The rest of the drive went quickly, and once she reached the store she pulled her hastily scribbled list from her pocket and went to work with the focused intensity that had made her business successful, happy to hand over Lannie’s card to buy a few reusable shopping totes with her goods, and toss the whole kit and caboodle into the bed of the truck behind the straw bale.
On the way back, the phone warbled a basic faux phone ring. Holly thought only of her message to Regan, and pulled the phone from the seat divider to accept the call.
“Holly?”
Holly’s breath caught on the decision to hang up. “Just listen,” Faith said, and her words were low and hasty—in the end, intriguing Holly just enough to stay on the call.
She found a wide spot by the side of the road to pull over. “I’m here.”
“Look,” Faith said. “I don’t really know what’s going on with you being here. I know what Lannie does for Brevis, so we do get people here sometimes, or he goes somewhere else, but there’s something different about this. About him.”
“You still trying to blame it on me?” Holly said. “Because as far as I’m concerned, you can take your Sentinels and—”
Faith’s heartfelt and indelicate noise in response did more to get Holly’s attention than anything else could have. “Look, I’m such a light blood that only someone like Lannie can even tell I’m Sentinel. They’re not my people—I ran from them a long time ago.”
“They let you go?” Holly asked, a flicker of hope in her voice.
After a hesitation and a number of muffled sounds, Faith replied. “Light blood,” she reminded Holly. “But listen. This is about Lannie. Something’s not right. And since he had to pull out of his home pack in order to deal with you—”
“He what?”
“God, don’t you know anything?”
Anger made its way to Holly’s throat, tightening it. “No more than I’ve been told.”
“Then ask Lannie. He’ll tell you as much as he can. But look, what I’m doing is asking you to keep an eye on him, okay? Because we can’t. Not the way we’re used to.”
Responses jumbled through her mind—the bitter awareness that she couldn’t ask for information when she didn’t even know enough to frame the right questions. The rising curiosity about Lannie and his home pack and his Sentinel other and what he did with it—or what had happened with the Jody thing. The cold hard fear of realizing anew that her life was totally out of her own control.
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,