emptiness. He fought a sudden stab of panic.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’ll wear off. But until then, you need a place to stay.”
And bring her more deeply into this mess, with the local Core, under Fabron Gausto’s rule, more aggressive than he’d ever suspected? “I’ll be fine here,” he said. “They think I’m dead.”
“Then there won’t be any problem with having you at the ranch.” She stood, stretching. Two of the three jackets slipped off; the T-shirt pulled high to expose a tight, smooth line of skin. “Look,” she said, bending to scoop up the jackets. She rolled them lengthwise and shot him a direct, spearing look. “I’ve got a horse coming in this afternoon. I need to be there. Can we just do this thing?” As if she didn’t have circles under her eyes and a certain grim determination to her movement.
And every moment he argued with her was a moment she wouldn’t be on her way home. He nodded; it took her by surprise much as her own recent concession had startled him, and she relaxed visibly.
There were already saddlebags resting over the horse’s loins; she tied the jackets over them and returned to the house, giving the floor and hearth area a careful inspection. “Can’t have the slightest bit of the herb stuff left out,” she said. “It’d kill anything smaller than a dog, with the whammy I put on it.”
Whammy. Oh, yeah. The Sentinels would just love that.
Meghan pushed away the exhaustion of the night, the turmoil of the morning, the fears for the future—even the odd feeling in her bones. She focused on her hands, where they tightened the girth one more time for the rugged ride home with a rider who wasn’t likely to keep his balance. “Have mercy on him, Luka,” she murmured as Dolan finally made it to his feet, wobbled there a moment and pretended to have found his strength.
She would have believed it, too, if she didn’t know what he’d been through this past night—or if she hadn’t seen him in full strength only days ago, full of prowl and power in either form. He made it to the gaping doorway and leaned there, and somehow made it look casual. She knew better than that, too.
“I’m not sure about the wards,” he said. “I thought I left them strong…but the Core followed me in without much trouble. I—”
“Can’t see them,” she said, only belatedly realizing she’d not only finished his sentence, but to judge by the startled look on his face, done it accurately. Or was that expression more properly called a glower? “I’ll come back later and see what needs to be done.” Not that the homestead often found use, but it still deserved some respect and protection. “I can do wards, but…not right now.” She ran a hand down Luka’s shoulder. “We’re ready when you are.”
He wasn’t. And he wasn’t going to be. She saw the flicker of despair on his face, there and gone again, right back to the tough-guy glower. For a scant moment, she wondered if it might not actually be best to leave him here. But even if the Core thought him dead, they might figure out they were wrong. And besides…she simply didn’t want to leave him behind.
Not that she wouldn’t have enough explaining to do when she got back.
She dropped the halter lead and went to him, where he pretended to stand in the doorway, and slipped in under his arm. “Oof,” she said, under her breath. And then shrugged off the shiver that ran down her back.
Luka stopped his tree-grazing to regard Dolan with a wary eye, pulling himself up with a high and warning neck. “Not now,” Meghan muttered. But still, she gave the horse a moment to accept Dolan’s nature. Dolan leaned heavily on shoulders made strong from ranch work and training—and she would have borne it easily had not another shiver run down her back, following each leg all the way down to the soles of her feet, to her toes. And the flush that followed, and the empty ache, building inside her chest.
Maybe just what she deserved for running out into the middle of a Sentinel/Atrum Core squabble.
But surely it hadn’t been catching. And she’d felt Dolan’s pain; she’d felt it clearly. This wasn’t painful…wasn’t even truly uncomfortable. Just…unusual.
Dolan’s arm tightened around her shoulders—for-bearance, she thought, as Luka offered a stretch of his neck, a disgruntled but accepting snort. Dolan reached out to the saddle, steadying himself that way. She would have bent to lace her fingers together into a “leg up” for him, but his hand fell on her arm, sending tingles of warmth and demand through the limb. Her jaw dropped; she looked down to his hand in disbelief.
Quite suddenly that hand moved to the back of her neck, half cradling her head. He pulled her to him—right up against him, her head tipped back and that ache nearly exploding inside her, separate pinwhirls of energy making her light-headed and joyous and terrified all at once. She gasped, fighting it, and his hand tightened behind her head, fingers catching in her hair. And when he asked, again, “What did you do?” this time there was a growl to it.
Except when she found his eyes, she found shadowed desperation.
What had she done?
She realized her lower lip trembled; she put fingers on it to still it, and the uncontrollable swell of emotions suddenly infuriated her as well. She tore away from him, losing half her ponytail but freeing her head, and she channeled all her fear into defiance. “I don’t know,” she said. “And I don’t care. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the aftereffects of—”
Of mingled blood and mingled memories and mingled pasts…
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she repeated, but her voice had lost its defiance. “It’ll fade.”
“You think so?” Hoarse and full of pain, those words. “Because I’m not so sure, Meghan Lawrence. I think there’s more to you than you know. I think there’s more to what’s between us than you’ll admit. And I don’t think this is going away.”
The absurdity of his words put her back on solid ground…dampened the pinwheels. “Get real,” she said. “There isn’t anything between us. I met you once, three days ago.”
“I know,” he agreed, and when she tried to look away she found her gaze flickering back to his despite herself. Still full of that dark desperation, purest, deepest blue flaring bright in the rising sun of a desert sky. “It happens that way with some of us. But this…this is beyond.” He closed his eyes, sucked in a breath.
He released her. “Some of us?” she said, stepping back. “I’m not us—and you know it.”
He didn’t open his eyes. “You’ve got the blood, whether you want it or not.”
And the ache, which had intensified now that she no longer touched him, intensified and swelled in protest, but now…faded.
And like that, she shook it off. She took another step back, clinging to the absurdity of it all. Shape-shifters, coming into her life these fifteen years later. Her enhanced herbs and old wards and a night with a black jaguar trying not to die…and now she stood, flushed and unsettled, by Luka’s head.
She straightened. She pulled the overstretched hair band free; she gathered her hair up and scraped it back into containment. “I think,” she said, pulling the band into place again, “that you’d better get into that saddle on your own.”
