by BJ James
“Patience is the steady one of us, the quietest.” At his look of askance and surprise, she amended, “At least she was as a kid. I suspect the rest of us are as steady now. Part of growing up. With it, I suppose we’ve all grown quieter.”
“As you are.”
Scrubbing her palms over the legs of her jeans, Valentina only then considered the long hours she’d spent with this man, and how little she’d spoken. “Yes.”
“Do you have a favorite brother?”
“Choosing one over the other would be impossible. There’s something about each of them that...” Valentina shook her head with a ghost of a smile. “I can’t explain. I only know that if they weren’t my brothers, I’d be in love with all three of them. Tynan for his gentleness, his insight, his empathy and his compassion. Kieran for his orderliness and stubborn conviction that every question has an answer. For his unswerving belief that nothing is impossible and no one is beyond redemption. First and last there’s Devlin, the oldest of us and yet the youngest. A rebel among rebels. Our wild one, who challenges life and death every day with a dare and a grin. The one who worries us. The one who makes us laugh.
“These are the individual qualities that come to mind, but, in truth, there’s some of each in each. Ty has grinned in the face of life and death. Kieran makes us laugh. And Devlin feels the hurts of others more than his own.”
“Quite a family.”
“I know.”
But who, Rafe wondered, was David? Had he made her laugh? Had he grinned in the face of his own death? Had she been in love with him? Was she still?
“Brothers like yours offer a lot for a man to measure up to.”
She nodded, absently, immersed again in private thought.
Rafe knew there would be no more. He’d lost her.
“It’s late,” she said, stirring at last. “We should turn in.”
“In a while.” Rafe returned to the small task of taking the spurs from his boots. He wouldn’t need them tomorrow.
Valentina sighed as she slid into her bedroll. With her cheek turned into the smooth leather of her saddle, she watched him. As he moved quietly about, she knew she hadn’t imagined the change wrought by his smile. In that moment, he could have been Tynan, or Kieran, and even Devlin. In the glimpse of a single smile, she saw much of them in him. He was their sort, with the same toughness tempered by kindness. The same mix of ruggedness and gentleness. The conviction and disbelief in the impossible. The daring, the grin. And, perhaps in a time less grave, the laughter.
The first smile made him more than an austere watchdog. The second made him beautiful—a man like her brothers. And, yes, a man she might have loved long ago, in another time, another place. When she was a woman capable of love.
Long ago, but not now.
She watched him settle back against the stone, the Stetson tilted low over his face. She watched him in his stillness and his quietude, and ached for something she’d lost, yet never had.
“Fool.” The condemnation was more breathy sigh than word. And, accepting her lot, yet thinking of his smile, she willed herself to sleep. There were smiles as she tumbled over the gentle precipice, but memories and guilt and David lay in wait in the dark chasm of a dream.
Rafe knew the exact moment she fell. He knew what would come. He knew and he waited, and at the sound of her first whispered cry, he rose. Suffering the unbearable no longer, he went to her and he knelt by her. Brushing back the tumbled mass of her hair, he looked into unseeing eyes and into anguish.
As the moon was rising, casting silver shadows over them, he lifted her in his arms and settled her in his lap. Thus he held her and soothed her, marking the passage of the night by the ever-changing moonscape.
His intention was only to comfort, but even in torment she was sweet, flowing silk in his arms. Her voice was the voice of a temptress, calling to him, needing him, as no woman ever had. The fire in her burned him. And for one mad moment his own need became flame. Searing, torrid desire licked at him, engulfing him.
But only for one moment, and only in fleeting madness, for it was another man’s name she called. Another man she needed. And tomorrow, for Valentina, the night would never have been.
“Fool” Her word, but he hadn’t understood and didn’t know.
His face was bleak, the sardonic countenance of the Creole again. Yet he didn’t put her from him, nor cease his soothing. His voice was soft as he spoke, his embrace gentle. Staring over the canyon rim he drew her close, and, though the moon still bathed them in its radiance, the light had gone from the night.
He held her, hearing her whispers in the darkness of his soul. For an eternity he listened. Until the dream ended. Until sleep overtook him. Until there was only tomorrow.
A fly buzzed, sweat trickled into stinging eyes. And little else stirred, neither air nor shrub, nor cloud in the sky. Once, in the uncanny hush, a nearly silent hum and a telltale rasp of undulating scales over parched stone warned of a rattler’s disturbed retreat. Valentina did not move.
Dismissing the rigors of the punishing climb, she’d lain for hours, as heedless of the pitiless sun beating down on her. As careless of cruel stone unyielding beneath her slender frame. Her riveted concentration never wavered from the shack—the melancholy testament of the passage of a mad prospector. A travesty of sloth and crumbling stone perched precariously on the sister of their own narrow summit. The one less tall was the bastion of Edmond Brown. Impregnable in concept, if not in strength, for no one could approach it unseen. Neither from the north, the south, east or west.
Above a fringe of weather sculpted juniper and trembling aspen worn like a jeweled necklace, the spire rose in a time and wind scoured pillar of striated sandstone in shades of red and brown The red-rock of red-rock country. Desolate ground, devoid of brush or boulder to offer secret asylum.
The mad prospector had chosen well. So had the Apostles.
Richard Trent’s men, deployed since the first day of the kidnapping, could only hover helplessly, in impotent anger, at its base. But on this, the last day, there was hope. Men, women, fathers and brothers, mothers and sisters, too long dormant, awakened from their seething lethargy. The camp, far removed from the main, came alive, stirring with a subdued excitement. No one dared look to the sky and the taller spire. As its shadow marked the crawl of time, they sought only to lure and keep Edmond Brown’s concern.
And, as they, Rafe waited. As helpless. As impotent.
She’s tired, he thought as he lay only inches from her in their aerie. Tired from the climb, tired from the tension. But none of the exhaustion he perceived was evident in look or manner. He hadn’t expected it to be, for this was the purpose of her training. She wouldn’t be Simon’s best had she not the strength to cope with the physical challenge and mental strain.
But when the ordeal ended, however it ended, what then? Frowning, Rafe hunkered into the cradling crevice of stone, and wondered.
The sun bore down, cloying heat scorching, cleaving the stagnant air. Like a charnel from the past, the stone shack with its one small window loomed across the void. Valentina didn’t grow impatient, she didn’t stir. The rifle with its powerful scope lay beneath her hand.
As the day crept by, Edmond Brown had been often visible. Always with Courtney at his side. Courtney at his feet. Courtney in his arms. Hostage and shield.
Valentina observed in narrowed contemplation, but never took up her rifle.
When once he would have questioned, now Rafe kept his silence, remembering this was her mission, her shot, her choice. Her conscience.
And in his silence he began to see a pattern. Edmond Brown moved by rote, a creature of habit. Each hour on the hour, the apostle stood at the open door smoking, taking the exact number of deeply drawn inhalations, the same leisurely exhales. Always with the same mocking arrogance. And always with his tiny, unwitting defender near.
Rafe seethed at the conceit. And, though she showed no sign of it, he knew Valentina had recognized the
repetitive ritual long before.
While the knowledge calmed him and a growing respect grew more, thirst sawed at his throat. Cramps threatened the long, desiccated muscles, but he lay as still and silent as she. Any move, unseen yet perceived by the visceral sixth sense of the hunted, could betray them. And a child would pay the price of betrayal. A young life too dear to lose for the cost of a sip of water or the ease of a muscle.
There would be no respite as the day, the last day, spun down.
Finally, in the canting light of late afternoon, Valentina stirred, guardedly testing joints and limbs too long immobile. Slowly, the rifle was taken up, the sights checked, the stock set against her shoulder.
With her cheek pressed against the smooth wood, gaze fixed on the door of the shack, she spoke for the first time since ascending the summit. “Time for a smoke. Ten puffs. Not nine, not eleven. Ten, you sanctimonious son of a bitch.”
A quarter hour passed, then another. The first hint of evening tinged the sky when the crack of a shot shattered the air.
Her mission was finished.
Carefully, woodenly, she laid the rifle aside. Her face was ashen beneath the Stetson’s brim, her hollowed eyes blackest blue and haunted. Hands that had been steadier than stone shook before she drew them abruptly into fists. The line of a mouth that had been lovely was hard and grave.
There was no revelry in her expertise. No pride in the exact calculation of distance. No exulting over an exquisitely accurate projection of the physics of trajectory. The shallow curve, the parabolic flight of the bullet was no mystery to her. She’d known by instinct, without conscious thought.
This was her gift and her curse.
As he stared at her, ears still drumming from the percussion, the acrid stench of nitrate filling his lungs, Rafe saw the penalty of gift and curse. Her body shrunken, diminished by more than the privation of water or food, she had withdrawn. Seeking within herself a place of safety and survival in the fragility of an awful moment.
Though time was of the essence, though his heart and soul yearned to be gone from this place, to gather in his arms the child of his friend, his godchild, he was torn by the need to hold the woman. The need to drive away this waking nightmare as he had that which stalked her sleep.
Knowing Richard Trent’s men waited only to be deployed, the Creole, man of decisive and unrepentant action, hesitated. In that precious increment, the decision was taken from him by Valentina.
“Go to her, to Courtney, child of your heart.” For all their poetry the words were lifeless. With none of the joy of keeping a vow to give Courtney McCallum back, first to Rafe, who cared so desperately, and then to her family. He was alone, at last. “Pray that she sleeps. If she does, take her carefully and she’ll never see, never have to know.” A long breath was drawn and held, then released. “And, perhaps, one day she will forget.”
Rafe understood, then, the dangerous delay, the twilight shot. This best of Simon’s Marauders had come to save more than the life of a child. She had come to save the woman the child would one day become by giving her back unscarred by bloody horror.
He took a step toward this strange and fascinating woman, but she waved him away. The message implicit—I don’t need you. Go to the one who does.
Standing as she commanded, he let her turn from him. As she stared over the rim, he knew she was truly gone from him, in mind and spirit, as well as in body.
She had spoken for the second time, and the last.
And Courtney waited. Sleeping, God willing, the sweet dreamless sleep of the innocent. As he made ready to begin his descent, he paused for one last glance. There would be no one here if he returned. He knew Valentina would be gone, as surely as he knew that someday he must find her.
This promise he made to himself, and, though she was beyond hearing, he made it to her. “Wherever you go, I’ll be there. Believe it or not, accept it or not, Irish, you do need me. You will need me.”
With one final look, stored for the days ahead, he slipped over the precipice, beginning the descent in earnest. Finding the way down far less difficult than the climb, he faced an uncommon truth.
For reasons he couldn’t explain, Rafe Courtenay, who had never truly needed a woman in his life, needed Valentina O’Hara.
Six
“Where is she?”
As his blazing gaze met Simon McKinzie’s bland stare, Rafe knew he was a long way and a long while from getting an answer. From long association and experience he knew, as well, there was wisdom in reason when one fenced with the silver haired master of tenacity. Tamping back a surge of anger, he spun about, putting distance and Simon’s desk between them.
Striving for vital calm, with shaking fingers curled into his palms in an unconscious sheathing of claws, the panther prowled. Stalking, padding back and forth, a proud and savage creature. The richly paneled walls of this spartan office his cage; beveled glass of arching windows its gleaming bars. And as the veiled and golden light of early evening settled over softly undulating mountains, a man as proud, a friend who meant only to guard those who risked mind and soul and life for The Black Watch, regarded him somberly.
Pausing before a cabinet filled, not with milestones of a long and spectacular career, but mementos of friendships, Rafe felt a momentary cooling of his anger. On crowded shelves lay works of art, pottery, carvings, bronzes and drawings. Whether breathtakingly skilled, heartwarming and childish, beautiful or garish, it made no difference to Simon.
Among them were, per chance, the most telling treasures of all. A misshapen cigarette lighter fashioned of clay by Simon’s namesake, the young son of Raven Canfield and the first man recruited for The Black Watch. And, a little apart, standing on a tiny easel, a miniature watercolor, a seascape. A delicate masterpiece painted by Ashley Blackmon. Or, more correctly, Ashley Blakemond. A great, gentle man-child and lost heir. An extraordinary talent, a life preserved by agents Tanner, Ryan, and Winter Sky. Three cast in the mold of the best and the first, David Canfield.
David, The name of dark dreams and whispered horror echoed through his mind in quick suspicion, as quickly silenced. The Canfields were well and happy, the perfect couple. Vibrant. Dynamic. And Rafe was as certain as he was of anything that no man alive would be Valentina’s David.
But that was a mystery to be unraveled, an answer for another time. The answers he needed now only Simon could give him. Putting speculation and presumption aside, steeling himself to play a waiting game with the master, he immersed himself in more of these tangible memoirs of Simon McKinzie... a clasp of hawk feathers and turquoise, locks of red-brown hair. A drift of lace winding through a length of McLachlan plaid. A broken ivory from a piano, the stained label torn from a bottle of bourbon. A replica of a gold medal. Trash among treasure, and treasures among trash. Each precious, each with a story. In bits and pieces they were scattered without rhyme or apparent reason. Unless one knew their stories.
Some Rafe knew because those few had touched his own life in some way. Others he did not. And Simon never explained.
But any who saw would understand that in this cabinet were more than memories. These were the ragtag history of a man and his work and what mattered to him. Sentiment that would never find its way into the Washington offices.
Rafe touched the glass that enclosed and protected, leaving the mark of his fingertip by a rose. Faded and dry, but perfect, a gift from Jordana McCallum.
“How is she?” First to speak in a battle of wills, Simon shattered the still quiet in a rasp of gruff concern.
One small, rare victory for the Creole.
Leaving the cabinet and the rose frozen in time, Rafe did not need to be told Simon spoke of Jordana. His answer was brief, with little joy in victory. “She improves every day.”
“She’s home?”
“Home, in Sedona.” Rafe nodded, giving complete credence to each question, though he was certain Simon knew each answer. “It was Jordana’s choice. As soon as she was able our red haired laird
would have whisked the whole family away to the safety of his keep in Scotland. She convinced him having Courtney back and none the worse for the ordeal was all any of them needed. She was adamant that staying and dealing with what had happened was better than scurrying away to hide.
“Jordana wins more debates, as she’s chosen to call them, with the stubborn Scot than any of the rest of us could ever hope. In this case, as in most, she was right. Staying was best.” He smiled, a mere tilt of his lips, a softening in his gaze. “Courtney’s as bossy and busy as ever. With her daughter, her boys, and Patrick around, Jordana absolutely glows with renewed health and serenity.”
“One thing she’ll never have to worry over is the Apostles for a New Day ” Simon’s fisted hand tapped the desk sharply. “Neither she nor anyone else.”
Rafe nodded again. He’d read the reports on the disbanding of the group, the separating of false leaders from those innocents who truly believed. “There will be others. Cabals with false prophets, as bad, or worse.”
“Vultures.” There was sorrow more than distaste in the single word.
“There will always be vultures.” Rafe predicted. “But McKinzie and The Watch will always be there to clip their wings.”
“So long as there’s breath in me.” The eyes that could intimidate with a glance reflected the threat of Simon’s vow.
“And so long as you have willing and skilled men and woman to aid the cause.”
Simon’s huge shoulders lifted, not in dismissal, but in deference to the commitment of those whom he had gathered into the unique and clandestine organization he commanded. The Black Watch, a fitting title, recalling the best of warriors among the warring people of Simon’s ancestral Scotland. But a misnomer still, as any title would be. Commissioned by a past president, and brought to viable reality by Simon, from the moment of its inception the organization had no recorded name. As those who worked within its sanction had no record of their true objectives.
