You really do want him. Right here, right now.

Regret assailed Lyn. Her alarmed expression, her body language…it must have felt like a slap in the face to Joe.

The thought that anything so strong, so overwhelming, could be anything but induced…

She couldn’t. Not with this man. Not with a Sentinel gone dark.

A Sentinel who just left himself open to a painful surge of power to save four people…

That didn’t mean he hadn’t got himself into trouble. Troubled men could mean well…could even be admirable. And a troubled man could damn well drag her down into the dark with him, if she let him.

Available in April 2010 from Mills & Boon® Intrigue

Secret Delivery by Delores Fossen & Her 24-Hour Protector by Loreth Anne White

Backstreet Hero by Justine Davis & Becoming a Cavanaugh by Marie Ferrarella

The Rancher Bodyguard by Carla Cassidy & Kincaid’s Dangerous Game by Kathleen Creighton

The Bride’s Secrets by Debra Webb

Cry of the Wolf by Karen Whiddon

Sentinels: Lion Heart by Doranna Durgin

Sentinels: Lion Heart

By

Doranna Durgin

MILLS & BOON®

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Doranna Durgin responded to all early injunctions to “put down that book/notebook and go outside to play” by climbing trees so that she’d have the freedom to read and write. Such a quirkiness of spirit has led to an eclectic publishing journey that has spanned genres and forms and resulted in twenty-five novels, which include mystery, science fiction and fantasy, action romance, paranormal and a slew of essays and short stories. But she still prefers to hang around outside her southwestern home with the animals, riding dressage on her Lipizzan and training for performance sports with the dogs. She doesn’t believe so much in mastering the beast within, but in channelling its power. For good or bad has yet to be decided…

You can find her online at www.doranna.net, where she keeps a picture collection of gorgeous high desert sunsets, lots of silly photos, the scoop on new projects and her contact info.

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Unquestionably dedicated to:

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Prologue

Dark Sentinel

Lyn Maines stared at the image of Joe Ryan, big as life—much bigger than life—as it splashed across the high-definition plasma screen of the sleek Sentinel conference room in Tucson, Arizona. Both Joe Ryans, actually—the man and his beast. On the left, tawny mountain lion, heavy masculine head with black tracings and jaw dropped in a snarl as the animal stalked the camera, clearly aware of and annoyed by the photographer’s presence. On the right, Joe Ryan the man, caught unaware, leaning over a railing before an enormous high desert panoramic vista of pines and sere ocher plains, head turned three-quarters to the camera, wind lifting his tawny hair with its dark tracings at the nape of his neck and temple, features clean and strong.

Not always did the human form reflect the Sentinel form. Her own didn’t, aside from a certain something around the eyes. But there in Joe Ryan, the mountain lion lurked out loud—the sinuous authority, the simmering power. All of it.

Too bad that striking exterior covered a corrupt interior.

Joe Ryan was as dirty as they came—a dark Sentinel. He’d killed his partner for cold hard cash, and he’d done it cleverly enough so that the Sentinel’s brevis region consul and his echelon hadn’t been able to pin him down. Cleverly enough so that Ryan had gone on to a new assignment, a new home at the base of Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks, to start a brand-new scheme—acquiring power on top of his money. Still on the Sentinel payroll, still roaming free in his powerful form. Still playing with power itself. And Lyn…

Lyn would prove it.

We think the Atrum Core drozhar might have fled there after the battle near Sonoita, the consul’s grim adjutant had said moments earlier, a warning. He’ll know you if he makes contact with you. He’ll target you.

Then she simply wouldn’t let herself be seen. “Send me there,” she said, flexing her fingers slightly as if she could feel her sharp claws while in this form. Ocelot, small and quick, with a knack for following power traces that had served her well against the Atrum Core this past spring—well enough so that the consul owed her one, if any such thing could ever be said. “I can be on his trail by nightfall.”

Yes. Lyn was the one who would finally prove it.

Chapter 1

Joe Ryan took a heady breath of hot, pine-scented air, basking in it—the scents so much stronger to the cougar, so subtly layered. Dirt and fallen pine needles and the scrub oak beside him, tangy and sharp as he barely brushed against it…each scent heated by the rising afternoon temperature and intensified by the moisture in the gathering monsoon clouds.

The humans he followed through this national forest probably noticed none of it, just as they’d missed the red-backed Abert’s squirrel shooting away from their blundering dog and the birds gone quiet overhead.

Joe noticed them all—but it was the humans he stalked.

The humans and their dog.

Joe loved dogs. He’d had one in Nevada, a big lunky hound mix who’d been bitten by a rattlesnake shortly before everything else went so bad. So much loss…

This was his turf now—the western slopes of the San Francisco Peaks. From peripheral Vegas to high-altitude desert. He couldn’t say he regretted the move. But the circumstances? Oh, yeah.

Still, he protected the area as best he could. Today, that meant ghosting along beside this chattering, trail-bound couple and their loose dog, unseen until he was good and ready to show himself.

There. Up ahead. He trotted a few rangy strides, big paws silent against the ground. He fought that ever-present instinct to hunt, to play with the dog like the prey it could be—

Down, boy-o. Dean’s voice in his head—or the memory of it. He slipped out through a sun-dappled spot between two oaks, crouching down tight behind the base of a giant old Ponderosa. He could shift in an instant if he had to.

The couple had stopped. “Did you see—?” asked the man.

“I’m not sure what I saw,” the woman said, alarm in her voice. “Bunky-Dog, come here.”

“Yeah,” the man agreed. “Let’s get him on the leash.”

Joe squeezed his eyes half-shut in practiced patience as the couple cajoled and chased and finally lured the oblivious Bunky-Dog with a treat. If he’d been a wild cougar drawn by the noisy, gamboling canine, they’d be good and mauled by now.

Finally. Their voices faded as they headed down the trail with haste. Mission accomplished. He’d work on saving the world tomorrow.

Joe stood and stretched, yawning hugely and letting his claws slide in and out of the soil, allowing himself some satisfaction. Now he could turn his attention to the power surge he’d felt on his way out—just like the one he’d felt yesterday, and a week earlier, when he’d been so felled by a cold that he hadn’t been certain he’d perceived it at all. The Peaks, turning and grumbling and rolling off power in disgruntled waves. Not a good thing.

He couldn’t let things go wrong on his watch. Not again.

He turned to cross the trail—and froze. Not alone.

Ocelot. Cleverly upwind, as silent as he could ever be. She sat, stiff and offended, her tail tucked around her front legs, rich black lining her chained rosettes and striping her legs and that thickly furred tail. She sported black-tipped ears and a pink nose, with black lines defining her delicate face along the inside corner of each eye. In comparison to his tawny cougar’s bulk, she was little more than dog-sized house cat.

A house cat who didn’t belong here—and whose intelligence shone from her eyes with an intensity that made him wince. Now that he’d seen her, she dropped the wards concealing her etheric presence; her power flowed over him, smooth as weightless silk.

Smooth as…

He fought the startling impulse to lean into the sensation, to let it trickle over his whiskers and ruffle his fur. And yet his ears flicked forward…back…indecisive. She was Sentinel; he knew that much. Those eyes gave her away, that indignant posture…the silky power. That she was here at all, an ocelot out of place and time.

Decision made. He flicked a shake down his spine, quick and sharp, and shed the cougar—sleek and efficient, blurring from one form of tawny and lean to another and assuming the organically made clothes that came with him. Faded jeans and a cotton flannel shirt, moccasin-like ankle boots, his knives enclosed in treated, warded fabric pockets.

Quite a few of those, when it came right down to it.

He stood beside the tree and waited. She gave him a flat up-and-down stare and obliged with her own shift to stand with quick grace, wearing undyed linen summer pants and a scoop-necked, cap-sleeved shirt of some fine mesh weave.

He realized that his gaze had lingered on her body—like the ocelot, it was petite and understated and yet lithe and perfectly balanced—and stared at her face instead. Her hair was black, her eyes deep brown—neither reflected her Sentinel form. But the ocelot was there, in the sharp nature of her chin, her strikingly large eyes…and he would bet that was a natural smudge of darkness around her lashes, and not mineral makeup applied before she’d shifted. There was intensity in those eyes…purpose. It spoke to him.

She stared back without welcome. “Have you no sense at all, putting us to the change out in the open?”

Joe bit down on irritation, knowing his nostrils flared anyway, catlike, and that his eyes narrowed. Of course she didn’t like him. She was a Sentinel with a mission…and that mission was probably him.

So he kept his voice even when he said, “There’s no one here to see us.” And he squashed his regret, that he’d never had any control over his heart. Foolish thing, heart.

She was oblivious to it. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking, exposing yourself to those hikers.”

He leaned a shoulder against the tree, as relaxed on the outside as he wasn’t on the inside. Cat-lazy. “When loose dogs lure cougars into human contact, it’s the cougar who usually ends up dead in the end. A little reminder that they’re not the only ones here generally straightens them up.” Training humans, that’s what he was doing.

And he’d been doing it since he got here, without incident. He thought about saying that, too, but he’d learned the hard way that vigorous self-defense only made things worse. Made it seem as though there was indeed something to be guilty over.

Especially if someone already believed that you were.

“I’m Joe Ryan,” he said. “But I suspect you already know that.”

“Yes.” She made no apology for it, or for the other things she already knew. “Lyn Maines. Can we talk?” As if he had any choice.

“Sure.” He took the short drop to the trail with looselimbed grace, hesitated long enough for her to join him, and headed up a narrow dirt path littered with volcanic cinders large and small. Raucous Steller’s jays followed them through the trees, unheeding of the bright, building clouds above the trees and the heat.

He moved just as she’d imagined he would—balanced, easy, holding himself with authority. But she also sensed a hint of restraint in his movement, and she didn’t blame him. He might have gone dark, but he was no fool. He knew she was there for him.

Even if that wasn’t the whole of it. Not with the mountain surging power, or the Atrum Core prince—this region’s drozhar—retreating here after losing a confrontation with Sentinels at the southern edge of the state. Retreating, or just moving on to the next greedy, wreck-the-world-along-the-way scheme?

“It can’t be a surprise that I’m here,” she told him. “You must know about the power surges in the area…even though you’ve said nothing to the brevis consul.”

He stopped short, clearly impatient with the hardly veiled accusation. In the gathering humidity of the afternoon storm, sweat darkened the tracings at his nape and temple. “That’s worth a phone call, not a personal visit. And not worth finding me in the woods when you could have waited for me at my place.”

“I—” She gathered herself. Of course he wouldn’t mince words…of course he’d be blunt. Maybe she should have hidden her bias when she’d met him.

Or maybe she shouldn’t have spent so much time familiarizing herself with his file on the flight from Tucson to Flagstaff, looking at those photos until she found her fingers brushing over his image, there with the wilds of the high desert reflected in his eyes.

Then she would have had the distance she needed, and not had to create it with her own frank, hard words.

Take a breath. Do this right. Stop the power drains, nail the dark Sentinel. So she said simply, “I wanted to stretch my legs.”

At that understandable truth, he relaxed slightly. When he spoke, she couldn’t read his voice at first, or his expression. “Thirteen tribes revere this mountain,” he said, looking up the incline where aspens now mingled with the pines. “Not so much these lower slopes, but the Peaks. The Navajo call them Dook’o’oslííd—Shining on Top—for the snow pack. The Hopi Katsinas live there. The Havasupai used to live on the northwest slopes.” She heard it, then. Anger. Not at her, this time. At…

The situation. Because what had been wasn’t any longer.

It startled her. She hadn’t expected the depth of his feelings. She held her silence, simply keeping up with him for a moment, watching the whimsical roll of cinders beneath her soft, laced black-leather flats. This trail was more suited to the ocelot than to her travel outfit.

He slowed without comment, just enough to ease her way. It gave her the breath to say, as neutrally as possible, “Are we still talking about the power surges?”

He glanced at her, his dusky hazel eyes an exact match for those of his cougar self. “The Tucson office should have known better than to give you a Caucasianonly assessment of this area.”

“Should have,” she repeated in agreement. “Didn’t. There was some rush.” An understatement. For all the relief over the victory near Sonoita, it had been a close thing—Dolan Treviño’s victory more than anything. No, the consul did not take this particular drozhar lightly.

“There’s been a power struggle in place on this mountain for years,” he said. “The tribes didn’t want the Snowbowl ski area built. It was. Now they don’t want recycled wastewater used to create artificial snow…but the courts are stomping all over the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.” His tone made it obvious where he stood on the matter. How he felt about this land.

Maybe how he felt about the power here. Wanting it. But she didn’t go so far as to say those words out loud. “Maybe I don’t yet understand the nuances of the situation—”

He gave a short laugh, turning from a short, steep section of barely a trail to offer his hand; she took it without thinking. “Of course you don’t. How can any of us? How can white man’s courts make judgments on the validity of religions they can’t possibly understand?”

She topped the rocky section and released his hand…or thought she had. She could still feel it, warm and calloused, against hers. She shook out her fingers. “You feel strongly about it, for someone who can’t possibly understand.”

Something flashed in his eyes, darkened them. “I understand being stomped on.”

Point to him. Supposing he hadn’t deserved being stomped on. Supposing he didn’t deserve it again. Way to play the wounded innocent.

Except if she’d been that easy, the brevis consul office wouldn’t have sent her. “Still not getting your point here, with the local interest story.”

“The point,” he said, as easily as if he hadn’t just thrown such intensity at her, “is that if you listen to the mountain, you’ll know that there’s just as much power in those ancient religions as the tribes believe there to be. It’s what drives this place.” He glanced up at the sky gone suddenly, truly threatening, and increased his pace. “I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the push to expand Snowbowl has escalated. The Atrum Core knows what’s here. They want it—they’re probably looking for a way to convert it. And they’re stirring things up on one front to obscure what they’ve been doing on another.”

Lyn pulled a suede ribbon from her pocket and tied back her hair, feeling it gone curly with the humidity of the building storm. “Apparently the Atrum Core isn’t the only one with a reason to go after that power. Or didn’t you think we’d notice your trace on the power fluctuations?”

He stopped short, one hand on the huge granite rock beside their path. “No,” he said, just as surprised as she’d meant him to be. Full of reaction, a swell of power she felt against her skin as if it were heat added to the storm. “It’s not—they’re twisting—”

And then, as if he realized he’d said too much even in those incomplete thoughts, he shut down, his jaw working, the defined nature of his lower lip going hard for a moment.

For it was the same excuse he’d used in Las Vegas over the body of his dead partner. They’re framing me. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.

Except it had been.

The Sentinels had enough proof to believe it…and not enough to pronounce judgment. Not through Sentinel Justice, not through the mundane justice system which had released him. So the Sentinels—wary of him, yet unwilling to waste his remarkable ability to monitor and manipulate subtle power flows—had sent him here, where the brooding power of the Peaks kept things stable.

Or used to.

“Storm’s coming in,” he said shortly, turning away from her. “I’m going cougar to beat it home—the strikes come down thick around here.” Everything about his body language suggested that she could stay human and get soaked if she wanted. The scathing look he threw over his shoulder confirmed it. Scathing and…something else. Something dark and powerful and warning. She blinked as the impact hit home, sending her a literal step backward.

“If you’re going to walk,” he informed her, his voice gone flat, “then be prepared to duck the lightning.”

Whoa. Way too late for that.

Chapter 2

They ran through the rugged terrain, four legs and fur, easing downslope. He loped along with rangy strides that made Lyn hunt vertical shortcuts. Lightning flickered above them in regular strokes; thunder shook the pines.

A sudden sweep of wind roared through the trees; Lyn flattened her ears, crouching against it. He tipped his head in a gesture she interpreted as encouragement and she squirted forward in an unhappy slink of a run, already ducking against anticipated rain and the next crash of thunder. Thin, dry soil beneath her paws, thick pine-needle patches, abrasive cinders…this was rugged terrain, with rough, unpredictable rocky outcrops that changed the nature of the ground with little warning.

The cougar hesitated at the lip of one of these, looking down over a shallow swale of land. On the slope opposite them sat the back of a log house with a second-story porch cradled in the center and a variety of roof levels. With her ocelot’s washed-out color vision, Lyn spotted his small SUV beside the house and her green rental car behind it.

Just in time. Intense, double-pronged lightning stabbed the sky not far from them, teamed with an instantaneous explosion of thunder. The cougar sprang into motion. Lyn followed at top speed, hyperaware of the large raindrops splatting off her head and back. Another strobing flash of lightning, another explosion of thunder so loud it rattled her body, and then the rain swept in for real and she was running blind, depending on her surefooted nature and the flickering black tail tip before her.

Together they crashed into the space beneath the porch, brushing through wards and giving Lyn a brief glimpse of yard tools and a wheelbarrow before the world lit up again and blinded her; she lost her bearings, paws slipping on the flagstone, and slammed into warm, musky wet fur.

The cougar shook off, short and sharp, and water flew. Lyn, following suit in a tidier fashion, caught the panting laughter in his expression. He loves this. The dash through the weather, the exhilaration of the run…right there in those dancing eyes, as if he’d forgotten who she was and why she was there, as if they were no more than two companions who’d outraced a storm.

She saw it the moment he remembered. His eyes shuttered; he shifted his weight away from her. And she saw in his posture the moment he decided to change; she scooted back, her long, full tail sweeping between them.

That’s when she felt it. As inevitable as the storm itself, as intertwined with the moment and the place. The deep, thrumming power of the mountain, a basso so profound that it put the rolling thunder to shame.

And dammit, woven in it all was the distinct trace of the very Sentinel who crouched before her—a smooth and corduroy-edged baritone trace, a beguiling brush of sensation even as he entered the change: a quick shake from shoulders up, a flicking twitch of skin down along his back, that elegant rise to his feet—

Except he faltered, and he fell. He crumpled down to his knees and elbows as the storm raged around them and the bass surge of the mountain’s power made Lyn’s bones hum, and his expression held astonishment and betrayal and pain.

Lyn flicked herself out of the ocelot. She went to him, crouching. “What is it?” She reached out, trying to find something identifiable other than Ryan’s trace, other than the wards around this space and those protecting the house.

Dead end.

She looked into his face and saw a dead end there, too. Hazel eyes gone into shadow, body language gone stiff and wary. He sat back on his heels, some part of his expression still lingering on surprise. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Got something in my eye.”

“That’s the most—” pathetic lie I ever heard. It made her wonder if it wasn’t an act, if Vegas had actually broken him, leaving him scrabbling in this last desperate bid for power without the chops to bring it off.

Or maybe he thought she was just that gullible.

Let him think it. No point in giving away the least advantage, even if he wasn’t all he’d been made out to be.

What the hell was that?

Good God, he’d almost lost control of the shifting, right in front of her. That hadn’t happened since…

Since puberty, when it happened to them all. Joe lingered there, sitting on his heels, knowing she was thinking about it, too—seeing the wariness hovering around her.

As if it mattered. She’d had her mind made up long before she’d met him. She had an intensity about her, a burn…Before this was over, he’d find out what had lit that fire. It might be focused on him, but it hadn’t started with him. Way too much momentum there. Alluring, shimmering intensity…

He lifted his face to the fine spray of water reflecting off the edge of the porch, let it mist over skin that felt hot. “If you’re so sure it’s me,” he said, “why not trail me instead of coming to me?”

She snorted, but the question did what he’d wanted—took her mind off his shifting stutter. She sat, bringing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. “I couldn’t trail you here without your knowledge, and you know it.”

Ah. In this, at least, she was sensible enough. She’d hidden her power from him at first, but no one could keep that up for long. Perceiving power shifts was what he did.

“Besides,” she said, still sensible, “whether you’re innocent or guilty, you want to prove me wrong, right? The best way to do that is by helping me. Or pretending to help me.”

Joe laughed. “So you’re betting you’re smarter than I am.”

“Yes,” she said, and shivered. The cleverly layered open weave of her shirt wasn’t much for keeping in the heat. Nor for obscuring the tightening of cold nipples, when it came to that. “It’s just a matter of which of us plays the game better.”

She shivered again. The storm—already moving eastward over the Peaks—had dropped the temperature by a good twenty degrees. Typical. Joe climbed to his feet. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go get warmed up.”

In response, he received a skeptical look. Eloquently skeptical, with one winged brow arching upward.

He shook his head. “I don’t care about your games. I just want to keep this mountain safe.” If they’d decided he was guilty of something, he’d be considered guilty whether they could prove it or not. If anyone knew the meaning of inevitable, it was Joe Ryan. No point in turning himself inside out over it.

“Keep the mountain safe,” she repeated flatly. And then she nodded, rising gracefully to her feet in spite of her shivers. “Okay. We’ll play it that way. Especially if it means coffee.”

Joe gave her coffee. He offered her a down-filled lap quilt, which she pulled over her shoulders, and he stopped short of offering her dry clothes. He’d long since dispersed of his sister’s clothing. No point in hanging on to it, now that she was gone. And thank God she had passed before they’d used her illness to ruin his life; thank God she’d never known.

Not that he’d much cared at the time. Too busy grieving and all that. By the time he started thinking straight again, the Sentinels had tried him in absentia, declared him not guilty but not innocent, and packed him off to this mountain where the deep, stable power was supposed to be big enough to keep him busy—taking advantage of his ability to influence slow swells of deep power—yet too big for him to mess with.

Apparently they’d changed their minds on that last part. He supposed he should feel flattered.

Instead he made coffee for a woman he didn’t know but who was already his enemy. Damn shame, that. Those eyes—

Don’t go there, boy-o.

Besides, he’d be in real trouble if they found out just how wrong they were when it came to his limits.

“We just have time to make it to Snowbowl,” he said, words she didn’t quite seem to absorb as she wandered the most public parts of the house—the entryway with its skylights, the soaring space of the great room with its cathedral ceiling and the wood stove set neatly in the corner. She’d spooked three of his four cats into brief appearance and now she drifted back to the kitchen, an area defined by half walls and countertops and otherwise completely open to the great room. “I can’t believe you have cats.”

“I don’t have them. They just live here.” He shrugged. “It amuses them.” In fact, cat number four, a little black shorthair, wound between his ankles as he pulled coffee mugs from the cupboard, her tail high and quivering. They’d all chosen him…followed him home, refused to go away, and now lived under his protection, indoors and safe from the predators of the area. “But four,” he admitted, “is the absolute limit.”

“Four,” she repeated, looking bemused. And then, finally registering his words, “Why Snowbowl?”

Coffee gurgled in the background, his sleek little onecup coffeemaker valiantly churning out a dark French blend, the very aroma of which ought to be enough to warm her right on the spot. “Because the Skyride is the fastest way to the top. Because one way or the other, that area is at the root of this problem.” He shrugged, and added almost against his will, “Because I want you to see the view. To see what this place really is.”

That stopped her. She hesitated, a moment in which he couldn’t read her at all. Even that whisper of silken power faded. And then she seemed to shake it off, and she moved in as he pulled the first mug from the brewer and pushed it across the polished charcoal granite counter. “I’d planned to do some tracking today.”

“So do I.” Different kinds, no doubt—she was a trace sniffer, someone who could find and follow specific individuals. It wasn’t even a guess. Only someone with those skills could have found him on the trail today. Joe himself felt the deeper power, could nudge it around to a point, detour it on occasion, follow it if the flow was sustained. Officially, anyway.

He was perfectly willing to take advantage of her complimentary skills while he was at it.

Chapter 3

Agassiz Peak. Lyn squinted upward into a bright sky; the rising mountain filled half of it. It didn’t look like all that much from here.

Ryan gave her a look. “You haven’t really seen it yet.”

Had she said that out loud? She couldn’t be certain. Standing here at the modest ski lodge and gift shop, the tortuously winding drive up Schultz Pass behind them and nothing but pines and bare volcanic cinder slopes up ahead, she’d let something of herself get lost in the thrumming of the mountain. No wonder the Atrum Core wanted this place. No wonder Ryan wanted it.

Although, as she left the solid-plank porch of the lower lodge and stepped out onto sparse native grasses, it occurred to her that he already had it, just by living here.

No. Wrong thinking. He was what he was; she couldn’t forget it. If he’d once made his trade-offs for his sister’s life, now he made them simply for power. For that desperate attempt to balance his life. It wasn’t as though he had anything to lose.

After all, he’d already lost his sister even after he’d paid her bills with blood money.

He came up behind her. His solidity made her feel weightless, as though she stayed grounded only because he stood behind her. Over her shoulder, he gestured toward an open space and its ski lift—the barely green grass of a natural meadow, sloping sharply upward and lined by woods. “Hart Prairie,” he said. “We can access a number of trails right here. But there are too many people for shifting, and you’re not dressed for hiking.”

At least she was dry, her wet clothes barely more than a memory in the resurging heat. As was he, in a basic T-shirt and jeans, a black leather vest completing the look in a way that should have been pathetically poser but instead looked perfectly natural. He looked up the slope, and even then she could have sworn he was drinking in the view. Drinking in the feel of the power, too—although it felt stable to her limited perception, and reassuring…like being held in the palm of some giant being.

He gave the slightest of nods as two hikers emerged from the trees. “We’ll take the Skyride. Half an hour and we’re there.”

She didn’t mind following his lead. Following blind…that was another thing. “And then?”

He grinned. “Then we see what we can see. And hope it doesn’t brew up another storm.” He offered his jacket—a lined canvas work jacket, strictly nonkosher when it came to shifting. “It’ll be a lot colder up there.”

“No, thanks,” she said. The last thing she needed—to be surrounded by the scent of him.

He opened his mouth as though to say something—some argument, no doubt—and closed it again, offering a shrug instead. In this light, his hazel eyes looked distinctly green, and the short black edging at his nape and temple stood out sharply from tawny hair.

Nothing about his demeanor made her think of someone who could kill his boyhood friend and Sentinel partner. Nothing about his stance. A big guy, a strong guy, an exceptionally charismatic guy…but not edgy. Not that gritty.

He turned abruptly away from the prairie ski area bunny slopes and headed across the parking lot with assured strides. She caught up in short order, and soon enough caught a glimpse of another ski lift—this one moving steadily, chairs filled with people pointing out the sights to one another.

“From the top, you can see the Grand Canyon.”

“I’m not here to see the Grand Canyon.”

He gave her a sharp look. “I think maybe you are.” He veered toward the upper of the two lodges, bought them both lift tickets, and returned with the conversation still on his tongue. “Thing is, you have to look. You have to see.”

“I’ve already seen more than you want me to,” she said, a deliberate and sharp reminder of her twofold purpose here.

He caught her gaze with a flash of green and held it. Quietly, he said, “If you think I’ve forgotten, you’d be very much mistaken.” And then he left her behind, heading directly for the mechanical clank of the lift.

They’d almost reached it when his long stride faltered. An instant later, she felt it—felt the surge of him and the turbulent rapids of power that followed, saw him stumble—and then they both froze at a shriek of fear from the ski lift.

They hadn’t been the only ones to feel the disruption—to react to it. A teenaged girl in skimpy shorts dangled from the lift behind a half-engaged safety bar, crop top riding high with her entanglement. Even as they watched, one of her flip-flops fell to the rocky grass below.

The lift wrangler was already on it, easing the cable to a stop—but so was Ryan. From easygoing to distinctly feral, from stumbling to smooth, poetic movement. He sprinted past the gasping crowd, past the lift wrangler and his incoherent yell of protest, and up the hill with no slack in his powerful sprint.

There’s no way. That chair had to be twice his height. Had to be—

That’s when she realized she was running, too, right behind him, scooping up the jacket he’d dropped and ready to…

What? Even drawing on an ocelot’s strength, she couldn’t reach that lift…

And then she stuttered to a halt in amazement as Ryan sprang from the ground, every bit of big-cat strength in play, latching on to the footrest while the car swung in reaction. There he hung a distinct moment while he spoke to the terrified girl.

Lyn wouldn’t have thought he could do it, not so smoothly—not without jarring the girl from her precarious perch. But he did. He swiftly pulled himself up, swung a leg up to hook around the seat, and slithered into a position from which he could haul the girl into the chair, flailing in fear until the moment she flung her arms around him.

He jerked the safety bar down; the wild edges of her sobs trickled unevenly down to Lyn, to the crowd. The silence exploded into relief and wonder and excited conversation. Did you see—? How did he—?

Lyn whirled around to jump into the next chair. The lift wrangler cried a knee-jerk protest and then he gave up and nudged the cable back up to speed, reaching for the radio at his side.

Lyn engaged her own safety bar, and then—already aware of the rising breeze and dropping temperatures as the lift swooped her up over the trees—tucked Ryan’s jacket around her shoulders.

Alone on a half-hour ski lift ride to the top of the tall peak, with nothing to do but contemplate the broad strength of the shoulders that had so easily pulled Ryan into the chair…Lyn thought of the sudden change of his presence when he’d focused himself on the girl’s lift chair, gone for it and caught it as resoundingly as prey in powerful cougar paws.

To think, only moments ago she’d been wondering if really he had the grit to go dark.

She laughed out loud, and if the man in the seat ahead with the girl clinging around his neck heard her, he gave no sign.

The topside lift wrangler waited for them as the chairs glided toward the turnaround, radio raised to his ear, face tense and determined. Gusts flapped at his jeans and windbreaker; Lyn drew Ryan’s coat closer as that same wind buffeted her. Ryan hadn’t been exaggerating; high summer had turned sharply to fall.

Abruptly, the chairs slowed in pace, giving Ryan a luxury of time to flip the safety bar up and disembark. The girl clung tightly as he half carried her away from the chair’s path, one arm wrapped around her waist.

Lyn fumbled with the unfamiliar bar as she, too, reached the summit, ducking away and to the side as the lift wrangler’s radio drizzled static in response to his short comment. The chairs sped up again, and Lyn glanced down the long swooping lines of the cables in surprise; she’d expected them to call an all-stop until things were sorted out. But it didn’t take her sharp vision long to pick out the cluster of occupied chairs heading their way in double time—E.M.T.s, officials.

She didn’t plan to be here.

Ryan apparently felt the same; he’d transferred the teenager to the lift operator and now headed for the narrow trail leading uphill.

“Hey,” the lift wrangler said, tangled up in the girl, “you can’t go…They’ll want to talk to you—”

Ryan spun briefly around to face him. “Go where?” he asked, wry enough to make the kid laugh.

Lyn took note. Not a lie, but misleading? Oh, yeah. Because she and Ryan had an entire extinct volcano over which to range—eighteen thousand acres of fragile, extreme Kachina Peaks Wilderness area above the more accessible trails.

On the other hand…

Don’t over analyze. Of course he’d misled the kid. Of course he’d do whatever low-key thing it took to keep them out of any official reports of the incident, just as she was prepared to do the same. And it didn’t take as much as one might think. Already she could imagine the reaction to the description of Joe Ryan leaping to catch hold of that lift chair and pull the girl to safety. Skepticism, if not outright disbelief. Chalking it up to a natural inclination to exaggerate.

Such skepticism served the Sentinels well.

Ryan moved effortlessly up the tricky trail, maneuvering its short, zigzagging sections with ease. Lyn followed, custom-made boots finding purchase in spite of rolling cinders over rock-hard dirt.

She’d thought he’d just keep going—get them out of sight and head into the woods. But instead, when the trail widened out to a viewing area perched at the edge of a rock outcrop, he hesitated. He wandered to the fenced edge, looking not at the drop before him but out at the reforming thunderheads of the waning afternoon. Lyn realized, then, with a startling snap of awareness—this was the very spot his dossier picture had been taken.

Yes, he knew this place.

He might even consider it his, in some ways.

He’d be wrong.

She wandered over to the token handrail. Ponderosas speared up at her from the plunging slope below; off to the side and farther down, ski resort personnel bustled around the teenager. Scattered groups of tourists appeared in the distant chairs on the lift. Good. With more people up here, their own absence would be less noticeable.

But while she tried to focus her thoughts on the power surges of the area, on the consequences of such surges, on her need to prove Joe Ryan a Sentinel gone dark, the gentle gusty wind snatched at her thoughts; the scent of sun-warmed pine beguiled her nose. The thin air slipped in and out of her lungs without leaving much impact, and her peripheral vision seemed ever so sparkly around the edges. Her fingers curled around the upper rail of the brown pipe fencing; she took a deep breath.

“Give it a few minutes,” Ryan said, giving her a quick, sharp glance before he returned his attention to the panorama before them. “You’ll adjust.”

More so than the average tourist—an advantage of her robust shifter form, and one she’d gladly take. Plenty of travelers found the seven-thousand-foot altitude at the base challenging enough; Lyn hadn’t even considered it until this moment. She took another deep breath, suddenly overwhelmed by the very alien nature of the landscape—from the volcanic rock formations around them to the distinct sections of forest and high desert prairie spread out below and the slash of the Grand Canyon far to the northwest…this place smelled different, it sounded different…it even tasted different, pressing in around her with clear, rarefied air and the unique trace of those creatures who dared to live at this cold, dry twelve thousand feet.

Perhaps that’s why she nearly missed it. Another rumble of power, a mere bass hiss of presence, tasting of Ryan and of deep green wild…Lyn found herself closing her eyes, leaning into it as she might a pleasant breeze on a hot day.

Her eyes snapped open, riveting to him in accusation—but the words she gathered to fling at him died on her lips. He stood braced against the rail, a frown drawing his brows, nostrils flared with the impact of that faint surge…or with effort, she wasn’t sure. Even as she watched, eyes narrowed, he lifted his head—a little jerk of determination there—and turned to her.

And then she couldn’t help it. Then the words burst out. “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel that. Don’t tell me you didn’t taste yourself in that surge!”

For an instant, he looked nothing more than nonplussed. And then his frustration snapped back at her. “No! It’s not—I—” A quick step, another, and he’d closed the distance between them, by then under better control. “Tell me, Lyn Maines…did you recognize your voice the first time you heard yourself recorded?”

She blinked. “I…” Flashed back to that day, two children playing with an off-limits answering machine, her brother leading the way into trouble even then. The laughter at how they sounded, their insistence—that really is you!

She didn’t get a chance to voice her answer; he turned away from her again, looking back out over the vista. It truly didn’t matter—they both knew her answer. And so the question became…did he not know why his trace was tangled with the surges? Or had he simply not realized it would be detectible?

Voices muttered up from below as the next wave of tourists grew closer, the Snowbowl management and emergency personnel in discussion with the lift operator. “They’ll be looking for us,” Ryan said, but it came as an afterthought, an aside to whatever else ran through his mind.

Lyn said, “If the Core siphons the energy of this place…if they store it in their amulets, if they use it against us…if they use it against the rest of the world—”

He didn’t turn on her, but she got the impression it was only through strength of will. “Then this ancient place will change forever,” he said, his voice low. “Irrevocably. The people who revere it, who draw their spiritual strength from it…those nations would never recover. There’s no telling what would happen to the delicate ecosystem up here.”

“And you?” she said, words that slipped out before she could think better of them. She tightened his jacket around her, realized suddenly that it was his, and pretended that it didn’t matter. “If you siphon energy?”

He laughed—a short, bitter sound. “They think I’m that good, do they?” He gestured out over the slopes—hard red-brown cinders cropping up in dramatic patches between the pines, while above them the trees stunted down and gave way to lichens and scrub. “Look at it! Can’t you feel it, lurking here, as big as the world? What would I do with it all?”

She shrugged, determined to be unaffected by his passion for this area. “Personal glory? A little something to make up for what you’ve lost?”

No laughter this time, but he grinned, and turned so the gusts lifted the hair from his forehead as he looked back at her. “Don’t you think it’s all just a little bit bigger than I am?”

“Well,” she said, taken aback at both the grin and the matter-of-fact nature of the response, “I do. But people who break rules usually think they’re the exception.”

He nodded. “Okay,” he said, and turned to her, leaning his hips against the top pipe rail with an insouciance she could not have mustered, not with the fatal nature of the drop behind him. He nodded again, catching her eyes. The sharp shadows thrown by his own features turned his dusky hazel gaze to something darker. “Okay,” he repeated. “That’s good. You think like that.”

She must have registered her surprise. He grinned again. “Thinking like that will find the truth. That’s fine by me. That’s not the same as already having made up your mind, and coming here with some old grudge already in hand.”

Lyn’s jaw dropped; she groped for words. Her temper filled the void. “How dare you even suggest—”

He cut her off with a snort of a laugh. “What have I got to lose?”

And that stopped her temper cold, floundering; she was unable to do anything but search his eyes. From below came filtered conversation—clear to any Sentinel, if not the average person. The lift wrangler said, “They’ve got to come down soon.”

“We should go,” Ryan said, dropping her gaze. He pushed away from the railing and then quite suddenly froze, and the hint of natural burnished color in his face paled away. His step faltered to the point that she reached for him—and that’s when she felt it herself, another angry aftershock of power, whispering through her veins and briefly clouding her head. Only the merest of grumbles, but here, so close to the source…

An instant of panic skittered down her spine, fluttered in her chest. So much power, and we’re sitting right on top of it…

What if she hadn’t even thought of the worst of the possibilities? What if brevis regional had missed it, too? Because…what if whoever had disturbed the mountain hadn’t done it right?

If the area had been unbalanced, destabilized…it could be on the verge of an eruption such as the world had never seen. Not magma, but pure power…

Take a breath. She did just that. Get a grip. Not quite as easily done. She took another breath, deeper…slower. She gathered her own energy, what little grasp she had of it. She was no Joe Ryan, to perceive and impose himself on the world’s deepest powers, but she could damn well control her own. She pulled it into herself, found it tainted with her fears, and hunted the inner note that had always cleared away such things…a silent hum. It grounded her…centered her.

And when she opened her eyes, she found him there—right there—his hand reaching for the side of her face, his expression equal parts intensity and wonder. “How…?” he said. And, “I thought you were a tracker…”

“I am,” she said, the calm lingering; she didn’t so much as blink to find him so close, though she couldn’t help but lift her chin slightly.

He shook his head. “Whatever. Damned fine job of…” He shook his head again. “It wasn’t shielding, or even just centering. Nicely done.”

She shrugged. “Are you all right? You looked—”

He waved off the rest of the question. “I had a bug earlier this week. I’m fine.” But he glanced down slope and took her arm, escorting her back to the trail and moving a little too quickly for her comfort.

She shook his hand free. “Where now?” she asked, and she lowered her voice in deference to those who were looking for them. She and Ryan were vulnerable now—silhouetted against bare rock and sky until the trail rounded the next hump of ground.

He looked back at her, ready to offer a hand if she needed it. “Following my feet,” he said. “You’ve seen for yourself…they pretty much lead me to trouble. Today, I’m counting on it.”

Chapter 4

Alien and familiar at the same time, the alpine zone of the Peaks never failed to draw Joe’s awe, here on the rarified trails across the towering Agassiz Peak summit to the saddles and dips between the other five Peaks. Arctic tundra, right here in the Arizona desert, with lichens and a threatened groundsel species and even a variety of buttercup; on the gentler slopes of swooping tundra meadows there were enough grasses, sedges and moss to keep his nose twitching—not to mention a shrew or two.

But he wasn’t here for shrews today. He glanced at Lyn; she, too, looked out over the cold rugged landscape, her eyes bright and alert, her ears flicking in tiny, precise motions.

So very Lyn.

The wind ruffled her thick, rich fur, rippling down along the length of a truly amazing tail. What would fur like that feel like beneath a man’s hands?

You’ll never know, boy-o.

They’d followed the trail at first, passing out of Snowbowl turf into the Kachina Peaks Wilderness area, where they definitely didn’t have the necessary permit. And so as soon as they found a grouping of rocks big enough to hide the jacket, Lyn had taken the ocelot, and Joe had turned his face to the sun and let the cougar come out.

From here, the power pushed at him with an inner rumble and a strong directional flow. Unlike warders with their discrete lines and precision knots, Joe saw broad tides and flows, overlays of movement over earth and sky. Tides and flows couldn’t be tied into knots or moved with precision. Might as well try to herd a flash flood. Managing power on this scale took deep concentration, a sense of conviction behind clear vision of what should be…an utter belief in success.

Even if Joe still had that belief in himself, it seemed that brevis regional did not. And looking out over this natural magic of delicate ecosystem backed by a power so deep that every native nation within reach had considered it sacred, Joe felt the resentment of it. I’ve done a good job here.

Probably part of the problem. They probably had no idea of the subtle adjustments he made, the corrections to natural flows gone astray in the face of modern incursions. Even if they’d read his reluctantly submitted reports, they’d never truly comprehend.

He stopped, flicked a whisker, briefly flattened annoyed ears. He had sent that last report, hadn’t he?

Damned paperwork.

The ocelot looked back at him, silent. Had she been more simpatico, they could have communicated clearly in thought. Also not gonna happen, boy-o. Joe padded past her, heading them down into the scoop of the meadow and toward the tree line on the far side—aiming through the Fremont Saddle to pick up the Weatherford Trail. “If they’ve been here,” he’d told her before the change, “they probably came this way.” Pretty much the only way, on foot.

They being the Core, of course. Those for whom he’d already intended to look today. Not because brevis had warned him, not because consul Dane had sent him any message or his adjutant Nick Carter had bothered with a heads-up, but because anywhere things went amiss as profoundly as the recent power surges, it was worth looking for Core influence.

The tree line rose up around them in an amazingly abrupt transition, stunted and gnarled spruce, firs and pines. Something of a rodent nature rustled low in the grass off to the side; Joe ignored the catlike impulse to play toss the squeakie. He threaded through the trees, heading for the trail in an efficient line—leaping onto rock outcrops as though they were mere steps, bounding over water-worn mini-gullies in the fragile soil.

When he struck the trail, he gave it over to Lyn. They’d had no discussion of it, but it made sense. He could track with his nose, his whiskers, his common sense, but the best trackers could sense any faint trace of used power, including the corrupt presence of Core amulets, and he was betting his little ocelot—

Right. Not yours. Not a tame ocelot. Don’t forget it.

But he thought Lyn could do it.

She didn’t hesitate to move out in front of him. She stepped onto the trail and trotted easily along. The unwary might have said she wasn’t paying attention, but Joe saw the swivel of her ears, the alert, graceful posture of her neck…the slight kink of tension near the end of her tail.

Quickly enough, she stopped short, her ears trained forward—presenting him with a perfect view of the yellow spot on the back of each small, perfectly aligned ear. He came up beside her, watching her whiskers quiver. The quiver traveled through her whole body until she gave a quiet, disdainful little sneeze and shook it off with distaste.

Core. His pulse quickened. And if they were indeed on this trail…he knew where they were headed.

She opened her eyes and instantly stiffened to find him so close, so large; she was ten inches shorter than he and nearly a hundred and fifty pounds lighter. She hissed.

He immediately crouched, not in submission but remorse. Hadn’t been thinking, nope. Sorry, he said, an apology she wouldn’t or couldn’t hear. But when she flicked her tail and stepped out to move on down the trail, he didn’t follow. For that scent in this place…he knew where they were headed, and that meant he was no longer just out for a ramble in the high, free air beside a beautiful companion. Not now.

Now, he was predator.

Lyn scowled. It came out as whiskers tipped back, baleful green eyes glowering at him, ears slanted. A powerful look, used to good effect.

Ryan ignored it. He may have tried to say something to her. She had the uneasy sense of it, enough to make her skin twitch. She couldn’t hear him; she didn’t want to hear him.

Even if it meant watching him turn away to lope downhill with directed strides, slipping between the gnarled, sun-scented pines where the shadows turned long from the early-evening sun. She sneezed again—this time from pure vexation.

Trust him, then. She’d know soon enough if he was leading her into folly…and now that she’d been to this place, she could find her way back with or without him.

She didn’t admit to herself that it was a relief to return to his smooth trace, the baritone feel and the textured depth of it. Something she could sink her mental fingers into, but not a sensation that would ever turn boring. It didn’t matter that he was already out of sight, or that her nose could track him as easily as her eyes. She slipped onto his trail without benefit of either, indulging in an all-out sprint, tail undulating behind her, until she caught sight of him flicking through stunted trees. He paused by a conglomeration of jumbled rocks and gnarled miniature trees to let her catch up.

His whiskers quirked in quick greeting. And she realized, startled, that she’d allowed the feel of him to capture her senses. She instantly closed her eyes to filter him out, pushing the Joe Ryan awareness back to a trickle and casting the area for other influences.

Nothing. Just the feel of this place itself, a deep rumbling hum with a touch of discord and the uncomfortable random prickle of physical static. They’d have to go back to the trail and start again; he’d merely led them astray.

But when she opened her eyes, she found him…gone. She gave a startled mrp, full of sudden suspicion, thoughts racing—had he led her into a trap? Abandoned her here, thinking she couldn’t find her way back? Gone off to—

But by then she had opened herself to the feel of him again, and the baritone corduroy came flooding back with such intensity that she knew he was still close.

Claws scratched rock above her; she glanced up to find him comfortably ensconced on the outcrop, one massive paw outstretched, claws exposed to knead stone and a cat grin on his face.

She would have blushed, had she been in the human form—this, then, was the reason she could never work alone. Too vulnerable, when those moments of utter concentration blocked out all else.

The skin over her shoulder twitched—no doubt he’d said something to her. She scrambled lightly up those rocks to stand beside him; he withdrew his outstretched paw and tucked it beneath him, classic cat, eyes squeezing closed.

Good God, was that a purr she heard?

If so, it was brief and barely evident, but he remained settled. In his element. For the moment, not concerned about Lyn, or about what they might find here. Certainly not concerned about what she might expose of his activities here.

Another flash of uncertainty hit her. Either brevis had been wrong all along—she’d been wrong—or he’d simply led her so astray that he already had complete command of the situation.

She’d prove him wrong. And damn fast.

She settled herself on their perch and went deep again; she wouldn’t let it be said that she’d stinted the search. She filtered him out—harder this time, with his contentment now coloring his trace—and she hunted. The land gave her a trickle of something fresh and bright and near, and at the same time nudged her with the distant unrest of a developing storm cell. And there, at the edges…

Something bitter. Something corrupt. The faint traces of power ripped from its living vessel and stored away, as decayed as any corpse but still entrapped.

Amulets.

Her eyes popped open. She found Ryan watching her with such interest in those predator’s dusky hazel eyes that she felt a quick, ephemeral thrill of fear—it ran down her spine and just like that, puffed out the considerable length of her tail.

He blinked, drew back. Looked, if it was possible, embarrassed. He sat, turning away to look out over the land. For the first time she realized that on the other side of their approach, the rocks tumbled away in a V shape. They sat at the apex, and directly below them, from within the steep cleft of stone and moss, a seep of water eased out to fill the most modest of pools near the base of the structure.

Suddenly she was so very thirsty. And she thought, from the sly flick of his ear and the way he didn’t quite look at her, that he might be laughing again—that she’d been so caught up in the hunt she hadn’t yet realized that he’d brought them to water.

The birds alone should have alerted her, flitting so actively from twisted evergreen branch to lichencovered rock, or the light scent of the tiny white flowers so thickly scattered along the gentle slope below. She gave another inward blush, another acknowledgment of how very focused she became when on the trail of something. They should have sent me with a partner.

But they hadn’t wanted Ryan to feel threatened enough to act rashly. They’d wanted him just as he was—aware of Lyn but underestimating her. If that meant she needed to pay a little more attention…

Well, then, she’d do it. She’d had her warning.

And now she scrambled to catch up, because Ryan had moved ahead, descending careful step by step on the nearly vertical clifflet. Here, Lyn found herself at an advantage, light and swift; she reached the spring before him, lapping neatly from its fresh, cold water, then moving aside so Ryan could join her—noisier, not quite so tidy.

Men.

That the thought held humor surprised her, and she was still somewhat bemused as she padded out beside him, heading toward another, much lower rock formation. Except this time he gave her a little sideways glance, and it was but an instant later that the first wafting stench of it hit her.

She stopped short. Her eyes widened; she sneezed. Corruption filled her nose, her sinuses, her inner self. It brushed against her soul with Brillo-pad harshness; she slammed her defenses shut. Another sneeze and she dropped to rub her paws over her face, and that’s how the change caught her; she came to the human curled up over her knees with her hands over her face.

Dammit. Another weakness, and one of her worst. She hadn’t intended to change, but when the trace came on that strong…it didn’t matter whether she was human or ocelot, she found herself jarred into whatever she wasn’t.

But Joe changed right beside her, already crouching down to put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

She sneezed, one more mortifying time, her face still buried in her hands. “I’m fine,” she said, her words muffled even to her own ears. Even now, the trace was strong—but she’d adjust. She’d push it back until she could filter out the details, just as she had pushed back the feel of Joe Ryan.

Except now, with the corruption so strong around them, she gave in to sudden impulse—she let his trace wash over her, as textured and deep as she remembered. She took it into herself, absorbing it like a decadent balm, and then took a breath, clearing her thoughts, finding her own inner note of centered calm…pulled that centered space around her as if it were a cloak.

Ryan made a strangled noise. His hand clenched down on her shoulder—until he snatched it back to himself, sucking in a quick breath. Lyn looked up from her centered, peaceful place to discover him staring at her, darkened eyes wide and alarmed and something she couldn’t read, his withdrawn hand clenched and…

Yes. Trembling.

Chapter 5

Joe took another deep breath. What the hell had she done? That centering thing of hers, but something else, too—something that had grabbed him and folded him in and damn well caressed him from the inside out, touching nerves he hadn’t even known he’d had.

And she clearly didn’t have a clue.

At least, not to judge from those big, brown eyes aimed his way, puzzled and a little concerned—but more suspicious than not. So Joe took one last deep breath and counted himself glad for clothes, and he turned himself brusque and matter-of-fact. He tightened all those feelings down into his clenched fist and allowed himself that small crutch while the rest of him went on. “We can’t stay this way long,” he said, certain the cold wind already bit into her as it did into him. He stood, held out a hand and pulled her to her feet.

She tucked a strand of wavy hair behind her ear and gestured at the area. “How did you know?”

He shrugged. “I guessed.” He pointed back at the little spring. “Believe it or not, that one’s not on any maps—none of the trails go anywhere near it. I call it the top of the world. It’s a place where…” He hesitated, narrowed his eyes slightly—and decided maybe not. Not when she’d already decided he had a thing for power. So instead he asked, “What’s it like? The traces? What do they feel like?”

She looked taken aback, as she well might. It was a personal question, in its way. Probably too personal, and probably she wouldn’t answer, but—

“It depends,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself—cold at that. Her eyes still watered slightly from her sneezing and she hadn’t quite recaptured all her hair; a wavy tendril from her temple fluttered in the breeze. Reluctantly, she added, “They come as smells, mainly, but also as…inner sensations. The sneezing…the amulets are particularly pungent, in all ways. Corrupt. Like sticking your nose into a liquefying corpse.”

He recoiled. “Tell me I don’t do that to you,” he said, the words out of his mouth before he thought them through.

She reacted much the same. “God, no,” she said. “You’re—” and then she caught herself. “No, not at all. Don’t worry about it.”

All right. Yeah. He changed directions again, back to where he’d been. “What I feel,” he said, “is too big to fit inside me. Like being inside a slow wind that goes right through your skin. Sometimes it gets gusty and fussy, but unless someone’s messing with it—” like lately “—it’s pretty steady. Feels different, depending on the source. It’s…”

And there he ran out of words, for how could he explain the thrill of riding power, of having it fill him and pass on through, leaving the taste of wherever it had come from and where it had been along the way? Like jumping off a high cliff and soaring on thermals and bounding downhill and flinging himself wide open to all the possibilities of what might be, all at the same time—

Mistake, boy-o. She’d seen something in his expression…something, perhaps, of the words he hadn’t said. Her eyes narrowed. And so, totally lame, he pointed to the rock formation over the spring. “It’s a natural channel…easy to monitor the area from here.”

“Right there,” she said flatly, and then repeated words that somehow now seemed childish. “At the top of the world.”

He suddenly felt exposed, scraped raw right down into a silly, insignificant core. Hardest thing he’d done in a long time, meeting her gaze just then. But he did it, and he said, “Yes.” And he gritted his teeth together a moment or two, clenching jaw muscles he hadn’t had occasion to use in such a fashion since the days of pain and loss—his sister, his partner, his life—and then managed to add more casually, “Once you caught trace on the Weatherford Trail, I figured our Core friends had headed this way. They just didn’t know the straightest route to get here. They probably circled in on it…had some kind of detection device.”

“Fabron Gausto,” she murmured, and shivered, rubbing her upper arms. Maybe the cold, maybe the thought of the Core’s local sept prince.

And then he realized she wasn’t just referring to the influence of the local Core when she named the man. She meant Fabron Gausto.

She meant here.

Right then she looked at him, and said, “He’s been here, all right,” a pronouncement filled with both satisfaction and trepidation.

“Hold on,” he said, and his temper suddenly felt hot within him, a rare thing for a man who’d become so resigned to so very much. “You expected to find him? You knew that son of a bitch Core prince would be here? And no one’s told me? Warned me? Done so much as dropped sly damned knowing hints?”

Her hands stilled on her arms; she looked back at him, nonplussed. “Of course we—” she started, and stopped to frown. “Didn’t you—?” And then gave a giant shiver and hugged herself anew.

The cold wind cut just as sharply through Joe’s shirt, tugging at his hair, gusting away the last remnants of the startling sensations she’d roused. He badly needed to take the cougar, and even more badly, she needed to take back the ocelot. To bask in the sharp intensity of the high altitude sun, buffered from the wind by thick coats.

But not until she explained why brevis regional, the Southwest office to which he reported, on which he depended for updates on the millennia-long clash between the Atrum Core and the Sentinels, had failed to mention their intel on Gausto’s location.

For although the simmering conflict between the Core and the Sentinels rarely exploded even on the most local of levels, Fabron Gausto had recently changed all that. A regional septs drozhar going against his own Continental septs prince, his own advisors, and the wisdom of every generation since the two organizations were both founded from the same family—by two brothers with the same Gaul mother, but fathers from two different nations—Gausto had broken rules that hadn’t been challenged for hundreds of years.

Early enough, the Druidic-born brother and the Roman-born brother had realized that whatever their clashes, their survival lay in their clandestine nature. Never mind that the Roman-born brother, finding himself completely without the inborn ability to manipulate earthly powers—including his Druidic brother’s amazing faculty for taking the form of a wild boar—turned early to darker, cruder options, justifying his actions as necessary to police any unsavory act his brother might commit. And never mind that the Druidic brother quickly set about refining his abilities, and set upon his descendants the obligation to continue his work. Vigilia, the Sentinels had been called back then—and, wisely keeping the strong, prepotent nature of their lineage to themselves, they thrived and grew and expanded…they spread across the continents, learning, growing…becoming sentinels of the earth.

The Atrum Core had taken their name from the Vigilia…Dark to the Core, they’d been called, and then Dark Core for short. It wasn’t supposed to be a compliment. No one ever expected them to take the name for their own. And while the Core ran itself on stolen power, half monarchy and half dictatorship, broken down into regional septs, the Sentinels had a more developed structure—more democratic.

Or so they liked to say. And so Joe had used to believe.

He’d given her too much time. She said, “You were told. Just as you were specifically asked to deliver your most recent report—the one that’s so late—and never did. That looked really good for you, by the way.”

“I—what?” Now it was his turn to stand and stare, until the next gust of wind hit him and he turned his back to it; he didn’t miss the way she angled around to use him as a wind break. Too cold, too high, too remote, with rain building up again in a little western thunderhead that might or might not dump on the mountain before it dissipated into evening darkness. No, humans didn’t belong up here. “Hell, it’s late…it’s always late. What’s the big deal?”

Dean used to rag him about that…his casual disrespect for paperwork. “You’re gonna get nailed, boy-o,” he’d said, more than once dropping forms on Joe’s desk or leaving sticky notes on his monitor. And with Dean around, the paperwork had, somehow, always gotten done on time.

Not so much since Dean’s death—nor since Joe had been both officially cleared of and unofficially convicted of causing it.

Lyn Maines snorted; it turned into half a sneeze, left her eyes watering as she said, “The big deal is that Nick requested it—he needed it to assess this situation. When he didn’t get it, all we could do was guess what’s been happening up here.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Maybe you’ve gone dark…maybe not. But letting down brevis because you just don’t care enough to do your job—?”

Joe recoiled as if she’d hit him. Hell, she had hit him. He’d never not cared, he’d never given this job—this life—less than everything he had. Being a little slow with the reports was one thing…ignoring a direct request for information, something else entirely. Lives depended on fulfilling such requests. “I never—” he said.

But suddenly it had the same old familiar feel to it. Not me. I didn’t do it. There’s been a mistake. And so he turned from her, quite abruptly taking the cougar—a quick, hard transition that found him already bounding back up to the top of the spring upon completion—and this time, if she’d had anything left to say, he was the one who wasn’t listening.

Lyn thought she’d never get warm again.

She took another sip of coffee from the simple machine in Joe Ryan’s barely detached casita—nothing like the home-ground beans from his own kitchen, just your basic Mr. Coffee and grounds from a can. Still, she was grateful for it, even with the bitter aftertaste going down.

Rather like her entire day. Definite bitter aftertaste there.

She hadn’t expected to end up here, in this little studio structure so common to Southwest homes—open kitchenette, full bath and a daybed. He’d offered it to her when they’d emerged from the Snowbowl woods at his car, and she couldn’t decide if he was trying to prove he had nothing to hide or if he just didn’t care. His words told her nothing; his eyes held dark secrets and a bruised soul.

Someone else might think it a sign of his innocence, that hurt. She found it less than convincing. The most dangerous were those whose hearts went dark because they felt justified…felt the world owed them something.

But when she curled up on the daybed in the cool night air beside the open window—when she wrapped herself in an old quilt that smelled faintly of Joe Ryan’s natural scent and vibrated even more faintly with his trace—she couldn’t help but regret her convictions.

Up on that mountain, they had run together. They had worked together. They had created a partnership where, for isolated moments, it hadn’t mattered who she was or why she was here, or who he was and what he’d done. Even after he’d turned away from her, he hadn’t gone far—only to the top of the spring, where he’d basked, eyes half-closed, immersing himself.

There, while she felt nothing more than the distressing tingle of amulets, Joe Ryan sat at the top of the world and sifted vast natural flows of power.

Even thinking about it, here in the casita with only a single dim light to disturb the night, she shivered slightly—and she couldn’t blame it on the cold this time. He not only felt those waves, not only rode them…he could, in subtle ways, manage them. Manipulate them.

The good a man like that might have done the Sentinels…might have done the world…

And the harm he might yet do, with those soulbruised eyes hiding the secrets of his inner world.

Lyn shivered again.

She threw aside the quilt, dumped the coffee down the sink and stalked to her tidy little backpack purse to grab her cell phone.

Brevis regional, she knew, would be waiting.

More specifically, Nick Carter—adjutant to the brevis regional counsel—would be waiting. Not that the brevis consul—a man named Dane Berger who’d become just a little too reclusive these past several years—was ever inclined to make day-to-day phone calls and communications, but sometimes Lyn got the impression—

No. Pondering her suspicions that Nick Carter now silently ran Southwest brevis regional was not the thing to do right now. He had an uncanny knack for plucking unspoken thoughts from her—and everyone else’s—head.

So for a long moment, while the cell phone warmed in her hand, Lyn thought of what she’d learned on the mountain that day. The confirmed presence of Fabron Gausto—no doubt completely bypassing the will of his septs prince. And he still had his sept posse, loyal in spite of his spectacular failure in Tucson. Didn’t have any choice at this point, Lyn imagined—no other Core sept would take them in.

She’d found more there, while Joe Ryan sat on the top of the world and absorbed the power flows. She’d found the disgusting trace of discharged amulets—powerful amulets, and a number of them. And Ryan, once they’d gone human again, had allowed that there was a ripple in the power flowing through that area, but couldn’t suggest its cause or meaning.

Unlike Ryan, she reported as expected. And that meant flipping the cell phone open and hitting the autodial that went straight to Nick Carter’s direct line.

“Carter,” he said, with noises in the background that made her believe he was at home—baying and carrying on, most boisterous.

“Is blood being shed?” she asked, amused, before stopping to think.

“Lyn,” he said, after a pause in which he’d obviously sorted out her voice. “Hounds and their toys…” Then his voice changed, hitting a businesslike note. “You’re in place?”

“I’m in his guest cabin.”

“He invited you?” Surprise there, enough to make Lyn wonder. “Does he know—?”

“That I’m not exactly his advocate? He picked up on that right away.” A flush of regret took her by surprise. Even full of suspicions and deep-seated determination to clear out the dark Sentinels, she’d seen a hint of something other than jaded resignation on Ryan’s face. Something that might have even been hurt, quickly covered.

So he’s wounded to be under suspicion again. Doesn’t mean he’s innocent.

“Lyn,” Nick said, and she could hear the hesitation in his voice and envision it in his pale green eyes. He was a wild one, that Nick Carter, a wolf wrapped in civility and manners, hoarfrost hair neatly trimmed, a lean, coiled power in his movements. Lyn suspected that his constrained manner was the only way he kept himself from startling people with his quickness, with the glimpse of the untamed showing through.

She’d never had a problem with keeping the ocelot tucked away—keeping that aspect of herself well behaved, covered with a tidy veneer of what society expected. She didn’t lean on her Sentinel nature, as did some; she didn’t need to. She was tenacious; she clung to lessons learned young. And she damned well knew what that hesitation of Nick’s meant. “You knew who I was when you sent me here,” she said. “I’ll get the job done, Nick.”

“I’m not concerned about your dedication,” he said dryly. He must have gone through a door; the noise of the dogs abruptly diminished. “Nor your ability. So don’t even go there.”

“What then? I’ve hardly had a chance to get started.”

“Your focus,” he said bluntly. “We need answers—whether or not they fit your personal mission.”

“You’re the one who thought he’d gone dark in the first place!” she blurted out, too surprised to be circumspect.

“And I still do. But even so, I need someone who can look for what’s actually there, and not for what you want to be there.”

For a long breath, she couldn’t say anything. She walked up to the casita’s large window, looking through the darkness at the house beside her, and the drop of the mountain beyond that. No blinding nighttime lighting for this property—nothing to interfere with the rich scatter of stars overhead. Only the most muted of lights from the second-floor loft area to indicate Ryan was still in there at all.

If he was. She didn’t think for a moment that her presence would stop him from ranging out. She should be keeping track of him, not losing herself in this conversation, familiar dismay lumping in the pit of her stomach. “You went digging,” she said. “That part of my background is supposed to be off the record.”

“Your brother—”

“Has nothing to do with this!” Except—“No, I take it back. He opened my eyes. He taught me important lessons. And do you really want this phone call to be about me? Because I don’t.”

“Do you have news already?”

“Don’t sound so surprised.” Her turn to be dry. “We went to the top of the world today, as it happens.” And she summarized their ascent and discovery of the trace. “But it could have been a throwaway.” A gift to make her think he was cooperating. “If so, he lost nothing of real value by revealing that spot…I couldn’t track them from there. Something about what they’d done with the amulets obliterated all but those first traces.”

But even as Nick absorbed her words, she realized the things she’d left out—the way Ryan had reacted to her flawed shielding technique, the way he’d reacted to the power surges…how in some odd way, they seemed to hurt and not help him. Things she’d usually report and wasn’t quite certain why she hadn’t.

Because I’m not sure yet. Not sure what she was seeing, or if she’d really even seen those things at all. She needed more time…

But Nick, knowing none of it, was still thinking of the words she had said. “So the Core is there. Then it’s not likely Ryan is doing this on his own. Too much coincidence, for them to show up along with the power surges, even with Ryan’s trace clinging to them.”

“He was surprised about that, by the way,” she observed. “It struck me as completely genuine. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t involved—only that he didn’t know his trace would show up, and didn’t recognize it when it did.” But that wasn’t the only thing that had surprised him this day, and she had to add, “He said he hadn’t heard from brevis regional regarding the Core’s suspected presence here.”

“Not quite the same as claiming he didn’t know they were there.” His voice was dark and certain.

She wouldn’t, she realized, want this man on her trail. “He also says he never got a message asking him to expedite that late report.”

They both sat on a beat of silence, and then she said, “I think you need to follow up on it, Nick.”

Surprise, there. “You believe him?”

“I think,” she said carefully, “that we should be ready to counter that claim if it isn’t true.”

He made a noise she couldn’t quite interpret. “You know,” he said, startling her with the same words she’d only just thought about him, “I wouldn’t want you on my trail.” But she heard the grin in his voice, and he added, “I’ll look into it. And you—be careful. I can have a full team out there within two hours, day or night—it’s not your job to confront the Core, or even to corner Ryan. Just get us close enough so we can get the drop on them.”

Right. That had been the point all along—coming in with a team too soon would tip off the Core, and spook Ryan into dropping whatever he was up to.

Supposing he still could. Lyn couldn’t help but wonder if he even had control any longer—if he’d choose to continue with a process that was affecting him as this one obviously did.

On the other hand, maybe he’d been telling the truth. Maybe he had gotten a bug, and it was messing with his Sentinel skills. It happened.

“Anything else going on?” Nick asked her, interrupting what she suddenly realized had become a long silence.

“No,” she said. “Sorry. Just thinking through it all. Same team, do you think?”

“You make the progression sound like a foregone conclusion.” His voice still held amusement. “Some of the same people, if it comes to that. I doubt I can tear Dolan away from Encontrados and Megan…she might be a natural with those wards, but she’s not ready for the field.”

Lyn wouldn’t expect it; it hadn’t been long enough since Dolan, the Southwest’s rogue Sentinel, had found Megan, bringing her back to the Sentinel fold after so many erroneous years of neglect. “And Dolan?” she asked. “Did he ever come in?”

“You mean did you talk him out of his grudges long enough to see that we need him?” Nick let out a breath. “He came in. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s thinking about it. Not for too long, I hope. I need Sentinels I can count on.”

Lyn heard what those words really meant. I need Sentinels who will stand with me when things get rough around here.

“I’ll be there,” she reminded him. For as much as she hunted those gone dark, she could well recognize a man leading the way for those who didn’t.

“I know,” he said. “But we’ll need…”

“More,” she finished for him, and couldn’t help a fleeting acknowledgment that Ryan’s strength, his solidity—his depth, even—could have made him valuable to Nick. Could have.

“And Lyn,” Nick said, his voice hitting a warning note, “keep in mind that there’s a third possibility when it comes to the things Ryan said he never heard from us. Because he could be telling the truth, and still be dark. There’s more than one tangle in play here.”

“Got it covered,” she told him. “Untangling trails is what I do.”

Chapter 6

Joe prowled in from the early morning sunshine on the roof, stretching hugely. He flicked his ears, resigning himself to the end of solitude.

Not that he’d found much solace in the night. Not with the echoes of the faintly twisted power from the top of the world still churning through his body…not with everything he’d learned the day before still tumbling through his mind. For it was clear now—while he’d been thick and slow with that cold, his territory had been invaded.

And the people who should have had his back now blamed him. This woman—the tightly wound tracker with precision in her movement and precision in her features—she blamed him, too. Had come to find proof, but made up her mind before she even got here.

The feel of what she’d done to him—unwittingly, unknowingly—out there on the mountain…it, too, had followed him through the night, tingling along awakened nerves to leave him restless and wakeful. Even the solace of the roof had not lured him into better-late-than-never sleep.

But it meant he was awake when Lyn Maines left the casita for an early-morning walk around the house, stretching her legs and yawning, her hair tumbled loose around her face and her neat travel outfit from the day before replaced by crop cargo pants and some sort of shirred top that had made him want to lean closer for a better look.

He hadn’t done it. He knew better than to provide any movement for her eye to latch on to. Only after she returned to the casita did he pad down from the roof, hopping lightly to the second-story porch and through the warded sliding-glass door…from there, straight to unclothed human form and then straight to the shower, the casual habits of a man who lived alone in a wild spot of land.

When he finally emerged onto the front porch, jeans and a loose-weave pullover blotting up the leftover dampness, he found her sitting on the porch bench seat, her hair now drawn back into a tidy clip. She looked up at him with a wary expectation, and he said, “Breakfast?”

And that was how she ended up cooking in his kitchen. Not because he couldn’t—he’d already started the coffee and gathered bacon, eggs and appropriate pans—but because she seemed so uncomfortable just sitting there that he asked if she’d rather. And that left him free to deal with the paws batting at the lower cabinets, where the little black shorthair waited.

“Because I haven’t fed you in a week, maybe two,” he murmured, hitting the pantry up for cat kibble. They were indoor cats, other than the escape artist of a brown tabby; special wards contained them when he left the upstairs door open a crack so the cougar could return. But this little black shorthair still managed to find trouble. This morning, rather than eating, she fussed and shook her front paw with a frantic need.

Lyn looked up from the bacon as she repositioned it in the pan. “Is she okay?”

As if this little scene was truly a domestically cozy moment, with two companionable people sharing a good-morning breakfast, the paper turned to the comics section and the scent of frying cholesterol in the air. Right.

He scooped the little cat up and murmured sweet nothings in her ear until she purred and barely noticed as he deftly rolled a particularly nasty goat’s head sticker out from between the pads. “She’s fine,” he said, rubbing lightly at that spot just between her eyes. “It must have come in on my shoe.”

“I hate those things,” Lyn said, vehemently enough to take him by surprise—to amuse him. She’d actually let something of herself peek out that time. And though she withdrew almost immediately, her eyes lingered on his fingers as they stroked the sleek black head and crumpled back delicate shell-pink ears to make the black cat purr.

“As it happens,” Joe said, a murmur to fool the cat into thinking he was talking to her, and indeed she purred more loudly in response, “I actually like my bacon a little burned.”

Lyn’s eyes widened; her nostrils flared slightly, taking in the same sharp odor he’d already noticed. Her lips formed a silent curse, and she whirled to tend to the fry pan.

Joe smiled at the cat, bringing that purring creature up so they could briefly butt faces. Distractable, Lyn was—focused in, and therefore not aware of the larger world. He’d already seen some of that up on the mountain, and could well understand why she didn’t work without a partner.

It did surprise him that brevis would have sent her without one. They trusted him to some extent, then—albeit probably only to maintain his supposed cover. And whatever they thought of him, he wouldn’t let her down. Not this dark-eyed ocelot with her fierce drive to clean up the Sentinels, not even if she didn’t realize they were on the same side.

Damned if he was going to let the Core get away with messing with this mountain.

The cat made an abrupt decision to be done with purring and face-butting, possibly inspired by the clatter of eggs being dished out. Lyn moved assertively in the unfamiliar kitchen, looking right at home as she finished up the meal.

“Juice?” he asked her, heading for the refrigerator to do at least that much.

She glanced at him, flicking the gas burner off. “Milk?” she said, a hopeful note in her voice.

“Sure, plenty of it.” He poured her a serving, set it on the marble counter with a decided clink of glass on stone, and went back for his favorite mix of tropical juices.

As his hand closed around the carton, it hit.

Not a bad one, just sudden—his hand spasmed around flimsy cardboard…for an instant he lost awareness, swamped in the harsh atonal power, a slow, thick ooze filling his lungs so his vision grayed and prickles of pain and weakness raked him from inside.

Lyn pushed in beside him, prying the carton from his hand, muttering a curse. But by then Joe had control—or at least partial control—pushing away the power so he could fumble for shields.

But Lyn had no hesitation, and no fumbling. She reached for that same centered place she’d created up at Snowbowl—he felt it build around them, gliding into place like a balm. And then his head snapped up and he sucked in his breath, because she’d gone that one step further—done that which breezed through him from within, caressing those very nerves that had been scraped with pain only a moment earlier. The contrast shocked him, wobbling his knees, and he snatched at the edge of the sink for support. In her smudge-lined eyes he saw reflected shock; she stiffened, jerking slightly. And then she narrowed her eyes, and the connection slammed closed.

He lost his knees entirely, falling back against the cabinets beneath the sink, breath grunting from his body and mixed up with an inarticulate, involuntary noise of protest.

That, too, startled her—she looked as though she wanted to skitter away, putting distance between them. But she stood straight and still, and after a moment she let out a long sigh of breath.

“Well, damn,” Joe grumbled, trying to ignore the incredible emptiness she’d left behind. There was no graceful way up from here, jammed back against the cabinets with his bare feet propped too close and his knees askew at chin level. “No offense, but whatever you’re doing…I think it needs practice.”

“I could say the same for you,” she responded tersely—but she stepped forward to brace herself and extend a hand. A small hand, but he didn’t make the mistake of supposing it lacked strength. She was, after all, Sentinel.

He took the hand and he took the strength she loaned him, and soon enough he was back on his feet, looking down at her again. He said, “Shielding…not my best thing.”

“No,” she agreed.

That stung a little. “Hey—it’s my job to keep track of what’s going on around here. You think I can do that if I fling up shields at every opportunity? When I was in Nevada, Dean—” He stopped. He didn’t want to talk about Dean Seacrest with her. He didn’t even want to bring it up. Not knowing she thought him guilty of Dean’s death.

Well, hell, maybe he was. But not in the way they thought. So he cleared his throat and said, “I was in better practice then.” Back when he hadn’t been isolated, when he’d had more cause to shield, and more tightly defined duties. Now it was all his, a lightly populated area considered so stable that one Sentinel could handle it.

At least, one Sentinel of Joe’s skills. Because, let’s face it, there weren’t many. And he had plenty of reason to rue it these days, when it seemed brevis consul and his posse had decided they couldn’t quite trust what a man of such skills could—or would—do. Even when they didn’t know it all.

But Lyn’s brows had quirked up. “That makes sense,” she said. “Although you should put in some practice.”

He couldn’t help but hope as he settled back against the edge of the sink. “So now you believe me?” That he’d have reason to shield, that he was as much a victim of what was happening here as anyone.

She gave him the driest of expressions; the hope died. “I’m riding a line,” she told him, blunt as she had been when she first approached him in the woods below. “For all I know, you started this thing and now it’s out of hand—or the Core went their own way and left you hanging.”

“Whoa.” He couldn’t help it; he shook off the words—physically, literally. “That’s a hell of a way to go through life. Thinking like that.” He thought about it; still didn’t like it. “I’ll stick with my way, thanks. But you’re right about the practice. I’ll get to work on that.” As if they’d been discussing the weather, he turned back to his partially crunched carton of juice and unscrewed the little plastic cap on the side. “Hope you like your eggs cold. I think that’s how we’re going to get them.”

“Eggs cold, bacon burned. Just as it should be.” She said it with such deadpan perfection that he jerked around to look at her and caught the barest glimpse of a smile tweaking the corner of her mouth as she turned away to take the plates to the small round table in the tree-dappled sunlight of the breakfast nook.

His answering grin came in spite of himself. Because whether he liked it or not, whether she knew it or not, his heart was right out there for her to see, as it had always been.

It was just a matter of how hard she crunched it before she was through.

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