Bj James - Whispers In The Dark

One

A telephone rang in the spartan mountain retreat. A telephone seldom used. Turning from a fire that did nothing to warm him in the unseasonable chill of late August, Simon McKinzie crossed with a heavy step to the jangling instrument. On the third ring, his square, strong hand raised the receiver slowly.

His massive shoulders were bowed, his face bleak. This was the call for which he’d been waiting. The call he’d feared.

“Yes?” No other greeting or identification was necessary, any informed of this line would not need it. Especially the man who called now.

“I heard. I’ve been waiting.” With his back to spacious windows and Blue Ridge vistas heralding an early autumn, he listened.

“Is there no other way?” His bleak expression grew bleaker. “I see.” The words were raw, bitter. Blunt fingers raked through silver hair, and, after a silent minute, he nodded. “I understand, and I agree.”

Again there was a hush in the softly lit study. A hush broken only by the crackle of the fire, the tick of a clock, and the voice that recounted horror in his ear. And into a hollow stillness he pledged, “The one you need will be on the way within the hour.”

There was more. More Simon didn’t need to hear, but out of concern and respect, he listened. “Within the hour,” he repeated when the somber soliloquy was done. “You have my word.

“And Jordana?” Hesitating, girding himself, he asked, “How is she?”

This time, as he listened, even the fire seemed mute, the clock still. A weighted sigh shredded his throat, and his voice roughened in shared pain. “I’m here, should you need me. If you need me.”

Returning the receiver to its cradle, he sat at the edge of his desk. As his hands curled around its beveled edge, his mind filled with memories of a young wife and mother, her fragile daughter, and the compelling man who loved them. And with it came the desolation that only the powerful can know in the face of utter helplessness.

Jordana, of whom Simon asked so earnestly and spoke so lovingly, was Jordana Daniel McCallum. A beautiful woman, a gentle woman. An American born to the power of wealth and influence, wed to more of the same in McCallum, her wild and wily auburn-haired Scot.

McCallum, chieftain of his clan, laird of her heart. Her true beloved, tamed by none but his own beloved, and only because he wished it

McCallum, who fought as he lived, and loved as she—with all his might, with all his heart.

Now, in this worst hour, even as one who built corporate empires as a way of life, moved mountains as easily as others moved lulls of sand, and commanded the respectful friendship of those as powerful, this man, this mighty Scot could do nothing. As the woman he loved above all else lay injured, perhaps dying, and with his family under siege, he had turned in his hopelessness to those he trusted.

But there was still hope. There was a way.

And in the hush of his study, oblivious to towering vistas and autumn chill, as he lifted the receiver again, a silvering bear of a man became much more than sorrowing friend. Much more than an ally. Within the beat of an aching heart, in quiet wrath, Simon McKinzie was the revered and sovereign commander of the most unique organization in the world. The most proficient. The most dangerous. The most covert—The Black Watch.

“Hope, Clan McCallum,” he murmured gravely as the connection was complete. “In the one I send you.”

Somewhere in Virginia, on the shore of the Chesapeake, another telephone rang. A voice answered softly, commenting on the beautiful day, thanking the caller for patronizing a business that did not exist, and inviting the statement of his need.

Interrupting the pleasantries, drawing a ragged breath, with steel in his words Simon McKinzie began.

Two

A panther stalked the shadowy corridor. Dark, lean, silent. A sartorial contradiction in a black blazer neatly buttoned, trousers perfectly creased, and pearl gray shirt of immaculate detail. A tie of rough silk, loosened, drawn down a fraction from the open collar, completed an air of barbaric elegance.

The clinic had closed hours ago, the tranquility of deserted thoroughfares broken only by light steps and muted voices of the midnight shift. This handsome intruder could have been a concerned physician returning for late rounds at the end of a protracted evening out. One look into the wintry blaze of his startling green eyes was enough to warn that he was not.

The nurse in charge would have stopped him as he passed her by. Should have, but the pain in the brief glance he spared her nailed her immutably in her seat. The savagery of rage lying like a mask over his stark face made her more than grateful for the protective enclosure of her station.

As he moved beyond her bright island into the second shadowy extension of her floor, she stared after him, her mind a jumble of stunning, vivid impressions. Surely she was only imagining. But was she? Had she? Had she only imagined him? The look? The manner? The man? Could anyone truly be so uncivilized beneath an urbane veneer? His face? Did its harsh lines rival chiseled stone? Could hair be that thick, that dark? And which of a thousand clichés would describe it? Blue-black? Iridescent? Soot? Did it blaze beneath the pale light with silver fire?

Were any eyes so green? So desperate? So kind?

Kind?

“No!” Biting her lip, she struggled in a mental fugue, determined to convince herself of her mistake.

It was past midnight, she was tired. She was wrong. But even that resolve faltered as her competent fingers, hovering unsteadily over a hidden switch, curled, one by one, into her palm. Security could continue in a ceaseless and rarely changing routine, she wouldn’t be summoning them. If the breach in protocol meant her job? What was a paycheck when one faced a stalking brute looking for someone to eat?

“After all,” she muttered as she picked up her pen, pretending to go about the business of charting the nightly needs of her patients, “why put a paltry stumbling block in the path of the inevitable?”

Why, indeed, she wondered as she waited and listened.

There was but one door past her station, one suite. But Nurse Carstairs wouldn’t have needed that obvious fact to spell out the destination of this grave and formidable transgressor. From the moment he’d stepped onto her hall, she’d needed no bolt of mental lightning to divine that he’d come in answer to a summons from the laird who waited and grieved behind its closed door.

“They are as different as the sun from the moon,” she mused, putting her pen and pretense aside. Adding, without really understanding, “Yet so much the same.”

He was beyond her sight, this virile intruder into the world of exquisitely specialized medicine. But, in the quiet, she heard the ceasing of his nearly soundless step. A quick rap. The scrape of a door. Then—shattering her new-found resolve that she’d seen the prowling beast—the gentle ripple of his deep voice.

“Patrick.”

The massive Scot stumbled to his feet, not out of clumsiness or the burden of his size, but from fatigue and worry. And from more than forty-eight hours without sleep as he kept a bedside vigil. His arms were iron bands enveloping the newcomer, but it was the smaller man whose whipcord strength offered support.

“Rafe.”

“Yes.”

Rafe Courtenay had come to Phoenix and the clinic from another country, another continent, in answer to a summons from the only man in the world who commanded such loyalty from the solitary Creole. Backing out of the desperate embrace, but keeping his hand on a taut shoulder, he looked up at Patrick McCallum, his friend and chosen family for most of his life.

If she could have seen, Nurse Carstairs would have been shocked to know how astute she’d been, that she’d imagined nothing. Rafe Courtenay and Patrick McCallum were, indeed, as different as the sun from the moon. And, indeed, the same. They were men of the same ilk, cast in the same mold. Dynamic, intense, complex and passionate. But individual. Distinctive. Different.