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“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.”
