But Lannie didn’t linger on the moment. He ran a hand through his damp hair, carelessly raking it back into some semblance of order. “You want coffee?”
“Holly drinks tea, if you have it,” Mariska said, apparently well-briefed on all things Holly. “So do I.”
Jason looked as though he’d drink whatever Lannie put before him.
They joined Lannie in a tiny nook in the back hallway, which had a coffeemaker and electric teakettle, a diminutive refrigerator, a sink and half a box of donuts sitting on an upended fifty-gallon drum. Lannie reached for the teakettle plug...and hesitated there, leaning heavily on the counter.
As if for that moment, the counter was the only thing holding him up.
Holly shot a startled look at Mariska and Jason, finding them involved in some sort of mostly silent but definitely emphatic disagreement. By the time she looked again at Lannie, the teakettle was firing up and Lannie had pulled a bowl stuffed with tea bags from the narrow, open-faced cabinet above the sink—right next to the big green tin of Bag Balm, some half-used horse wormer and an open bag of castration bands.
“So,” Holly said. “Lannie. My name is Holly Faulkes, and I don’t want to be here.”
He pulled four mugs from the half-sized drainer hanging in the sink, and she realized she hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know—but that unlike everyone else in this mess, he wasn’t impatient or annoyed by it.
“Phelan,” he told her, swirling the coffee in its carafe. “Phelan Stewart. But yes. You can call me Lannie.” He filled one of the mugs with coffee and handed it out to Jason without looking; the teakettle activity built to a fever pitch. “What’s your story, Holly Faulkes?”
“What’s yours, eh?” she countered. “Why are they dumping me on you?”
Lannie held out the tea bags without any visible reaction, and Holly plucked out a random blend and passed the bowl to Mariska. Lannie put his hip against the counter and sipped coffee—only to immediately dump it down the sink, exposing a gleam of torso through the gaping shirt and annoying Holly simply because she’d noticed.
“Faith,” he said, as if that explained it all. And then, “Holly Faulkes, if you’d come with a group, I’d say you all needed to become a team. Since you’re here alone, you’re probably not playing well with others in some way.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, patently ignoring Jason’s dilemma over whether to try the coffee. “You must be important to them.”
She found herself amused. “Because Brevis only bothers you with the important things, eh?”
“Something like that. And the fact that I’m on sabbatical.” He held out his hand. After a hesitation, Holly offered him her tea bag. He took Mariska’s, plunked them both into mugs, poured hot water on top and handed the mugs over. “Your turn. Or would you rather have them tell your story?”
Holly relaxed, curling her hands around the mug. He might be Sentinel, but he wasn’t pushing her. He’d given her options.
Even if they were both bad ones.
So she told him the truth. “I’m not a Sentinel, I don’t want to be a Sentinel, and I’m not going to drink your Sentinel Kool-Aid no matter how you dress it up in obligation and heroics.”
She heard Mariska’s intake of breath, but Lannie’s quick blue glance quelled her. “Sentinel isn’t something you get to choose.”
“And yet it’s a choice I made a long time ago,” she told him, not an instant’s hesitation. “It’s a choice my family made—that we were forced to make. That’s not something you can change, eh? But it’s obvious you’ll have to work that out for yourself.”
“You’ll stay long enough for me to do that?”
“As if that’s a choice.” But she felt the briefest flash of hope, felt herself halfway out the door.
“Brevis pulled Mariska in from Tucson. So either you’re in a great deal of danger or they think you’ll run—and if you do, that you’ll be good at it.”
“Run?” Holly shot Mariska a baleful look. “How stupid do you think I am? You people already found me once. My best chance of getting on with life is to let you figure out what a waste of time this is. If you don’t, then we’ll see about running.”
“Fair enough,” he murmured. “Give me your word on that and these two will leave, and we can get you settled.”
Holly’s temper flared hot and strong. She set the mug on the counter with a thump. “Pay attention, why don’t you? I’ll be settled when I’m back home in the Upper Peninsula, rebuilding the business you’ve just destroyed!”
She transferred her glare to Jason and Mariska. “And meanwhile, who’s feeding my feral cats? Who’s holding my best friend’s hand when she has her first baby? Do you people even think about what you’ve done, or do you just ride through on the strength of your astonishing arrogance?”
Jason summoned up a bright smile, only a hint of panic behind it. “Ohh-kay, then,” he said. “My job is done. I’ll just wait in the car.”
“Jason,” Mariska said, annoyance in her voice.
“Thanks for the coffee.” Jason inched behind Holly to put the mug on the barrel. “Such as it was.”
“Faith,” Lannie said again—but his voice didn’t have the same quiet strength, and Holly shot a look at him, finding his knuckles white at the edge of the counter and his tanned face gone pale, his shoulders tight...his expression faintly surprised.
But only until he saw her watching. Then the weakness disappeared; he returned her gaze with an even expression.
Holly, it seemed, wasn’t the only one hiding the truth of herself from the Sentinels.
For all her resentment, Holly found herself regretting Mariska and Jason’s departure, as they unloaded her single, quickly packed suitcase, handed Lannie a thin file folder and drove away.
They were, if nothing else, familiar.
Not like Lannie Stewart—not only unfamiliar, but just a little more Sentinel than she wanted to deal with on her own.
But she’d known all her life that this day might come. If she blamed the Sentinels for anything, it was for being the kind of organization that sent her family into hiding in the first place.
Lannie locked the door behind them, made sure the open sign was flipped to Closed and went behind the cash register counter to do...
To do cash register things, probably. She didn’t care. Although she had the impression that he was, somehow, actually assessing her. That his attention never left her.
Screw that. She glanced pointedly at the full darkness that had fallen since her arrival. “I haven’t eaten yet.” Of course, she hadn’t wanted to. Until he’d come into the store, her stomach had been unsettled by that funky discomfiting feeling under her skin, the faintest bitter taste in her mouth. How he’d buffered that, she didn’t know. But now her stomach growled.
He made a sound that must have been acknowledgment. “In, out, or fast?”
“It’s your game. You choose.”
He stopped what he was doing, a bank bag in hand, and she drew breath at the blue flint in his gaze. “Nothing about this is a game.”
“Lannie!” A young woman’s voice rang out from the back of the store. A waifish young woman emerged from between the shelving, her hair dyed black, her makeup