Sentinels: Alpha Rising

For now.

“Look, I get it.” Faith’s words came with the white noise of something brushing across the phone, and Holly suddenly realized that she was crouched somewhere in the feed store, trying to hide the call from Lannie. “You don’t owe us anything and I was a bitch to you. But this is about Lannie, okay?”

And Holly found herself saying, “Okay.”

She hung up the phone in a bemused state, taking the remainder of the drive home with a slower speed than the car behind her probably would have preferred. At the farm store, she pulled around back to park as if she’d always been here, always been driving Lannie’s truck...always been the one to co-opt his pack. When she disembarked and grabbed her bags from the back, the midafternoon heat bore down on her in a sizzle of sun—one the shade of the barn quickly quenched into a chill.

She began to understand why people here dressed in so many layers.

She took the exterior steps up to Lannie’s barn apartment two at a time, and realized how much better she felt for the chance to collect her thoughts.

Or maybe it was just her Sentinel constitution after all—adjusting to the altitude more quickly than expected after her morning’s difficulty.

Maybe.

She let herself into the apartment and stopped short at the sight.

Lannie.

To be more precise, Lannie’s back. He stood at his kitchen sink, shirtless, muscles flexing as he reached overhead to put away a set of mugs. Enough spicy humidity filled the air so even if she hadn’t seen the gleam of dampness across his skin and in the slight curl of his hair, she would have known he’d just stepped out of the shower.

He barely turned his head to greet her and she realized that of course he’d known she was coming. If he hadn’t heard the truck, if he hadn’t heard her steps on the stairs...

She had the feeling he still would have known.

“Get what you needed?” he asked, as if this would be some plain old conversation about simple things.

“More or less,” she said, playing the same game. “Should I unpack them?”

He grabbed a basin from the sink, handling it carefully enough so she knew it still held water. “Is that your way of asking if you’re staying here?”

Without waiting for a response, he took the basin to the other side of the loft—to the giant hexagonal window she’d admired so much that morning, however briefly. Iron scrollwork crawled around the edges and the supporting grids, intimating leaves and twining vines, and light flooded through to fill the loft. Before it sat a motley collection of plants, each of which now received a careful portion of what must have been his rinse water.

Not that she cared. She was too caught up in watching him move, handling the awkward chore with a masculine grace.

When he glanced over his shoulder, she realized just how hypnotized she’d become.

Maybe she should have blushed and stammered at being caught, but she didn’t care to. He was worth watching. So she smiled.

After a moment, his mouth quirked in what might have been amusement, and might have been response. “Yes,” he said. “You’re welcome to stay here while we figure out the most obvious solution to the situation.”

Reality intruded. “But what about—”

He shook his head, returning the basin to the sink, and then propped himself against it to regard her. “I shower and eat here. Where I sleep isn’t an issue.” At the disbelieving look on her face, he laughed, a quiet huff of humor. “Trust me, Holly. It’s fine.”

“Trust you?” She let the shopping totes slide gently to the floor, refusing to be distracted by the flat planes of his sparsely furred chest or the window light skipping across his abs. Absolutely refusing. Even when the knife wound he’d so readily dismissed caught that same light, raw and inflamed and hardly healing. “Is this is a test of some sort?”

He cocked his head, barely enough to see it. “If you like.”

“Fine,” she said. “I have a test for you, too.”

He planted the heels of his hands against the counter and waited. Holly took it for invitation. “What did Faith mean, you’ve had to disconnect from your home pack for me? What does that mean to you? Why, exactly, am I here? It’s not just to keep me safe while things settle down. And also, you need to let me do something with that.” She nodded at his side. “Like take you to the local urgent care.”

Lannie snorted. “I can take myself anywhere I need to go.”

“Really?” Holly smiled at him, so beatific. “Because as I recall, just this morning you were a little unpredictable about staying on your feet.”

“I’m fine,” he said, and this time the words had a little growl behind them, one that showed in his eyes.

Holly found herself delighted to have gotten under his skin at all. Lannie Stewart, she thought, was used to being the one with the answers.

She lifted his truck keys. “I bet you keep the spares down behind the store counter. Want to bet your little friend Faith has already hidden them?”

This time the growl was unmistakable. It reverberated against something inside Holly, something she hadn’t even known was there. She hid the shiver of it from him by flipping the keys back into her hand and tucking them away in her front cargo pocket. “You might have thought this was about protecting the resistant younger sister of your latest Sentinel hero, but it’s much, much more—and so am I. No urgent care? Fine. Get your first-aid supplies. Then we’ll talk.”

* * *

Lannie had little in the way of Band-Aids and gauze, and little patience for any of it. He was Sentinel; he would heal. He didn’t often take serious injury in his work, but he’d been there enough to know.

Holly found the employee kit in the store’s break room, grabbed self-sticking horse bandages from the shelf, and returned to the loft no less determined than she’d left it.

Lannie had spent the time basking in the window sunlight as wolf, pretending the occasional peak of underlying static didn’t break through his thoughts. He heard her coming at the bottom step and almost didn’t make it into human—and into his pants—before she opened the door.

He’d forgotten how she took those steps two at a time.

“Here,” Holly said, even as she came through the door with her bounty, a tube of hydrogel included. “Faith said you would use this stuff.”

“You told Faith?” He couldn’t quite keep the alarm from his voice.

She made an amused sound. “Did you think she didn’t already know?” At his silence, she added, “And you shouldn’t have left that mess of a man-bandage in the counter trash if you wanted it to be some big hairy secret. What was that, half a roll of duct tape?”

“It didn’t stay on anyway,” he grumbled with generalized disgruntlement.

“While we were doing that hay? No kidding.” Holly seemed more cheerful now that she’d outmaneuvered him regarding the truck keys. If it made her feel as though she’d gained some control over her life, she would have it.

For the moment.

Holly busied herself pulling butterfly bandages from the box and lining them up on the tiny breakfast bar jutting out from the wall between the kitchen and the window area. Aside from the plants, the window space held exactly one couch—it was as close to a social space as the loft got, with the bed tucked in behind the half wall across from the window and the bathroom taking up just as much room across from the kitchen. He’d roughed in an unheated closet, but he doubted she’d discovered that particular feature yet.

It wasn’t a bachelor pad so much as the space of an alpha wolf still alone at heart.

“There.” Satisfaction tinged Holly’s voice. “Come on over and lean against the bar.”

Lannie released a silent sigh and complied, leaning to expose the injury to the light and grunting at the painful stretch of it.

Holly made a dismayed sound in her throat. “Have you looked—”

“It’s fine,” Lannie said. “If it was a problem, the fast healing would kick in—and I’d know if that was happening. It hurts.”