Читать книгу Sentinels: Lion Heart - Doranna Durgin - Страница 14

Joe prowled in from the early morning sunshine on the roof, stretching hugely. He flicked his ears, resigning himself to the end of solitude.

Not that he’d found much solace in the night. Not with the echoes of the faintly twisted power from the top of the world still churning through his body…not with everything he’d learned the day before still tumbling through his mind. For it was clear now—while he’d been thick and slow with that cold, his territory had been invaded.

And the people who should have had his back now blamed him. This woman—the tightly wound tracker with precision in her movement and precision in her features—she blamed him, too. Had come to find proof, but made up her mind before she even got here.

The feel of what she’d done to him—unwittingly, unknowingly—out there on the mountain…it, too, had followed him through the night, tingling along awakened nerves to leave him restless and wakeful. Even the solace of the roof had not lured him into better-late-than-never sleep.

But it meant he was awake when Lyn Maines left the casita for an early-morning walk around the house, stretching her legs and yawning, her hair tumbled loose around her face and her neat travel outfit from the day before replaced by crop cargo pants and some sort of shirred top that had made him want to lean closer for a better look.

He hadn’t done it. He knew better than to provide any movement for her eye to latch on to. Only after she returned to the casita did he pad down from the roof, hopping lightly to the second-story porch and through the warded sliding-glass door…from there, straight to unclothed human form and then straight to the shower, the casual habits of a man who lived alone in a wild spot of land.

When he finally emerged onto the front porch, jeans and a loose-weave pullover blotting up the leftover dampness, he found her sitting on the porch bench seat, her hair now drawn back into a tidy clip. She looked up at him with a wary expectation, and he said, “Breakfast?”

And that was how she ended up cooking in his kitchen. Not because he couldn’t—he’d already started the coffee and gathered bacon, eggs and appropriate pans—but because she seemed so uncomfortable just sitting there that he asked if she’d rather. And that left him free to deal with the paws batting at the lower cabinets, where the little black shorthair waited.

“Because I haven’t fed you in a week, maybe two,” he murmured, hitting the pantry up for cat kibble. They were indoor cats, other than the escape artist of a brown tabby; special wards contained them when he left the upstairs door open a crack so the cougar could return. But this little black shorthair still managed to find trouble. This morning, rather than eating, she fussed and shook her front paw with a frantic need.

Lyn looked up from the bacon as she repositioned it in the pan. “Is she okay?”

As if this little scene was truly a domestically cozy moment, with two companionable people sharing a good-morning breakfast, the paper turned to the comics section and the scent of frying cholesterol in the air. Right.

He scooped the little cat up and murmured sweet nothings in her ear until she purred and barely noticed as he deftly rolled a particularly nasty goat’s head sticker out from between the pads. “She’s fine,” he said, rubbing lightly at that spot just between her eyes. “It must have come in on my shoe.”

“I hate those things,” Lyn said, vehemently enough to take him by surprise—to amuse him. She’d actually let something of herself peek out that time. And though she withdrew almost immediately, her eyes lingered on his fingers as they stroked the sleek black head and crumpled back delicate shell-pink ears to make the black cat purr.

“As it happens,” Joe said, a murmur to fool the cat into thinking he was talking to her, and indeed she purred more loudly in response, “I actually like my bacon a little burned.”

Lyn’s eyes widened; her nostrils flared slightly, taking in the same sharp odor he’d already noticed. Her lips formed a silent curse, and she whirled to tend to the fry pan.

Joe smiled at the cat, bringing that purring creature up so they could briefly butt faces. Distractable, Lyn was—focused in, and therefore not aware of the larger world. He’d already seen some of that up on the mountain, and could well understand why she didn’t work without a partner.

It did surprise him that brevis would have sent her without one. They trusted him to some extent, then—albeit probably only to maintain his supposed cover. And whatever they thought of him, he wouldn’t let her down. Not this dark-eyed ocelot with her fierce drive to clean up the Sentinels, not even if she didn’t realize they were on the same side.

Damned if he was going to let the Core get away with messing with this mountain.

The cat made an abrupt decision to be done with purring and face-butting, possibly inspired by the clatter of eggs being dished out. Lyn moved assertively in the unfamiliar kitchen, looking right at home as she finished up the meal.

“Juice?” he asked her, heading for the refrigerator to do at least that much.

She glanced at him, flicking the gas burner off. “Milk?” she said, a hopeful note in her voice.

“Sure, plenty of it.” He poured her a serving, set it on the marble counter with a decided clink of glass on stone, and went back for his favorite mix of tropical juices.

As his hand closed around the carton, it hit.

Not a bad one, just sudden—his hand spasmed around flimsy cardboard…for an instant he lost awareness, swamped in the harsh atonal power, a slow, thick ooze filling his lungs so his vision grayed and prickles of pain and weakness raked him from inside.

Lyn pushed in beside him, prying the carton from his hand, muttering a curse. But by then Joe had control—or at least partial control—pushing away the power so he could fumble for shields.

But Lyn had no hesitation, and no fumbling. She reached for that same centered place she’d created up at Snowbowl—he felt it build around them, gliding into place like a balm. And then his head snapped up and he sucked in his breath, because she’d gone that one step further—done that which breezed through him from within, caressing those very nerves that had been scraped with pain only a moment earlier. The contrast shocked him, wobbling his knees, and he snatched at the edge of the sink for support. In her smudge-lined eyes he saw reflected shock; she stiffened, jerking slightly. And then she narrowed her eyes, and the connection slammed closed.

He lost his knees entirely, falling back against the cabinets beneath the sink, breath grunting from his body and mixed up with an inarticulate, involuntary noise of protest.

That, too, startled her—she looked as though she wanted to skitter away, putting distance between them. But she stood straight and still, and after a moment she let out a long sigh of breath.

“Well, damn,” Joe grumbled, trying to ignore the incredible emptiness she’d left behind. There was no graceful way up from here, jammed back against the cabinets with his bare feet propped too close and his knees askew at chin level. “No offense, but whatever you’re doing…I think it needs practice.”

“I could say the same for you,” she responded tersely—but she stepped forward to brace herself and extend a hand. A small hand, but he didn’t make the mistake of supposing it lacked strength. She was, after all, Sentinel.

He took the hand and he took the strength she loaned him, and soon enough he was back on his feet, looking down at her again. He said, “Shielding…not my best thing.”

“No,” she agreed.

That stung a little. “Hey—it’s my job to keep track of what’s going on around here. You think I can do that if I fling up shields at every opportunity? When I was in Nevada, Dean—” He stopped. He didn’t want to talk about Dean Seacrest with her. He didn’t even want to bring it up. Not knowing she thought him guilty of Dean’s death.

Well, hell, maybe he was. But not in the way they thought. So he cleared his throat and said, “I was in better practice then.” Back when he hadn’t been isolated, when he’d had more cause to shield, and more tightly defined duties. Now it was all his, a lightly populated area considered so stable that one Sentinel could handle it.

At least, one Sentinel of Joe’s skills. Because, let’s face it, there weren’t many. And he had plenty of reason to rue it these days, when it seemed brevis consul and his posse had decided they couldn’t quite trust what a man of such skills could—or would—do. Even when they didn’t know it all.

But Lyn’s brows had quirked up. “That makes sense,” she said. “Although you should put in some practice.”

He couldn’t help but hope as he settled back against the edge of the sink. “So now you believe me?” That he’d have reason to shield, that he was as much a victim of what was happening here as anyone.

She gave him the driest of expressions; the hope died. “I’m riding a line,” she told him, blunt as she had been when she first approached him in the woods below. “For all I know, you started this thing and now it’s out of hand—or the Core went their own way and left you hanging.”

“Whoa.” He couldn’t help it; he shook off the words—physically, literally. “That’s a hell of a way to go through life. Thinking like that.” He thought about it; still didn’t like it. “I’ll stick with my way, thanks. But you’re right about the practice. I’ll get to work on that.” As if they’d been discussing the weather, he turned back to his partially crunched carton of juice and unscrewed the little plastic cap on the side. “Hope you like your eggs cold. I think that’s how we’re going to get them.”

“Eggs cold, bacon burned. Just as it should be.” She said it with such deadpan perfection that he jerked around to look at her and caught the barest glimpse of a smile tweaking the corner of her mouth as she turned away to take the plates to the small round table in the tree-dappled sunlight of the breakfast nook.

His answering grin came in spite of himself. Because whether he liked it or not, whether she knew it or not, his heart was right out there for her to see, as it had always been.

It was just a matter of how hard she crunched it before she was through.