Goddess of Legend

If only I can discover the right woman, the goddess mused as she entered her palace and impatiently brushed away the naiad hand-maidens who surrounded her, singing their desire to serve her every need. And isn’t that always the way of the world—the right woman is often the only thing that can dislodge those gods-be-damned Fates ...

CHAPTER ONE

ISABEL decided the morning couldn’t be more perfect. Well, possibly better if she was sore from a great night of sex, but that wasn’t in the cards. Not today, probably not tomorrow. Probably not in this decade. Nonetheless, a beautiful day.

She finished adjusting the tripod that held her favorite camera and then straightened, drawing in a deep breath of the sweet Oklahoma air. She didn’t peer through the camera lens as would most photographers. Of course she would eventually, but Isabel trusted her naked eye more than any lens, no matter how clear or magnified or uber-telephoto. So she studied the landscape before her as she sipped from her thermos of Vienna roast coffee.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the silver of her thermos. Distorted as it was, she could tell she was smiling. And her lips, which every lover seemed to comment on, looked like big clown lips. Men seemed to love them. She was always trying to suck them in. She didn’t believe for a second that Angelina’s were for real. Unfortunately, she knew too well that hers were.

“‘When the young dawn, with fingertips of rose lit up the world,’ ” she murmured, surprising herself with the Homeric quote. “Appropriate, though . . .” Isabel sighed with pleasure. The light here was absolutely exquisite! Oklahoma’s Tallgrass Prairie had been the right choice to begin her new photography collection, American Heartscapes. It was early spring, but the ridge in front of her was already covered with knee-high grasses, waving oceanlike in the morning breeze. The air had the scent of impending rain, but there were so many more scents that filled her. The grasses, the lake, the occasional odor of a skunk. Nature. What a high.

The sky was an explosion of pastels washed against a backdrop of cumulus clouds that puffed high into the stratosphere—mute testimony to today’s weather forecast of midday thunderstorms. Isabel hardly gave the impending storm a thought—she’d be gone before the first raindrop fell. But even if the weather chased her away, she didn’t mind. On the ridge before her, under the frothy cotton candy sky, was a sight Isabel knew would make the perfect cover photo for her collection. The landscape was dotted with bison. Isabel’s eyes glistened as she gazed at them, framing pictures—creating art in her mind’s eye. The huge beasts looked timeless in the changing light of dawn, especially since they were positioned so that there were no telephone poles or modern houses or even visible roads anywhere around them. It was just the beasts, the land and the amazing sky.

Isabel took another sip of her coffee before she put the cup down and began focusing her camera and setting up the first shots. As she worked, a sense of peace filled her, and Isabel’s skin tingled with happiness.

“And you thought you’d lost it,” she spoke aloud to herself softly, letting her voice fill the empty space around her. “Well, not lost it,” she muttered as she sighted through the telephoto lens and focused on a huge bison bull backlit by the rosebud-hued sky. “Just lost the peace in it.”

Ironic, really, that the collection of photographs USA Today had called Peace? had made her lose her perspective on the subject.

“Afghanistan will do that.” Isabel clicked off several frames of the bison.

In retrospect she should have known the assignment was going to be a tough one. But she’d gotten cocky. Hell, she’d been a photojournalist—a successful, award-winning photojournalist—for twenty years now. She wasn’t a dewy-eyed twenty-something anymore. She was a fearless forty-two, which was part of her problem. Overconfidence in her ability had blinded her to the realities of what really seeing would do to her.

Of course, it wasn’t like she hadn’t been to war zones before—Bosnia, the Falklands and South Africa had all come before her lens. But something had been different in Afghanistan. I’d been different. Somehow I’d lost perspective and darkness and chaos slithered in, Isabel admitted to herself as she changed the angle of the tripod and shot several frames rapidly, catching a young calf frolicking around its grazing mother.

It had started with the soldier, Curtis Johnson. He’d had kind brown eyes set in a face that was young and more cute than handsome. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and he’d flirted outrageously with her as he escorted her to the jeep she’d be riding in—the one smack in the middle of the convoy of supplies they were taking from the U.S. airbase to one of the small native settlements just a few miles down the potholed road.

Actually, Curtis had been so cute and clever that she’d been daydreaming about loosening up her rule on not having a fling when she was on assignment. She’d been counting the years between them and had decided that, what the hell, if sexy young Curtis didn’t care that she was almost twenty years his senior, then why the hell should she care?

And that was when the roadside bomb detonated. Isabel had switched to photographer autopilot, and in the middle of the smoke and fire, darkness and horror, she’d captured some of the most profound images of her career—images that had included Curtis Johnson, whose strong right leg and well-muscled right arm had been blown completely off. She’d never meant to capture him. She hadn’t even realized he’d been part of the blast. She’d meant only to do what was instinctive; capture the truth. And then the truth bombed her in the face, and she nearly fell apart.

Curtis’s eyes had still been kind, even as they’d clouded with shock. Before he’d lost consciousness, he’d been worried about her—been warning her to get down . . . get under cover . . . Then he’d bled out on the cracked desert sand and died in her arms. All hell broke loose around her, and all she remembered after that was screaming to keep her camera. She absolutely had to have the pictures of Curtis in life. For his family. For her.

Isabel shivered and realized she’d stopped taking pictures and was standing beside her tripod. She lifted a hand to the chill on her cheeks. They were wet.

“Focus on what you’re doing!” Isabel told herself. “This is your chance to regain your center—your normalcy.” And to get over your grief.

She did the buck-up thing her father had always taught her, got rid of the tears and the memories and focused on her job.

Shaking her head, she returned to the frame of her camera, her smile feeling sarcastic. Her gang of best friends would agree that an Isabel Cantelli norm wasn’t anywhere near most people’s norm. She could almost hear her gang chastising her. Meredith would shrug and say the Isabel norm usually worked for her—it had certainly made her successful. Robin would shake her head and say Isabel needed to find a full-time man, not just a string of attractive lovers. Kim would dissect Isabel’s psyche and eventually agree with Robin that more permanence in her life would help ground her, and Teresa would chime in that whatever made Isabel happy was what she should go for.

Until a month ago and that trip to Afghanistan, Isabel would have laughed, rolled her eyes, poured herself more champagne and said her nomadic life, free of entangling man strings, was exactly what made her happy.

Then Curtis Johnson had happened to her, and Isabel’s view of the world had changed, and in this new, tainted viewpoint she’d realized that she’d been fooling herself for quite a while. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she’d been searching for herself for quite a while, because somewhere in the middle of her successful career and her group of intelligent, articulate friends and her life that was at once exciting and comfortable, she’d lost herself.

Which is why she was here, on Oklahoma’s Tallgrass Prairie. She was doing the only thing she knew to reground herself—she was viewing life through her camera and searching for her true north again so she could find a way to navigate through the changing landscape of her life. Her plan had seemed to be working, until she’d allowed her mind to wander and her eyes to see the past. And the past had good and bad memories, times of joy and ridiculous fear. If there was an emotion she’d ever not experienced, she wasn’t sure what it would be. She