Sentinels: Alpha Rising

He wanted to blame her but couldn’t. No more than he could blame her for the residual stiffness in his ribs and shoulders, or the half-healed wound on his side.

He wasn’t so certain about the suddenly uncontrollable nature of his mojo. She’d called him on that the night before, but...

He would have said he wasn’t tapping into his alpha at all.

He would have said she’d somehow done it to him.

Except it didn’t work that way, and the situation left him uneasy and half-aroused and extra wary about doing the right thing for her—about whether he even could, given the circumstances. It left him without much sleep, a buzzing head, and a semitruckload of hay on the way in.

“Hey, boss!” Faith said cheerfully, buckling her work chaps around her waist with the legs still swinging free as she strode from the back to slap her gloves against the counter. Her piercings glimmered, an incongruous counterpoint to the cap crammed over her black hair. “I should have another go at that coffee before the hay gets here, right?”

“God, no,” he said, working hard to inject just the right matter-of-fact note into his voice, just the right alacrity into his movement as he raised his head, turning a deliberately discerning eye her way. “The overflow area ready for unloading?”

He knew it wasn’t. So did she. “Javi’s not here yet,” she said, which started off sounding like an excuse and ended with a quick shift to determination. “I’ll go get started while I’m waiting.”

You do that. He waited until she headed out the front door, setting the bells to jingling and trailing one of the several store cats in her wake.

Hay delivery meant shifting old stock, sweeping out corners...disturbing mice. The cats always knew.

So did the wolf. The wolf also knew when Holly entered the store from the back—and it rose to greet her, humming with a possessive intensity.

Lannie didn’t ever remember pushing the wolf away. Hadn’t ever needed to.

He did it now.

Holly stood beside the closest shelving endcap, her expression faintly wary and definitely uncertain. She made no attempt to hide her scrutiny of him; her gaze traveled from his features to his shoulder and quickly checked out his side, where no stain would show simply because he’d grown impatient and slapped on gauze with Bag Balm and far too much duct tape.

He eyed her back, easily able to see the tension riding in her shoulders. She wore no makeup to hide the lingering bruises of fatigue under her eyes, and glossy hair spilled from a high ponytail, a style that highlighted the clarity of her features and her large, impossibly rich brown eyes. She wore the same khaki pants from the day before and a no-nonsense polo shirt quite clearly tailored for a lean feminine form. The embroidery on her left shoulder read Holly Springs in a bold but elegant font interwoven with leaves, and beneath that in plainer text, a simple Holly Faulkes.

It told him a lot. It told him the kind of life she led—hardworking and active, and tied to the natural world. More Sentinel than she thought. It told him she truly hadn’t had much time to pack. And it told him that whatever life of hiding her family had chosen, they hadn’t considered their names to have been a risk. They’d somehow never been in official Sentinel roles.

It meant that her parents had never had the confidence and familiarity to turn to Brevis in the first place. And there was no telling what misinformation they’d given Holly along the way.

Or failed to give her.

She said, “I ate your sausage and oatmeal. I hope you expected that.”

His stomach grumbled. But he knew better than to start the day with the pastry treats Faith left around—not with the wolf prowling so close to the surface, itching for a hunt.

The wolf grew surly on carbs.

Holly gave him an uncertain look; only then did he realize he hadn’t said so much as good morning. Too lost in the static of his thoughts...and in his wolf’s response to her. It’s not real, he reminded himself, and said, “I hope you found everything you needed.”

“Actually, I need a number of things,” she said, her eye wandering to and clearly catching on Horace, the full-size fiberglass horse model at the front of the store. She visibly shook off the sight of Horace’s current dress mode—makeup applied to mirror Faith’s—and returned to her thoughts with determination. “Depends on how long I’m going to be here—here, at your place, and here, in New Mexico.”

He lifted one shoulder. “Couldn’t tell you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. Surely you don’t want to continue sleeping wherever you clearly didn’t actually sleep last night.”

So much for any impression of invincibility. He said only, “I was perfectly comfortable.” Probably she wasn’t ready to hear that the wolf slept where he would, and that last night’s barn had been a luxury.

“Well, I’m not comfortable here, so if you can manage to give me some idea of how long this whole thing will take, I’d appreciate that.”

The answer was only the same. Lannie didn’t repeat himself.

She looked like a woman hanging on to her temper by a very thin margin. She spoke with a snappy precision he knew to remember. “Fine. I need clothes. I need more than the three ounces of shampoo that were in my travel kit. I need feminine products. And I want a bike. Do you want details, or do you just want to hand over your credit card?”

Lannie said, “A bike?”

“Yes. I bike. Therefore I need a bike.”

“There’s a bike shop in Cloudview,” he said. A bike shop, good hunting territory, and...Holly’s brother. Seeing him—realizing that she could see him—might go a long way toward settling her resentment.

And seeing him immersed in his Sentinel nature might go a long way to helping her accept her own.

“Cloudview?” Holly crossed her arms under her breasts, emphasizing both toned arms and modest but perfectly formed curves; Lannie found himself standing straighter. “What’s the catch?”

Faith opened the front entry just long enough to sing out over the bells. “Hay’s here early! Javi’s late!”

Lannie allowed a faint grimace. “That,” he said, “is the catch. Twenty tons of hay to unload first.”

Holly didn’t hesitate. “Then I’ll go get my gloves and help.”

Lannie did hesitate. She hadn’t come here to heave two-string orchard grass.

“Look,” she said. “I work for a living. I’ll go insane all that much faster if you don’t give me something to do while I’m waiting for whatever magical things you people want to see happen.”

Magical. Yeah, something like that.

He reached under the counter for the stack of mismatched work gloves and dropped them on the glass. “See if anything here fits.”

Holly quickly selected snug gloves of leather and stretchy backing—one an alarming pink, one blue—and tugged them on, flexing her fingers to settle them.

Lannie led the way to the barn overflow, filling his lungs with a deep, surreptitious breath and letting it out slowly—letting the restless wolf fill his skin, trying to appease the other in him until he had that time to hunt.

Holly wasn’t far off his shoulder. She muttered a faintly singsong “Stop that...” and startled the wolf away.

Lannie barely stopped himself startling, too.

You weren’t supposed to see it.

All in all, Holly Faulkes was far more Sentinel than she knew.

* * *

Javi arrived only a few moments into the unloading, allowing Lannie to step back and inspect the bales, approve the load and meet up with the trucker to handle paperwork.

“New hand, eh?” The man moved efficiently to wind and stash the webbing straps that had secured the semitruck’s load, and then came to stand beside Lannie as he scrawled his signature without bothering to prop the clipboard against the truck. “Have to say I approve.”