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“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
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.”