Journey's End. Bj James

O’Hara.” Surprise showed only in her eyes as she tilted her head toward him. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

      “No problem.” Dragging a chair from the table, he spun it around and sat across it as if it were a saddle. Folding his arms over the back, he grinned at her. “It’s an easy thing to lose oneself in a Montana morning. Though there is a problem.”

      “I’m sorry,” Merrill rushed in. “I saw the coffee was ready and I didn’t think you’d mind.” She started to rise. “I can make a fresh pot, if you like.”

      “No, Miss Santiago.” He stopped her with a hand on her forearm. “I don’t mind and I don’t need a fresh pot.” He grinned again. “You can’t corrupt my kitchen or my coffee any more than you can Shadow. You’re welcome to anything, anytime. So sit.”

      “I could pour you a cup, at least.” She sat on the edge of her chair, waiting to jump up the minute he released her.

      “Sit. Stay,” he said firmly as he swung out of his seat. “I can do that as well. I wouldn’t know how to behave with someone serving me.”

      Merrill waited until he returned to the table before she spoke her concern. “You said there was a problem.”

      “There is.” His sobering gaze met hers over the rim of his cup. He drank deeply, savoring the first cup of the day. The best cup of the day. Setting it aside, he refolded his hands over the chair. “A most serious problem.”

      “If you’ve changed your mind... If you’d like for me to leave...” Her hands curled tensely on the table. “I know I haven’t been a model guest. It can’t have been comfortable for you to have a strange woman intruding on your solitude.” A week ago she would have been eager to go. Now she realized to her own amazement that she wanted to stay. For a while longer.

      “Hey.” Stroking a finger along the line of her jaw, Ty turned her face to his. A frisson of emotion he didn’t stop to identify fluttered in his chest as he saw her disappointment. “I haven’t changed my mind. I haven’t been uncomfortable. And I don’t want you to leave.”

      “But I’ve been...”

      “You’ve been fine. Healing as you came here to do, in your own way. In your own time, Miss Santiago. Miss Santiago.” With the repetition of the name he sighed heavily and moved his hand down her throat and away. “That’s the problem.”

      She looked at him blankly, not understanding. But he had her complete attention.

      “The formality,” he explained gently. “This mister and miss stuff is going be a waste of effort and breath if we’re to be housemates for the winter.”

      “You want me to call you Tynan?”

      “If you like. Tynan is fine, but Ty would be better. It’s what my family and friends call me, and I’d like to think that considering the time we’ll be together, we’ll be friends.”

      “A nickname,” Merrill said thoughtfully. “I’ve never had a nickname.”

      “You’re joking.” The smile that had begun to curl again beneath his mustache faded when he read his mistake in her expression. “You aren’t joking.”

      “There were never nicknames in our family. At least not the sort that were called to our faces, nor that one would want repeated.”

      “A formal family, I take it.” With no show of the affection pet names often revealed? he wondered.

      “Military and male, for nearly a century. An attitude, a way of life at home, as much as a profession.” She could have added an almost brutal adhering to the military formality that spilled over to childhood friendships. Affecting them, keeping them distant and virtually impossible.

      “Military and male?” He asked to encourage her to continue. Last night she’d listened. Today he hoped she would speak and grow comfortable with him, establishing stronger lines of communication.

      “Very military. Very male. I was the first girl child born in a long line of male progeny. Before the fact, my birth was heralded as cause for great celebration. I was to be that special child, the son who would mark a century for the Santiagos at West Point. For the space of a bitter and disappointed week, no one knew what to do with me.

      “A female! Females were hand picked and accepted into the family by marriage, never born to it.” Merrill bowed her head as if imagining that shocking day. “Yet there I was, born and bred, a Santiago.”

      “A beautiful disaster,” Ty observed, with pity for the unexpected child fervent in his heart.

      “Beautiful? Maybe, as all babies are. Disaster? Beyond a doubt. Then, recovering from his shock, if never his bitter disappointment, my father took charge. He decided, that with some minor adjustments, the family would go on as before. Tradition would be upheld. From that moment, on the strength of that decision, I was groomed for the day I would fulfill his dream.”

      “Another Santiago fed like fodder to the military.” Ty very carefully kept his escalating distaste for a man he’d never met from his voice.

      Her stare was distant, looking into the past. Softly, her words more than a breath, less than a whisper, Merrill said, “My father never forgave me for refusing to go to The Point.”

      “You chose Duke University and languages instead.” This he knew from the little Valentina had told him when she’d called to make certain Merrill had arrived safely, and to wheedle herself back into his good graces. “I’ve been told you have an astonishing gift for languages.”

      “I suppose you could call it that, or simply an affinity that came with exposure. My father moved around quite a lot, from base to base and country to country. Because not even he could bully the all male boarding school Santiagos have attended from time immemorial to ease the regulations and accept me, I stayed and traveled with the family. And, yes, I discovered first that languages were fascinating, then that they came easily for me, almost instinctively.”

      Shadow sighed and lay down at Merrill’s feet Ty knew the wolf had been hoping for a romp in the snow before it disappeared. But he knew, as well, that now that the furry protector had taken Merrill to his untamed heart, the loyal creature wouldn’t leave her side.

      “Your mother was supportive?”

      Her hands were folded now in her lap. She looked down at them. “As much as she could be. It was difficult for her because she shared my fathers view as strongly.”

      “Ahh, yes,” Ty drawled drolly. “Of course she would. Because she’d been one of the chosen, no doubt.” A woman as suited to the military as her man. No doubt there either. Ty had crossed paths with such men and women, and such famlies before. He was as well traveled as Merrill, but there the similarity stopped. Though he had little difficulty imagining the discipline, the unreasonable expectations of a martial martinet, nothing could have been more disparate than his own sprawling, comfortable family. As far as nicknames went, he’d had more than he could remember, ranging from professor to jughead. And finally settling in adulthood to Ty. “I can see that you must have been a shock to your family.”

      “A shock and a disappointment,” she repeated. “From the day of my birth, and now.”

      She said it lightly, too lightly. Ty saw through the nonchalance to the little girl who first and last had been a failure. Damn them! he raged in heated silence, and wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her—the little girl and the woman—for past and present hurts. Instead he caught a rippling curl and wrapped it briefly around his finger, then watched it drift back to her shoulder.

      “And no one ever called you Merry?” he murmured in a voice that had suddenly grown husky.

      “Nicknames, loving names, should fit. Merry wouldn’t have suited me as a child.” she said with unconscious gravity. “It wouldn’t now.”

      Ty let his look wander over her. Her hair was a tumble of rivulets in scintillating