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
