Blackwolf's Redemption

Thought he could? The truth was, he’d done it. Several times. And if he could pull that off so easily, was it his fault…or hers?

Never mind.

His address book was right where he’d said it would be. Sienna found the phone numbers, made the calls he’d requested. Demanded, was more like it. He had an aura of command, an I-always-get-what-I-want sensibility. Was it his military background? Was it because he was a man of the 1970s? Or was it just him?

Never mind trying to figure that out, either. Not now, anyway.

She had never needed a job as badly as she needed this one.

Neither his pilot nor his housekeeper seemed surprised to hear a woman’s voice relaying his instructions. Were they well trained in taking calls from a prior secretary or were they accustomed to their boss having a woman in his life? His private life. Not that she was a woman. Well, she was, of course, but she was his employee, that was all, and if he thought he could get her into his bed by taking her with him…

Sienna laughed.

If he’d wanted to take her to bed, he’d do it here. No need to fly her, what, eight, nine hundred miles? They both knew he could seduce her without half trying.

But she wasn’t going to let it happen.

She was in enough of a mess. Sleeping with him would only make things worse. The last thing she needed was to connect with a complex man. A mysterious man. Google had given her hardly any information about him. She’d found that curious.

Now, knowing him, she found it credible.

An empty leather briefcase lay on a small worktable. She grabbed it, tucked a steno pad into it—good grief, a steno pad!—along with some pens and pencils.

The Internet had given her information about the canyon, the sacred stone, the tribes who’d lived on Blackwolf land a couple of hundred years ago and the people who’d inhabited it thousands of years before that. All she’d found about Jesse was his date of birth and the notation that he was “reclusive.” Wikipedia had been more direct and referred to him as a loner who’d inherited the ranch on the deaths of his parents, lived on it for a few years and then…

Then, nothing.

“Sienna? Are you ready?”

She looked up, saw him in the doorway. He’d changed into close-fitting, faded jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, a tweedy light gray sport coat and what surely were hand-tooled black leather boots.

He looked as if he’d just stepped out of GQ.

She looked as if she’d just stepped out of a thrift shop.

And he was so beautiful he made her ache.

His plane was a Learjet.

It said so on the tail.

You could take what she knew about planes, stuff it into a walnut and have room to spare, but you didn’t have to know planes to know this one was a reflection of its owner, a sleek, magnificent combination of power and purpose.

The pilot, Tony, was a man of few words. He greeted Jesse with a salute that Jesse ignored.

“Lieutenant,” Tony said.

“Tony. We good to go?”

Tony nodded. “Absolutely.” He gave her a sidelong glance and a polite smile.

“This is Sienna Cummings. My new secretary.”

“His administrative assistant,” Sienna said.

Tony’s eyebrows rose, rose again when she stuck out her hand. He looked at it as if he’d never before seen a woman’s hand extended that way, but after a second, he got the message and shook it.

Yet another little reminder that this was the seventies.

“You want to take the controls, Lieutenant?”

Jesse said no, not this time; he had work to do. Tony nodded; nodding seemed to be his favored form of communication. Another quick salute and he vanished into the cockpit.

Sienna looked at Jesse. “Lieutenant?”

He shrugged. “We were in the service together.”

“And you know how to fly?”

A quick, cold smile. “Surprised?”

“No, not really. You just never said—”

Her tone—not just surprised but disbelieving—might have made him laugh if he hadn’t grown accustomed to that kind of reaction. All his life, people had tried to fit what they knew of him into neat little boxes.

The Blackwolf kid, hell-bent on trouble. The scholarship student with the brilliant SAT scores who didn’t seem to give a damn about his grades. The army recruit who could shoot the eye out of a gnat, take down a man in hand-to-hand combat without breaking a sweat—and read Schopenhauer in his spare time.

This time around, though, he’d surprised himself, first by riding out to watch the solstice before he turned his back on the nonsensical superstitions of ancestors.

And then by bringing Sienna into his life.

Who was she, really? What had brought her here? There was something she wasn’t telling him. Not that he cared. Sienna Cummings was just a temporary distraction and, damn it, why hadn’t he left her at the Greyhound terminal? Why had he offered her a job he didn’t need filled? Better still, why had he brought her with him on this trip?