He didn’t need to guess at her discomfort. He’d felt it, too, the moment she’d touched him. A flow of energy, something greedy and demanding…wanting more. He’d wanted more.
Luka followed Meghan in mincing steps, and Dolan did his best simply to stay out of the animal’s way until they reached the bottom.
But bottom was a relative term…it simply meant the narrow trail now wound sideways along the slope. Meghan stopped again, patting Luka’s sweat-soaked shoulder—for although ambient temperatures were still modestly cool, the high-altitude sun stabbed down hard.
Meghan hesitated, looking down the vista below them—the tiny dots of the ranch house and barn, the swell of the hill from which he’d once watched for her. She glanced back at him. “God, you’re a mess,” she muttered. “Maybe I should have left you…” But she didn’t finish that thought. She took an audible breath and reached for him, steadying him; straightening him. She wound his fingers firmly around the grab strap. He knew she felt the surge of energy there—her hand tightened briefly around his. Not consoling, not reaching out, but a white-knuckled attempt to push through it.
“There,” she said, and her voice was hardly steady. “We’re almost there.” Then she looked down the hill again and gave a short laugh. “Well, maybe not. But the hardest parts are over.” Her hand, free of Dolan’s, trailed down the horse’s neck. Luka turned his head and tilted it just so, and Meghan gave a little laugh. “I don’t have any. Get us back home again and I promise you a bucketful of carrots.”
But as she stepped out in front, she hesitated, and said somberly, “It’s never really going to be the same, is it?”
“No,” he said, hating the weakness in his voice, the vulnerability it exposed. But she deserved an answer…she deserved the truth. “You know too much now.”
“I’ve seen too much,” she said, and glanced back at him—no recrimination there now, just sad awareness. “I’ll have to lie to my people. My chosen family. Or not answer them. Either way, they’ll know something’s wrong. And changed.”
“Don’t think about the big picture,” he said. “Screw the future. Think about getting down this hill. I know I am.”
She gave a short laugh. “I’ll bet. But you know…if you didn’t find what you came for…if the Core didn’t get it from you…then this has really all just begun.”
And here he’d thought she’d been so deeply in denial that she hadn’t been paying attention. Wrong. He reeled slightly in the saddle, caught himself and met her eyes one last time before she turned and led them back down the hill. “Yes,” he said. “It’s really all just begun.”
“Meghan!” Anica ran from the casita at top speed, slowing only when Luka made himself tall in warning, raised neck and pricked, intense ears. A small, dark and well-rounded whirlwind of a vet tech who’d burned out of city life, Anica now focused all her considerable energies toward healing the rescued animals of Encontrados Ranch—and sometimes the people.
Not this one, Meghan thought. Anica would quickly pick up on Dolan’s unusual nature. Not everyone who came to this ranch had their own quirks and sensitivities…but those who stayed? Yeah. They all found this place to be a haven, and some had stayed in this chosen family that Meghan found herself building.
“We were worried to death!” Anica said, running to meet them. “What were you doing out all night? What happened to your arm? You should have taken a cell phone!”
Meghan shook her head. “No reception that high, you know that. I ran into someone in trouble, that’s all. We couldn’t travel in the dark. And I’m fine.”
Anica said flatly, “You ran into someone in trouble.” She held her hand up in a dramatic gesture, her faint Latino accent coming out a little more strongly. “No. Wait. Don’t tell me. You had a feeling.”
Here came the evasions. “This is Dolan. Think altitude sickness. And unless I’m mistaken, he’s about to fall off the horse.”
“Right.” Anica stood to the side, giving Dolan the once-over. Dolan, in his black leather biker jacket and his black jeans and booted feet, whisker-shadowed jaw and pain-shadowed eyes, barely sitting in the saddle at all. “A tourist.”
Meghan swallowed back her new fears, knowing there was little she could do or say at this point; either Anica would accept Meghan’s new understanding of her world, or she wouldn’t. Just another way that Dolan’s appearance had intruded on her life.
She led the horse toward the porch, with Dolan dipping and swaying over Luka’s withers. One hand was still clamped around the grab strap; the other had found Luka’s mane halfway up his neck. His eyes were clenched as tightly shut as his grip. “Dolan,” she said, reaching to touch him—and then thinking better of it.
“He’s really out of it,” Anica said. “Maybe we should call 911.”
“He asked me not to,” Meghan said. She knew well enough that Dolan would prefer to stay out of the system—that the Sentinels would be coming for him. And that conventional medicine would be of little help anyway. But at the look on Anica’s face, she added, “Don’t worry—if he doesn’t perk up with some liquids, we’ll call.”
“Okay, then,” Anica said, tugging Dolan’s foot from the stirrup. She went on to untie the jackets and saddlebags, pulling them off Luka’s rump to splat carelessly against the dusty yard. “You ready?”
Oh, no. Not for the touching. “Come on, Dolan. We’re home.”
But when he looked at her, she wasn’t the least bit sure he actually saw her—or anything, for that matter. There was no focus or recognition in those blue, blue eyes. Dammit. “Hold on,” she said to Anica when the other woman would have shoved his leg over Luka’s patient rump. Another deep breath; she flexed her hand, reaching out to his calf…hesitating with her hand close enough to feel the warmth of him.
“Meghan?”
Right. Best get on with it. Gently, she let her hand settle onto his leg. At first she felt only muscle beneath denim, lax with the herbal incantations she’d put into his system, warm and yielding. And then it started—a thrumming through her body, an aching awareness—awareness that this time pooled in sensitive places she’d very much rather not have respond to him at all.
Anica gave her a strange look over the saddlebags, and Meghan did what she hadn’t even thought to do, but which suddenly felt altogether too natural after a night of swapping memories. She focused her thoughts and snapped Dolan! without ever opening her mouth.
He started slightly, looking at her with a confounded expression. Anica abruptly shoved his leg over Luka’s rump and Dolan’s eyes widened—and over he went, taking Meghan down with him in a tangle of arms and legs and the disgruntled snarl of a jaguar in the background of Meghan’s mind.
“Take care of Luka?” Meghan asked Anica, straightening Dolan’s legs on the bed of the creaky-floored little box of a guest room and starting in on the leather laces of his boots.
Anica hesitated, still aware she hadn’t been given all the answers here, aware that Meghan was giving off a muddle of mixed signals, and nodded shortly. “Call out if you need anything. I’ll give Luka a good rubdown and get the quarantine stall ready for our newcomer. You’ll be out?”
“That’s the plan,” Meghan said, doing her best to keep the grim out of her voice.
Anica hesitated in the doorway as if she might say something. When she finally murmured, “Call for help if you need it,” Meghan knew those weren’t the words that had lingered on the tip of her tongue. Those words would have been something more like What’s up with you, woman?
Just as well Anica hadn’t asked. Meghan had no answers.
She