Sentinels: Alpha Rising
Sentinels: Alpha Rising
Doranna Durgin
The Alpha’s reluctant houseguest…Holly Faulkes’s life had been spent in hiding from the Sentinels. But now she is their prisoner, kept by Lannie Stewart, an undeniably sexy alpha wolf determined to initiate her into their world. Lannie’s gift of influence has never failed him before… but Holly is not so easily won. Despite this, the Sentinel can sense the untapped power in Holly that they all desperately need. For a new enemy has risen, one determined to destroy their kind. And Holly can overcome this danger only if Lannie can convince her to accept and release her true identity.
“I am not yours,” Holly proclaimed as she stood taller and straighter.
She might even have stood on her toes, leaning into him physically just as he’d breathed in the song of her. “I am not Sentinel, and I am not yours, and nothing you can do will change that.”
The pack song stuttered back to static, staggering him as much as the connection had done. Holly turned on her heel, going down the steps with the same authority with which she’d come up.
And Lannie stood there with his side aching from her touch and aching for it, and knew she was exactly right.
Sentinels:
Alpha Rising
Doranna Durgin
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
DORANNA DURGIN spent her childhood filling notebooks first with stories and art, and then with novels. She now has over fifteen novels spanning an array of eclectic genres, including paranormal romance, on the shelves. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds web pages, enjoys photography and works with horses and dogs. You can find a complete list of her titles at doranna.net.
Dedicated to tree huggers everywhere!
And with thanks to the Hitchin Post, where they not only help me take care of my own horse, they answer silly questions with a grin. The same could be said of my wondrous agent, come to think of it.
Contents
Cover (#u8f2ac5c2-5d07-5b80-8939-db8592c4ca7f)
Introduction (#u497c1549-392d-5618-82cd-70ec8a81dcc5)
Title Page (#u4921595b-c07c-50ca-a659-b686a110f31c)
About the Author (#ua0b87575-b06b-50f3-8de9-7b16d64ba59c)
Dedication (#uf765754c-b7bc-5c80-927a-0ce37ffc2a83)
Chapter 1 (#udf0b5f99-d99a-5508-9581-74949f78a99c)
Chapter 2 (#ucc5a9be2-a49c-5a1f-af72-2d179b399f68)
Chapter 3 (#u6edd2d4f-344e-537d-a74e-4f38ac8544dc)
Chapter 4 (#u992b30a9-2eb7-56e5-bef3-a878fc70ff44)
Chapter 5 (#u0904491e-0abf-5d21-abc5-ae4d998f668b)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b53f03c3-ae85-51f7-a257-b6c65f83f811)
Lannie Stewart fell back against the brick wall with a startled grunt of pain and a rare flash of temper. Son of a bitch has a knife.
His hand closed around the grip of the small blade now caught between his lower ribs; he twisted it slightly, releasing it...sending the white-hot scrape of sensation back at his attackers in the form of a snarl.
All five of them.
One of them cursed. The others didn’t have a chance. Lannie plowed into them, throwing the knife aside and drawing on the wolf within.
Alpha. No-holds-barred.
That made him faster than they were, and stronger, and riding the awareness of every pack he’d ever built. Not to mention infuriated by their assault of someone older and weaker and not looking for trouble.
A quick flurry of blows—fierce, efficient, effective—and they fell back, stunned not just by the impact but also by Lannie’s unexpected participation in a fight that had started out as five men kicking around what seemed to be easy prey. The men hesitated—suddenly wary, not willing to come back at him and not quite able to run.
Human submission. Or as close as they could be in this moment.
Fury still gripped Lannie, swelling against every breath. He eased back one step, then another—and there he held his ground, breathing hard but still perfectly ready.
The men got the message. They assessed themselves and their injuries, spat a few frustrated curses and bent to haul up their faltering friends. Lannie stood silent, letting them limp away—even if they did so with many a backward glance, not trusting Lannie to stand down when he’d gained such advantage.
But that was what a true alpha did.
Later, he’d find out who these men were and why they’d thought themselves safe not just to trespass, but to claim this space as their own. Most likely they’d come for a bro party involving six-packs and fisticuffs, but Lannie wouldn’t assume. Not with the recent threats—and losses—the Sentinels had taken lately.
For now he watched until they were truly away, loaded up on their four-wheelers and bouncing away through the dusk as if they belonged on this remote and rutted dirt road. But this was Lannie’s own property on the outskirts of the tiny high-country town of Descanso, New Mexico, even if the road itself defined the easement to the old community well house behind him.
Behind that hid the old man who had once again come out here to smoke his occasional joint—this time, apparently, also looking like tempting prey. Or maybe his whimsical coyote nature had once again gotten the better of him, and he’d approached and aggravated the men in some way.
Not that it made any difference, with five against one, youth against age. But the old man knew better.
“Aldo,” Lannie said, warning in his voice. He pressed a hand against his side, feeling the hot blood of a wound still fresh enough that it hadn’t quite pulsed up to pain.
The injury didn’t worry him. Not when he was Sentinel, and belonged to an ancient line of people whose connection to the earth gave them more than just strength and healing and a variety of power-fueled skills. His heritage meant he carried within him the shape of his other—his wolf. His exceptionally strong blood meant that unlike most of his ilk, he could also take the shape of that other.
Alpha wolf.
So no, the injuries and the pain didn’t worry him—but they damn well annoyed the hell out of him.
The thick scent of pot stung the air. Lannie said, “Aldo.”
The old man came out from behind the well house, carefully pinching off his joint. “They made me anxious,” he said, and kept his gaze averted.
Aldo had never been alpha of anything. But until lately, he’d been irrepressible, with a cackle of laughter and a strong side of levity. Now he bore his own bruises, and a vague expression of guilt. “I didn’t do anything, Lannie. This has always been an okay place for me.”
A safe place, on feed-store land. Lannie’s cell rang, a no-nonsense tone cutting through the falling darkness—a rare connection up on this mountainside. Lannie didn’t even look as he silenced the call and shoved the phone back into his pocket. “It is an okay place for you.”
Or it should have been, and now Lannie’s temper rode high on a flare of hot pain and swelling bruises. If Aldo’s recent alarm hadn’t slapped through the pack connection and drawn him out here into the fading heat of dusk, the old man would have gone down under that knife. Aldo was a strong sixty, but he was still sixty.
“We’ll sort it out,” Lannie said, lifting his hand to assess the bleeding. Dammit, this was one of his favorite shirts.
“Let me help,” Aldo said. “You know I have some healing.”
“So do we all,” Lannie told him, already feeling the burn of his blood as the Sentinel in him took hold; the bleeding would stop and the wound would seal. And then it would leave him to grouch and ouch, wisely not spending resources on a wound that no longer posed a threat.
Aldo ran a hand over thick, grizzled hair cut short, tucking his stubby joint into the pocket of a shirt that had seen better days even before its recent misadventure. “You know what I mean.”
“It’s fine,” Lannie said. A vibration against his butt cheek signaled cell phone voice mail. “Let’s get back to the store. Faith is worried.”
Aldo squinted at him, cautiously pleased. “She tell you that, or you just picked up on it...?”
Lannie made an amused sound in his throat. “Do you think she had to tell me?” Not when he was enough of an alpha to take a stand when necessary, to back down when appropriate, to remain in the background unless needed. And to have a singular skill for building teams and pack connections, even among the mundane humans who had no sense or knowledge of his other.
It was a skill so deeply ingrained that he’d learned to factor it into every part of his life—the depth of his friendships, the instant flare of his attractions, the strength of his anger.
“Yeah, you just picked up on it with your pack mojo,” Aldo concluded, and rightly so. Faith’s rising concern had come through in an undertone, the taste of anxiety with the faint whisper of identity that belonged to the young woman named Faith.
They struck out across the land of transitional high prairie, where ponderosa pine mingled with cedar and oaks and the land came studded with cactus and every other kind of prickly little scrub plant. The undulating slopes took them down to the feed-store lot with its storage barn, back corrals and low, no-nonsense storefront building.
An unfamiliar car sat in the lot out front of the otherwise bare lot, and Lannie thought again about that unexpected phone call, his annoyance rising. Sabbatical from Brevis duty means leave me alone.
Faith bolted out the store’s back door, all goth eyes and piercings. “It’s Brevis,” she said in unwitting confirmation, a little walleyed along the way—and so thin of Sentinel blood that no one knew just what her other might have been. A little bit rebellious, a little bit damaged, a whole lot of runaway just barely now of age.
She had no idea that Brevis—the regional Sentinel headquarters—had once quietly nudged her in Lannie’s direction. She was one of his now. Home pack.
“What are they doing here?” she demanded. “I’m not going back in there. Do you think they can tell I’m—that I was—oh, for butt’s sake. Look at you. What did you get him into, Aldo?”
“Nothing!” Aldo protested, trying to sound righteously indignant and not quite pulling it off. Hard to, with the scent of pot still following him around. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Lannie told her, and she closed her mouth on a response sure to have been stinging, regarding him uncertainly. “I’m fine,” he said. “Why don’t you help Aldo clean up in the barn. The Brevis folks can cool their heels a moment.” Because Brevis or not, this was his turf. They didn’t get to upset his people.
Especially when they hadn’t warned him of their arrival in the first place.
Especially when they shouldn’t have even been here. Not after how things had gone down with the last group he’d pulled into pack status. Too little time, too many challenges...and one damaged individual who had fooled them all.
He headed for the barn, where the stairs along the outside led up to a section of finished loft. Before he reached the top step, he’d peeled off the shirt and wiped himself down with it, heading straight to the bathroom to slap an adhesive strip over the now-barely-oozing wound.
The bruises were what they were; he didn’t so much as glance in the distorted old medicine-cabinet mirror before heading out to the half-walled bedroom area to hunt up a fresh shirt, tugging it on with care.
The phone rang again. He let the ringtones cut the air while he stood quietly in the rugged old barn loft...eyes closed, recent encounter pushed away...muting the underlying home pack song in favor of the Sentinel whole. Shutting himself away from his own people, in spite of their upset, to prepare himself for whatever Brevis had come to ask of him.
For a strange, brief moment, the home song resisted his touch. It spun around him in a dizzying whirl, closing in like a warder’s web and throbbing with an ugly, unfamiliar dissonance.
He took it as a rebuke. It was bad timing to interrupt pack song in the wake of such disturbance, and he knew it. He swallowed away the unease of it, settling into his own skin. Felt the aches of being there, and settled into that, too, accepting and dismissing them.
The dissonance slowly faded.
Finally, then, he reached for his larger pack sense, the one that made him ready for the outside world and whatever Brevis might ask from him. The bigger picture—the one that would ride him hard.
More so, in the wake of Jody. In the wake of her death. In the wake of all their deaths.
One more breath, deep and quiet, and then...he was no longer just plain Lannie. He no longer hummed to the tune of his own small pack but had set them—temporarily—aside, so existing pack song wouldn’t interfere with the formation of whatever was to come.
He was the unentangled alpha that Brevis had come to see.
* * *
Babysitters.
Holly Faulkes wanted to spit the words at them—the man and the woman who’d brought her to this tiny New Mexico town of Descanso. They’d driven an hour through the desert mountains, pulling her away from her family during a still-heated discussion about her past, her present and her future—and all so she could wait in this cool, shadowed feed store with its cluttered shelves and dry dust, its thick scent of hay and oats and molasses and leather.
Sentinel babysitters.
As if she hadn’t even been part of the recent Cloudview conversation, sitting beside her parents in silence—all of them tense, all of them terse. As good as prisoners in the old town hotel.
And as if she hadn’t just missed meeting her brother Kai for the very first time since childhood, hearing of his feral beauty and of the lynx that peered out from under his skin at every turn, but being whisked away from both Cloudview and her parents before the Sentinels could call Kai in from the mountains.
Sentinels. If not exactly the enemy, also not her friends. Not considering she’d hidden from them since she’d been born, sheltered first by her family and then by deliberate, active choice. God, she didn’t want to be here. And at twenty-four years old, it should have stayed her choice.
“Are you all right?” The woman eyed her. Her name was Mariska, and she was far too knowing for Holly’s taste. Far closer to bodyguard than escort, with a short sturdy form both rounded and strong—not to mention a sharp gaze that gave away more than Holly was probably supposed to see. So did her complexion, a distinctly beautiful brown shade that might have come from south India but instead came from the bear within her.
“You’re kidding, eh?” Holly said. “No, I’m not all right. Why can’t you people just leave us alone? Leave me alone?”
Mariska transferred her gaze to Holly’s hands, where they chafed against her arms in spite of the distinct heat still overlaying the fading summer day.
“Being here makes my skin crawl,” Holly told the woman, which was only the blunt truth. She’d felt it before, this sensation...on her Upper Michigan home turf, when she first started a restoration on an old clogged water feature. But nothing like this. One final squeeze of her upper arms and she let her hands fall. “You have no right to do this to me.”
But she’d always known they would. Just as she’d known that her parents would pay the price for hiding their family to protect Kai.
“Maybe we don’t,” Mariska said. “But we hope you’ll come to understand.” She lifted her chin at Jason, the tall man who served as her partner; they exchanged commentary in a silent but very real conversation, the likes of which Holly had previously seen only between her parents. Jason raised his phone, hitting the redial button. Again. Trying to reach the man they’d called Lannie with a strange mix of familiarity and deference.
“If you’re trying to reach him, why don’t you just talk to him?” Holly gestured between them in reference to the silent exchange they’d just had, only peripherally aware that the crawling sensation in her blood had eased.
“Lannie prefers that we don’t.” The woman gave her a wry look, one that said she had chosen her words diplomatically. “Besides, not all of us do that.”
“I don’t,” Holly muttered. Because she didn’t need it and she didn’t want it. She had no intention of letting someone else in her head—
It’s not real.
No way.
“What did you say?” Holly asked, a wary tone that drew Mariska’s surprised glance. Her glance would have turned into a question, had not a ringing phone pealed from the back of the store.
Jason made an exasperated face. “You might have picked up instead of just coming in,” he muttered, slipping his phone away—but he sounded more relieved than he might have.
Holly looked at him in surprise, understanding. “You weren’t sure he’d come.”
“Oh,” Jason said drily, “we were pretty sure he’d come. We just aren’t sure—”
“Shut up,” Mariska said, sharp and hasty, her gaze probing the back of the store.
It’s not real.
Holly spotted the new arrival against a backdrop of hanging bridle work and lead ropes, and understood immediately that this man owned this place.
That he owned any place in which he chanced to stand.
It wasn’t his strength, and it wasn’t the quiet but inexorable gaze he turned on her companions. It wasn’t even the first shock of his striking appearance—clean features with even lines, strong brows and nose and jaw, a sensual curve of lower lip and eyes blue enough to show from across the store. His hair was longer than stylish these days, layered and curling with damp around the edges.
No, it was more than all that.
“Oh, turn it off,” Mariska said.
Something changed—Holly didn’t even quite know what. Only that he was suddenly just a man in a casual blue plaid shirt yoked over the shoulder, half-buttoned and hanging out over jeans and boots, a heavy oval belt buckle evident beneath.
Cowboy, Holly thought, and found herself surprised by that. For the first time, she noticed not only bruises, but fresh bruises. A little smear of blood on a freshly washed cheek, a stain coming through the side of the shirt. An odd look on his face as he watched her, something both startled and somehow just as wary as she was—and then that, too, faded.
“That’s better,” Mariska grumbled, but the words held grudging respect. She exchanged a glance with Holly that was nothing to do with their individual reasons for being here and everything to do with a dry, shared appreciation for what they’d seen—a recognition that Holly had seen it, too.
The man rolled one sleeve and then the other, joining them with a loose walk that also somehow spoke of strength. “A little warning might have been nice,” he said, a quiet voice with steel behind it.
Jason held up the phone. “We called.”
“Did you?” the man said flatly. He eyed Holly with enough intent to startle her—as if he assessed her on a level deeper than she could even perceive.
She suddenly wished she wasn’t still wearing well-worn work gear—tough slim-fit khakis over work boots and a long-tailed berry-colored shirt. Her hair was still yanked back into the same ponytail high at the back of her head, and it was a wonder her gloves weren’t jammed into her back pocket instead of in her overnighter.
She released a breath when the man turned away from her.
Jason scowled, eyes narrowing, and Mariska stepped on whatever he was about to say. “Look, Lannie, this all happened fast, and we’re making it up as we go. There’s no cell reception between here and Cloudview—and we did call as soon as we could get through. If we’d been able to talk to you—”
Silently, she meant. Even Holly understood that much. But Mariska had said it. Lannie prefers that we don’t.
Lannie didn’t raise his voice...somehow he didn’t need to. “You aren’t supposed to be reaching out to me at all.”
“No, sir,” Jason said, just a little bit miserable. “The Jody thing. I know. But that wasn’t your fault, and we—” And then he stopped, apparently thinking better of the whole thing—and who wouldn’t, from the quick, hard pale-eyed look Lannie gave him?
Holly found herself smiling a little. After hours in the care of these two, unable to so much as use a toilet without an escort, it was gratifying to see the tables turned. Even if she did wonder about the Jody thing.
But Lannie didn’t linger on the moment. He ran a hand through his damp hair, carelessly raking it back into some semblance of order. “You want coffee?”
“Holly drinks tea, if you have it,” Mariska said, apparently well-briefed on all things Holly. “So do I.”
Jason looked as though he’d drink whatever Lannie put before him.
They joined Lannie in a tiny nook in the back hallway, which had a coffeemaker and electric teakettle, a diminutive refrigerator, a sink and half a box of donuts sitting on an upended fifty-gallon drum. Lannie reached for the teakettle plug...and hesitated there, leaning heavily on the counter.
As if for that moment, the counter was the only thing holding him up.
Holly shot a startled look at Mariska and Jason, finding them involved in some sort of mostly silent but definitely emphatic disagreement. By the time she looked again at Lannie, the teakettle was firing up and Lannie had pulled a bowl stuffed with tea bags from the narrow, open-faced cabinet above the sink—right next to the big green tin of Bag Balm, some half-used horse wormer and an open bag of castration bands.
“So,” Holly said. “Lannie. My name is Holly Faulkes, and I don’t want to be here.”
He pulled four mugs from the half-sized drainer hanging in the sink, and she realized she hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know—but that unlike everyone else in this mess, he wasn’t impatient or annoyed by it.
“Phelan,” he told her, swirling the coffee in its carafe. “Phelan Stewart. But yes. You can call me Lannie.” He filled one of the mugs with coffee and handed it out to Jason without looking; the teakettle activity built to a fever pitch. “What’s your story, Holly Faulkes?”
“What’s yours, eh?” she countered. “Why are they dumping me on you?”
Lannie held out the tea bags without any visible reaction, and Holly plucked out a random blend and passed the bowl to Mariska. Lannie put his hip against the counter and sipped coffee—only to immediately dump it down the sink, exposing a gleam of torso through the gaping shirt and annoying Holly simply because she’d noticed.
“Faith,” he said, as if that explained it all. And then, “Holly Faulkes, if you’d come with a group, I’d say you all needed to become a team. Since you’re here alone, you’re probably not playing well with others in some way.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, patently ignoring Jason’s dilemma over whether to try the coffee. “You must be important to them.”
She found herself amused. “Because Brevis only bothers you with the important things, eh?”
“Something like that. And the fact that I’m on sabbatical.” He held out his hand. After a hesitation, Holly offered him her tea bag. He took Mariska’s, plunked them both into mugs, poured hot water on top and handed the mugs over. “Your turn. Or would you rather have them tell your story?”
Holly relaxed, curling her hands around the mug. He might be Sentinel, but he wasn’t pushing her. He’d given her options.
Even if they were both bad ones.
So she told him the truth. “I’m not a Sentinel, I don’t want to be a Sentinel, and I’m not going to drink your Sentinel Kool-Aid no matter how you dress it up in obligation and heroics.”
She heard Mariska’s intake of breath, but Lannie’s quick blue glance quelled her. “Sentinel isn’t something you get to choose.”
“And yet it’s a choice I made a long time ago,” she told him, not an instant’s hesitation. “It’s a choice my family made—that we were forced to make. That’s not something you can change, eh? But it’s obvious you’ll have to work that out for yourself.”
“You’ll stay long enough for me to do that?”
“As if that’s a choice.” But she felt the briefest flash of hope, felt herself halfway out the door.
“Brevis pulled Mariska in from Tucson. So either you’re in a great deal of danger or they think you’ll run—and if you do, that you’ll be good at it.”
“Run?” Holly shot Mariska a baleful look. “How stupid do you think I am? You people already found me once. My best chance of getting on with life is to let you figure out what a waste of time this is. If you don’t, then we’ll see about running.”
“Fair enough,” he murmured. “Give me your word on that and these two will leave, and we can get you settled.”
Holly’s temper flared hot and strong. She set the mug on the counter with a thump. “Pay attention, why don’t you? I’ll be settled when I’m back home in the Upper Peninsula, rebuilding the business you’ve just destroyed!”
She transferred her glare to Jason and Mariska. “And meanwhile, who’s feeding my feral cats? Who’s holding my best friend’s hand when she has her first baby? Do you people even think about what you’ve done, or do you just ride through on the strength of your astonishing arrogance?”
Jason summoned up a bright smile, only a hint of panic behind it. “Ohh-kay, then,” he said. “My job is done. I’ll just wait in the car.”
“Jason,” Mariska said, annoyance in her voice.
“Thanks for the coffee.” Jason inched behind Holly to put the mug on the barrel. “Such as it was.”
“Faith,” Lannie said again—but his voice didn’t have the same quiet strength, and Holly shot a look at him, finding his knuckles white at the edge of the counter and his tanned face gone pale, his shoulders tight...his expression faintly surprised.
But only until he saw her watching. Then the weakness disappeared; he returned her gaze with an even expression.
Holly, it seemed, wasn’t the only one hiding the truth of herself from the Sentinels.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_ddf520f0-fe40-5f76-b925-a567376bec69)
For all her resentment, Holly found herself regretting Mariska and Jason’s departure, as they unloaded her single, quickly packed suitcase, handed Lannie a thin file folder and drove away.
They were, if nothing else, familiar.
Not like Lannie Stewart—not only unfamiliar, but just a little more Sentinel than she wanted to deal with on her own.
But she’d known all her life that this day might come. If she blamed the Sentinels for anything, it was for being the kind of organization that sent her family into hiding in the first place.
Lannie locked the door behind them, made sure the open sign was flipped to Closed and went behind the cash register counter to do...
To do cash register things, probably. She didn’t care. Although she had the impression that he was, somehow, actually assessing her. That his attention never left her.
Screw that. She glanced pointedly at the full darkness that had fallen since her arrival. “I haven’t eaten yet.” Of course, she hadn’t wanted to. Until he’d come into the store, her stomach had been unsettled by that funky discomfiting feeling under her skin, the faintest bitter taste in her mouth. How he’d buffered that, she didn’t know. But now her stomach growled.
He made a sound that must have been acknowledgment. “In, out, or fast?”
“It’s your game. You choose.”
He stopped what he was doing, a bank bag in hand, and she drew breath at the blue flint in his gaze. “Nothing about this is a game.”
“Lannie!” A young woman’s voice rang out from the back of the store. A waifish young woman emerged from between the shelving, her hair dyed black, her makeup dramatic and her piercings generous; she dragged in her wake a wiry older man with mussed hair and a bruised face—eye puffy, lip split and swollen. “Lannie, did you see what those men did to him? What business did they have back there, anyway?”
“None,” Lannie dropped the cash bag on the scratched counter over a glass-front display of fancy show spurs and silver conchas, and lifted his brow at her. It had been her task, apparently.
“That’s not my fault,” she protested, confirming it. “First you lit out after Aldo, and then those strongbloods came when they should be leaving you alone—” She stopped, scowling, her attention riveted on him. “They got you, too. I knew it.”
“Faith.” It was a single word, but it had quelling impact. Holly fiddled with her suitcase handle, and it occurred to her that she could run. She’d never promised. And they weren’t paying any particular attention.
Lannie looked down at the splotch of blood at his side, briefly pressing a hand to it.
“Five to one,” the old man said helpfully. “Our boy took care of it.”
Lannie grunted. “No one’s boy,” he said, but Holly heard affection for the old man behind his words. “And it’s not bleeding anymore.”
“You’ll need food,” the girl said, as if she’d somehow taken over. She closed the distance to the counter with decisive steps, picking up the bag. “You go. I’ll take care of this.”
“Faith,” he said, and it sounded like an old conversation. Finally he shook his head, a capitulation of some sort. “Learn to make the coffee, would you?”
Faith tossed her head in a way that made Holly think the coffee wouldn’t change. “See you tomorrow, Lannie.” And then, on her way out the back again, she offered Holly an arch glance. “Don’t you cause him trouble, whoever you are.”
Startled—offended—Holly made a sound that came out less of a sputter and more of a warning. But the young woman was already moving out through the same aisle that had brought her.
The elderly man held out his hand, a spark of interest in his eye. “I’m Aldo. And this is Lannie.”
There was nothing to do but take that dry and callous grip for a quick shake, contact that brought a whiff of something potent. Pot? She startled, looking to Lannie for confirmation without thinking about it, and found a resigned expression there.
Lannie came out from behind the counter. “She knows who I am, Aldo. And don’t you go charming her.”
“No,” Aldo said, looking more closely at Holly. “Not this one. She’s all yours, Lannie. I’m sleeping in the barn tonight, good with you? Good. You’ll be right as rain tomorrow, see if you’re not.”
Holly took a deep breath in the wake of his abrupt departure. Then another. Trying to find her bearings, and to refocus on the resentful fury that had gotten her through these past twenty-four hours so far. “Let’s get one thing straight,” she said. “I’m not all yours. Not in any sense of the word.”
“Not yet,” he said mildly, and caught her elbow as if she would have stalked by, luggage and all, to batter her way through that locked door and out into the world. “The truck’s out back. Let’s eat.”
* * *
Lannie tossed the suitcase into the truck bed and climbed into the pickup with a stiffness that made him very much rue that five against one.
He let her open her own door simply because she needed the chance to slam it closed again. And she did, too—not once, but twice, then reached for the seat belt with a brusque efficiency that spoke as much for her familiarity with this model truck as for her simmering anger.
He inserted the key and waited. It didn’t take long.
“Not yet?” Holly made a noise in her throat. Lannie took it for warning—and he wondered how strong her Sentinel blood ran, and if anyone else in her family took the cat.
He turned to look at her, unhurried, hand resting on the gear shift between them. “That’s why you’re here.”
She snorted, a wholly human sound. “So, what—so I can submit to you?”
He shook his head. “So you can figure out that’s not what this is about.” And he kept his voice matter-of-fact but couldn’t help the impact of her words. Too independent. Not just struggling to form pack bonds, but resisting them with everything she had. What was Brevis thinking?
She lifted a lip of derision at his words and crossed her arms over her chest. The feed-store front light hit the end of its timer cycle, plunging them into darkness.
But Lannie had a Sentinel’s blue-tinged night vision, and he saw her perfectly. Knew her hair to be brown unto black, and drawn into a shiny fall of a ponytail. Saw her upswept eyes to be equally brown unto black, and snapping mad beneath brows that might ordinarily be softly angled, but now just frowned. A thick ruffle of bangs scattered over her forehead, offsetting features that could have looked at home under a high-society do...if it weren’t for her rugged work clothes and the matter-of-fact prowl beneath her movements, an innately graceful glimpse of her other.
She tipped her head at him in annoyed impatience, quite possibly not aware of his scrutiny or how well he could see her. But he felt nothing except what he’d perceived in this woman before he’d even quite seen her: a throb of hurt and anger and fear, somehow striking deeply into his own soul and spiking a very personal, protective response. In spite of knowing better.
It’s not real. It never was. It’s not personal.
It was just who he was. That quick connection, that ability to spin it into something more permanent.
Even when it wasn’t right for either of them.
She gave him a wary glance. “Did you say something?”
He turned the key. “Not yet.”
He drove her on winding roads to the other side of the small town, where the ElkNAntlers Bar & Grill scented the area with barbecue and sizzling steak. He waited for Holly at the front of the truck, and then waited again inside the entrance, giving her time to absorb the ambience—families scattered around tables, a bar off to the side, and antlers...
Everywhere. Mulies, elk and pronghorn—antlers high, antlers low, and the occasional full cape head mount. And, naturally, a few token jackalopes scattered over the bar.
The owners, Jack and Barbara, had been aiming for quirky humor. Lannie thought of it more as Dr. Seuss.
Barbara waved at them from where she unloaded a tray of glasses at the bar, raising her voice over the mixed early-evening crowd. “Hi, Lannie. Find yourself a spot.”
Holly gave the interior one final skeptical look and chose a table from afar. He wasn’t surprised when she led him to a corner, and he wasn’t surprised when her limber, graceful movement only reinforced his initial impression of her other. Her clothes might have been rugged, but the bright thermal top hugged a lean, curvy figure, and khaki pants followed the roll of her hips to perfection. Sturdy ankle-high boots should have looked clunky, but instead only reinforced the confident precision with which she placed her feet.
Something inside him tightened.
But his response to her wasn’t real. However intensely he felt her presence as the pack bond formed between them, the effect would fade when she moved on to her true place in the Sentinels. It always did.
But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t complicate things along the way. Or that he didn’t still need time to deal with how it so recently had.
She slipped into her chair and picked up the plastic-coated menu, glancing at Lannie only long enough to reassure herself that he had, in fact, followed.
Barbara appeared at their table to slap down a complimentary basket of jerky chips. “Welcome to the ElkNAntlers,” she said. “Need a rundown of the menu, or are you good here?”
“I’m fine,” Holly said. Her smile changed her face, bringing stern lines into beauty; it quite suddenly caught Lannie’s breath. Dammit. “And I’ll take whatever you suggest from the barbecue side of the menu.”
“Smart woman,” Barbara said, collecting the menu and glancing at Lannie. “You?”
“Whatever you bring her.” Lannie lifted a wry shoulder. “It’s not like I haven’t had it all.”
Barbara grinned, tucked her pencil behind her ear, and took Lannie’s menu, too. “I’ll surprise you, then.” She nodded to someone behind Lannie as she left, and a young man appeared to pour them each a generous glass of ice water.
“Drink it,” Lannie advised as Holly simply eyed hers. “The desert and the altitude will get you if you don’t stay wet.” He drank half of his in one go, knowing he’d done himself no good turns out by the well pump house, and waited until she’d done the same. “Exactly why are you here, Holly Faulkes?”
She looked at him as though he might just be a little bit insane. “Because I didn’t hide well enough or run fast enough, youbetcha.” When he didn’t rise to that, she asked, “Who’s Jody? And why is she a problem now?”
He stiffened. He hadn’t thought she’d catch it through the undertone so quickly when she had so much adjustment to do on her own account. He certainly hadn’t expected her to parry with it. Or to recognize just how it affected him.
Too little time, too much resistance. Both Holly and Jody were without the concept of teamwork that made Sentinel field operations viable—and if Holly had both Jody’s arrogant certainty that her way was the right way, and Jody’s willingness to make such choices outside the team framework, then Holly also lacked the most basic foundation of what it meant to be Sentinel in the first place. And Holly had spent her life in extreme independence.
Not teamwork. Not the faintest suggestion of it.
So he didn’t answer her. He couldn’t answer her. Not with the voices of Jody’s team still riding him, the memories of their deaths ripping through his lingering pack link.
He tried to ease the strain in his voice and only half succeeded. “Talk to me. They brought you here for a reason. A good one.”
“That’s right. Because Brevis only bothers you with the important things.” She shrugged. “Didn’t Mariska give you my file?”
“This is the story the way you’d tell it, not them.”
She sat back in the chair to regard him. “It’s not much of a story. My brother needed to hide from you and the Core. When he was fifteen, we left him stashed up near Cloudview and we went to hide in other places so we couldn’t be used against him.”
“How old were you?”
“Not very old. Eight? Nine, maybe?” She shrugged. “What’s it matter? Old enough to know that if you people had been willing to leave him alone, our lives would have been so much different. I wouldn’t have a brother I don’t even know...my mother wouldn’t have cried so much...and I wouldn’t be here now, when my life is somewhere else entirely.”
Another challenge that he didn’t take.
After a narrow-eyed interlude, she shrugged and filled the silence. “Things changed. This spring, he came out of hiding to save his turf from the Core—and to save the rest of you from what the Core had planned. He’s a good man, my brother. Maybe I’ll get the chance to know him now.” Another dark look, aimed his way. “Supposing the rest of you let me.”
Lannie could figure out the remainder of the story. “Once your brother was out in the open, Brevis realized you existed, too.” And the Sentinels didn’t allow strongbloods to roam unconnected. Such individuals had too much potential to create havoc...and Brevis had too much need of them.
He gave her a sharp glance, suddenly understanding. “Kai Faulkes,” he said. “Your brother.” The long-hidden, barely tamed Sentinel who took the Lynx as his other and who had almost single-handedly undermined the Core’s infiltration of his high mountain paradise.
“Kai Faulkes,” she said, her pride coming through in the lift of her chin.
And then the Sentinels had found her, sent a strike team and extracted her from her life. For her own protection, but not without self-interest.
Right now she probably saw only the self-interest.
“Look,” she said, spearing him with a direct gaze. “This isn’t my world. Your fights aren’t my fights. I have no training. My folks could never take the forms of their others, and I never even tried. I don’t know what I’d turn out to be and I don’t care.”
He wondered if she saw the irony of it. Kai Faulkes was a Sentinel’s Sentinel. He lived his other to the fullest in the absence of Brevis; he lived their mission of protection as naturally as breathing.
Holly didn’t even know what her other was.
“Don’t you get it?” She gestured impatiently at his failure to react. “You made me this way. Now it is what it is, and you can’t change that. I’m not one of you and I never will be.”
He straightened, frozen in the act of unwrapping his silverware, suddenly understanding the unspoken piece. Should have read that file. “You haven’t been initiated, have you?”
She made that small, catlike noise of offense in her throat again. “That’s none of your business!”
Of course she hadn’t. She’d been so young when her family separated, going from inconspicuous to deeply underground.
But initiation changed everything. She wouldn’t truly know who she was, or what she was, until she had that first adult connection with another Sentinel—careful, skilled intimacy, bringing her powers to fruition.
No wonder she’d never truly felt the itch to reach out to her other in spite of its expression in her movement, her mannerisms and even her expressions.
“Stop staring,” she told him, mouth flattening in annoyance. Ears flattening, head tipped just so. “And stop doing that thing.”
“That thing,” he repeated without inflection.
“Yes, that thing.” She leaned over the table, creating such privacy as was possible in the tavern. “What you were doing in the store, and Mariska told you to turn it off. That. Stop it.”
Ah. The alpha. When he’d put his unexpected visitors on notice.
But he couldn’t turn it off because he hadn’t turned it on. Whatever she saw came from her own perceptions of his basic Sentinel nature as much as his presentation. No doubt she had other perceptions she wasn’t used to managing outside her normal life, and she’d probably adjusted to a certain element of heightened sight and scent, but this...
This would be new. And different. And she’d been thrust in the middle of it.
He found himself reaching for her pack song. Through pack song, he could understand her, assess her, support her—
But an unexpected, unprecedented crackle of mental static snapped through his mind. What the hell? Surely she wasn’t resisting him; she didn’t know enough to do it. Surely he could get at least a hint of her—a single note, a thread of inner melody...
An orchestra.
Her music flooded him, waking the alpha after all. His pack sense rose to absorb and receive and, just maybe, drown in the rich complexity she offered. He watched her eyes widen and then narrow, and a thread of anger gained clarity in her song.
She half rose from her chair, elbows on the table as she closed some of the distance between them. “Stop it,” she said, but there was no force behind those breathless words. She took a visible breath, a flush bringing out the color on her cheeks, dark eyes and dark hair contrasting against otherwise fair skin.
Not that stopping it was an option, even if he tried. Not with the glory of all she was coming at him, unfiltered and unfettered.
Her voice gained hard strength. “Fine,” she said. “Be an asshole. Your friend can bring my dinner over to the bar, because that’s where I’ll be sitting. Without you.”
She didn’t storm away. She didn’t have to. She made her point with the rolling precision of her stride, the hard line of her jaw...the straightness of her back.
Whoa.
Lannie could do nothing but stare after her, only beginning to understand that she’d done to him as much as he’d done to her—and she had no idea.
Maybe because it wasn’t her fault. Maybe it was the pack mojo gone wild. Maybe—
Barbara slid between tables to deposit his meal in front of him, whisking Holly’s abandoned napkin out of the way to do the same for her. “Now, when she gets back from the ladies’, you be sure to tell her I’ll swap this out if it’s not to her liking.”
Lannie wasn’t quite ready to trust his voice; he nodded at the bar, where Holly had taken a spot apart from the rest and hitched her hip up over the bar stool, already reaching for the nearby dish of pistachios.
Her back was still stiff enough to tell the tale.
Barbara’s brow rose in surprise. “Never thought I’d see that day,” she told him, and reclaimed Holly’s deep-dish plate of shredded elk over crisped sweet potato medallions. She slipped in to place the plate beside Holly, her words clear enough to Lannie’s wolf. “Here you go, honey. You want a beer to go with that?”
Holly nodded, and Lannie jerked his attention to the casual approach of the slender man who took a seat in Holly’s empty chair.
This time when Lannie drew on his alpha, he did it deliberately. He eyed the man without welcome and without apology.
The man met his gaze without rising to that challenge. Faint concern lived in the lines gathering at his brow. “I know I’m intruding,” he said. “Hear me out. We have a common interest.”
Lannie gave the man a sharper look. He’d dressed out of Cabela’s outfitter catalog for the evening—high country fisherman casual, all fresh from the package—and while he hadn’t quite shaved down his balding head, he’d come close enough for dignity. His watch was high quality without being ostentatious; his single ring was black onyx in a masculine setting and his ears went unadorned.
No particular threat there. But on this night when Lannie had taken responsibility for Kai Faulkes’s vulnerable, wayward sister, he didn’t much like coincidences. “How many of your conversations start out this way and still end well?”
“I’m interrupting,” the man said, a touch of car salesman in his demeanor. “I understand that. But I need to talk to you about what happened earlier this evening.”
Lannie kept his stare flat. “Earlier this evening I closed down my store, met a friend for dinner and came here. You’re sitting in her seat.”
Earlier this evening, he’d taken a knife between the ribs and still put five men down...and then walked away from it.
But this man couldn’t know that unless he’d been part of it somehow.
“I’m not doing this well,” the man said. “I’m more than aware that under other circumstances, we not only wouldn’t be companionable, we wouldn’t even speak—”
And then a cluster of casually raucous men moved to the bar, and Lannie saw their faces.
Familiar faces. Battered faces. Only four of them, because the fifth apparently hadn’t recovered from the consequences of sticking a knife into Lannie.
And there was Holly, sitting alone and upset, and completely unaware.
Lannie didn’t much like coincidences.
“You should have talked faster.” He rose from his chair with the wolf coming out strong, already silent in movement. “Your friends tipped your hand.” He hesitated, briefly, to loom over the smaller man. “Whatever you want...this was a mistake.”
“You misunderstand,” the man said, drawing back—but at Lannie’s expression, his protests died back into annoyance. After a final hesitation, he rose from his seat and strode for the exit. Lannie might have grabbed his arm—might have demanded an explanation—but Holly came first. He headed for the bar.
Barbara crossed his path with empty serving tray in hand and caught sight of his expression, freezing there a moment. “Lannie?” But then she saw the men, and muttered a curse. “I see them. But this is a family place, Lannie.” He passed her by, snagging the tray from her unsuspecting grip along the way. She let him have it but still followed him. “Lannie!”
Lannie moved in beside Holly. She made a startled sound and sent a glare his way.
“Right,” he said. “You’re pissed at me. I get it. Let’s go.”
“I’m eating.” She turned away from him and forked up some sauce-smeared sweet potato.
“Lannie,” Barbara said from behind, “what—”
“These guys are not our friends.” Lannie caught Holly’s gaze, nodding at the little gang. They hadn’t spotted him yet, but they’d be looking. They were just having fun along the way.
“I see them.” She took a swig of her own bottled beer, and her Upper Peninsula accent came out strong. “They’re rude. Big wha. I run my own crews, Mr. Stewart—you think I haven’t handled rude before?”
“Holly.” Lannie took the beer from her, set it on the bar, and ignored her fully justified glare of astonishment. “These guys are not our friends.” It didn’t matter that Lannie got no sense of Core from them; he wasn’t sensitive to that particular stench in the first place. They’d already attacked his pack, and they’d attacked him. They were the enemy, and he needed to get Holly out of here, and he told her so with his expression and with his eyes and with every bit of the alpha within.
Holly’s eyes widened; she closed her mouth on whatever she’d been about to say and cast a more thoughtful glance at the men, three of whom were giving the bartender grief while the fourth caught sight of Lannie and stiffened, his expression darkening.
“Uh-oh,” said Barbara from behind him, and hastened away.
“I’m hungry,” Lannie told Holly. “Grab your meal and your beer and we’ll eat somewhere else.”
By then the gang was headed their way. Lannie took the step in front of Holly and felt more than saw as she slid off the stool to stand at his shoulder.
“Look who we found.” The lead guy came to a stop, his expression just a little too bright, his bruises from earlier in the day blooming puffy and dramatic. “The idiot who showed up in the middle of nowhere to mess with our business.”
Lannie kept his voice even and his hands low. “Out in the middle of nowhere happens to have been my property. And the old man you beat up happens to be my friend.”
The man offered him a nasty smile. “You should have thought of this moment before you butted in.”
“There were five of you and one of me, and I’m still standing. This time there are only four of you. Is this really something you want everyone to see?” He didn’t, at the moment, feel the aches. He didn’t feel the wound on his side. And he didn’t hold the alpha inside.
“Let’s just go.” Holly’s low voice held disgust rather than fear. “You were right. We can eat somewhere else.”
A camera flashed from behind Lannie, highlighting the man—tall, muscle-bound and graced with a graying blond beard that crawled unmanaged down his throat to his chest. His friends started as the flash went off again, and Barbara made a satisfied noise in her throat. “Got ’em. Now you scoot, Lannie. If they wanted to take a poke at you in my place, they should’ve been faster about it.”
“Yes’m,” Lannie said, easing a step aside without taking his eyes off the men. This would be the moment, if they—
The big guy in front went for it, dropping his shoulder for driving punch that would have caught Lannie pretty much where the knife had.
Lannie whipped the serving tray up between them, bracing it against the sharp impact; hot pain tore at his side. As the man cried out and grabbed his injured hand, Lannie yanked the tray up and cracked it in half over his head.
The man dropped like a rock. Lannie held the other three with his eye, waiting that extra beat. When they exchanged an uncertain glance, he dropped the tray halves on top of their fallen friend.
Barbara had more than a camera; she had a short bat, and she tapped it meaningfully against her palm. “We done here, boys?”
That could have been it. That should have been it. But the fallen man surged upward with offended fury and Lannie snarled it back at him, grabbing the bat from Barbara—
Heavy glass thudded dully against a hard head. The man collapsed in a moaning heap.
Holly looked ruefully at her beer bottle—upended and now empty. She placed the bottle carefully upright on the bar. “Maybe we can get those dinners to go?”
Chapter 3 (#ulink_e240d49e-0d01-59cb-92e0-a66fa2c579ba)
Awesome. A bar fight.
Holly sat on her suitcase in the bed of Lannie’s pickup, a take-out container balanced on her knees, a new beer at her feet and anger tempered only by the weight of fatigue. She’d done no more than catnap since the Sentinels had snatched her from her home, and right now it didn’t seem to matter that the food was good, the incredible expanse of night sky was filled with diamond-sharp stars and the companionship was currently undemanding.
Because it didn’t change anything. She’d lost a life she’d fought hard to have, and one she loved. She could be furious or she could grieve, but right now this dull, exhausted anger suited her just fine.
“You suck,” she told Lannie, who sat on a hay bale beside her.
“Yeah,” he said, and took a pull on his own beer. “Maybe.”
“Will you ever let me go?” she asked him, making no attempt to hide her frustration.
“Me?” He tipped his head back to watch the stars as if considering—but flinched at the stretch, his hand going to his side where blood had dried earlier in the evening. “Yes.”
“But not them,” Holly said, hearing his unspoken words.
Lannie put aside his empty takeout container and rested his elbows on his knees. “Never entirely. It doesn’t mean you won’t end up back where you were, or where you want to be.”
She made a derisive sound in her throat. “Sure. As long as I’m not too valuable so you people aren’t willing to let me go. And supposing that the Atrum Core stays hands-off.”
Lannie pushed a thumb at the knot of discomfort between his brows, a gesture her unusually sensitive eyes saw just fine. Maybe he had a headache. Good.
He said, “You’re Sentinel, Holly. Having a connection to the whole is part of that, and that’s all you’re here to find. Where you fit in the whole is up to you. But until things settle out, you’re not safe at home.”
She laughed outright. “Safe? Are you even listening to yourself? How safe is your friend Aldo? How safe was it to be in that tavern with you this evening?” She set her beer down with a clunk of heavy glass against the truck bed lining. “If you weren’t what you are, we wouldn’t be eating dinner out here in the bed of a truck.”
He didn’t reply right away; she chose to believe it was because he had no defense. When he did speak, it was only to say, “Well. It’s an awfully pretty night.”
She made a derisive sound.
“Don’t get stars this clear from the ground in Michigan,” he said. “Don’t get them without mosquitoes, either.”
“Maybe I like mosquitoes!” she snapped at him, which was so patently ridiculous that she was glad when he didn’t respond. After a round of silence, the breeze rustling through piñons behind them, she sighed. “God, I need a shower. I don’t even know where I’m sleeping tonight.”
“My place,” Lannie said—and offered the faintest of smiles in the darkness in response to her scowl. “I’ll sleep somewhere else, and tomorrow we’ll sort things out. I didn’t have much notice.”
“Yeah,” Holly said. “I gathered that. I feel so welcome, eh?”
He straightened. “No,” he said, his hand pressed back to his side but his voice taking on that note of command she’d heard there before. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” she meant to demand, but he stepped on the words.
“Don’t think of yourself that way. Don’t think of me that way. Unprepared isn’t the same as unwilling or unwelcoming.”
She didn’t even have to see him to know. Or to feel. He was doing it again. If she looked, she’d find him more than. She’d find herself drawn to him in spite of the fact that she didn’t want to be here in the first place. Just as he’d done to her in the tavern, right there in front of everyone—looking at her so steadily from those dark-rimmed pale eyes, somehow drawing her in and waking the impulse to go to him—to smooth the lines from his brow and kiss the faint lingering bruises on his face, and even to trace her tongue over the luxury of his mouth.
She found her voice, strained as it was. “Stop. Doing. That.”
But he didn’t stop. He even looked as though he might reach out to her. She tensed in anticipation of that touch, wanting it, already responding to it—
Holly reached for all the strength she’d ever had—all the personal sense of self she’d developed young and hard in a life of hiding who she really was, her family split beyond repair. Independent. Capable. Without need for any Sentinel identity. Somehow, she made her voice cutting. “Really? This is your plan? To use Sentinel mojo to seduce me until I can’t think straight? You want to tell me how that’s any different than slipping me some drug?”
He drew in a sharp breath, and for that moment she wished she couldn’t see so well at night after all. Not his startled expression, and not the way her words had hit him like a cruel blow.
It was almost enough to make her wonder if she’d gotten it wrong.
But not quite.
* * *
Lannie faced the morning without enthusiasm, standing not so much behind the farm store counter as draped over it, his head resting on his forearm and buzzing like the inside of a sonic toothbrush.
He wanted to blame Holly.
Pack song was a touchy thing. To be so abruptly disengaged from his home pack, to encounter such resistance from his new pack...
He wanted to blame her but couldn’t. No more than he could blame her for the residual stiffness in his ribs and shoulders, or the half-healed wound on his side.
He wasn’t so certain about the suddenly uncontrollable nature of his mojo. She’d called him on that the night before, but...
He would have said he wasn’t tapping into his alpha at all.
He would have said she’d somehow done it to him.
Except it didn’t work that way, and the situation left him uneasy and half-aroused and extra wary about doing the right thing for her—about whether he even could, given the circumstances. It left him without much sleep, a buzzing head, and a semitruckload of hay on the way in.
“Hey, boss!” Faith said cheerfully, buckling her work chaps around her waist with the legs still swinging free as she strode from the back to slap her gloves against the counter. Her piercings glimmered, an incongruous counterpoint to the cap crammed over her black hair. “I should have another go at that coffee before the hay gets here, right?”
“God, no,” he said, working hard to inject just the right matter-of-fact note into his voice, just the right alacrity into his movement as he raised his head, turning a deliberately discerning eye her way. “The overflow area ready for unloading?”
He knew it wasn’t. So did she. “Javi’s not here yet,” she said, which started off sounding like an excuse and ended with a quick shift to determination. “I’ll go get started while I’m waiting.”
You do that. He waited until she headed out the front door, setting the bells to jingling and trailing one of the several store cats in her wake.
Hay delivery meant shifting old stock, sweeping out corners...disturbing mice. The cats always knew.
So did the wolf. The wolf also knew when Holly entered the store from the back—and it rose to greet her, humming with a possessive intensity.
Lannie didn’t ever remember pushing the wolf away. Hadn’t ever needed to.
He did it now.
Holly stood beside the closest shelving endcap, her expression faintly wary and definitely uncertain. She made no attempt to hide her scrutiny of him; her gaze traveled from his features to his shoulder and quickly checked out his side, where no stain would show simply because he’d grown impatient and slapped on gauze with Bag Balm and far too much duct tape.
He eyed her back, easily able to see the tension riding in her shoulders. She wore no makeup to hide the lingering bruises of fatigue under her eyes, and glossy hair spilled from a high ponytail, a style that highlighted the clarity of her features and her large, impossibly rich brown eyes. She wore the same khaki pants from the day before and a no-nonsense polo shirt quite clearly tailored for a lean feminine form. The embroidery on her left shoulder read Holly Springs in a bold but elegant font interwoven with leaves, and beneath that in plainer text, a simple Holly Faulkes.
It told him a lot. It told him the kind of life she led—hardworking and active, and tied to the natural world. More Sentinel than she thought. It told him she truly hadn’t had much time to pack. And it told him that whatever life of hiding her family had chosen, they hadn’t considered their names to have been a risk. They’d somehow never been in official Sentinel roles.
It meant that her parents had never had the confidence and familiarity to turn to Brevis in the first place. And there was no telling what misinformation they’d given Holly along the way.
Or failed to give her.
She said, “I ate your sausage and oatmeal. I hope you expected that.”
His stomach grumbled. But he knew better than to start the day with the pastry treats Faith left around—not with the wolf prowling so close to the surface, itching for a hunt.
The wolf grew surly on carbs.
Holly gave him an uncertain look; only then did he realize he hadn’t said so much as good morning. Too lost in the static of his thoughts...and in his wolf’s response to her. It’s not real, he reminded himself, and said, “I hope you found everything you needed.”
“Actually, I need a number of things,” she said, her eye wandering to and clearly catching on Horace, the full-size fiberglass horse model at the front of the store. She visibly shook off the sight of Horace’s current dress mode—makeup applied to mirror Faith’s—and returned to her thoughts with determination. “Depends on how long I’m going to be here—here, at your place, and here, in New Mexico.”
He lifted one shoulder. “Couldn’t tell you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. Surely you don’t want to continue sleeping wherever you clearly didn’t actually sleep last night.”
So much for any impression of invincibility. He said only, “I was perfectly comfortable.” Probably she wasn’t ready to hear that the wolf slept where he would, and that last night’s barn had been a luxury.
“Well, I’m not comfortable here, so if you can manage to give me some idea of how long this whole thing will take, I’d appreciate that.”
The answer was only the same. Lannie didn’t repeat himself.
She looked like a woman hanging on to her temper by a very thin margin. She spoke with a snappy precision he knew to remember. “Fine. I need clothes. I need more than the three ounces of shampoo that were in my travel kit. I need feminine products. And I want a bike. Do you want details, or do you just want to hand over your credit card?”
Lannie said, “A bike?”
“Yes. I bike. Therefore I need a bike.”
“There’s a bike shop in Cloudview,” he said. A bike shop, good hunting territory, and...Holly’s brother. Seeing him—realizing that she could see him—might go a long way toward settling her resentment.
And seeing him immersed in his Sentinel nature might go a long way to helping her accept her own.
“Cloudview?” Holly crossed her arms under her breasts, emphasizing both toned arms and modest but perfectly formed curves; Lannie found himself standing straighter. “What’s the catch?”
Faith opened the front entry just long enough to sing out over the bells. “Hay’s here early! Javi’s late!”
Lannie allowed a faint grimace. “That,” he said, “is the catch. Twenty tons of hay to unload first.”
Holly didn’t hesitate. “Then I’ll go get my gloves and help.”
Lannie did hesitate. She hadn’t come here to heave two-string orchard grass.
“Look,” she said. “I work for a living. I’ll go insane all that much faster if you don’t give me something to do while I’m waiting for whatever magical things you people want to see happen.”
Magical. Yeah, something like that.
He reached under the counter for the stack of mismatched work gloves and dropped them on the glass. “See if anything here fits.”
Holly quickly selected snug gloves of leather and stretchy backing—one an alarming pink, one blue—and tugged them on, flexing her fingers to settle them.
Lannie led the way to the barn overflow, filling his lungs with a deep, surreptitious breath and letting it out slowly—letting the restless wolf fill his skin, trying to appease the other in him until he had that time to hunt.
Holly wasn’t far off his shoulder. She muttered a faintly singsong “Stop that...” and startled the wolf away.
Lannie barely stopped himself startling, too.
You weren’t supposed to see it.
All in all, Holly Faulkes was far more Sentinel than she knew.
* * *
Javi arrived only a few moments into the unloading, allowing Lannie to step back and inspect the bales, approve the load and meet up with the trucker to handle paperwork.
“New hand, eh?” The man moved efficiently to wind and stash the webbing straps that had secured the semitruck’s load, and then came to stand beside Lannie as he scrawled his signature without bothering to prop the clipboard against the truck. “Have to say I approve.”
Lannie gave him a hard glance. The man was twice Holly’s age, his admiration frank but at a distance. Lannie’s initial irrational irritation faded; he glanced up to where she worked the truck—strong and confident and more graceful than thou while she was at it, braced in perfect balance over the hay bales. She’d already figured out the rhythm of the work, the perfect combination of leverage and muscle to make the bales sail down in quiet arcs to a thumping impact. Her face had flushed pleasantly with the exertion, and from the looks of it, she was only just getting warmed up.
In the end, Lannie said only, “She’d eat you alive.”
“You, too, buddy,” the man said, affably enough. “Best watch yourself, if it’s like that.”
It wasn’t like that. She was his job, and his response to her was no more real than ever in the opening stages of creating pack. But that wouldn’t keep him from responding, and it wouldn’t keep him from watching her. Appreciating her.
Beautiful, he thought—and then drew a hard breath when she jerked to a stop, turning to stare down at him.
Best watch yourself, Lannie Stewart.
He handed over the paperwork and put himself back to work. The familiar rhythm of it warmed stiff muscles and tugged as much against the duct tape as it did against his healing side. For long moments, he let go of his thoughts, giving over to the muted conversation of familiar teamwork, the occasional grunt of effort, Faith’s giggles in the background when she lost her grip on a bale and it went pinwheeling off into the yard. When the truck sat empty and swept, the driver pulled away to leave them to the stacking...and eventually that was done, too, and Holly stood beside Lannie looking flushed but relaxed, mismatched gloves tucked away in a back pocket.
Her song trickled through to him, complex and self-confident and, at the moment, devoid of the resentful edge.
“Three hours,” Faith said. “Not our best time, but decent.”
“Thanks to Holly,” said Javi, his eye already gone worshipful when it turned to Holly.
“Yeah,” Faith said, older and wiser by not very many years, her back propped against the towering stack of hay and out of the sun. “You don’t wanna go there. Just say thanks again.”
“Right,” Javi said, blushing beneath the olive tones of his skin. “Thanks, Miss Holly.”
Holly seemed bemused to find herself back in a conversation—and a normal one, at that. “I was glad for it,” she said. “I needed to get the travel kinks out.” She brushed hay from her shirt and reaching for the neckerchief Javi had given her shortly after his arrival—a hesitant offering, gratefully received, and now full of enough hay to have proven its worth.
“Oh, no,” Javi said, backing away a step just in case. “You keep it. You’ll need one of those around here.”
Holly’s smile made Lannie straighten. Once again he found himself pushing back the wolf, the little growl in his mind that said mine.
Maybe so. But too strong or too fast with this one, and he’d lose her altogether. If it had been easier than this, Brevis wouldn’t have brought her so precipitously to his doorstep.
“Drink something,” he told Faith and Javi—and Holly, for that matter. “Bottled water in the fridge.”
“Cool,” said Faith. “Hey, Javi, I got some power powder to try in it. It’ll turn your mouth blue.”
“No, no,” Javi said, following her anyway. “Mi madre would whip my behind if I come home with a blue mouth.”
“She would not.” Faith’s words floated back over her shoulder as she rounded the corner of the barn overflow, and Lannie knew that Javi’s mouth didn’t stand a chance. So did Holly, to judge by the amusement lighting her expression—though that faded when she looked his way.
“You, too,” he said. “Especially you.”
She dusted at the hay on her legs. “And then?” When he only looked at her, she said, “Then what? We’re going to Cloudview, I know. But I’m here for a reason. Do we have team-building games to play, or do I have homework, or are you going to put me on a shelf while you do other things?” Before he’d had time to truly consider that, she added, “One thing they should have warned you—I like to keep busy.”
“I can arrange for another load of hay,” Lannie said, deceptively mild.
“Sure,” she said, just as evenly.
“What’s next specifically,” he told her, “is that we dust the hay out of our hair and get something to drink. Then I’d like to take a few moments to sniff around the well house—you can come or not, as you please.”
He wasn’t sure if sniffing around qualified as busy or boring, and in truth he wasn’t sure he wanted her along. He’d just as soon take the wolf for this particular task, and he didn’t think she was ready for that yet. When it came to that, he didn’t think he was ready for it. Not to ride the edge of the most primal part of himself while she was nearby.
“And then Cloudview,” she said. “I know. But after that. I don’t get the sense that you have any sort of plan when it comes to me.”
Lannie stood taller in a stretch, rotating one shoulder slightly. “I tend to play it by ear.”
“Awesome,” Holly said flatly. She pushed away from the hay bales. “Since we have such a good plan, we might as well get to it.” She headed for the front of the overflow area—a tall, three-sided pole structure—and turned in the direction of the store, striding across the ground like she owned it.
Lannie watched the languid roll of her hips and wanted to follow. The wolf watched the casual strength in her and growled, chafing, wanting to follow.
Lannie made them both wait, and settle, and swallow back the wanting. Only then did he allow his feet to move, strangely distant from the earth and from the new pack song he already ached to call his own.
* * *
Holly avoided a flat, shrunken prickly pear, her thighs aching from the distinctly uphill hike. Lannie Stewart moved with assurance, familiar with the terrain and taking his own strength for granted. When he stopped and checked back for her, she knew for certain it was only for her sake, and not because he found himself winded.
But Holly was glad to suck in air. She was fit—she was damned fit—but she’d already helped unload twenty tons of hay and she was fit at sea level.
He nodded up ahead, and she belatedly saw the upper half and roof of a wood structure that looked more like a community pit toilet than any official well house, clearly placed just beyond the crest of this slope. “I’d like to take a look around before we add more footprints to the area.”
“You want me to stay here.” She realized it with surprise. Some part of her had enjoyed these silent moments of climbing the hillside together, no matter the effort, or the fact that she hadn’t wanted to be here in the first place. Still didn’t want to be here.
But that didn’t mean her best option wasn’t to wait this situation out, going through Sentinel hoops until she could walk away.
Lannie eyed her as if he was trying to read her thoughts from her face, and nodded. “Only a few moments. Catch your breath, look around. There’s more going on in this forest than you think.”
She wouldn’t have called it a forest at all. But she only nodded, plucking a final stray piece of hay from her shirt, and he hiked on without her.
She watched until he moved out of sight, hidden by a trick of terrain and brush, and then sat herself down to look around. Low, flat cactus here...bushy treelike things dotted along the hill and set on gravelly, sandy soil. Sparse clumps of bunchgrass offered barely a hint of green, and the occasional long-needled pine towered over all.
“Forest,” she snorted. But she wrapped her arms around her knees and tipped her face to the sun, realizing for the first time the true impact of its heat. A quick relocation to the shade of a spicy cedar brought out goose bumps, and she finally put herself half in, half out, and rested her forehead on her knees.
Maybe she shouldn’t have. Maybe she should have kept moving. The quiet gave her space to recognize a strange, small edge of unease running through the center of her—a ripple of vertigo, and an escalation of what she’d experienced on arrival. She put her hand to the ground, eyes still closed, absorbing the textured feel of the cedar sheddings—tiny dry twigs, gritty soil, the angular hump of an exposed root. The connection steadied her in some way, but her sense of unease failed to fade.
Lannie had been right. She needed more water. Something to trail her fingers in, something to fiddle with.
Then again, it was nothing that going home wouldn’t fix. A reasonable altitude, a reasonable humidity and a sun that didn’t feel so close. Anyone would feel disoriented.
Song intruded, humming into her thoughts with such an insidious ease that she startled when she finally recognized it there, jerking her head up to scan the hill where Lannie had disappeared. She caught the glimpse of flickering light, a coruscation of energy; the song swelled and then faded. What the—?
Holly clambered to her feet to squint up the hill, swiping her hands off against the tough material of her work pants, hesitating on the verge of hiking on up. Lannie had had plenty of time to look around, and what if he—
He came into sight at the crest of the hill, appearing from between two junipers to wave her onward, and she suddenly understood. Lannie had gone uphill to take his other—whatever his other was. The light, the energy, even the humming song—those had all been the edges of his return to human. And now he stood there waiting for her, all matter-of-fact confidence and underlying strength.
She hiked the last hundred feet more quickly than she’d thought she had left in her, and greeted him with demand. “Was that you?”
She didn’t truly expect his frown. “Maybe,” he said, and thought about it until he shook his head. “Did it bother you?”
“Bother?” She found her hand was still gritty, the thin soil pressed into the lines of her palm, where she’d grabbed at the ground in her reaction to that song. She realized, too, what she really, really didn’t want to admit—that her body had responded, humming along in its own way, and that now it had warmed to him in a clear defiance of how she felt about Sentinels, being here and being anywhere near him in the first place.
Good God, she wanted him.
Except she didn’t. She didn’t want any part of being here, Lannie Stewart included. So she, too, finally shook her head. “It didn’t bother me,” she said. “It surprised me. It was rude.”
He pondered that, watching her with an awareness she wasn’t sure she liked. “Probably so,” he allowed, and left it at that, switching his attention to the well house now completely within view. “There’s nothing much up here. They didn’t waste much time trying to chase Aldo off.” He shook his head. “Just an old man taking a smoke.”
Holly took a few more steps in that direction, eyeing the faint track of an unofficial lane. The well house itself didn’t do anything to offset her initial impression, and its security consisted of a simple aged hasp and lock. “Why would they even come down this road?”
Lannie walked past her to the lane, scuffing his way across it. At her inquisitive look, he pointed downward. “This ground holds a track a whole lot better than you might think. I’ll know it when someone comes through this way again.”
Tracks. She looked down at that weird mix of silty, gritty soil overlaying hard ground, and discovered herself in the midst of them.
Not all of them human.
She crouched, running a forefinger around the outside of the nearest track. The nearest huge track, doglike in shape if not in size. Lannie’s? Or had it been here all along? “You’re right,” she said. “This ground holds a significant track.” She glanced up at him. “You should have brought a broom.”
“Maybe I will.” He paced down the road, looking along its length as if the guy gang and their truck might come barreling back down it any moment now. Holly pressed her hand over the track, obliterating it, and stood up. A few steps took her to the only snatch of color in the pale ground, and it took her some moments to recognize the splatter of dried blood. Her gaze flickered to the faded bruising on his face, and he shook his head. “Not mine.”
“Nice,” she said. “They probably never knew what hit them.”
Because he was Sentinel. He was stronger. He was supposed to pull his punches.
“There were five of them,” he reminded her.
“Sentinel,” she reminded him, out loud this time.
To her surprise, he lifted the front tail of his shirt. At first she saw nothing but the gleam of skin over surprisingly hard muscle, the light scatter of hair toward the center of a torso leaner than she’d expected. She stuttered on a response—and then realized the steep shadow between two of his lowest ribs wasn’t a shadow, but the angry and slightly gaping lips of a knife wound.
“Sentinel,” he said. “Not Superman. You should know. Your blood is strong enough.”
“I never thought so,” she said, more faintly than pleased her. “I’m not truly different from anyone else. Not like—”
You. With the way the wild strength sometimes gleamed straight from his eyes, or how the very way he stood broadcast the dangerous nature lurking behind a laconic exterior.
“Look in a mirror sometime.” He let the shirttail fall.
“I don’t understand.” She tore her gaze away from his side to search his expression, finding little she could read there at all. “I don’t heal much faster than anyone else.” She made a face, and admitted, “Yes, a little. But I thought Sentinels healed really fast.”
His grin was wry; it changed his face, made her want to reach out to him and take his hand and bump a companionable shoulder. She took a step back instead, startled at herself. He said, “If we’re badly injured, the early healing comes quick. Hurts like hell, too. But it keeps us alive when we might otherwise die.” He shrugged. “After that? You already know. We heal a little more quickly than normal. That’s all.”
“Then that must have been a whole lot worse yesterday.” Realization struck. “Right after I got here.” And then she leaped forward to a whole new understanding, and she speared a glance at him. “You were loading hay with that?”
He frowned down at the injury, resting his hand lightly over top. “There was hay to unload.”
She exhaled a sharp and impatient breath. “For everything you say, I swear there are two things you’re keeping to yourself.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But never things about you, from you. Just ask.”
She made a noncommittal noise in her throat that sounded no more convinced that she felt; he looked sharply at her. “Altitude catching up with you?”
“Maybe.” She looked down the slope—the unfamiliarity of the terrain, the unfamiliarity of the scents and even the sound of the bird flashing bright blue from the brush as it scolded them. The unfamiliarity, yes...and deeper, beneath it all, the sense that something else was missing, was wrong. Something she’d been leaning on so long she hadn’t even known it was there and now couldn’t begin to define.
“Still want to go to Cloudview?”
She jerked her head back to narrow her eyes at him. “Don’t you dare go back on that.”
Was that amusement on his features, lurking at the corners of his eyes, in the slight lift on one side of his mouth? She took a step toward him, a light growl vibrating somewhere in her chest. “Are you laughing at me?”
At the same time, she heard it again—the hint of song, beguiling cello tones weaving beneath faint strains of barely whispered complexity. The intrusion stunned her—the affront of it, the fact that she could hear it at all—but she’d barely drawn breath to protest when he grinned outright. Also unexpected, and also stunning—in its own way, striking deep into the heart of her.
By then he’d taken the few steps between them and wrapped an unexpected arm around her shoulder in a gesture of startling affection.
She wanted to sputter at him. She wanted to say I didn’t invite you to do that and You have no right—but her body was already melting into him. Just long enough to feel the upright strength in him, and to understand how clearly his gentleness was a choice.
Then he stepped back, framing her head between both big hands to look directly into her gaze, piercing eyes gone somehow softer. “It gets easier,” he told her. “Let’s go see your brother.”
And then he took her hand and led her down the hill.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_f0a4223c-eb38-5c2a-adc2-cd1780885cd9)
The familiar terrain gentled as Lannie led the way back to the feed-store cluster, revealing a barely sloping spread that held not just the feed-store grounds but a faint scatter of buildings along the curving country road. Lannie’s two mules engaged in some sort of conversational disagreement, gamboling without grace but with power to spare.
Holly might have hesitated, taking it all in, but Lannie kept them moving. The noon sun had brought out the heat of the day—and as much as Holly seemed to need activity, allowing her to help with the entire load of hay hadn’t been the smartest choice of his day.
Too damned bad he’d been so distracted by watching her.
“We’ll grab something to eat on the way out of town,” he said. “I just need a moment to square away—”
Pain shot through his side; the faint music underlying his soul burst into brief static. He blinked, and found himself looking up into bright blue sky. The uneven ground pressed into his back, sharp with myriad little stones and prickery bunchgrass, and his legs were ungainly, bent and sprawling as if they’d simply forgotten how to be legs. “What,” he said quite clearly, “the hell?”
“You tell me,” Holly said, and couldn’t hide worry with her scowl. She had one hand pressed on his shoulder as if she knew the first thing he’d do was try to get up, and the other at his pulse—pounding hard and fast, but perfectly regular.
“Hey!” Faith shouted from the bottom of the slope, her accusing voice getting closer with each word. “What did you do to him?”
“To him?” Holly said, rising to that bait even as she kept Lannie’s shoulder to the ground. But she only had leverage as long as he didn’t roll aside—and that he did, rising as smoothly as he ever did. Holly made that disgusted little feline noise in her throat and came to her feet beside him.
By then Faith had reached them, heavy work boots amazingly spry along the way. “Yes!” she snapped at Holly. “You! To him!”
“Whoa,” Lannie said as the static struck again, his alarm having less to do with going down and everything to do with the potential collision of Faith and Holly. When he could see clearly again he found himself on hands and knees, blinking at the ground.
“Why did you even get up?” Faith asked in exasperation, though it was Holly’s hand at the back of his neck, quiet and firm.
Because that shouldn’t have happened at all. Never mind a second time. Or, if he counted the odd moments of the previous evening, a third or fourth or a...
“Faith,” he said, with as much authority as any man in his situation could muster, “this is not Holly’s doing.”
“Right,” Holly said. “Blame me. Awesome. I am so glad to be here.”
“You showed up and this happened,” Faith said, bending to peer at Lannie.
“This was happening when I got here,” Holly said, sounding so certain that Lannie lifted his head to look at her in surprise. “Oh, yes,” she said, seeing it. “Last night. Right in front of me.”
“You were watching me.” It warmed something inside him, which shouldn’t have mattered but did.
Holly made an exasperated sound. “Of course I was watching you. Under the circumstances, I’d have been an idiot if I’d done anything else, eh?”
He remembered to feel his own exasperation. He thought he’d hidden those moments of disorientation. Mariska wouldn’t have hesitated to call him out if she’d noticed anything wrong.
“Lannie!” Aldo’s whiskery voice carried uphill far too well. “No, no—this isn’t supposed to happen!”
Lannie rubbed his hands over his face. His legs were his own again; his mind was clear, and his soul carried his own faint inner song. “Awesome,” he muttered, deliberately echoing Holly’s flat tone.
“Yeah, now I know you’re not right,” Faith told him.
Aldo reached them and knelt down to put a hand on Lannie’s knee. “You okay, son? Ah, this is all my fault—”
“Aldo.” Lannie said it firmly. “Yesterday was not your fault. I don’t care what you said to them. There’s no reason good enough for five guys to beat up on a sixty-year-old man.”
“Seemed funny at the time,” Aldo said, looking somewhat bereft.
No doubt it had.
Lannie sighed and regained his feet. He took a brief but ruthless check of himself and found nothing amiss—except for the dent in his pride.
Alpha wasn’t bully, or overbearing. But alpha did mean strength.
His strength was smarting.
Holly kept pace with him as they headed downhill. “Look,” she said, brushing off the seat of her pants as they walked. “I’d really like to grab some things from the closest big-box store.”
“Ruidoso,” Faith told her, slipping it in between Holly’s words.
“And I’d really like to have time to rest this afternoon. And,” she said, giving Lannie a sharp eye, “I don’t really want to be in a car with you behind the wheel right now.”
He squelched that little bit of sting. “Cloudview will be there tomorrow.”
“Good.” She nodded, more or less to herself; her ponytail swung to land gently over her shoulder. Lannie should have been prepared at the spark of amusement showing in her eye, but as they reached the back of the store, she managed to take him by surprise. Again.
“Keys,” she said, and held out her hand—adding, when he only stared at her, “Ruidoso. Truck.”
And then she smiled.
* * *
Holly made off with more than the truck keys; she pulled a local map off the Internet, acquired Lannie’s credit card and his cell phone and escaped the feed store without an escort.
Not that she needed one. Lannie could no doubt find her anywhere now that he’d taken her in. He kept track of his people, that was obvious enough.
And like it or not, she was one of his people now. At least in his mind.
On the way out to Ruidoso—forty minutes of curving, challenging roads with the faint background buzz of disorientation in her head—she spent no little time wondering how she would have reacted to the man if he’d simply walked into her office looking for a consultation on a water feature. If there’d been no preestablished baggage between them.
The thought woke things in her that she would rather have left sleeping. Hot-and-bothered things that left her shifting uncomfortably in the truck’s otherwise comfortable seat. Because never mind his muscled build and strong shoulders and perfectly lean cowboy hips. Or even his eyes—Good God, those eyes.
There was that something more about him. The charisma. The way he stood even when he wasn’t pouring on the attitude. The way his other showed, even when he didn’t know it—and even when she didn’t yet know what other form he took.
The way he cared about his people.
He’s still your jailer.
He was still a complicit part of the team that now kept her away from her own life.
Remembering that should have cooled her blood somewhat. Should have. Holly distracted herself by pulling off the road long enough to call her brother—not at a phone that would reach him directly, because no phone ever did. But she dialed the number for Regan Adler, her brother’s love—and soon enough, his spouse.
“Hey,” she said into the machine that resided in a small but personable cabin home deep at the edge of Kai’s woods. “This is Holly. Hello to Kai, but this message is for Regan. We might be coming your way tomorrow. If you have time, I’d like to meet up.” Regan might be self-employed, providing lush and slyly quirky illustrations for nature guides of all sorts along with her own painting, but Holly knew better than to take her time for granted. Had been there, and had that done to her. “I know we don’t know each other, but I’m hoping you can give me some perspective on this situation.”
This situation. What a plethora of Sentinel sins that phrase encompassed.
“Anyway,” Holly added hastily, “I hope you’ll call. PS—this is Lannie Stewart’s phone.”
The rest of the drive went quickly, and once she reached the store she pulled her hastily scribbled list from her pocket and went to work with the focused intensity that had made her business successful, happy to hand over Lannie’s card to buy a few reusable shopping totes with her goods, and toss the whole kit and caboodle into the bed of the truck behind the straw bale.
On the way back, the phone warbled a basic faux phone ring. Holly thought only of her message to Regan, and pulled the phone from the seat divider to accept the call.
“Holly?”
Holly’s breath caught on the decision to hang up. “Just listen,” Faith said, and her words were low and hasty—in the end, intriguing Holly just enough to stay on the call.
She found a wide spot by the side of the road to pull over. “I’m here.”
“Look,” Faith said. “I don’t really know what’s going on with you being here. I know what Lannie does for Brevis, so we do get people here sometimes, or he goes somewhere else, but there’s something different about this. About him.”
“You still trying to blame it on me?” Holly said. “Because as far as I’m concerned, you can take your Sentinels and—”
Faith’s heartfelt and indelicate noise in response did more to get Holly’s attention than anything else could have. “Look, I’m such a light blood that only someone like Lannie can even tell I’m Sentinel. They’re not my people—I ran from them a long time ago.”
“They let you go?” Holly asked, a flicker of hope in her voice.
After a hesitation and a number of muffled sounds, Faith replied. “Light blood,” she reminded Holly. “But listen. This is about Lannie. Something’s not right. And since he had to pull out of his home pack in order to deal with you—”
“He what?”
“God, don’t you know anything?”
Anger made its way to Holly’s throat, tightening it. “No more than I’ve been told.”
“Then ask Lannie. He’ll tell you as much as he can. But look, what I’m doing is asking you to keep an eye on him, okay? Because we can’t. Not the way we’re used to.”
Responses jumbled through her mind—the bitter awareness that she couldn’t ask for information when she didn’t even know enough to frame the right questions. The rising curiosity about Lannie and his home pack and his Sentinel other and what he did with it—or what had happened with the Jody thing. The cold hard fear of realizing anew that her life was totally out of her own control.
For now.
“Look, I get it.” Faith’s words came with the white noise of something brushing across the phone, and Holly suddenly realized that she was crouched somewhere in the feed store, trying to hide the call from Lannie. “You don’t owe us anything and I was a bitch to you. But this is about Lannie, okay?”
And Holly found herself saying, “Okay.”
She hung up the phone in a bemused state, taking the remainder of the drive home with a slower speed than the car behind her probably would have preferred. At the farm store, she pulled around back to park as if she’d always been here, always been driving Lannie’s truck...always been the one to co-opt his pack. When she disembarked and grabbed her bags from the back, the midafternoon heat bore down on her in a sizzle of sun—one the shade of the barn quickly quenched into a chill.
She began to understand why people here dressed in so many layers.
She took the exterior steps up to Lannie’s barn apartment two at a time, and realized how much better she felt for the chance to collect her thoughts.
Or maybe it was just her Sentinel constitution after all—adjusting to the altitude more quickly than expected after her morning’s difficulty.
Maybe.
She let herself into the apartment and stopped short at the sight.
Lannie.
To be more precise, Lannie’s back. He stood at his kitchen sink, shirtless, muscles flexing as he reached overhead to put away a set of mugs. Enough spicy humidity filled the air so even if she hadn’t seen the gleam of dampness across his skin and in the slight curl of his hair, she would have known he’d just stepped out of the shower.
He barely turned his head to greet her and she realized that of course he’d known she was coming. If he hadn’t heard the truck, if he hadn’t heard her steps on the stairs...
She had the feeling he still would have known.
“Get what you needed?” he asked, as if this would be some plain old conversation about simple things.
“More or less,” she said, playing the same game. “Should I unpack them?”
He grabbed a basin from the sink, handling it carefully enough so she knew it still held water. “Is that your way of asking if you’re staying here?”
Without waiting for a response, he took the basin to the other side of the loft—to the giant hexagonal window she’d admired so much that morning, however briefly. Iron scrollwork crawled around the edges and the supporting grids, intimating leaves and twining vines, and light flooded through to fill the loft. Before it sat a motley collection of plants, each of which now received a careful portion of what must have been his rinse water.
Not that she cared. She was too caught up in watching him move, handling the awkward chore with a masculine grace.
When he glanced over his shoulder, she realized just how hypnotized she’d become.
Maybe she should have blushed and stammered at being caught, but she didn’t care to. He was worth watching. So she smiled.
After a moment, his mouth quirked in what might have been amusement, and might have been response. “Yes,” he said. “You’re welcome to stay here while we figure out the most obvious solution to the situation.”
Reality intruded. “But what about—”
He shook his head, returning the basin to the sink, and then propped himself against it to regard her. “I shower and eat here. Where I sleep isn’t an issue.” At the disbelieving look on her face, he laughed, a quiet huff of humor. “Trust me, Holly. It’s fine.”
“Trust you?” She let the shopping totes slide gently to the floor, refusing to be distracted by the flat planes of his sparsely furred chest or the window light skipping across his abs. Absolutely refusing. Even when the knife wound he’d so readily dismissed caught that same light, raw and inflamed and hardly healing. “Is this is a test of some sort?”
He cocked his head, barely enough to see it. “If you like.”
“Fine,” she said. “I have a test for you, too.”
He planted the heels of his hands against the counter and waited. Holly took it for invitation. “What did Faith mean, you’ve had to disconnect from your home pack for me? What does that mean to you? Why, exactly, am I here? It’s not just to keep me safe while things settle down. And also, you need to let me do something with that.” She nodded at his side. “Like take you to the local urgent care.”
Lannie snorted. “I can take myself anywhere I need to go.”
“Really?” Holly smiled at him, so beatific. “Because as I recall, just this morning you were a little unpredictable about staying on your feet.”
“I’m fine,” he said, and this time the words had a little growl behind them, one that showed in his eyes.
Holly found herself delighted to have gotten under his skin at all. Lannie Stewart, she thought, was used to being the one with the answers.
She lifted his truck keys. “I bet you keep the spares down behind the store counter. Want to bet your little friend Faith has already hidden them?”
This time the growl was unmistakable. It reverberated against something inside Holly, something she hadn’t even known was there. She hid the shiver of it from him by flipping the keys back into her hand and tucking them away in her front cargo pocket. “You might have thought this was about protecting the resistant younger sister of your latest Sentinel hero, but it’s much, much more—and so am I. No urgent care? Fine. Get your first-aid supplies. Then we’ll talk.”
* * *
Lannie had little in the way of Band-Aids and gauze, and little patience for any of it. He was Sentinel; he would heal. He didn’t often take serious injury in his work, but he’d been there enough to know.
Holly found the employee kit in the store’s break room, grabbed self-sticking horse bandages from the shelf, and returned to the loft no less determined than she’d left it.
Lannie had spent the time basking in the window sunlight as wolf, pretending the occasional peak of underlying static didn’t break through his thoughts. He heard her coming at the bottom step and almost didn’t make it into human—and into his pants—before she opened the door.
He’d forgotten how she took those steps two at a time.
“Here,” Holly said, even as she came through the door with her bounty, a tube of hydrogel included. “Faith said you would use this stuff.”
“You told Faith?” He couldn’t quite keep the alarm from his voice.
She made an amused sound. “Did you think she didn’t already know?” At his silence, she added, “And you shouldn’t have left that mess of a man-bandage in the counter trash if you wanted it to be some big hairy secret. What was that, half a roll of duct tape?”
“It didn’t stay on anyway,” he grumbled with generalized disgruntlement.
“While we were doing that hay? No kidding.” Holly seemed more cheerful now that she’d outmaneuvered him regarding the truck keys. If it made her feel as though she’d gained some control over her life, she would have it.
For the moment.
Holly busied herself pulling butterfly bandages from the box and lining them up on the tiny breakfast bar jutting out from the wall between the kitchen and the window area. Aside from the plants, the window space held exactly one couch—it was as close to a social space as the loft got, with the bed tucked in behind the half wall across from the window and the bathroom taking up just as much room across from the kitchen. He’d roughed in an unheated closet, but he doubted she’d discovered that particular feature yet.
It wasn’t a bachelor pad so much as the space of an alpha wolf still alone at heart.
“There.” Satisfaction tinged Holly’s voice. “Come on over and lean against the bar.”
Lannie released a silent sigh and complied, leaning to expose the injury to the light and grunting at the painful stretch of it.
Holly made a dismayed sound in her throat. “Have you looked—”
“It’s fine,” Lannie said. “If it was a problem, the fast healing would kick in—and I’d know if that was happening. It hurts.”
“And that doesn’t?”
“It hurts more,” he said pointedly.
Holly rested hesitant fingers on his side; he twitched against it, swearing inwardly as the wolf reared up and took interest. Warm fingers, gentle touch...for an instant, it was the only thing he could feel. At least, until the rest of his body figured it out and responded.
Well, the wolf was alive. And so was the man. And Holly’s touch reached them both.
“It’s ugly,” Holly said, her fingertips pressing lightly around his ribs as she assessed the cut. “Really irritated. Until it does heal, you ought to quit taking yourself for granted.”
He frowned at the countertop. “Ow!”
“Like I said.” She dabbed ointment along the edges of the wound.
His hands bore down on the counter, as much irritation as bullet biting. “It shouldn’t be that—ow!” He jerked away, turning a glare of impatience on her.
“Uh-huh. Whatever. Stop growling.”
By dint of will, he did, and he held himself still while she pinched the edges of the wound and placed a generous row of butterfly bandages. By the time she finished—by the time she stretched her arms around him to wind the self-sticking elastic around his torso—that pain was a thing of the past, and her touch was again the only thing of the present—light, skimming his flesh with authority, patting the whole arrangement into place. Lingering, while her scent permeated the air around him—his shampoo and her own personal perfume, mingled into something that felt so very much like possession.
She stood, fumbling the bandage onto the counter—hesitating, when she might have been stepping away, her face flushed. She visibly hunted for words, her teeth lingering on her lower lip before she found them. “I don’t know how long that’ll last, but...try to take it easy?”
He barely heard her. From behind the static, a sweet melody flowed, winding through Lannie like the vines winding along his window. He leaned into it, breathing it deeply into his body, his eyes closing as he absorbed that brief purity.
When he opened them again and found her so very close, so visibly trembling, he had nothing to say—nothing he could say. Not when enthralled in such a deep thrum of underlying need. Mine. A singular thought, threading through sensation. Mine. Not as alpha, not as Sentinel. Just as man.
Mine.
Holly’s eyes opened wide; she stood taller and straighter, and her nostrils flared. “I am not yours.” She looked right back up at him, her pupils grown big within a narrow ring of darkening brown. She might even have stood on her toes, leaning into him physically just as he’d breathed in the song of her. “I am not Sentinel and I am not yours, and nothing you can do will change that.”
The song stuttered back to static, staggering him as much as the connection had done. Holly slapped the remainder of the elastic bandage on the tiny breakfast bar and turned on her heel, going down the steps with the same authority with which she’d come up.
And Lannie stood there with his side aching from her touch and aching for it, and knew she was exactly right.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_105a6717-156d-56e0-836a-9d2ee72a84c5)
Lannie snagged Holly’s file from the cupboard nook where he’d stashed it and went to his thinking spot—or at least the thinking spot he used while in human form.
He sat beside the mule paddock, leaning against the join of two metal corral panels and propping his knees up to serve as a desk for Holly’s file. He’d pulled on a worn chambray shirt, rolled up the sleeves and left the tails hanging out. Not customer-worthy and not concerned about it even if the store had another hour to go before closing. Everyone knew better than to bother him when he went to sit with the mules.
Everyone except Aldo.
The old man approached with a sideways sort of step, not quite looking at Lannie, a giant plastic travel mug in hand.
“Hey, Lannie,” he said.
Lannie blew out a sigh. “Hey, Aldo.”
“Brought you iced tea.”
“Did you, now.”
Another few steps and Aldo held the mug out. He looked his usual borderline disreputable, his thinning gray hair drawn back in a braid, his red-checkered shirt only half buttoned, and his jeans a size too large and hunting for a place to settle on skinny hips.
Lannie took the mug—although when he lifted it for a gulp, he stopped long enough to ask, “You didn’t put peyote in this, right?”
Aldo affected an offended expression. “Wouldn’t do that to you, Lannie-boy.” Although when Lannie raised a skeptical brow, the old man added, “Least, not without telling you. And this time I’m telling you not.”
The tea went down cold and crisp, and Lannie set the offering aside. “What’s on your mind, old man?”
Aldo looked around, not half as surreptitiously as he likely thought. “That Holly girl gone?”
“Up the hill,” Lannie told him, perfectly aware of the thin thread of Holly’s presence. “Using your spot, I believe. Let her be.”
Aldo only nodded, somewhat more sagely than often. But he was coyote; he had a nose for knots and implications, and he knew as well as any that Lannie wouldn’t leave Holly completely off leash. Not yet. “Already bringing her into yourself, then?”
Firm if not unkind, Lannie said, “It’s not your business.”
Maybe a little more firmly than usual.
Aldo only smiled, a thing often not to be trusted. “You’re okay, then.”
Lannie looked the old man straight in the eye—only the faintest hint of threat in his eye, at the edge of his lip. Gone alpha, because with Aldo there was no giving ground. Not when questioned about pack matters.
Aldo offered instant sulk, which was also as it should be. “Just asking, just asking.”
Lannie waited another moment and said, “Good tea, Aldo. Thanks.”
Aldo straightened some. “Sure,” he said. And then, very carefully, “It’s just that if...well, if you weren’t...I mean, I would want to know. Just in case.”
Lannie didn’t even know what to do with that, so he did nothing—his thoughts already tugging back to Holly, and the very thin file at his disposal—the first pages of which had been all about her brother Kai and his extreme sensitivity to the land, and to all traces of Core magic. Unlike any other known Sentinel, Kai could instantly, reliably, perceive the presence of the new silent Atrum Core workings.
Lannie wasn’t certain that Lily and Aeron Faulkes had chosen the best course by bringing their small family to this area. The Core princes and posses preferred their comforts and amenities; they preferred hiding within clusters of humanity. And unlike Sentinels, so many of whom gravitated toward the land, those in the Atrum Core were related by blood line and activity but not by nature. They had no others; they had no sense of the Earth and no ability to navigate its unseen ways.
They never heard Lannie’s song.
He looked up, realized Aldo was still waiting, and said, “Something else?”
Aldo fished in one baggy jeans pocket and pulled out Lannie’s phone—last seen in Holly’s possession as she headed out for her errands. “This was ringing in the truck.”
Lannie scowled at it. This was not a place he brought the phone. “And it couldn’t have waited?”
Aldo shrugged, radiating inoffensiveness—which only meant that he’d done something he likely shouldn’t have. “She called Regan Adler. Regan Adler called back.”
“Give me that,” Lannie growled, holding out his hand. “Go help Faith prep the store for closing, and I’ll put you on the clock for a couple hours.”
Aldo brightened, handing the phone over with a new energy. Brevis covered Aldo’s basic needs, but picking up sporadic hours at the feed store added a tiny bit of luxury to his spare life. Sporadic because that was all Aldo had ever been, and because in these past weeks he’d only become more so. “Appreciate that, Lannie.”
“So will I, if you keep Faith’s mind on her work. Brevis spooks her, you know that.” Not so much as it used to, but Aldo would take it to heart. “Git, then.”
Aldo hustled back to the barn, though not without turning back to offer, “Want me to put hay by the door for those mules?”
Lannie lifted his head in thanks, already absorbed again by the contents of the folder, by the phone in his hand...by the deep tug from his wolf. Find her. He pushed against the bridge of his nose, hunting focus, and reached for the folder. But the next page turned out to be a scant recitation of Holly’s circumstances—her tidy little cottage house in Upper Michigan, the sketchy notes of an upbringing that emphasized her independent nature, her steadfastly non-Sentinel lifestyle
He thought of Jody. He couldn’t help but think of Jody. The woman had been raised Sentinel, but without humility. She’d never been exposed to the consequences of her reckless ways, but had been protected from them. Her full-blooded nature and brilliance with stealth had put her in the field; her inability to mesh with her team had put the team in his hands...with only a few short days to integrate them before they’d gone south to deal with an exotics smuggling ring.
He’d done his best. He’d connected instantly with her—he’d felt her brilliance, her bright spark of life. And maybe she’d understood at that...
But she hadn’t had time to live it. To practice it. And she’d gone out in the field and gotten them all killed.
He’d felt that, too.
And now here was Holly. Yanked from her home, from her life, from her very way of being. There was no telling how enmeshed she’d been in her surrounding territory, if she was anything like her brother—whether she knew it or not.
Her occasionally palpable resentment...
He deserved it. They all did. And if she had any idea she was working with an alpha still reeling from failure and its resulting disaster...
He picked up the phone.
* * *
Holly found herself back up at the well house for the second time that day, only this time she turned around to glare down at the amazing vista and think at it with loud, angry clarity. I am not yours!
That wasn’t quite enough, so she did it out loud, too. “I am not yours!”
Her words rang loudly in the evergreen-studded landscape, and she should have felt just a little bit silly.
She didn’t. And she hoped someone was listening.
Even if no one answered.
“Bother,” she grumbled, and sat on the crest of that final hill to look down on it all. A massive canine paw print was pressed into the dirt at her side, and she stared at it for a good long while.
Wolf? Boy, wouldn’t that explain a lot.
If her family had stayed within a brevis, would she know what her other was? Would she have tried to take it? Would she be initiated, and secure in her Sentinel abilities?
“The big question is, do I care?” She slapped her hand over the paw print, obliterating it, and propped her chin in her hand, looking out over Lannie Stewart’s land. Maybe it wasn’t the thick green woods in which she felt so at home...but if she quit trying to see it through Michigan-colored glasses, the undulating land did have its own beauty. This morning the sky had been crystal clear, bluer than blue and bigger than big. This early evening it was still big enough, but giant, towering clouds shifted across the sky, brilliant white above and glowering bruised blues below and scudding distinct shadows across the ground.
Holly lifted her face not to the sun, but to those clouds—drawn to the majestic purity of them. Without thinking, she stood again—stretching herself tall, arms reaching high and fingers spread wide, every bit of her body yearning to touch those stormy clouds.
She didn’t. She couldn’t. She came off her toes in a huff of disgust, not even sure what she’d been thinking.
Nothing. She hadn’t been thinking anything. She’d just been doing, one woman alone on the hillside and completely out of her own place in the world.
She sat again, this time more slowly. Rather than reach for the sky, she pressed her hands flat to the ground and closed her eyes—looking for something, anything, that might be familiar. She pushed her own awareness, seeking...
Home.
Or some sense of it.
Instead she felt an ugly, distinct sense of rejection. The barrier wasn’t a slap so much as an inexorable refusal to allow her to become part of where she was. It left her sitting perched on the earth, her eyes closed and her teeth biting her lip on the sudden certainty that she might just come flying free of the ground altogether.
She withdrew back inside herself, wrapping her arms around her torso and suddenly shivered—glancing up to find herself in the deep shadow of one of those clouds.
Her breathing slowed; her pounding heart eased. She sat, one woman alone on the hillside, yearning for something she couldn’t define, and listening, listening for even the faintest hint of inexplicable song.
* * *
“Lannie who?”
The woman’s voice at Lannie’s ear sounded puzzled, and he didn’t blame her. No one seemed quite to know what was going on around here.
“Lannie Stewart,” he said, eyeing the sky and pondering the potential for monsoon rain. “I’m in Descanso. Kai’s sister Holly is staying with me for integration work.”
“Ah,” Regan Adler said, wisdom replacing confusion. “The enforced indoctrination.”
He didn’t quite know what to say to that, so he didn’t.
“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe that wasn’t fair. But Holly didn’t even have a chance to see her brother before your people whisked her away. And does she even know her parents have been taken to Brevis?”
Careful, careful. “Her parents made their choices,” Lannie said. “Not that I don’t understand them. But choices have consequences.”
“None of that was Holly’s fault,” Regan said. “But she’s the one paying the price, don’t you think?”
“More than she should,” Lannie agreed. One of the mules came up behind him, reaching through the corral pipe to inspect Lannie’s hair; he reached up to tug on the creature’s chin, and mulish contentment rolled over him. “We’re coming to Cloudview tomorrow to get Holly a bike.”
Silence greeted that pronouncement, if only for a moment. “I thought it wasn’t safe.”
“It’s not safe for Holly to be on her own,” Lannie said. “She isn’t.”
Regan bristled audibly. “You know, we’ve done fine without you so far.”
“Right,” Lannie said, failing to rise to her anger one little bit. “And now you don’t have to.” He let the words settle. “More importantly, Holly doesn’t have to. She has a lot to learn, Regan. I think it would help if she could see you and Kai. If you’re not up for that, I’ll handle it.”
“I have no problem with Holly,” Regan said instantly. “Damn you.”
Lannie laughed. “We’ll call once we have the bike.”
“Fine,” Regan said. “You tell her I’ll be glad to give her perspective. Use those words.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lannie said, without any sign of meekness. He grinned as he ended the call, struck by Regan’s assertively defensive response to Holly’s needs—struck by the similar strengths in the two women.
He reached over his head to give the hovering mule another chin tug. “I think I just might live to regret this.”
When the mule snorted on him, he took it as agreement.
* * *
Lannie was waiting for her when she came down the hill—the folder tucked away, the mules happy with a flake or two of hay to carry them into the evening and the night growing cool around them all. The clouds had stalled, lurking up high with no indication of releasing any rain.
Holly returned in the twilight, moving easily downhill in that rolling walk. Lannie watched her progress with a semihypnotized gaze, instinctively reaching out to share pack song—
She doesn’t want that. He stopped himself short, shifted subtle intent and let himself listen instead—waiting for the ongoing static to make way for the light and airy sense of her, and then breathing it in.
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Doranna Durgin
The Alpha’s reluctant houseguest…Holly Faulkes’s life had been spent in hiding from the Sentinels. But now she is their prisoner, kept by Lannie Stewart, an undeniably sexy alpha wolf determined to initiate her into their world. Lannie’s gift of influence has never failed him before… but Holly is not so easily won. Despite this, the Sentinel can sense the untapped power in Holly that they all desperately need. For a new enemy has risen, one determined to destroy their kind. And Holly can overcome this danger only if Lannie can convince her to accept and release her true identity.
“I am not yours,” Holly proclaimed as she stood taller and straighter.
She might even have stood on her toes, leaning into him physically just as he’d breathed in the song of her. “I am not Sentinel, and I am not yours, and nothing you can do will change that.”
The pack song stuttered back to static, staggering him as much as the connection had done. Holly turned on her heel, going down the steps with the same authority with which she’d come up.
And Lannie stood there with his side aching from her touch and aching for it, and knew she was exactly right.
Sentinels:
Alpha Rising
Doranna Durgin
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
DORANNA DURGIN spent her childhood filling notebooks first with stories and art, and then with novels. She now has over fifteen novels spanning an array of eclectic genres, including paranormal romance, on the shelves. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds web pages, enjoys photography and works with horses and dogs. You can find a complete list of her titles at doranna.net.
Dedicated to tree huggers everywhere!
And with thanks to the Hitchin Post, where they not only help me take care of my own horse, they answer silly questions with a grin. The same could be said of my wondrous agent, come to think of it.
Contents
Cover (#u8f2ac5c2-5d07-5b80-8939-db8592c4ca7f)
Introduction (#u497c1549-392d-5618-82cd-70ec8a81dcc5)
Title Page (#u4921595b-c07c-50ca-a659-b686a110f31c)
About the Author (#ua0b87575-b06b-50f3-8de9-7b16d64ba59c)
Dedication (#uf765754c-b7bc-5c80-927a-0ce37ffc2a83)
Chapter 1 (#udf0b5f99-d99a-5508-9581-74949f78a99c)
Chapter 2 (#ucc5a9be2-a49c-5a1f-af72-2d179b399f68)
Chapter 3 (#u6edd2d4f-344e-537d-a74e-4f38ac8544dc)
Chapter 4 (#u992b30a9-2eb7-56e5-bef3-a878fc70ff44)
Chapter 5 (#u0904491e-0abf-5d21-abc5-ae4d998f668b)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b53f03c3-ae85-51f7-a257-b6c65f83f811)
Lannie Stewart fell back against the brick wall with a startled grunt of pain and a rare flash of temper. Son of a bitch has a knife.
His hand closed around the grip of the small blade now caught between his lower ribs; he twisted it slightly, releasing it...sending the white-hot scrape of sensation back at his attackers in the form of a snarl.
All five of them.
One of them cursed. The others didn’t have a chance. Lannie plowed into them, throwing the knife aside and drawing on the wolf within.
Alpha. No-holds-barred.
That made him faster than they were, and stronger, and riding the awareness of every pack he’d ever built. Not to mention infuriated by their assault of someone older and weaker and not looking for trouble.
A quick flurry of blows—fierce, efficient, effective—and they fell back, stunned not just by the impact but also by Lannie’s unexpected participation in a fight that had started out as five men kicking around what seemed to be easy prey. The men hesitated—suddenly wary, not willing to come back at him and not quite able to run.
Human submission. Or as close as they could be in this moment.
Fury still gripped Lannie, swelling against every breath. He eased back one step, then another—and there he held his ground, breathing hard but still perfectly ready.
The men got the message. They assessed themselves and their injuries, spat a few frustrated curses and bent to haul up their faltering friends. Lannie stood silent, letting them limp away—even if they did so with many a backward glance, not trusting Lannie to stand down when he’d gained such advantage.
But that was what a true alpha did.
Later, he’d find out who these men were and why they’d thought themselves safe not just to trespass, but to claim this space as their own. Most likely they’d come for a bro party involving six-packs and fisticuffs, but Lannie wouldn’t assume. Not with the recent threats—and losses—the Sentinels had taken lately.
For now he watched until they were truly away, loaded up on their four-wheelers and bouncing away through the dusk as if they belonged on this remote and rutted dirt road. But this was Lannie’s own property on the outskirts of the tiny high-country town of Descanso, New Mexico, even if the road itself defined the easement to the old community well house behind him.
Behind that hid the old man who had once again come out here to smoke his occasional joint—this time, apparently, also looking like tempting prey. Or maybe his whimsical coyote nature had once again gotten the better of him, and he’d approached and aggravated the men in some way.
Not that it made any difference, with five against one, youth against age. But the old man knew better.
“Aldo,” Lannie said, warning in his voice. He pressed a hand against his side, feeling the hot blood of a wound still fresh enough that it hadn’t quite pulsed up to pain.
The injury didn’t worry him. Not when he was Sentinel, and belonged to an ancient line of people whose connection to the earth gave them more than just strength and healing and a variety of power-fueled skills. His heritage meant he carried within him the shape of his other—his wolf. His exceptionally strong blood meant that unlike most of his ilk, he could also take the shape of that other.
Alpha wolf.
So no, the injuries and the pain didn’t worry him—but they damn well annoyed the hell out of him.
The thick scent of pot stung the air. Lannie said, “Aldo.”
The old man came out from behind the well house, carefully pinching off his joint. “They made me anxious,” he said, and kept his gaze averted.
Aldo had never been alpha of anything. But until lately, he’d been irrepressible, with a cackle of laughter and a strong side of levity. Now he bore his own bruises, and a vague expression of guilt. “I didn’t do anything, Lannie. This has always been an okay place for me.”
A safe place, on feed-store land. Lannie’s cell rang, a no-nonsense tone cutting through the falling darkness—a rare connection up on this mountainside. Lannie didn’t even look as he silenced the call and shoved the phone back into his pocket. “It is an okay place for you.”
Or it should have been, and now Lannie’s temper rode high on a flare of hot pain and swelling bruises. If Aldo’s recent alarm hadn’t slapped through the pack connection and drawn him out here into the fading heat of dusk, the old man would have gone down under that knife. Aldo was a strong sixty, but he was still sixty.
“We’ll sort it out,” Lannie said, lifting his hand to assess the bleeding. Dammit, this was one of his favorite shirts.
“Let me help,” Aldo said. “You know I have some healing.”
“So do we all,” Lannie told him, already feeling the burn of his blood as the Sentinel in him took hold; the bleeding would stop and the wound would seal. And then it would leave him to grouch and ouch, wisely not spending resources on a wound that no longer posed a threat.
Aldo ran a hand over thick, grizzled hair cut short, tucking his stubby joint into the pocket of a shirt that had seen better days even before its recent misadventure. “You know what I mean.”
“It’s fine,” Lannie said. A vibration against his butt cheek signaled cell phone voice mail. “Let’s get back to the store. Faith is worried.”
Aldo squinted at him, cautiously pleased. “She tell you that, or you just picked up on it...?”
Lannie made an amused sound in his throat. “Do you think she had to tell me?” Not when he was enough of an alpha to take a stand when necessary, to back down when appropriate, to remain in the background unless needed. And to have a singular skill for building teams and pack connections, even among the mundane humans who had no sense or knowledge of his other.
It was a skill so deeply ingrained that he’d learned to factor it into every part of his life—the depth of his friendships, the instant flare of his attractions, the strength of his anger.
“Yeah, you just picked up on it with your pack mojo,” Aldo concluded, and rightly so. Faith’s rising concern had come through in an undertone, the taste of anxiety with the faint whisper of identity that belonged to the young woman named Faith.
They struck out across the land of transitional high prairie, where ponderosa pine mingled with cedar and oaks and the land came studded with cactus and every other kind of prickly little scrub plant. The undulating slopes took them down to the feed-store lot with its storage barn, back corrals and low, no-nonsense storefront building.
An unfamiliar car sat in the lot out front of the otherwise bare lot, and Lannie thought again about that unexpected phone call, his annoyance rising. Sabbatical from Brevis duty means leave me alone.
Faith bolted out the store’s back door, all goth eyes and piercings. “It’s Brevis,” she said in unwitting confirmation, a little walleyed along the way—and so thin of Sentinel blood that no one knew just what her other might have been. A little bit rebellious, a little bit damaged, a whole lot of runaway just barely now of age.
She had no idea that Brevis—the regional Sentinel headquarters—had once quietly nudged her in Lannie’s direction. She was one of his now. Home pack.
“What are they doing here?” she demanded. “I’m not going back in there. Do you think they can tell I’m—that I was—oh, for butt’s sake. Look at you. What did you get him into, Aldo?”
“Nothing!” Aldo protested, trying to sound righteously indignant and not quite pulling it off. Hard to, with the scent of pot still following him around. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Lannie told her, and she closed her mouth on a response sure to have been stinging, regarding him uncertainly. “I’m fine,” he said. “Why don’t you help Aldo clean up in the barn. The Brevis folks can cool their heels a moment.” Because Brevis or not, this was his turf. They didn’t get to upset his people.
Especially when they hadn’t warned him of their arrival in the first place.
Especially when they shouldn’t have even been here. Not after how things had gone down with the last group he’d pulled into pack status. Too little time, too many challenges...and one damaged individual who had fooled them all.
He headed for the barn, where the stairs along the outside led up to a section of finished loft. Before he reached the top step, he’d peeled off the shirt and wiped himself down with it, heading straight to the bathroom to slap an adhesive strip over the now-barely-oozing wound.
The bruises were what they were; he didn’t so much as glance in the distorted old medicine-cabinet mirror before heading out to the half-walled bedroom area to hunt up a fresh shirt, tugging it on with care.
The phone rang again. He let the ringtones cut the air while he stood quietly in the rugged old barn loft...eyes closed, recent encounter pushed away...muting the underlying home pack song in favor of the Sentinel whole. Shutting himself away from his own people, in spite of their upset, to prepare himself for whatever Brevis had come to ask of him.
For a strange, brief moment, the home song resisted his touch. It spun around him in a dizzying whirl, closing in like a warder’s web and throbbing with an ugly, unfamiliar dissonance.
He took it as a rebuke. It was bad timing to interrupt pack song in the wake of such disturbance, and he knew it. He swallowed away the unease of it, settling into his own skin. Felt the aches of being there, and settled into that, too, accepting and dismissing them.
The dissonance slowly faded.
Finally, then, he reached for his larger pack sense, the one that made him ready for the outside world and whatever Brevis might ask from him. The bigger picture—the one that would ride him hard.
More so, in the wake of Jody. In the wake of her death. In the wake of all their deaths.
One more breath, deep and quiet, and then...he was no longer just plain Lannie. He no longer hummed to the tune of his own small pack but had set them—temporarily—aside, so existing pack song wouldn’t interfere with the formation of whatever was to come.
He was the unentangled alpha that Brevis had come to see.
* * *
Babysitters.
Holly Faulkes wanted to spit the words at them—the man and the woman who’d brought her to this tiny New Mexico town of Descanso. They’d driven an hour through the desert mountains, pulling her away from her family during a still-heated discussion about her past, her present and her future—and all so she could wait in this cool, shadowed feed store with its cluttered shelves and dry dust, its thick scent of hay and oats and molasses and leather.
Sentinel babysitters.
As if she hadn’t even been part of the recent Cloudview conversation, sitting beside her parents in silence—all of them tense, all of them terse. As good as prisoners in the old town hotel.
And as if she hadn’t just missed meeting her brother Kai for the very first time since childhood, hearing of his feral beauty and of the lynx that peered out from under his skin at every turn, but being whisked away from both Cloudview and her parents before the Sentinels could call Kai in from the mountains.
Sentinels. If not exactly the enemy, also not her friends. Not considering she’d hidden from them since she’d been born, sheltered first by her family and then by deliberate, active choice. God, she didn’t want to be here. And at twenty-four years old, it should have stayed her choice.
“Are you all right?” The woman eyed her. Her name was Mariska, and she was far too knowing for Holly’s taste. Far closer to bodyguard than escort, with a short sturdy form both rounded and strong—not to mention a sharp gaze that gave away more than Holly was probably supposed to see. So did her complexion, a distinctly beautiful brown shade that might have come from south India but instead came from the bear within her.
“You’re kidding, eh?” Holly said. “No, I’m not all right. Why can’t you people just leave us alone? Leave me alone?”
Mariska transferred her gaze to Holly’s hands, where they chafed against her arms in spite of the distinct heat still overlaying the fading summer day.
“Being here makes my skin crawl,” Holly told the woman, which was only the blunt truth. She’d felt it before, this sensation...on her Upper Michigan home turf, when she first started a restoration on an old clogged water feature. But nothing like this. One final squeeze of her upper arms and she let her hands fall. “You have no right to do this to me.”
But she’d always known they would. Just as she’d known that her parents would pay the price for hiding their family to protect Kai.
“Maybe we don’t,” Mariska said. “But we hope you’ll come to understand.” She lifted her chin at Jason, the tall man who served as her partner; they exchanged commentary in a silent but very real conversation, the likes of which Holly had previously seen only between her parents. Jason raised his phone, hitting the redial button. Again. Trying to reach the man they’d called Lannie with a strange mix of familiarity and deference.
“If you’re trying to reach him, why don’t you just talk to him?” Holly gestured between them in reference to the silent exchange they’d just had, only peripherally aware that the crawling sensation in her blood had eased.
“Lannie prefers that we don’t.” The woman gave her a wry look, one that said she had chosen her words diplomatically. “Besides, not all of us do that.”
“I don’t,” Holly muttered. Because she didn’t need it and she didn’t want it. She had no intention of letting someone else in her head—
It’s not real.
No way.
“What did you say?” Holly asked, a wary tone that drew Mariska’s surprised glance. Her glance would have turned into a question, had not a ringing phone pealed from the back of the store.
Jason made an exasperated face. “You might have picked up instead of just coming in,” he muttered, slipping his phone away—but he sounded more relieved than he might have.
Holly looked at him in surprise, understanding. “You weren’t sure he’d come.”
“Oh,” Jason said drily, “we were pretty sure he’d come. We just aren’t sure—”
“Shut up,” Mariska said, sharp and hasty, her gaze probing the back of the store.
It’s not real.
Holly spotted the new arrival against a backdrop of hanging bridle work and lead ropes, and understood immediately that this man owned this place.
That he owned any place in which he chanced to stand.
It wasn’t his strength, and it wasn’t the quiet but inexorable gaze he turned on her companions. It wasn’t even the first shock of his striking appearance—clean features with even lines, strong brows and nose and jaw, a sensual curve of lower lip and eyes blue enough to show from across the store. His hair was longer than stylish these days, layered and curling with damp around the edges.
No, it was more than all that.
“Oh, turn it off,” Mariska said.
Something changed—Holly didn’t even quite know what. Only that he was suddenly just a man in a casual blue plaid shirt yoked over the shoulder, half-buttoned and hanging out over jeans and boots, a heavy oval belt buckle evident beneath.
Cowboy, Holly thought, and found herself surprised by that. For the first time, she noticed not only bruises, but fresh bruises. A little smear of blood on a freshly washed cheek, a stain coming through the side of the shirt. An odd look on his face as he watched her, something both startled and somehow just as wary as she was—and then that, too, faded.
“That’s better,” Mariska grumbled, but the words held grudging respect. She exchanged a glance with Holly that was nothing to do with their individual reasons for being here and everything to do with a dry, shared appreciation for what they’d seen—a recognition that Holly had seen it, too.
The man rolled one sleeve and then the other, joining them with a loose walk that also somehow spoke of strength. “A little warning might have been nice,” he said, a quiet voice with steel behind it.
Jason held up the phone. “We called.”
“Did you?” the man said flatly. He eyed Holly with enough intent to startle her—as if he assessed her on a level deeper than she could even perceive.
She suddenly wished she wasn’t still wearing well-worn work gear—tough slim-fit khakis over work boots and a long-tailed berry-colored shirt. Her hair was still yanked back into the same ponytail high at the back of her head, and it was a wonder her gloves weren’t jammed into her back pocket instead of in her overnighter.
She released a breath when the man turned away from her.
Jason scowled, eyes narrowing, and Mariska stepped on whatever he was about to say. “Look, Lannie, this all happened fast, and we’re making it up as we go. There’s no cell reception between here and Cloudview—and we did call as soon as we could get through. If we’d been able to talk to you—”
Silently, she meant. Even Holly understood that much. But Mariska had said it. Lannie prefers that we don’t.
Lannie didn’t raise his voice...somehow he didn’t need to. “You aren’t supposed to be reaching out to me at all.”
“No, sir,” Jason said, just a little bit miserable. “The Jody thing. I know. But that wasn’t your fault, and we—” And then he stopped, apparently thinking better of the whole thing—and who wouldn’t, from the quick, hard pale-eyed look Lannie gave him?
Holly found herself smiling a little. After hours in the care of these two, unable to so much as use a toilet without an escort, it was gratifying to see the tables turned. Even if she did wonder about the Jody thing.
But Lannie didn’t linger on the moment. He ran a hand through his damp hair, carelessly raking it back into some semblance of order. “You want coffee?”
“Holly drinks tea, if you have it,” Mariska said, apparently well-briefed on all things Holly. “So do I.”
Jason looked as though he’d drink whatever Lannie put before him.
They joined Lannie in a tiny nook in the back hallway, which had a coffeemaker and electric teakettle, a diminutive refrigerator, a sink and half a box of donuts sitting on an upended fifty-gallon drum. Lannie reached for the teakettle plug...and hesitated there, leaning heavily on the counter.
As if for that moment, the counter was the only thing holding him up.
Holly shot a startled look at Mariska and Jason, finding them involved in some sort of mostly silent but definitely emphatic disagreement. By the time she looked again at Lannie, the teakettle was firing up and Lannie had pulled a bowl stuffed with tea bags from the narrow, open-faced cabinet above the sink—right next to the big green tin of Bag Balm, some half-used horse wormer and an open bag of castration bands.
“So,” Holly said. “Lannie. My name is Holly Faulkes, and I don’t want to be here.”
He pulled four mugs from the half-sized drainer hanging in the sink, and she realized she hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know—but that unlike everyone else in this mess, he wasn’t impatient or annoyed by it.
“Phelan,” he told her, swirling the coffee in its carafe. “Phelan Stewart. But yes. You can call me Lannie.” He filled one of the mugs with coffee and handed it out to Jason without looking; the teakettle activity built to a fever pitch. “What’s your story, Holly Faulkes?”
“What’s yours, eh?” she countered. “Why are they dumping me on you?”
Lannie held out the tea bags without any visible reaction, and Holly plucked out a random blend and passed the bowl to Mariska. Lannie put his hip against the counter and sipped coffee—only to immediately dump it down the sink, exposing a gleam of torso through the gaping shirt and annoying Holly simply because she’d noticed.
“Faith,” he said, as if that explained it all. And then, “Holly Faulkes, if you’d come with a group, I’d say you all needed to become a team. Since you’re here alone, you’re probably not playing well with others in some way.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, patently ignoring Jason’s dilemma over whether to try the coffee. “You must be important to them.”
She found herself amused. “Because Brevis only bothers you with the important things, eh?”
“Something like that. And the fact that I’m on sabbatical.” He held out his hand. After a hesitation, Holly offered him her tea bag. He took Mariska’s, plunked them both into mugs, poured hot water on top and handed the mugs over. “Your turn. Or would you rather have them tell your story?”
Holly relaxed, curling her hands around the mug. He might be Sentinel, but he wasn’t pushing her. He’d given her options.
Even if they were both bad ones.
So she told him the truth. “I’m not a Sentinel, I don’t want to be a Sentinel, and I’m not going to drink your Sentinel Kool-Aid no matter how you dress it up in obligation and heroics.”
She heard Mariska’s intake of breath, but Lannie’s quick blue glance quelled her. “Sentinel isn’t something you get to choose.”
“And yet it’s a choice I made a long time ago,” she told him, not an instant’s hesitation. “It’s a choice my family made—that we were forced to make. That’s not something you can change, eh? But it’s obvious you’ll have to work that out for yourself.”
“You’ll stay long enough for me to do that?”
“As if that’s a choice.” But she felt the briefest flash of hope, felt herself halfway out the door.
“Brevis pulled Mariska in from Tucson. So either you’re in a great deal of danger or they think you’ll run—and if you do, that you’ll be good at it.”
“Run?” Holly shot Mariska a baleful look. “How stupid do you think I am? You people already found me once. My best chance of getting on with life is to let you figure out what a waste of time this is. If you don’t, then we’ll see about running.”
“Fair enough,” he murmured. “Give me your word on that and these two will leave, and we can get you settled.”
Holly’s temper flared hot and strong. She set the mug on the counter with a thump. “Pay attention, why don’t you? I’ll be settled when I’m back home in the Upper Peninsula, rebuilding the business you’ve just destroyed!”
She transferred her glare to Jason and Mariska. “And meanwhile, who’s feeding my feral cats? Who’s holding my best friend’s hand when she has her first baby? Do you people even think about what you’ve done, or do you just ride through on the strength of your astonishing arrogance?”
Jason summoned up a bright smile, only a hint of panic behind it. “Ohh-kay, then,” he said. “My job is done. I’ll just wait in the car.”
“Jason,” Mariska said, annoyance in her voice.
“Thanks for the coffee.” Jason inched behind Holly to put the mug on the barrel. “Such as it was.”
“Faith,” Lannie said again—but his voice didn’t have the same quiet strength, and Holly shot a look at him, finding his knuckles white at the edge of the counter and his tanned face gone pale, his shoulders tight...his expression faintly surprised.
But only until he saw her watching. Then the weakness disappeared; he returned her gaze with an even expression.
Holly, it seemed, wasn’t the only one hiding the truth of herself from the Sentinels.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_ddf520f0-fe40-5f76-b925-a567376bec69)
For all her resentment, Holly found herself regretting Mariska and Jason’s departure, as they unloaded her single, quickly packed suitcase, handed Lannie a thin file folder and drove away.
They were, if nothing else, familiar.
Not like Lannie Stewart—not only unfamiliar, but just a little more Sentinel than she wanted to deal with on her own.
But she’d known all her life that this day might come. If she blamed the Sentinels for anything, it was for being the kind of organization that sent her family into hiding in the first place.
Lannie locked the door behind them, made sure the open sign was flipped to Closed and went behind the cash register counter to do...
To do cash register things, probably. She didn’t care. Although she had the impression that he was, somehow, actually assessing her. That his attention never left her.
Screw that. She glanced pointedly at the full darkness that had fallen since her arrival. “I haven’t eaten yet.” Of course, she hadn’t wanted to. Until he’d come into the store, her stomach had been unsettled by that funky discomfiting feeling under her skin, the faintest bitter taste in her mouth. How he’d buffered that, she didn’t know. But now her stomach growled.
He made a sound that must have been acknowledgment. “In, out, or fast?”
“It’s your game. You choose.”
He stopped what he was doing, a bank bag in hand, and she drew breath at the blue flint in his gaze. “Nothing about this is a game.”
“Lannie!” A young woman’s voice rang out from the back of the store. A waifish young woman emerged from between the shelving, her hair dyed black, her makeup dramatic and her piercings generous; she dragged in her wake a wiry older man with mussed hair and a bruised face—eye puffy, lip split and swollen. “Lannie, did you see what those men did to him? What business did they have back there, anyway?”
“None,” Lannie dropped the cash bag on the scratched counter over a glass-front display of fancy show spurs and silver conchas, and lifted his brow at her. It had been her task, apparently.
“That’s not my fault,” she protested, confirming it. “First you lit out after Aldo, and then those strongbloods came when they should be leaving you alone—” She stopped, scowling, her attention riveted on him. “They got you, too. I knew it.”
“Faith.” It was a single word, but it had quelling impact. Holly fiddled with her suitcase handle, and it occurred to her that she could run. She’d never promised. And they weren’t paying any particular attention.
Lannie looked down at the splotch of blood at his side, briefly pressing a hand to it.
“Five to one,” the old man said helpfully. “Our boy took care of it.”
Lannie grunted. “No one’s boy,” he said, but Holly heard affection for the old man behind his words. “And it’s not bleeding anymore.”
“You’ll need food,” the girl said, as if she’d somehow taken over. She closed the distance to the counter with decisive steps, picking up the bag. “You go. I’ll take care of this.”
“Faith,” he said, and it sounded like an old conversation. Finally he shook his head, a capitulation of some sort. “Learn to make the coffee, would you?”
Faith tossed her head in a way that made Holly think the coffee wouldn’t change. “See you tomorrow, Lannie.” And then, on her way out the back again, she offered Holly an arch glance. “Don’t you cause him trouble, whoever you are.”
Startled—offended—Holly made a sound that came out less of a sputter and more of a warning. But the young woman was already moving out through the same aisle that had brought her.
The elderly man held out his hand, a spark of interest in his eye. “I’m Aldo. And this is Lannie.”
There was nothing to do but take that dry and callous grip for a quick shake, contact that brought a whiff of something potent. Pot? She startled, looking to Lannie for confirmation without thinking about it, and found a resigned expression there.
Lannie came out from behind the counter. “She knows who I am, Aldo. And don’t you go charming her.”
“No,” Aldo said, looking more closely at Holly. “Not this one. She’s all yours, Lannie. I’m sleeping in the barn tonight, good with you? Good. You’ll be right as rain tomorrow, see if you’re not.”
Holly took a deep breath in the wake of his abrupt departure. Then another. Trying to find her bearings, and to refocus on the resentful fury that had gotten her through these past twenty-four hours so far. “Let’s get one thing straight,” she said. “I’m not all yours. Not in any sense of the word.”
“Not yet,” he said mildly, and caught her elbow as if she would have stalked by, luggage and all, to batter her way through that locked door and out into the world. “The truck’s out back. Let’s eat.”
* * *
Lannie tossed the suitcase into the truck bed and climbed into the pickup with a stiffness that made him very much rue that five against one.
He let her open her own door simply because she needed the chance to slam it closed again. And she did, too—not once, but twice, then reached for the seat belt with a brusque efficiency that spoke as much for her familiarity with this model truck as for her simmering anger.
He inserted the key and waited. It didn’t take long.
“Not yet?” Holly made a noise in her throat. Lannie took it for warning—and he wondered how strong her Sentinel blood ran, and if anyone else in her family took the cat.
He turned to look at her, unhurried, hand resting on the gear shift between them. “That’s why you’re here.”
She snorted, a wholly human sound. “So, what—so I can submit to you?”
He shook his head. “So you can figure out that’s not what this is about.” And he kept his voice matter-of-fact but couldn’t help the impact of her words. Too independent. Not just struggling to form pack bonds, but resisting them with everything she had. What was Brevis thinking?
She lifted a lip of derision at his words and crossed her arms over her chest. The feed-store front light hit the end of its timer cycle, plunging them into darkness.
But Lannie had a Sentinel’s blue-tinged night vision, and he saw her perfectly. Knew her hair to be brown unto black, and drawn into a shiny fall of a ponytail. Saw her upswept eyes to be equally brown unto black, and snapping mad beneath brows that might ordinarily be softly angled, but now just frowned. A thick ruffle of bangs scattered over her forehead, offsetting features that could have looked at home under a high-society do...if it weren’t for her rugged work clothes and the matter-of-fact prowl beneath her movements, an innately graceful glimpse of her other.
She tipped her head at him in annoyed impatience, quite possibly not aware of his scrutiny or how well he could see her. But he felt nothing except what he’d perceived in this woman before he’d even quite seen her: a throb of hurt and anger and fear, somehow striking deeply into his own soul and spiking a very personal, protective response. In spite of knowing better.
It’s not real. It never was. It’s not personal.
It was just who he was. That quick connection, that ability to spin it into something more permanent.
Even when it wasn’t right for either of them.
She gave him a wary glance. “Did you say something?”
He turned the key. “Not yet.”
He drove her on winding roads to the other side of the small town, where the ElkNAntlers Bar & Grill scented the area with barbecue and sizzling steak. He waited for Holly at the front of the truck, and then waited again inside the entrance, giving her time to absorb the ambience—families scattered around tables, a bar off to the side, and antlers...
Everywhere. Mulies, elk and pronghorn—antlers high, antlers low, and the occasional full cape head mount. And, naturally, a few token jackalopes scattered over the bar.
The owners, Jack and Barbara, had been aiming for quirky humor. Lannie thought of it more as Dr. Seuss.
Barbara waved at them from where she unloaded a tray of glasses at the bar, raising her voice over the mixed early-evening crowd. “Hi, Lannie. Find yourself a spot.”
Holly gave the interior one final skeptical look and chose a table from afar. He wasn’t surprised when she led him to a corner, and he wasn’t surprised when her limber, graceful movement only reinforced his initial impression of her other. Her clothes might have been rugged, but the bright thermal top hugged a lean, curvy figure, and khaki pants followed the roll of her hips to perfection. Sturdy ankle-high boots should have looked clunky, but instead only reinforced the confident precision with which she placed her feet.
Something inside him tightened.
But his response to her wasn’t real. However intensely he felt her presence as the pack bond formed between them, the effect would fade when she moved on to her true place in the Sentinels. It always did.
But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t complicate things along the way. Or that he didn’t still need time to deal with how it so recently had.
She slipped into her chair and picked up the plastic-coated menu, glancing at Lannie only long enough to reassure herself that he had, in fact, followed.
Barbara appeared at their table to slap down a complimentary basket of jerky chips. “Welcome to the ElkNAntlers,” she said. “Need a rundown of the menu, or are you good here?”
“I’m fine,” Holly said. Her smile changed her face, bringing stern lines into beauty; it quite suddenly caught Lannie’s breath. Dammit. “And I’ll take whatever you suggest from the barbecue side of the menu.”
“Smart woman,” Barbara said, collecting the menu and glancing at Lannie. “You?”
“Whatever you bring her.” Lannie lifted a wry shoulder. “It’s not like I haven’t had it all.”
Barbara grinned, tucked her pencil behind her ear, and took Lannie’s menu, too. “I’ll surprise you, then.” She nodded to someone behind Lannie as she left, and a young man appeared to pour them each a generous glass of ice water.
“Drink it,” Lannie advised as Holly simply eyed hers. “The desert and the altitude will get you if you don’t stay wet.” He drank half of his in one go, knowing he’d done himself no good turns out by the well pump house, and waited until she’d done the same. “Exactly why are you here, Holly Faulkes?”
She looked at him as though he might just be a little bit insane. “Because I didn’t hide well enough or run fast enough, youbetcha.” When he didn’t rise to that, she asked, “Who’s Jody? And why is she a problem now?”
He stiffened. He hadn’t thought she’d catch it through the undertone so quickly when she had so much adjustment to do on her own account. He certainly hadn’t expected her to parry with it. Or to recognize just how it affected him.
Too little time, too much resistance. Both Holly and Jody were without the concept of teamwork that made Sentinel field operations viable—and if Holly had both Jody’s arrogant certainty that her way was the right way, and Jody’s willingness to make such choices outside the team framework, then Holly also lacked the most basic foundation of what it meant to be Sentinel in the first place. And Holly had spent her life in extreme independence.
Not teamwork. Not the faintest suggestion of it.
So he didn’t answer her. He couldn’t answer her. Not with the voices of Jody’s team still riding him, the memories of their deaths ripping through his lingering pack link.
He tried to ease the strain in his voice and only half succeeded. “Talk to me. They brought you here for a reason. A good one.”
“That’s right. Because Brevis only bothers you with the important things.” She shrugged. “Didn’t Mariska give you my file?”
“This is the story the way you’d tell it, not them.”
She sat back in the chair to regard him. “It’s not much of a story. My brother needed to hide from you and the Core. When he was fifteen, we left him stashed up near Cloudview and we went to hide in other places so we couldn’t be used against him.”
“How old were you?”
“Not very old. Eight? Nine, maybe?” She shrugged. “What’s it matter? Old enough to know that if you people had been willing to leave him alone, our lives would have been so much different. I wouldn’t have a brother I don’t even know...my mother wouldn’t have cried so much...and I wouldn’t be here now, when my life is somewhere else entirely.”
Another challenge that he didn’t take.
After a narrow-eyed interlude, she shrugged and filled the silence. “Things changed. This spring, he came out of hiding to save his turf from the Core—and to save the rest of you from what the Core had planned. He’s a good man, my brother. Maybe I’ll get the chance to know him now.” Another dark look, aimed his way. “Supposing the rest of you let me.”
Lannie could figure out the remainder of the story. “Once your brother was out in the open, Brevis realized you existed, too.” And the Sentinels didn’t allow strongbloods to roam unconnected. Such individuals had too much potential to create havoc...and Brevis had too much need of them.
He gave her a sharp glance, suddenly understanding. “Kai Faulkes,” he said. “Your brother.” The long-hidden, barely tamed Sentinel who took the Lynx as his other and who had almost single-handedly undermined the Core’s infiltration of his high mountain paradise.
“Kai Faulkes,” she said, her pride coming through in the lift of her chin.
And then the Sentinels had found her, sent a strike team and extracted her from her life. For her own protection, but not without self-interest.
Right now she probably saw only the self-interest.
“Look,” she said, spearing him with a direct gaze. “This isn’t my world. Your fights aren’t my fights. I have no training. My folks could never take the forms of their others, and I never even tried. I don’t know what I’d turn out to be and I don’t care.”
He wondered if she saw the irony of it. Kai Faulkes was a Sentinel’s Sentinel. He lived his other to the fullest in the absence of Brevis; he lived their mission of protection as naturally as breathing.
Holly didn’t even know what her other was.
“Don’t you get it?” She gestured impatiently at his failure to react. “You made me this way. Now it is what it is, and you can’t change that. I’m not one of you and I never will be.”
He straightened, frozen in the act of unwrapping his silverware, suddenly understanding the unspoken piece. Should have read that file. “You haven’t been initiated, have you?”
She made that small, catlike noise of offense in her throat again. “That’s none of your business!”
Of course she hadn’t. She’d been so young when her family separated, going from inconspicuous to deeply underground.
But initiation changed everything. She wouldn’t truly know who she was, or what she was, until she had that first adult connection with another Sentinel—careful, skilled intimacy, bringing her powers to fruition.
No wonder she’d never truly felt the itch to reach out to her other in spite of its expression in her movement, her mannerisms and even her expressions.
“Stop staring,” she told him, mouth flattening in annoyance. Ears flattening, head tipped just so. “And stop doing that thing.”
“That thing,” he repeated without inflection.
“Yes, that thing.” She leaned over the table, creating such privacy as was possible in the tavern. “What you were doing in the store, and Mariska told you to turn it off. That. Stop it.”
Ah. The alpha. When he’d put his unexpected visitors on notice.
But he couldn’t turn it off because he hadn’t turned it on. Whatever she saw came from her own perceptions of his basic Sentinel nature as much as his presentation. No doubt she had other perceptions she wasn’t used to managing outside her normal life, and she’d probably adjusted to a certain element of heightened sight and scent, but this...
This would be new. And different. And she’d been thrust in the middle of it.
He found himself reaching for her pack song. Through pack song, he could understand her, assess her, support her—
But an unexpected, unprecedented crackle of mental static snapped through his mind. What the hell? Surely she wasn’t resisting him; she didn’t know enough to do it. Surely he could get at least a hint of her—a single note, a thread of inner melody...
An orchestra.
Her music flooded him, waking the alpha after all. His pack sense rose to absorb and receive and, just maybe, drown in the rich complexity she offered. He watched her eyes widen and then narrow, and a thread of anger gained clarity in her song.
She half rose from her chair, elbows on the table as she closed some of the distance between them. “Stop it,” she said, but there was no force behind those breathless words. She took a visible breath, a flush bringing out the color on her cheeks, dark eyes and dark hair contrasting against otherwise fair skin.
Not that stopping it was an option, even if he tried. Not with the glory of all she was coming at him, unfiltered and unfettered.
Her voice gained hard strength. “Fine,” she said. “Be an asshole. Your friend can bring my dinner over to the bar, because that’s where I’ll be sitting. Without you.”
She didn’t storm away. She didn’t have to. She made her point with the rolling precision of her stride, the hard line of her jaw...the straightness of her back.
Whoa.
Lannie could do nothing but stare after her, only beginning to understand that she’d done to him as much as he’d done to her—and she had no idea.
Maybe because it wasn’t her fault. Maybe it was the pack mojo gone wild. Maybe—
Barbara slid between tables to deposit his meal in front of him, whisking Holly’s abandoned napkin out of the way to do the same for her. “Now, when she gets back from the ladies’, you be sure to tell her I’ll swap this out if it’s not to her liking.”
Lannie wasn’t quite ready to trust his voice; he nodded at the bar, where Holly had taken a spot apart from the rest and hitched her hip up over the bar stool, already reaching for the nearby dish of pistachios.
Her back was still stiff enough to tell the tale.
Barbara’s brow rose in surprise. “Never thought I’d see that day,” she told him, and reclaimed Holly’s deep-dish plate of shredded elk over crisped sweet potato medallions. She slipped in to place the plate beside Holly, her words clear enough to Lannie’s wolf. “Here you go, honey. You want a beer to go with that?”
Holly nodded, and Lannie jerked his attention to the casual approach of the slender man who took a seat in Holly’s empty chair.
This time when Lannie drew on his alpha, he did it deliberately. He eyed the man without welcome and without apology.
The man met his gaze without rising to that challenge. Faint concern lived in the lines gathering at his brow. “I know I’m intruding,” he said. “Hear me out. We have a common interest.”
Lannie gave the man a sharper look. He’d dressed out of Cabela’s outfitter catalog for the evening—high country fisherman casual, all fresh from the package—and while he hadn’t quite shaved down his balding head, he’d come close enough for dignity. His watch was high quality without being ostentatious; his single ring was black onyx in a masculine setting and his ears went unadorned.
No particular threat there. But on this night when Lannie had taken responsibility for Kai Faulkes’s vulnerable, wayward sister, he didn’t much like coincidences. “How many of your conversations start out this way and still end well?”
“I’m interrupting,” the man said, a touch of car salesman in his demeanor. “I understand that. But I need to talk to you about what happened earlier this evening.”
Lannie kept his stare flat. “Earlier this evening I closed down my store, met a friend for dinner and came here. You’re sitting in her seat.”
Earlier this evening, he’d taken a knife between the ribs and still put five men down...and then walked away from it.
But this man couldn’t know that unless he’d been part of it somehow.
“I’m not doing this well,” the man said. “I’m more than aware that under other circumstances, we not only wouldn’t be companionable, we wouldn’t even speak—”
And then a cluster of casually raucous men moved to the bar, and Lannie saw their faces.
Familiar faces. Battered faces. Only four of them, because the fifth apparently hadn’t recovered from the consequences of sticking a knife into Lannie.
And there was Holly, sitting alone and upset, and completely unaware.
Lannie didn’t much like coincidences.
“You should have talked faster.” He rose from his chair with the wolf coming out strong, already silent in movement. “Your friends tipped your hand.” He hesitated, briefly, to loom over the smaller man. “Whatever you want...this was a mistake.”
“You misunderstand,” the man said, drawing back—but at Lannie’s expression, his protests died back into annoyance. After a final hesitation, he rose from his seat and strode for the exit. Lannie might have grabbed his arm—might have demanded an explanation—but Holly came first. He headed for the bar.
Barbara crossed his path with empty serving tray in hand and caught sight of his expression, freezing there a moment. “Lannie?” But then she saw the men, and muttered a curse. “I see them. But this is a family place, Lannie.” He passed her by, snagging the tray from her unsuspecting grip along the way. She let him have it but still followed him. “Lannie!”
Lannie moved in beside Holly. She made a startled sound and sent a glare his way.
“Right,” he said. “You’re pissed at me. I get it. Let’s go.”
“I’m eating.” She turned away from him and forked up some sauce-smeared sweet potato.
“Lannie,” Barbara said from behind, “what—”
“These guys are not our friends.” Lannie caught Holly’s gaze, nodding at the little gang. They hadn’t spotted him yet, but they’d be looking. They were just having fun along the way.
“I see them.” She took a swig of her own bottled beer, and her Upper Peninsula accent came out strong. “They’re rude. Big wha. I run my own crews, Mr. Stewart—you think I haven’t handled rude before?”
“Holly.” Lannie took the beer from her, set it on the bar, and ignored her fully justified glare of astonishment. “These guys are not our friends.” It didn’t matter that Lannie got no sense of Core from them; he wasn’t sensitive to that particular stench in the first place. They’d already attacked his pack, and they’d attacked him. They were the enemy, and he needed to get Holly out of here, and he told her so with his expression and with his eyes and with every bit of the alpha within.
Holly’s eyes widened; she closed her mouth on whatever she’d been about to say and cast a more thoughtful glance at the men, three of whom were giving the bartender grief while the fourth caught sight of Lannie and stiffened, his expression darkening.
“Uh-oh,” said Barbara from behind him, and hastened away.
“I’m hungry,” Lannie told Holly. “Grab your meal and your beer and we’ll eat somewhere else.”
By then the gang was headed their way. Lannie took the step in front of Holly and felt more than saw as she slid off the stool to stand at his shoulder.
“Look who we found.” The lead guy came to a stop, his expression just a little too bright, his bruises from earlier in the day blooming puffy and dramatic. “The idiot who showed up in the middle of nowhere to mess with our business.”
Lannie kept his voice even and his hands low. “Out in the middle of nowhere happens to have been my property. And the old man you beat up happens to be my friend.”
The man offered him a nasty smile. “You should have thought of this moment before you butted in.”
“There were five of you and one of me, and I’m still standing. This time there are only four of you. Is this really something you want everyone to see?” He didn’t, at the moment, feel the aches. He didn’t feel the wound on his side. And he didn’t hold the alpha inside.
“Let’s just go.” Holly’s low voice held disgust rather than fear. “You were right. We can eat somewhere else.”
A camera flashed from behind Lannie, highlighting the man—tall, muscle-bound and graced with a graying blond beard that crawled unmanaged down his throat to his chest. His friends started as the flash went off again, and Barbara made a satisfied noise in her throat. “Got ’em. Now you scoot, Lannie. If they wanted to take a poke at you in my place, they should’ve been faster about it.”
“Yes’m,” Lannie said, easing a step aside without taking his eyes off the men. This would be the moment, if they—
The big guy in front went for it, dropping his shoulder for driving punch that would have caught Lannie pretty much where the knife had.
Lannie whipped the serving tray up between them, bracing it against the sharp impact; hot pain tore at his side. As the man cried out and grabbed his injured hand, Lannie yanked the tray up and cracked it in half over his head.
The man dropped like a rock. Lannie held the other three with his eye, waiting that extra beat. When they exchanged an uncertain glance, he dropped the tray halves on top of their fallen friend.
Barbara had more than a camera; she had a short bat, and she tapped it meaningfully against her palm. “We done here, boys?”
That could have been it. That should have been it. But the fallen man surged upward with offended fury and Lannie snarled it back at him, grabbing the bat from Barbara—
Heavy glass thudded dully against a hard head. The man collapsed in a moaning heap.
Holly looked ruefully at her beer bottle—upended and now empty. She placed the bottle carefully upright on the bar. “Maybe we can get those dinners to go?”
Chapter 3 (#ulink_e240d49e-0d01-59cb-92e0-a66fa2c579ba)
Awesome. A bar fight.
Holly sat on her suitcase in the bed of Lannie’s pickup, a take-out container balanced on her knees, a new beer at her feet and anger tempered only by the weight of fatigue. She’d done no more than catnap since the Sentinels had snatched her from her home, and right now it didn’t seem to matter that the food was good, the incredible expanse of night sky was filled with diamond-sharp stars and the companionship was currently undemanding.
Because it didn’t change anything. She’d lost a life she’d fought hard to have, and one she loved. She could be furious or she could grieve, but right now this dull, exhausted anger suited her just fine.
“You suck,” she told Lannie, who sat on a hay bale beside her.
“Yeah,” he said, and took a pull on his own beer. “Maybe.”
“Will you ever let me go?” she asked him, making no attempt to hide her frustration.
“Me?” He tipped his head back to watch the stars as if considering—but flinched at the stretch, his hand going to his side where blood had dried earlier in the evening. “Yes.”
“But not them,” Holly said, hearing his unspoken words.
Lannie put aside his empty takeout container and rested his elbows on his knees. “Never entirely. It doesn’t mean you won’t end up back where you were, or where you want to be.”
She made a derisive sound in her throat. “Sure. As long as I’m not too valuable so you people aren’t willing to let me go. And supposing that the Atrum Core stays hands-off.”
Lannie pushed a thumb at the knot of discomfort between his brows, a gesture her unusually sensitive eyes saw just fine. Maybe he had a headache. Good.
He said, “You’re Sentinel, Holly. Having a connection to the whole is part of that, and that’s all you’re here to find. Where you fit in the whole is up to you. But until things settle out, you’re not safe at home.”
She laughed outright. “Safe? Are you even listening to yourself? How safe is your friend Aldo? How safe was it to be in that tavern with you this evening?” She set her beer down with a clunk of heavy glass against the truck bed lining. “If you weren’t what you are, we wouldn’t be eating dinner out here in the bed of a truck.”
He didn’t reply right away; she chose to believe it was because he had no defense. When he did speak, it was only to say, “Well. It’s an awfully pretty night.”
She made a derisive sound.
“Don’t get stars this clear from the ground in Michigan,” he said. “Don’t get them without mosquitoes, either.”
“Maybe I like mosquitoes!” she snapped at him, which was so patently ridiculous that she was glad when he didn’t respond. After a round of silence, the breeze rustling through piñons behind them, she sighed. “God, I need a shower. I don’t even know where I’m sleeping tonight.”
“My place,” Lannie said—and offered the faintest of smiles in the darkness in response to her scowl. “I’ll sleep somewhere else, and tomorrow we’ll sort things out. I didn’t have much notice.”
“Yeah,” Holly said. “I gathered that. I feel so welcome, eh?”
He straightened. “No,” he said, his hand pressed back to his side but his voice taking on that note of command she’d heard there before. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” she meant to demand, but he stepped on the words.
“Don’t think of yourself that way. Don’t think of me that way. Unprepared isn’t the same as unwilling or unwelcoming.”
She didn’t even have to see him to know. Or to feel. He was doing it again. If she looked, she’d find him more than. She’d find herself drawn to him in spite of the fact that she didn’t want to be here in the first place. Just as he’d done to her in the tavern, right there in front of everyone—looking at her so steadily from those dark-rimmed pale eyes, somehow drawing her in and waking the impulse to go to him—to smooth the lines from his brow and kiss the faint lingering bruises on his face, and even to trace her tongue over the luxury of his mouth.
She found her voice, strained as it was. “Stop. Doing. That.”
But he didn’t stop. He even looked as though he might reach out to her. She tensed in anticipation of that touch, wanting it, already responding to it—
Holly reached for all the strength she’d ever had—all the personal sense of self she’d developed young and hard in a life of hiding who she really was, her family split beyond repair. Independent. Capable. Without need for any Sentinel identity. Somehow, she made her voice cutting. “Really? This is your plan? To use Sentinel mojo to seduce me until I can’t think straight? You want to tell me how that’s any different than slipping me some drug?”
He drew in a sharp breath, and for that moment she wished she couldn’t see so well at night after all. Not his startled expression, and not the way her words had hit him like a cruel blow.
It was almost enough to make her wonder if she’d gotten it wrong.
But not quite.
* * *
Lannie faced the morning without enthusiasm, standing not so much behind the farm store counter as draped over it, his head resting on his forearm and buzzing like the inside of a sonic toothbrush.
He wanted to blame Holly.
Pack song was a touchy thing. To be so abruptly disengaged from his home pack, to encounter such resistance from his new pack...
He wanted to blame her but couldn’t. No more than he could blame her for the residual stiffness in his ribs and shoulders, or the half-healed wound on his side.
He wasn’t so certain about the suddenly uncontrollable nature of his mojo. She’d called him on that the night before, but...
He would have said he wasn’t tapping into his alpha at all.
He would have said she’d somehow done it to him.
Except it didn’t work that way, and the situation left him uneasy and half-aroused and extra wary about doing the right thing for her—about whether he even could, given the circumstances. It left him without much sleep, a buzzing head, and a semitruckload of hay on the way in.
“Hey, boss!” Faith said cheerfully, buckling her work chaps around her waist with the legs still swinging free as she strode from the back to slap her gloves against the counter. Her piercings glimmered, an incongruous counterpoint to the cap crammed over her black hair. “I should have another go at that coffee before the hay gets here, right?”
“God, no,” he said, working hard to inject just the right matter-of-fact note into his voice, just the right alacrity into his movement as he raised his head, turning a deliberately discerning eye her way. “The overflow area ready for unloading?”
He knew it wasn’t. So did she. “Javi’s not here yet,” she said, which started off sounding like an excuse and ended with a quick shift to determination. “I’ll go get started while I’m waiting.”
You do that. He waited until she headed out the front door, setting the bells to jingling and trailing one of the several store cats in her wake.
Hay delivery meant shifting old stock, sweeping out corners...disturbing mice. The cats always knew.
So did the wolf. The wolf also knew when Holly entered the store from the back—and it rose to greet her, humming with a possessive intensity.
Lannie didn’t ever remember pushing the wolf away. Hadn’t ever needed to.
He did it now.
Holly stood beside the closest shelving endcap, her expression faintly wary and definitely uncertain. She made no attempt to hide her scrutiny of him; her gaze traveled from his features to his shoulder and quickly checked out his side, where no stain would show simply because he’d grown impatient and slapped on gauze with Bag Balm and far too much duct tape.
He eyed her back, easily able to see the tension riding in her shoulders. She wore no makeup to hide the lingering bruises of fatigue under her eyes, and glossy hair spilled from a high ponytail, a style that highlighted the clarity of her features and her large, impossibly rich brown eyes. She wore the same khaki pants from the day before and a no-nonsense polo shirt quite clearly tailored for a lean feminine form. The embroidery on her left shoulder read Holly Springs in a bold but elegant font interwoven with leaves, and beneath that in plainer text, a simple Holly Faulkes.
It told him a lot. It told him the kind of life she led—hardworking and active, and tied to the natural world. More Sentinel than she thought. It told him she truly hadn’t had much time to pack. And it told him that whatever life of hiding her family had chosen, they hadn’t considered their names to have been a risk. They’d somehow never been in official Sentinel roles.
It meant that her parents had never had the confidence and familiarity to turn to Brevis in the first place. And there was no telling what misinformation they’d given Holly along the way.
Or failed to give her.
She said, “I ate your sausage and oatmeal. I hope you expected that.”
His stomach grumbled. But he knew better than to start the day with the pastry treats Faith left around—not with the wolf prowling so close to the surface, itching for a hunt.
The wolf grew surly on carbs.
Holly gave him an uncertain look; only then did he realize he hadn’t said so much as good morning. Too lost in the static of his thoughts...and in his wolf’s response to her. It’s not real, he reminded himself, and said, “I hope you found everything you needed.”
“Actually, I need a number of things,” she said, her eye wandering to and clearly catching on Horace, the full-size fiberglass horse model at the front of the store. She visibly shook off the sight of Horace’s current dress mode—makeup applied to mirror Faith’s—and returned to her thoughts with determination. “Depends on how long I’m going to be here—here, at your place, and here, in New Mexico.”
He lifted one shoulder. “Couldn’t tell you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. Surely you don’t want to continue sleeping wherever you clearly didn’t actually sleep last night.”
So much for any impression of invincibility. He said only, “I was perfectly comfortable.” Probably she wasn’t ready to hear that the wolf slept where he would, and that last night’s barn had been a luxury.
“Well, I’m not comfortable here, so if you can manage to give me some idea of how long this whole thing will take, I’d appreciate that.”
The answer was only the same. Lannie didn’t repeat himself.
She looked like a woman hanging on to her temper by a very thin margin. She spoke with a snappy precision he knew to remember. “Fine. I need clothes. I need more than the three ounces of shampoo that were in my travel kit. I need feminine products. And I want a bike. Do you want details, or do you just want to hand over your credit card?”
Lannie said, “A bike?”
“Yes. I bike. Therefore I need a bike.”
“There’s a bike shop in Cloudview,” he said. A bike shop, good hunting territory, and...Holly’s brother. Seeing him—realizing that she could see him—might go a long way toward settling her resentment.
And seeing him immersed in his Sentinel nature might go a long way to helping her accept her own.
“Cloudview?” Holly crossed her arms under her breasts, emphasizing both toned arms and modest but perfectly formed curves; Lannie found himself standing straighter. “What’s the catch?”
Faith opened the front entry just long enough to sing out over the bells. “Hay’s here early! Javi’s late!”
Lannie allowed a faint grimace. “That,” he said, “is the catch. Twenty tons of hay to unload first.”
Holly didn’t hesitate. “Then I’ll go get my gloves and help.”
Lannie did hesitate. She hadn’t come here to heave two-string orchard grass.
“Look,” she said. “I work for a living. I’ll go insane all that much faster if you don’t give me something to do while I’m waiting for whatever magical things you people want to see happen.”
Magical. Yeah, something like that.
He reached under the counter for the stack of mismatched work gloves and dropped them on the glass. “See if anything here fits.”
Holly quickly selected snug gloves of leather and stretchy backing—one an alarming pink, one blue—and tugged them on, flexing her fingers to settle them.
Lannie led the way to the barn overflow, filling his lungs with a deep, surreptitious breath and letting it out slowly—letting the restless wolf fill his skin, trying to appease the other in him until he had that time to hunt.
Holly wasn’t far off his shoulder. She muttered a faintly singsong “Stop that...” and startled the wolf away.
Lannie barely stopped himself startling, too.
You weren’t supposed to see it.
All in all, Holly Faulkes was far more Sentinel than she knew.
* * *
Javi arrived only a few moments into the unloading, allowing Lannie to step back and inspect the bales, approve the load and meet up with the trucker to handle paperwork.
“New hand, eh?” The man moved efficiently to wind and stash the webbing straps that had secured the semitruck’s load, and then came to stand beside Lannie as he scrawled his signature without bothering to prop the clipboard against the truck. “Have to say I approve.”
Lannie gave him a hard glance. The man was twice Holly’s age, his admiration frank but at a distance. Lannie’s initial irrational irritation faded; he glanced up to where she worked the truck—strong and confident and more graceful than thou while she was at it, braced in perfect balance over the hay bales. She’d already figured out the rhythm of the work, the perfect combination of leverage and muscle to make the bales sail down in quiet arcs to a thumping impact. Her face had flushed pleasantly with the exertion, and from the looks of it, she was only just getting warmed up.
In the end, Lannie said only, “She’d eat you alive.”
“You, too, buddy,” the man said, affably enough. “Best watch yourself, if it’s like that.”
It wasn’t like that. She was his job, and his response to her was no more real than ever in the opening stages of creating pack. But that wouldn’t keep him from responding, and it wouldn’t keep him from watching her. Appreciating her.
Beautiful, he thought—and then drew a hard breath when she jerked to a stop, turning to stare down at him.
Best watch yourself, Lannie Stewart.
He handed over the paperwork and put himself back to work. The familiar rhythm of it warmed stiff muscles and tugged as much against the duct tape as it did against his healing side. For long moments, he let go of his thoughts, giving over to the muted conversation of familiar teamwork, the occasional grunt of effort, Faith’s giggles in the background when she lost her grip on a bale and it went pinwheeling off into the yard. When the truck sat empty and swept, the driver pulled away to leave them to the stacking...and eventually that was done, too, and Holly stood beside Lannie looking flushed but relaxed, mismatched gloves tucked away in a back pocket.
Her song trickled through to him, complex and self-confident and, at the moment, devoid of the resentful edge.
“Three hours,” Faith said. “Not our best time, but decent.”
“Thanks to Holly,” said Javi, his eye already gone worshipful when it turned to Holly.
“Yeah,” Faith said, older and wiser by not very many years, her back propped against the towering stack of hay and out of the sun. “You don’t wanna go there. Just say thanks again.”
“Right,” Javi said, blushing beneath the olive tones of his skin. “Thanks, Miss Holly.”
Holly seemed bemused to find herself back in a conversation—and a normal one, at that. “I was glad for it,” she said. “I needed to get the travel kinks out.” She brushed hay from her shirt and reaching for the neckerchief Javi had given her shortly after his arrival—a hesitant offering, gratefully received, and now full of enough hay to have proven its worth.
“Oh, no,” Javi said, backing away a step just in case. “You keep it. You’ll need one of those around here.”
Holly’s smile made Lannie straighten. Once again he found himself pushing back the wolf, the little growl in his mind that said mine.
Maybe so. But too strong or too fast with this one, and he’d lose her altogether. If it had been easier than this, Brevis wouldn’t have brought her so precipitously to his doorstep.
“Drink something,” he told Faith and Javi—and Holly, for that matter. “Bottled water in the fridge.”
“Cool,” said Faith. “Hey, Javi, I got some power powder to try in it. It’ll turn your mouth blue.”
“No, no,” Javi said, following her anyway. “Mi madre would whip my behind if I come home with a blue mouth.”
“She would not.” Faith’s words floated back over her shoulder as she rounded the corner of the barn overflow, and Lannie knew that Javi’s mouth didn’t stand a chance. So did Holly, to judge by the amusement lighting her expression—though that faded when she looked his way.
“You, too,” he said. “Especially you.”
She dusted at the hay on her legs. “And then?” When he only looked at her, she said, “Then what? We’re going to Cloudview, I know. But I’m here for a reason. Do we have team-building games to play, or do I have homework, or are you going to put me on a shelf while you do other things?” Before he’d had time to truly consider that, she added, “One thing they should have warned you—I like to keep busy.”
“I can arrange for another load of hay,” Lannie said, deceptively mild.
“Sure,” she said, just as evenly.
“What’s next specifically,” he told her, “is that we dust the hay out of our hair and get something to drink. Then I’d like to take a few moments to sniff around the well house—you can come or not, as you please.”
He wasn’t sure if sniffing around qualified as busy or boring, and in truth he wasn’t sure he wanted her along. He’d just as soon take the wolf for this particular task, and he didn’t think she was ready for that yet. When it came to that, he didn’t think he was ready for it. Not to ride the edge of the most primal part of himself while she was nearby.
“And then Cloudview,” she said. “I know. But after that. I don’t get the sense that you have any sort of plan when it comes to me.”
Lannie stood taller in a stretch, rotating one shoulder slightly. “I tend to play it by ear.”
“Awesome,” Holly said flatly. She pushed away from the hay bales. “Since we have such a good plan, we might as well get to it.” She headed for the front of the overflow area—a tall, three-sided pole structure—and turned in the direction of the store, striding across the ground like she owned it.
Lannie watched the languid roll of her hips and wanted to follow. The wolf watched the casual strength in her and growled, chafing, wanting to follow.
Lannie made them both wait, and settle, and swallow back the wanting. Only then did he allow his feet to move, strangely distant from the earth and from the new pack song he already ached to call his own.
* * *
Holly avoided a flat, shrunken prickly pear, her thighs aching from the distinctly uphill hike. Lannie Stewart moved with assurance, familiar with the terrain and taking his own strength for granted. When he stopped and checked back for her, she knew for certain it was only for her sake, and not because he found himself winded.
But Holly was glad to suck in air. She was fit—she was damned fit—but she’d already helped unload twenty tons of hay and she was fit at sea level.
He nodded up ahead, and she belatedly saw the upper half and roof of a wood structure that looked more like a community pit toilet than any official well house, clearly placed just beyond the crest of this slope. “I’d like to take a look around before we add more footprints to the area.”
“You want me to stay here.” She realized it with surprise. Some part of her had enjoyed these silent moments of climbing the hillside together, no matter the effort, or the fact that she hadn’t wanted to be here in the first place. Still didn’t want to be here.
But that didn’t mean her best option wasn’t to wait this situation out, going through Sentinel hoops until she could walk away.
Lannie eyed her as if he was trying to read her thoughts from her face, and nodded. “Only a few moments. Catch your breath, look around. There’s more going on in this forest than you think.”
She wouldn’t have called it a forest at all. But she only nodded, plucking a final stray piece of hay from her shirt, and he hiked on without her.
She watched until he moved out of sight, hidden by a trick of terrain and brush, and then sat herself down to look around. Low, flat cactus here...bushy treelike things dotted along the hill and set on gravelly, sandy soil. Sparse clumps of bunchgrass offered barely a hint of green, and the occasional long-needled pine towered over all.
“Forest,” she snorted. But she wrapped her arms around her knees and tipped her face to the sun, realizing for the first time the true impact of its heat. A quick relocation to the shade of a spicy cedar brought out goose bumps, and she finally put herself half in, half out, and rested her forehead on her knees.
Maybe she shouldn’t have. Maybe she should have kept moving. The quiet gave her space to recognize a strange, small edge of unease running through the center of her—a ripple of vertigo, and an escalation of what she’d experienced on arrival. She put her hand to the ground, eyes still closed, absorbing the textured feel of the cedar sheddings—tiny dry twigs, gritty soil, the angular hump of an exposed root. The connection steadied her in some way, but her sense of unease failed to fade.
Lannie had been right. She needed more water. Something to trail her fingers in, something to fiddle with.
Then again, it was nothing that going home wouldn’t fix. A reasonable altitude, a reasonable humidity and a sun that didn’t feel so close. Anyone would feel disoriented.
Song intruded, humming into her thoughts with such an insidious ease that she startled when she finally recognized it there, jerking her head up to scan the hill where Lannie had disappeared. She caught the glimpse of flickering light, a coruscation of energy; the song swelled and then faded. What the—?
Holly clambered to her feet to squint up the hill, swiping her hands off against the tough material of her work pants, hesitating on the verge of hiking on up. Lannie had had plenty of time to look around, and what if he—
He came into sight at the crest of the hill, appearing from between two junipers to wave her onward, and she suddenly understood. Lannie had gone uphill to take his other—whatever his other was. The light, the energy, even the humming song—those had all been the edges of his return to human. And now he stood there waiting for her, all matter-of-fact confidence and underlying strength.
She hiked the last hundred feet more quickly than she’d thought she had left in her, and greeted him with demand. “Was that you?”
She didn’t truly expect his frown. “Maybe,” he said, and thought about it until he shook his head. “Did it bother you?”
“Bother?” She found her hand was still gritty, the thin soil pressed into the lines of her palm, where she’d grabbed at the ground in her reaction to that song. She realized, too, what she really, really didn’t want to admit—that her body had responded, humming along in its own way, and that now it had warmed to him in a clear defiance of how she felt about Sentinels, being here and being anywhere near him in the first place.
Good God, she wanted him.
Except she didn’t. She didn’t want any part of being here, Lannie Stewart included. So she, too, finally shook her head. “It didn’t bother me,” she said. “It surprised me. It was rude.”
He pondered that, watching her with an awareness she wasn’t sure she liked. “Probably so,” he allowed, and left it at that, switching his attention to the well house now completely within view. “There’s nothing much up here. They didn’t waste much time trying to chase Aldo off.” He shook his head. “Just an old man taking a smoke.”
Holly took a few more steps in that direction, eyeing the faint track of an unofficial lane. The well house itself didn’t do anything to offset her initial impression, and its security consisted of a simple aged hasp and lock. “Why would they even come down this road?”
Lannie walked past her to the lane, scuffing his way across it. At her inquisitive look, he pointed downward. “This ground holds a track a whole lot better than you might think. I’ll know it when someone comes through this way again.”
Tracks. She looked down at that weird mix of silty, gritty soil overlaying hard ground, and discovered herself in the midst of them.
Not all of them human.
She crouched, running a forefinger around the outside of the nearest track. The nearest huge track, doglike in shape if not in size. Lannie’s? Or had it been here all along? “You’re right,” she said. “This ground holds a significant track.” She glanced up at him. “You should have brought a broom.”
“Maybe I will.” He paced down the road, looking along its length as if the guy gang and their truck might come barreling back down it any moment now. Holly pressed her hand over the track, obliterating it, and stood up. A few steps took her to the only snatch of color in the pale ground, and it took her some moments to recognize the splatter of dried blood. Her gaze flickered to the faded bruising on his face, and he shook his head. “Not mine.”
“Nice,” she said. “They probably never knew what hit them.”
Because he was Sentinel. He was stronger. He was supposed to pull his punches.
“There were five of them,” he reminded her.
“Sentinel,” she reminded him, out loud this time.
To her surprise, he lifted the front tail of his shirt. At first she saw nothing but the gleam of skin over surprisingly hard muscle, the light scatter of hair toward the center of a torso leaner than she’d expected. She stuttered on a response—and then realized the steep shadow between two of his lowest ribs wasn’t a shadow, but the angry and slightly gaping lips of a knife wound.
“Sentinel,” he said. “Not Superman. You should know. Your blood is strong enough.”
“I never thought so,” she said, more faintly than pleased her. “I’m not truly different from anyone else. Not like—”
You. With the way the wild strength sometimes gleamed straight from his eyes, or how the very way he stood broadcast the dangerous nature lurking behind a laconic exterior.
“Look in a mirror sometime.” He let the shirttail fall.
“I don’t understand.” She tore her gaze away from his side to search his expression, finding little she could read there at all. “I don’t heal much faster than anyone else.” She made a face, and admitted, “Yes, a little. But I thought Sentinels healed really fast.”
His grin was wry; it changed his face, made her want to reach out to him and take his hand and bump a companionable shoulder. She took a step back instead, startled at herself. He said, “If we’re badly injured, the early healing comes quick. Hurts like hell, too. But it keeps us alive when we might otherwise die.” He shrugged. “After that? You already know. We heal a little more quickly than normal. That’s all.”
“Then that must have been a whole lot worse yesterday.” Realization struck. “Right after I got here.” And then she leaped forward to a whole new understanding, and she speared a glance at him. “You were loading hay with that?”
He frowned down at the injury, resting his hand lightly over top. “There was hay to unload.”
She exhaled a sharp and impatient breath. “For everything you say, I swear there are two things you’re keeping to yourself.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But never things about you, from you. Just ask.”
She made a noncommittal noise in her throat that sounded no more convinced that she felt; he looked sharply at her. “Altitude catching up with you?”
“Maybe.” She looked down the slope—the unfamiliarity of the terrain, the unfamiliarity of the scents and even the sound of the bird flashing bright blue from the brush as it scolded them. The unfamiliarity, yes...and deeper, beneath it all, the sense that something else was missing, was wrong. Something she’d been leaning on so long she hadn’t even known it was there and now couldn’t begin to define.
“Still want to go to Cloudview?”
She jerked her head back to narrow her eyes at him. “Don’t you dare go back on that.”
Was that amusement on his features, lurking at the corners of his eyes, in the slight lift on one side of his mouth? She took a step toward him, a light growl vibrating somewhere in her chest. “Are you laughing at me?”
At the same time, she heard it again—the hint of song, beguiling cello tones weaving beneath faint strains of barely whispered complexity. The intrusion stunned her—the affront of it, the fact that she could hear it at all—but she’d barely drawn breath to protest when he grinned outright. Also unexpected, and also stunning—in its own way, striking deep into the heart of her.
By then he’d taken the few steps between them and wrapped an unexpected arm around her shoulder in a gesture of startling affection.
She wanted to sputter at him. She wanted to say I didn’t invite you to do that and You have no right—but her body was already melting into him. Just long enough to feel the upright strength in him, and to understand how clearly his gentleness was a choice.
Then he stepped back, framing her head between both big hands to look directly into her gaze, piercing eyes gone somehow softer. “It gets easier,” he told her. “Let’s go see your brother.”
And then he took her hand and led her down the hill.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_f0a4223c-eb38-5c2a-adc2-cd1780885cd9)
The familiar terrain gentled as Lannie led the way back to the feed-store cluster, revealing a barely sloping spread that held not just the feed-store grounds but a faint scatter of buildings along the curving country road. Lannie’s two mules engaged in some sort of conversational disagreement, gamboling without grace but with power to spare.
Holly might have hesitated, taking it all in, but Lannie kept them moving. The noon sun had brought out the heat of the day—and as much as Holly seemed to need activity, allowing her to help with the entire load of hay hadn’t been the smartest choice of his day.
Too damned bad he’d been so distracted by watching her.
“We’ll grab something to eat on the way out of town,” he said. “I just need a moment to square away—”
Pain shot through his side; the faint music underlying his soul burst into brief static. He blinked, and found himself looking up into bright blue sky. The uneven ground pressed into his back, sharp with myriad little stones and prickery bunchgrass, and his legs were ungainly, bent and sprawling as if they’d simply forgotten how to be legs. “What,” he said quite clearly, “the hell?”
“You tell me,” Holly said, and couldn’t hide worry with her scowl. She had one hand pressed on his shoulder as if she knew the first thing he’d do was try to get up, and the other at his pulse—pounding hard and fast, but perfectly regular.
“Hey!” Faith shouted from the bottom of the slope, her accusing voice getting closer with each word. “What did you do to him?”
“To him?” Holly said, rising to that bait even as she kept Lannie’s shoulder to the ground. But she only had leverage as long as he didn’t roll aside—and that he did, rising as smoothly as he ever did. Holly made that disgusted little feline noise in her throat and came to her feet beside him.
By then Faith had reached them, heavy work boots amazingly spry along the way. “Yes!” she snapped at Holly. “You! To him!”
“Whoa,” Lannie said as the static struck again, his alarm having less to do with going down and everything to do with the potential collision of Faith and Holly. When he could see clearly again he found himself on hands and knees, blinking at the ground.
“Why did you even get up?” Faith asked in exasperation, though it was Holly’s hand at the back of his neck, quiet and firm.
Because that shouldn’t have happened at all. Never mind a second time. Or, if he counted the odd moments of the previous evening, a third or fourth or a...
“Faith,” he said, with as much authority as any man in his situation could muster, “this is not Holly’s doing.”
“Right,” Holly said. “Blame me. Awesome. I am so glad to be here.”
“You showed up and this happened,” Faith said, bending to peer at Lannie.
“This was happening when I got here,” Holly said, sounding so certain that Lannie lifted his head to look at her in surprise. “Oh, yes,” she said, seeing it. “Last night. Right in front of me.”
“You were watching me.” It warmed something inside him, which shouldn’t have mattered but did.
Holly made an exasperated sound. “Of course I was watching you. Under the circumstances, I’d have been an idiot if I’d done anything else, eh?”
He remembered to feel his own exasperation. He thought he’d hidden those moments of disorientation. Mariska wouldn’t have hesitated to call him out if she’d noticed anything wrong.
“Lannie!” Aldo’s whiskery voice carried uphill far too well. “No, no—this isn’t supposed to happen!”
Lannie rubbed his hands over his face. His legs were his own again; his mind was clear, and his soul carried his own faint inner song. “Awesome,” he muttered, deliberately echoing Holly’s flat tone.
“Yeah, now I know you’re not right,” Faith told him.
Aldo reached them and knelt down to put a hand on Lannie’s knee. “You okay, son? Ah, this is all my fault—”
“Aldo.” Lannie said it firmly. “Yesterday was not your fault. I don’t care what you said to them. There’s no reason good enough for five guys to beat up on a sixty-year-old man.”
“Seemed funny at the time,” Aldo said, looking somewhat bereft.
No doubt it had.
Lannie sighed and regained his feet. He took a brief but ruthless check of himself and found nothing amiss—except for the dent in his pride.
Alpha wasn’t bully, or overbearing. But alpha did mean strength.
His strength was smarting.
Holly kept pace with him as they headed downhill. “Look,” she said, brushing off the seat of her pants as they walked. “I’d really like to grab some things from the closest big-box store.”
“Ruidoso,” Faith told her, slipping it in between Holly’s words.
“And I’d really like to have time to rest this afternoon. And,” she said, giving Lannie a sharp eye, “I don’t really want to be in a car with you behind the wheel right now.”
He squelched that little bit of sting. “Cloudview will be there tomorrow.”
“Good.” She nodded, more or less to herself; her ponytail swung to land gently over her shoulder. Lannie should have been prepared at the spark of amusement showing in her eye, but as they reached the back of the store, she managed to take him by surprise. Again.
“Keys,” she said, and held out her hand—adding, when he only stared at her, “Ruidoso. Truck.”
And then she smiled.
* * *
Holly made off with more than the truck keys; she pulled a local map off the Internet, acquired Lannie’s credit card and his cell phone and escaped the feed store without an escort.
Not that she needed one. Lannie could no doubt find her anywhere now that he’d taken her in. He kept track of his people, that was obvious enough.
And like it or not, she was one of his people now. At least in his mind.
On the way out to Ruidoso—forty minutes of curving, challenging roads with the faint background buzz of disorientation in her head—she spent no little time wondering how she would have reacted to the man if he’d simply walked into her office looking for a consultation on a water feature. If there’d been no preestablished baggage between them.
The thought woke things in her that she would rather have left sleeping. Hot-and-bothered things that left her shifting uncomfortably in the truck’s otherwise comfortable seat. Because never mind his muscled build and strong shoulders and perfectly lean cowboy hips. Or even his eyes—Good God, those eyes.
There was that something more about him. The charisma. The way he stood even when he wasn’t pouring on the attitude. The way his other showed, even when he didn’t know it—and even when she didn’t yet know what other form he took.
The way he cared about his people.
He’s still your jailer.
He was still a complicit part of the team that now kept her away from her own life.
Remembering that should have cooled her blood somewhat. Should have. Holly distracted herself by pulling off the road long enough to call her brother—not at a phone that would reach him directly, because no phone ever did. But she dialed the number for Regan Adler, her brother’s love—and soon enough, his spouse.
“Hey,” she said into the machine that resided in a small but personable cabin home deep at the edge of Kai’s woods. “This is Holly. Hello to Kai, but this message is for Regan. We might be coming your way tomorrow. If you have time, I’d like to meet up.” Regan might be self-employed, providing lush and slyly quirky illustrations for nature guides of all sorts along with her own painting, but Holly knew better than to take her time for granted. Had been there, and had that done to her. “I know we don’t know each other, but I’m hoping you can give me some perspective on this situation.”
This situation. What a plethora of Sentinel sins that phrase encompassed.
“Anyway,” Holly added hastily, “I hope you’ll call. PS—this is Lannie Stewart’s phone.”
The rest of the drive went quickly, and once she reached the store she pulled her hastily scribbled list from her pocket and went to work with the focused intensity that had made her business successful, happy to hand over Lannie’s card to buy a few reusable shopping totes with her goods, and toss the whole kit and caboodle into the bed of the truck behind the straw bale.
On the way back, the phone warbled a basic faux phone ring. Holly thought only of her message to Regan, and pulled the phone from the seat divider to accept the call.
“Holly?”
Holly’s breath caught on the decision to hang up. “Just listen,” Faith said, and her words were low and hasty—in the end, intriguing Holly just enough to stay on the call.
She found a wide spot by the side of the road to pull over. “I’m here.”
“Look,” Faith said. “I don’t really know what’s going on with you being here. I know what Lannie does for Brevis, so we do get people here sometimes, or he goes somewhere else, but there’s something different about this. About him.”
“You still trying to blame it on me?” Holly said. “Because as far as I’m concerned, you can take your Sentinels and—”
Faith’s heartfelt and indelicate noise in response did more to get Holly’s attention than anything else could have. “Look, I’m such a light blood that only someone like Lannie can even tell I’m Sentinel. They’re not my people—I ran from them a long time ago.”
“They let you go?” Holly asked, a flicker of hope in her voice.
After a hesitation and a number of muffled sounds, Faith replied. “Light blood,” she reminded Holly. “But listen. This is about Lannie. Something’s not right. And since he had to pull out of his home pack in order to deal with you—”
“He what?”
“God, don’t you know anything?”
Anger made its way to Holly’s throat, tightening it. “No more than I’ve been told.”
“Then ask Lannie. He’ll tell you as much as he can. But look, what I’m doing is asking you to keep an eye on him, okay? Because we can’t. Not the way we’re used to.”
Responses jumbled through her mind—the bitter awareness that she couldn’t ask for information when she didn’t even know enough to frame the right questions. The rising curiosity about Lannie and his home pack and his Sentinel other and what he did with it—or what had happened with the Jody thing. The cold hard fear of realizing anew that her life was totally out of her own control.
For now.
“Look, I get it.” Faith’s words came with the white noise of something brushing across the phone, and Holly suddenly realized that she was crouched somewhere in the feed store, trying to hide the call from Lannie. “You don’t owe us anything and I was a bitch to you. But this is about Lannie, okay?”
And Holly found herself saying, “Okay.”
She hung up the phone in a bemused state, taking the remainder of the drive home with a slower speed than the car behind her probably would have preferred. At the farm store, she pulled around back to park as if she’d always been here, always been driving Lannie’s truck...always been the one to co-opt his pack. When she disembarked and grabbed her bags from the back, the midafternoon heat bore down on her in a sizzle of sun—one the shade of the barn quickly quenched into a chill.
She began to understand why people here dressed in so many layers.
She took the exterior steps up to Lannie’s barn apartment two at a time, and realized how much better she felt for the chance to collect her thoughts.
Or maybe it was just her Sentinel constitution after all—adjusting to the altitude more quickly than expected after her morning’s difficulty.
Maybe.
She let herself into the apartment and stopped short at the sight.
Lannie.
To be more precise, Lannie’s back. He stood at his kitchen sink, shirtless, muscles flexing as he reached overhead to put away a set of mugs. Enough spicy humidity filled the air so even if she hadn’t seen the gleam of dampness across his skin and in the slight curl of his hair, she would have known he’d just stepped out of the shower.
He barely turned his head to greet her and she realized that of course he’d known she was coming. If he hadn’t heard the truck, if he hadn’t heard her steps on the stairs...
She had the feeling he still would have known.
“Get what you needed?” he asked, as if this would be some plain old conversation about simple things.
“More or less,” she said, playing the same game. “Should I unpack them?”
He grabbed a basin from the sink, handling it carefully enough so she knew it still held water. “Is that your way of asking if you’re staying here?”
Without waiting for a response, he took the basin to the other side of the loft—to the giant hexagonal window she’d admired so much that morning, however briefly. Iron scrollwork crawled around the edges and the supporting grids, intimating leaves and twining vines, and light flooded through to fill the loft. Before it sat a motley collection of plants, each of which now received a careful portion of what must have been his rinse water.
Not that she cared. She was too caught up in watching him move, handling the awkward chore with a masculine grace.
When he glanced over his shoulder, she realized just how hypnotized she’d become.
Maybe she should have blushed and stammered at being caught, but she didn’t care to. He was worth watching. So she smiled.
After a moment, his mouth quirked in what might have been amusement, and might have been response. “Yes,” he said. “You’re welcome to stay here while we figure out the most obvious solution to the situation.”
Reality intruded. “But what about—”
He shook his head, returning the basin to the sink, and then propped himself against it to regard her. “I shower and eat here. Where I sleep isn’t an issue.” At the disbelieving look on her face, he laughed, a quiet huff of humor. “Trust me, Holly. It’s fine.”
“Trust you?” She let the shopping totes slide gently to the floor, refusing to be distracted by the flat planes of his sparsely furred chest or the window light skipping across his abs. Absolutely refusing. Even when the knife wound he’d so readily dismissed caught that same light, raw and inflamed and hardly healing. “Is this is a test of some sort?”
He cocked his head, barely enough to see it. “If you like.”
“Fine,” she said. “I have a test for you, too.”
He planted the heels of his hands against the counter and waited. Holly took it for invitation. “What did Faith mean, you’ve had to disconnect from your home pack for me? What does that mean to you? Why, exactly, am I here? It’s not just to keep me safe while things settle down. And also, you need to let me do something with that.” She nodded at his side. “Like take you to the local urgent care.”
Lannie snorted. “I can take myself anywhere I need to go.”
“Really?” Holly smiled at him, so beatific. “Because as I recall, just this morning you were a little unpredictable about staying on your feet.”
“I’m fine,” he said, and this time the words had a little growl behind them, one that showed in his eyes.
Holly found herself delighted to have gotten under his skin at all. Lannie Stewart, she thought, was used to being the one with the answers.
She lifted his truck keys. “I bet you keep the spares down behind the store counter. Want to bet your little friend Faith has already hidden them?”
This time the growl was unmistakable. It reverberated against something inside Holly, something she hadn’t even known was there. She hid the shiver of it from him by flipping the keys back into her hand and tucking them away in her front cargo pocket. “You might have thought this was about protecting the resistant younger sister of your latest Sentinel hero, but it’s much, much more—and so am I. No urgent care? Fine. Get your first-aid supplies. Then we’ll talk.”
* * *
Lannie had little in the way of Band-Aids and gauze, and little patience for any of it. He was Sentinel; he would heal. He didn’t often take serious injury in his work, but he’d been there enough to know.
Holly found the employee kit in the store’s break room, grabbed self-sticking horse bandages from the shelf, and returned to the loft no less determined than she’d left it.
Lannie had spent the time basking in the window sunlight as wolf, pretending the occasional peak of underlying static didn’t break through his thoughts. He heard her coming at the bottom step and almost didn’t make it into human—and into his pants—before she opened the door.
He’d forgotten how she took those steps two at a time.
“Here,” Holly said, even as she came through the door with her bounty, a tube of hydrogel included. “Faith said you would use this stuff.”
“You told Faith?” He couldn’t quite keep the alarm from his voice.
She made an amused sound. “Did you think she didn’t already know?” At his silence, she added, “And you shouldn’t have left that mess of a man-bandage in the counter trash if you wanted it to be some big hairy secret. What was that, half a roll of duct tape?”
“It didn’t stay on anyway,” he grumbled with generalized disgruntlement.
“While we were doing that hay? No kidding.” Holly seemed more cheerful now that she’d outmaneuvered him regarding the truck keys. If it made her feel as though she’d gained some control over her life, she would have it.
For the moment.
Holly busied herself pulling butterfly bandages from the box and lining them up on the tiny breakfast bar jutting out from the wall between the kitchen and the window area. Aside from the plants, the window space held exactly one couch—it was as close to a social space as the loft got, with the bed tucked in behind the half wall across from the window and the bathroom taking up just as much room across from the kitchen. He’d roughed in an unheated closet, but he doubted she’d discovered that particular feature yet.
It wasn’t a bachelor pad so much as the space of an alpha wolf still alone at heart.
“There.” Satisfaction tinged Holly’s voice. “Come on over and lean against the bar.”
Lannie released a silent sigh and complied, leaning to expose the injury to the light and grunting at the painful stretch of it.
Holly made a dismayed sound in her throat. “Have you looked—”
“It’s fine,” Lannie said. “If it was a problem, the fast healing would kick in—and I’d know if that was happening. It hurts.”
“And that doesn’t?”
“It hurts more,” he said pointedly.
Holly rested hesitant fingers on his side; he twitched against it, swearing inwardly as the wolf reared up and took interest. Warm fingers, gentle touch...for an instant, it was the only thing he could feel. At least, until the rest of his body figured it out and responded.
Well, the wolf was alive. And so was the man. And Holly’s touch reached them both.
“It’s ugly,” Holly said, her fingertips pressing lightly around his ribs as she assessed the cut. “Really irritated. Until it does heal, you ought to quit taking yourself for granted.”
He frowned at the countertop. “Ow!”
“Like I said.” She dabbed ointment along the edges of the wound.
His hands bore down on the counter, as much irritation as bullet biting. “It shouldn’t be that—ow!” He jerked away, turning a glare of impatience on her.
“Uh-huh. Whatever. Stop growling.”
By dint of will, he did, and he held himself still while she pinched the edges of the wound and placed a generous row of butterfly bandages. By the time she finished—by the time she stretched her arms around him to wind the self-sticking elastic around his torso—that pain was a thing of the past, and her touch was again the only thing of the present—light, skimming his flesh with authority, patting the whole arrangement into place. Lingering, while her scent permeated the air around him—his shampoo and her own personal perfume, mingled into something that felt so very much like possession.
She stood, fumbling the bandage onto the counter—hesitating, when she might have been stepping away, her face flushed. She visibly hunted for words, her teeth lingering on her lower lip before she found them. “I don’t know how long that’ll last, but...try to take it easy?”
He barely heard her. From behind the static, a sweet melody flowed, winding through Lannie like the vines winding along his window. He leaned into it, breathing it deeply into his body, his eyes closing as he absorbed that brief purity.
When he opened them again and found her so very close, so visibly trembling, he had nothing to say—nothing he could say. Not when enthralled in such a deep thrum of underlying need. Mine. A singular thought, threading through sensation. Mine. Not as alpha, not as Sentinel. Just as man.
Mine.
Holly’s eyes opened wide; she stood taller and straighter, and her nostrils flared. “I am not yours.” She looked right back up at him, her pupils grown big within a narrow ring of darkening brown. She might even have stood on her toes, leaning into him physically just as he’d breathed in the song of her. “I am not Sentinel and I am not yours, and nothing you can do will change that.”
The song stuttered back to static, staggering him as much as the connection had done. Holly slapped the remainder of the elastic bandage on the tiny breakfast bar and turned on her heel, going down the steps with the same authority with which she’d come up.
And Lannie stood there with his side aching from her touch and aching for it, and knew she was exactly right.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_105a6717-156d-56e0-836a-9d2ee72a84c5)
Lannie snagged Holly’s file from the cupboard nook where he’d stashed it and went to his thinking spot—or at least the thinking spot he used while in human form.
He sat beside the mule paddock, leaning against the join of two metal corral panels and propping his knees up to serve as a desk for Holly’s file. He’d pulled on a worn chambray shirt, rolled up the sleeves and left the tails hanging out. Not customer-worthy and not concerned about it even if the store had another hour to go before closing. Everyone knew better than to bother him when he went to sit with the mules.
Everyone except Aldo.
The old man approached with a sideways sort of step, not quite looking at Lannie, a giant plastic travel mug in hand.
“Hey, Lannie,” he said.
Lannie blew out a sigh. “Hey, Aldo.”
“Brought you iced tea.”
“Did you, now.”
Another few steps and Aldo held the mug out. He looked his usual borderline disreputable, his thinning gray hair drawn back in a braid, his red-checkered shirt only half buttoned, and his jeans a size too large and hunting for a place to settle on skinny hips.
Lannie took the mug—although when he lifted it for a gulp, he stopped long enough to ask, “You didn’t put peyote in this, right?”
Aldo affected an offended expression. “Wouldn’t do that to you, Lannie-boy.” Although when Lannie raised a skeptical brow, the old man added, “Least, not without telling you. And this time I’m telling you not.”
The tea went down cold and crisp, and Lannie set the offering aside. “What’s on your mind, old man?”
Aldo looked around, not half as surreptitiously as he likely thought. “That Holly girl gone?”
“Up the hill,” Lannie told him, perfectly aware of the thin thread of Holly’s presence. “Using your spot, I believe. Let her be.”
Aldo only nodded, somewhat more sagely than often. But he was coyote; he had a nose for knots and implications, and he knew as well as any that Lannie wouldn’t leave Holly completely off leash. Not yet. “Already bringing her into yourself, then?”
Firm if not unkind, Lannie said, “It’s not your business.”
Maybe a little more firmly than usual.
Aldo only smiled, a thing often not to be trusted. “You’re okay, then.”
Lannie looked the old man straight in the eye—only the faintest hint of threat in his eye, at the edge of his lip. Gone alpha, because with Aldo there was no giving ground. Not when questioned about pack matters.
Aldo offered instant sulk, which was also as it should be. “Just asking, just asking.”
Lannie waited another moment and said, “Good tea, Aldo. Thanks.”
Aldo straightened some. “Sure,” he said. And then, very carefully, “It’s just that if...well, if you weren’t...I mean, I would want to know. Just in case.”
Lannie didn’t even know what to do with that, so he did nothing—his thoughts already tugging back to Holly, and the very thin file at his disposal—the first pages of which had been all about her brother Kai and his extreme sensitivity to the land, and to all traces of Core magic. Unlike any other known Sentinel, Kai could instantly, reliably, perceive the presence of the new silent Atrum Core workings.
Lannie wasn’t certain that Lily and Aeron Faulkes had chosen the best course by bringing their small family to this area. The Core princes and posses preferred their comforts and amenities; they preferred hiding within clusters of humanity. And unlike Sentinels, so many of whom gravitated toward the land, those in the Atrum Core were related by blood line and activity but not by nature. They had no others; they had no sense of the Earth and no ability to navigate its unseen ways.
They never heard Lannie’s song.
He looked up, realized Aldo was still waiting, and said, “Something else?”
Aldo fished in one baggy jeans pocket and pulled out Lannie’s phone—last seen in Holly’s possession as she headed out for her errands. “This was ringing in the truck.”
Lannie scowled at it. This was not a place he brought the phone. “And it couldn’t have waited?”
Aldo shrugged, radiating inoffensiveness—which only meant that he’d done something he likely shouldn’t have. “She called Regan Adler. Regan Adler called back.”
“Give me that,” Lannie growled, holding out his hand. “Go help Faith prep the store for closing, and I’ll put you on the clock for a couple hours.”
Aldo brightened, handing the phone over with a new energy. Brevis covered Aldo’s basic needs, but picking up sporadic hours at the feed store added a tiny bit of luxury to his spare life. Sporadic because that was all Aldo had ever been, and because in these past weeks he’d only become more so. “Appreciate that, Lannie.”
“So will I, if you keep Faith’s mind on her work. Brevis spooks her, you know that.” Not so much as it used to, but Aldo would take it to heart. “Git, then.”
Aldo hustled back to the barn, though not without turning back to offer, “Want me to put hay by the door for those mules?”
Lannie lifted his head in thanks, already absorbed again by the contents of the folder, by the phone in his hand...by the deep tug from his wolf. Find her. He pushed against the bridge of his nose, hunting focus, and reached for the folder. But the next page turned out to be a scant recitation of Holly’s circumstances—her tidy little cottage house in Upper Michigan, the sketchy notes of an upbringing that emphasized her independent nature, her steadfastly non-Sentinel lifestyle
He thought of Jody. He couldn’t help but think of Jody. The woman had been raised Sentinel, but without humility. She’d never been exposed to the consequences of her reckless ways, but had been protected from them. Her full-blooded nature and brilliance with stealth had put her in the field; her inability to mesh with her team had put the team in his hands...with only a few short days to integrate them before they’d gone south to deal with an exotics smuggling ring.
He’d done his best. He’d connected instantly with her—he’d felt her brilliance, her bright spark of life. And maybe she’d understood at that...
But she hadn’t had time to live it. To practice it. And she’d gone out in the field and gotten them all killed.
He’d felt that, too.
And now here was Holly. Yanked from her home, from her life, from her very way of being. There was no telling how enmeshed she’d been in her surrounding territory, if she was anything like her brother—whether she knew it or not.
Her occasionally palpable resentment...
He deserved it. They all did. And if she had any idea she was working with an alpha still reeling from failure and its resulting disaster...
He picked up the phone.
* * *
Holly found herself back up at the well house for the second time that day, only this time she turned around to glare down at the amazing vista and think at it with loud, angry clarity. I am not yours!
That wasn’t quite enough, so she did it out loud, too. “I am not yours!”
Her words rang loudly in the evergreen-studded landscape, and she should have felt just a little bit silly.
She didn’t. And she hoped someone was listening.
Even if no one answered.
“Bother,” she grumbled, and sat on the crest of that final hill to look down on it all. A massive canine paw print was pressed into the dirt at her side, and she stared at it for a good long while.
Wolf? Boy, wouldn’t that explain a lot.
If her family had stayed within a brevis, would she know what her other was? Would she have tried to take it? Would she be initiated, and secure in her Sentinel abilities?
“The big question is, do I care?” She slapped her hand over the paw print, obliterating it, and propped her chin in her hand, looking out over Lannie Stewart’s land. Maybe it wasn’t the thick green woods in which she felt so at home...but if she quit trying to see it through Michigan-colored glasses, the undulating land did have its own beauty. This morning the sky had been crystal clear, bluer than blue and bigger than big. This early evening it was still big enough, but giant, towering clouds shifted across the sky, brilliant white above and glowering bruised blues below and scudding distinct shadows across the ground.
Holly lifted her face not to the sun, but to those clouds—drawn to the majestic purity of them. Without thinking, she stood again—stretching herself tall, arms reaching high and fingers spread wide, every bit of her body yearning to touch those stormy clouds.
She didn’t. She couldn’t. She came off her toes in a huff of disgust, not even sure what she’d been thinking.
Nothing. She hadn’t been thinking anything. She’d just been doing, one woman alone on the hillside and completely out of her own place in the world.
She sat again, this time more slowly. Rather than reach for the sky, she pressed her hands flat to the ground and closed her eyes—looking for something, anything, that might be familiar. She pushed her own awareness, seeking...
Home.
Or some sense of it.
Instead she felt an ugly, distinct sense of rejection. The barrier wasn’t a slap so much as an inexorable refusal to allow her to become part of where she was. It left her sitting perched on the earth, her eyes closed and her teeth biting her lip on the sudden certainty that she might just come flying free of the ground altogether.
She withdrew back inside herself, wrapping her arms around her torso and suddenly shivered—glancing up to find herself in the deep shadow of one of those clouds.
Her breathing slowed; her pounding heart eased. She sat, one woman alone on the hillside, yearning for something she couldn’t define, and listening, listening for even the faintest hint of inexplicable song.
* * *
“Lannie who?”
The woman’s voice at Lannie’s ear sounded puzzled, and he didn’t blame her. No one seemed quite to know what was going on around here.
“Lannie Stewart,” he said, eyeing the sky and pondering the potential for monsoon rain. “I’m in Descanso. Kai’s sister Holly is staying with me for integration work.”
“Ah,” Regan Adler said, wisdom replacing confusion. “The enforced indoctrination.”
He didn’t quite know what to say to that, so he didn’t.
“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe that wasn’t fair. But Holly didn’t even have a chance to see her brother before your people whisked her away. And does she even know her parents have been taken to Brevis?”
Careful, careful. “Her parents made their choices,” Lannie said. “Not that I don’t understand them. But choices have consequences.”
“None of that was Holly’s fault,” Regan said. “But she’s the one paying the price, don’t you think?”
“More than she should,” Lannie agreed. One of the mules came up behind him, reaching through the corral pipe to inspect Lannie’s hair; he reached up to tug on the creature’s chin, and mulish contentment rolled over him. “We’re coming to Cloudview tomorrow to get Holly a bike.”
Silence greeted that pronouncement, if only for a moment. “I thought it wasn’t safe.”
“It’s not safe for Holly to be on her own,” Lannie said. “She isn’t.”
Regan bristled audibly. “You know, we’ve done fine without you so far.”
“Right,” Lannie said, failing to rise to her anger one little bit. “And now you don’t have to.” He let the words settle. “More importantly, Holly doesn’t have to. She has a lot to learn, Regan. I think it would help if she could see you and Kai. If you’re not up for that, I’ll handle it.”
“I have no problem with Holly,” Regan said instantly. “Damn you.”
Lannie laughed. “We’ll call once we have the bike.”
“Fine,” Regan said. “You tell her I’ll be glad to give her perspective. Use those words.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lannie said, without any sign of meekness. He grinned as he ended the call, struck by Regan’s assertively defensive response to Holly’s needs—struck by the similar strengths in the two women.
He reached over his head to give the hovering mule another chin tug. “I think I just might live to regret this.”
When the mule snorted on him, he took it as agreement.
* * *
Lannie was waiting for her when she came down the hill—the folder tucked away, the mules happy with a flake or two of hay to carry them into the evening and the night growing cool around them all. The clouds had stalled, lurking up high with no indication of releasing any rain.
Holly returned in the twilight, moving easily downhill in that rolling walk. Lannie watched her progress with a semihypnotized gaze, instinctively reaching out to share pack song—
She doesn’t want that. He stopped himself short, shifted subtle intent and let himself listen instead—waiting for the ongoing static to make way for the light and airy sense of her, and then breathing it in.
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Doranna Durgin
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Alpha’s reluctant houseguest…Holly Faulkes’s life had been spent in hiding from the Sentinels. But now she is their prisoner, kept by Lannie Stewart, an undeniably sexy alpha wolf determined to initiate her into their world. Lannie’s gift of influence has never failed him before… but Holly is not so easily won. Despite this, the Sentinel can sense the untapped power in Holly that they all desperately need. For a new enemy has risen, one determined to destroy their kind. And Holly can overcome this danger only if Lannie can convince her to accept and release her true identity.