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
