Blackwolf's Redemption (10 page)

“I’m here,” she said.

His eyebrows lifted. She’d found the office without him; she was seated behind his big desk, a stack of papers before her. Not the ranch-sale documents, he saw with relief. They were untouched, safe inside a file folder. What Sienna had in front of her was his mail, all of it. It had been accumulating since his last secretary had quit a couple of weeks ago.

She’d said he had the disposition of a rabid skunk.

Maybe not a skunk, he’d thought, but yeah, okay, the rabid part fit.

Mrs. Marx had worked at a small desk in the corner of the big office. Not Sienna. She’d settled in his chair, at his desk. It dwarfed her. Even the windows behind her seemed determined to do their part. Add in that she was wearing those ridiculous oversized sweats and she should have looked silly…

She didn’t.

She looked spectacular.

The sun, streaming through the glass, touched her with gold. She was frowning as she studied the paper in her hands, but he knew, when she looked up, her eyes would be that deep violet….

Violet, and filled with disdain. He saw that, too.

“Do you ever even open your mail?”

Damn, he could feel color rise in his face. “Of course.”

“And your bills. Do you pay them or do you just save them until you have enough to paper a wall?”

His mouth became a hard, thin line. “I did not ask you to critique my management style, Cummings.”

She snorted. “Is that what you call it? Trust me, Mr. Blackwolf. You don’t need a secretary, you need a bulldozer.”

“Look, I haven’t had the chance to get to this stuff lately, okay? And it isn’t going to matter. That’s what I have to tell you about this job. See—”

“You had a couple of phone calls. I took the messages. Didn’t you ever hear of voice mail?”

Jesse sighed. “I have no idea what—”

“An answering machine. You need one.”

“I have one. The storm must have—”

“The call was from a Mr. Henley.”

Jesse cocked his head. “Henley? What did he say?”

“Something about the investment you’re interested in. He said the company might be up for grabs.” Sienna glanced at a small piece of paper. “‘Up for grabs.’ Those were his exact words. And he said, if you’re interested, you’d better be in San Francisco by late afternoon.” She looked at him. “San Francisco?”

Jesse clasped his hands behind his back and paced from one side of the room to the other. In what he thought of as his other life, he’d put a bid on the controlling shares in a startup, a small company working in the new field of computer technology. He wanted it; he knew it had one hell of a future even if he still didn’t quite understand what it could do.

“And you had a call from a Mr. Harper. Something about the bill of sale for Blackwolf Ranch…?”

Damn it, this was the last thing he wanted. The two most important deals in his life, coming together at one time….

“Jesse?” Sienna’s voice dropped. “You aren’t really going
to sell it, are you? The ranch? The canyon? All those ancient, beautiful sites?”

He swung toward her. “I’m going to do exactly what I have to do,” he said coldly.

“But—”

“There’s an address book in the top right-hand drawer. On the first page, you’ll see phone numbers for my pilot—”

“Your what?”

“My pilot.”

“You have a pilot? And a plane?”

He almost laughed. For once, the tables were turned.
He
was surprising
her.

“The two usually go together, yes. So, call him. His name is Tony. Tell him to be ready to leave in an hour. Then find the number for a woman named Hilda.”

“Listen, pal, you want to call some woman, do it your—”

“My San Francisco housekeeper,” he said, and wondered why watching her bristle with resentment should have pleased him. “Tell her I’m flying in today.”

“Your San Francisco housekeeper?”

“Yeah. I have a place there.”

“In San Francisco,” she said, a little weakly.

That pleased him, too.

He eyed her with dispassion. “As for what you’re wearing…it will have to do until we get to the West Coast.”

“Until
we
…” Sienna stood up. “I am not going with you.”

“You want this job or not?”

“That’s not the point.”

Jesse lifted his eyebrows. “What is?”

What? she thought. What, indeed? How about the point was that she had no idea what was going on here? Jesse Blackwolf, he of the painted face and eagle-talon amulet, was
turning into someone else. When she looked him up on Google, the ranch, the canyon, the sacred stone, there’d been nothing about—

“Answer the question. If wanting the job isn’t the point, what is?”

Sienna swallowed hard. “Being your secretary is one thing. Going with you to San Francisco is—”

“—is part of the job,” he said, finishing her protest with cold authority.

“You can get someone in San Francisco. Hire a temp.”

She was right, he could. He’d done it before. In fact, it was what he always did on his trips to the coast. He sure as hell had never taken Mrs. Marx or any of her predecessors with him. Why would he? He had a house on Russian Hill; he’d converted one room to an office, and, really, it was all he needed. On those few occasions he’d required someone to take dictation or type a letter, he called an office temps firm.

But why go through that when he already had a secretary right here? That was the only reason for taking Sienna with him.

Of course it was. And he told her so.

“Make up your mind,” he said. “Do you want this job or do you intend to quit on your first day?”

“I’m not quitting. It’s just that—that—”

She stared at him. He was right; she knew that. She’d agreed to take the position. Why was she trying so hard to avoid going with him?

Was it because she knew her secretarial skills were lacking?

Or was it because things were moving too fast? Because the ground was shifting under her feet so quickly that there were times she honestly felt dizzy?

Or was it simpler than that?

Was it because, despite how she’d been sniping at Jesse,
she had only to look at him and her heartbeat quickened? She couldn’t stop remembering the feel of his arms, the taste of his mouth, the exquisite pleasure of his touch.

She could not feel that way about a man who didn’t exist! Or a man who didn’t exist when she existed! Oh, God, she had to figure this out, figure out what would happen next—

Sienna shot to her feet. “I’m not going with you,” she said, rushing the words together. “You don’t really need me there.”

“Don’t tell me what I need and don’t need,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.

She cried out as he scooped her into his arms, threaded a hand through her hair, brought her face to his and captured her mouth.

He kissed her hard and deep, and maybe she could have dealt with that but then his kiss changed. He kissed her slowly, with tenderness, with longing, and just as she felt as if her bones might melt, he clasped her shoulders and put her from him.

“Make those calls,” he said.

And then he was gone.

W
HO
was Jesse Blackwolf, anyway?

First he kissed her until she couldn’t think.

Then he walked away.

He rode horses, drove a truck, painted his face with a warrior’s stripes, wore an eagle amulet—and lived in a magnificent house in the middle of a gorgeous wilderness, owned a private plane and, so he said, a home in one of the world’s most sophisticated cities.

Complex
didn’t come close to describing him.
Surprising
might be a better word, and maybe the most surprising thing was that he thought he could take her in his arms and kiss her to silence or, at least, to acquiescence.

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?

You know why,
a mocking voice inside him said.
Just take her to bed and get it over with, then she’ll be out of your system.

He looked at Sienna, that surprised
“Lieutenant?”
still buzzing in his head.

“Sienna.” She turned toward him. “To answer your question,” he said coolly, “yes, I held the rank of lieutenant. And
just to get it out of the way, yes, those were medals you saw on my uniform, including the Distinguished Service Cross. And yes, I know how to fly. I know how to do a lot of things, including not bothering with small talk. Am I being clear? Because, just in case you thought otherwise, work is the sole reason I brought you along.”

Her face turned pink. Her eyes flashed. She turned to the window but he saw her hands knot together in her lap.

You are a gold-plated bastard, Blackwolf,
he told himself.

And a very bad liar.

He’d brought her with him because he wanted her near him. The sound of her laughter, the look of her, the way she stood up to him every time…

He wanted to get out of his seat, go to her and take her in his arms.

Instead, he dug in his pocket for a pen and a small, leather-bound notebook, opened it and began scribbling notes. That the notes were meaningless didn’t matter.

Keeping busy was everything.

The flight was smooth and took less than four hours.

Sienna had never been to San Francisco before, which meant she had no way of knowing if the skyline had changed much between Jesse’s day and hers. But the taxi ride from the airport had been a revelation. The city was big and busy, its roads crowded with old cars…except they weren’t old. Not really. And the way people were dressed, all those silly bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes…

It might have been amusing, but it wasn’t. It was, instead, a reminder—as if she needed one—that she had somehow slipped through time.

Don’t think about that,
she told herself,
don’t!
Instead, she
took refuge in a cool cynicism, as if what awaited her here was nothing out of the ordinary, starting with the moment the taxi pulled up before a glass-and-concrete tower on Russian Hill.

It was, she knew, some of the priciest real estate in the world.

She focused on keeping her face free of expression as they rode a private elevator to the penthouse floor, which turned out to be all Jesse’s. Huge rooms, high ceilings, acres of glass with views of the city in all directions, including the glorious Golden Gate Bridge.

His housekeeper had left a note. It was polite and brief. The refrigerator was fully stocked, there was a stir-fry of shrimp, bok choy and snow peas ready for heating. The bedrooms were all freshly made up, the bathrooms fully stocked with Mr. Blackwolf’s favorite supplies, though she advised against using the fourth bathroom because the tile work around the tub had not yet been completed.

Sienna looked up, an eyebrow raised. “The fourth bathroom? How many are there?”

“The four,” Jesse said with a gruffness that was either careless or embarrassed. She couldn’t be sure which. “And a half,” he added, and now there was no question about it, he was embarrassed. “I wanted the place for the view.”

“The view from the half bath?” she said sweetly.

“The apartment,” he said with a glare—and then, to her surprise, he laughed. “It’s kind of big, I admit.”

Big? It was almost the size of his house. Not that she cared one way or another. It was just that this was a long way from horses and canyons and Chevy trucks.
How?
she wanted to ask. Better still, why?

But she wasn’t about to ask him anything….

“Stocks,” he said brusquely. “I’m an investor. A trader.”

So much for cool cynicism. “Oh,” she said, and he laughed
again, this time a real laugh, straight from his belly. His flat, hard belly…

“What? Can’t you think of me as an investor?”

Sienna swallowed dryly. What she’d been thinking about him didn’t have a thing to do with investments, and she was not going there! She raised her chin, gave him her best “Who cares?” look.

“Frankly, I wasn’t thinking of you at all. I was thinking which of those four-and-a-half bathrooms would be mine.”

“Pick a bedroom. They all come with bathrooms.” His mouth twitched. “Though you might want to avoid the one with the unfinished tile work.”

“The only bedroom I want to avoid is the one that belongs to you.”

She’d meant it as a cool statement of fact and saw, immediately, that Jesse had taken it as a challenge.

“Trust me, baby,” he said softly. “If I wanted you in my bedroom, you’d be there.”

She felt her face heat, knew she needed a flippant rejoinder, but her mind was blank so she made do with marching out of the room. She hadn’t gotten far when he called her name.

“Sienna?”

She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. “What now?”

“I have a meeting in two hours. It’s business, which means you have a meeting, too.”

She swung toward him. “A meeting? I really don’t want to go to a—”

“I want you ready to go in an hour and a half.”

She looked down at herself. There wasn’t much to get ready. Her sweats—
his
sweats—had not magically become better-fitting, and now they bore almost two days’ worth of grime.

His gaze followed hers. He looked up, arms folded, one
booted foot tapping against the marble floor. “You can’t go to a business meeting looking like that.”

“No.” She smiled, the skirmish won. “I can’t. So go to your meeting, have a great time, and—”

He said something under his breath, something she didn’t understand and probably was better off not understanding, and he hurried to where she stood, grabbed her arm and hustled her out the door.

A while ago, she’d have said nothing this man could do would surprise her anymore.

Taking her to Neiman Marcus blew that conviction out of the water.

“May I help you, sir?”

If the sight of a gorgeous man propelling forward a woman wearing oversized soiled sweats was unusual, you’d never have known it from the sales clerk’s polite smile.

“The lady needs something to wear,” Jesse said grimly.

“Certainly, sir. Of what type?”

“Of what…” Jesse scowled. “Something appropriate for a business meeting. And fast.” The clerk’s eyebrows rose and Jesse took a deep breath. “Please,” he said, and smiled, and damn the man, the smile—sexy, open, charming—made the clerk melt.

She hustled Sienna into a dressing room, looked her over as if she were a chicken waiting to be put into a pot.

“I’m a size eight,” Sienna said, “and I like earth tones.”

Might as well talk to the wall.

“A six,” the woman said, “pinks and blues.” And she left.

Five minutes later, Sienna put the sweats back on, pushed past the sputtering clerk and out of the dressing room. Jesse was seated in a gilt chair. Someone had brought him coffee
and a stack of magazines. He looked big and masculine, completely out of place and uncomfortable, which was, at least, some reason for rejoicing.

“Jesse,” Sienna hissed. He looked up. “We need to find a different store. I can’t afford anything here.”

“No,” he said, “you can’t. But I can.”

“I cannot permit you to—”

“This is a business expense.”

“It most certainly is not!”

“And you know that because…?”

“I told you.” She folded her arms. “I took business courses. Intro to Financial Accounting. Clothing is not—”

“Intro to Accounting?” His smile was pitying. “Just choose something to wear, Cummings. And leave financial decisions to someone who knows how to make them.”

She couldn’t come up with an answer that didn’t involve four-letter words. After a moment of icy silence, he looked at his watch, then at her. “Ten minutes. I suggest you get moving.”

Back to the fitting room. Five more minutes went by. He heard female voices and then Sienna was standing in front of him again.

“I cannot possibly go to a business meeting in this!”

Jesse looked her over. She had on a pink sweater with some kind of narrow bands down the front. It was tucked into purple trousers that looked as if they’d started out okay before flaring wide enough to hide a couple of dozen dwarfs in each leg. Topping it all was a long purple jacket with a collar big enough to threaten the wearer with decapitation.

Jesse tried not to laugh. A good plan, because Sienna’s expression was grim.