only tenderness. “One day,” he promised a
nd let his hands fall from her, giving her space. “But not yet.”

  Reaching out to him, with her fingertips she traced the line and contour of his face as if she were memorizing it. Lingering at the chiseled line of his cheek and the tilt of his mustache, finding the pulse beneath his jaw, then in the hollow of his throat Her quest came to an end against the solid support of his chest and the thundering rhythm of his heart.

  “I have to go back, you know.”

  Ty bowed his head, but didn’t speak. In the intensity of the moment he’d let himself forget, but he knew. He’d known for a long while, perhaps even before Merrill, that one day she would go back to her own world. That she must, at least for a while.

  “When you hold me, I can face anything, and see everything as it should be. Guiterrez, the children, myself. But I have to stand on my own. I have to trust my judgment, with or without you. The unexpected rapport with Casey was a beginning. Watching him mend and grow and reach out, added confidence as well. But dealing with the grizzly in Wildflower Canyon was a step in the direction I must go.”

  “Acting as the situation demanded.” If he shut his eyes, Ty could see the bear, humpbacked, silvertipped and grizzled. One of two with half a front paw missing. And for the maiming loss, that much more unpredictable. That much more dangerous. In his mind’s eye he saw it, a thousand pounds of crazed, killing fury threatening Casey. And Merrill, a feather in comparison, challenging the beast, acting, reacting. Coolly, competently. Effectively. “With the instinct that leaves no room for doubt or hesitation. When either would be fatal.”

  “Instinct without doubt.” Merrill mulled over the clear cut analysis that came so naturally to Ty. “Yes! Exactly the reactions I couldn’t be sure I would have. Or ever will again.”

  “It’s important that you do?” A question that needed no answer, for it was written on her face.

  “More than important. Necessary.”

  “Why?” Ty wanted this, at least.

  Merrill’s eyes were bright. Golden brown, glittering with flecks of amber, in a look that was unwavering. “To be the woman Tynan O’Hara deserves.”