Sentinels: Lion Heart

by Doranna Durgin

  Then again, he didn’t really care how they’d gotten from there to here. He just wanted to finish here. And he wanted to do it now. Her shielding wrapped around them so tightly, so snugly…he knew exactly how she’d brought him back, if not exactly where he’d been. And now it pulsed around them and there she sat, right where it mattered, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright and her hair tousled and her shirred top wildly askew, showing him a neat little belly button in a tight tummy, ribs softened by just enough flesh, breasts snugly encased by soft, thin material and every feature showing, every aroused pucker and every hold-me curve.

  He reached for her pants and she reached for his pants and hot damn, then there were no pants. But as much as he ached and strained for her as she came back astride him, he pulled her down to his chest instead. He pushed her shirt up so they came delicious skin to skin, proving that yes indeed, she had no bra. Oh, yeah, he needed to kiss her senseless. And though the plump nature of her lips and the faint brush burn on her cheeks told him they’d already done some of that, he needed to do it while he was…well, here.

  She hardly seemed adverse. She even seemed prepared for something less controlled—but oh, he liked that sound she made in her throat when he gentled their contact, when he played with her mouth, when he teased her tongue. He ran his hands down her back, found the tight round and wonderfully naked curves of her bottom, cupped her to him. He absorbed her purr as his hands admired her breasts, not so very large but oh-so-perfect. And he grinned against her lips as she caressed everything she could reach, while her shields enclosed them, cocooned them…filled them.

  All of which had him pretty smug about life in general, pretty much in control again, back in his head, back in his body, back in his bed with this woman he’d wanted since he’d laid eyes on her. Right up until the moment she managed to work those small hands between them and take hold of him, fingers oh-so-clever, eyes glinting oh-so-wicked.

  So maybe he lost it then. Maybe he arched up and maybe he cried out and maybe he tipped his head back hard against the bed. Maybe not so cool, maybe not in any control whatsoever, but then again maybe she wasn’t, either, for suddenly she was astride him and taking him in, that small body somehow just big enough, those slender legs gripping him tightly as she took him, hot and ready. She cried out, a surprised sound; she quivered. And he froze, panting, afraid to move one way or the other because there she was and there he was and she’d somehow clamped those shields down, stopping the ebb and flow of energy between them.

  “Let it go, Lyn,” he rasped, teeth gritted, every incredible flicker of pleasure in his body tightening in streaks down his spine, down his buttocks, heading for hot damn the place it would do the most good. “Let it—”

  Another noise of surprise, a cry of discovery—and she released her hold on the shields and the energy came flooding through and—

  And maybe he lost his mind just then and maybe he didn’t. Maybe they cried out together, helpless and entwined every which way a man and woman could be, spasming in the culmination of all that energy and all that touching and all that exchanged emotion.

  Joe only knew for certain that he’d never felt anything quite like it.

  No, he decided, coming back to his senses with Lyn draped limply over his body, her hair sweeping over his neck and those sweet breasts pressing into his chest, he also knew for certain that he wanted to do it again. As soon as possible.

  Well. Perhaps with a few moments to recover.

  “Where did you go?”

  Lyn’s voice startled Joe from his very pleasant doze. In a night so surreal, he made no assumptions; he opened his eyes—and found exactly what he thought he’d find. The middle of the night in his loft room, his bed comfortably beneath him, if at some odd angle, a comforter scrounged from the pile of covers to lay lightly over himself and the woman draped over his side. Three cats had magically appeared in some unknown recent moment, taking up their accustomed stations at various points on the bed.

  Yup. That’s how it should have been, all right. So it seemed only sensible for him to say, “I’m right here.”

  She drew a deep breath, let it out slowly in a way that probably wasn’t meant to tickle his ribs. “When you followed the power,” she said, her words deliberate, “where did you go?”

  And here he’d been so content to have her tucked into his elbow, his hand lazily wandering the spare contours of her body, his mind drowsy. He shifted, putting himself up on his elbows, awakening an entire host of aches and pains in the process. “Ow,” he said. “What did you do to me? While I was where I went?”

  “What you did to yourself is more like it.” She rolled away from him, leaning her chin in her hand. “Wherever you went, I thought it was going to kill you before I could get you back. And then…you weren’t really here at all…as if some part of you had been trapped behind.” She shook her head. “There’s something powerful going on. Something unusual. And it’s all tied up in you.”

  “Regretting that trust you so recently offered up?” he asked ruefully.

  She scowled at him—an imposing expression, with those dark-rimmed eyes of hers. “Noting things worth looking into.”

  “Ha,” he said, and settled back to stare at the ceiling far above. “If we weren’t here in my bed, you’d be making lists.”

  Her silence gave her away.

  “OhmyGod,” he said, all one long amused word. “You want to be making lists.”

  She drew slightly away from him. “Lists,” she said, somewhat stiffly, “can be useful.”

  He pulled her back, waited for her to relax, and said, “I don’t know where I went. At first, it was what I’d expect. Swimming upstream. Okay, it hurt some.” Hurt like unimaginable hell is more like it. Swimming upstream into acid rain from the inside out. But…He frowned, hunting memory. “I swear, I was doing it. I was getting close. And it felt familiar, but—” He went deeper, looking for where he’d been, casting about for something on which to pin that sense of familiarity. There was the pain, and a gray haze, and…and…

  …and…

  He startled at her hand on his torso, shoving him—and not gently, either—and slapped his own over it, stilling her. “Hey, hey—what’s that all about?”

  “You were gone again,” she informed him, her hand now pressing down across his ribs as if to reassure herself, her face grim. Whisker-burned and smoky eyes and love-sultry lips and grim, didn’t quite all fit together somehow. “Promise me you won’t try that again.”

  “I didn’t know I was trying anything in the first place.” Following memories? Right there in his head? Deep trouble, boy-o. But he gave her shoulders a squeeze. “No fears. I won’t go back. There’s no information for us there. Just that sense of…” He hesitated, and then asked—most carefully,” Is there any chance you missed something at the top of the world?”

  Where her hand had shoved, it now stroked—following the contours of his ribs, following the shape of muscles kept hard by running the mountain as the cougar and climbing them as the man. She found the faint line of hair that gathered at his navel and headed south, and would have followed that, too, if he hadn’t stopped her. He captured her hand and rolled on his side to face her. “Lyn. The top of the world?”

  “I was sifting through what you might have meant,” she admitted. “I give. Missed what?”

  So it was her turn to be obtuse. “Trace. Working amulets left behind. Some sort of…I don’t know, anchor.”

  Understanding brought a scowl, and instant denial. “If you even knew how insulting that was—”

  He made a rude noise, bringing her up short. “This is beyond ego, Lyn. It’s sure as hell beyond mine. It’s got my trace and yet I can’t follow it? Yeah, that’s what I wanted to learn tonight. But we’ve got to assume this thing could be outside our experience in other ways.”

  She scowled again, but it was a softer expression—and it wasn’t aimed at him. “All right,” she said. “But there wasn’t anything active up t
here, just the signs that they’d been through.”

  “I don’t get the impression you usually have a problem following fresh trace.” For he remembered her lashing tail, her poorly hidden annoyance, there at the top of the world where she’d grudgingly trusted him to keep watch while she circled and quartered and nosed around.

  Some of that annoyance resurfaced even as he watched, and worked its way around her expression, and finally turned into long exhalation. “Ego,” she murmured, and sighed again. “Ouch.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said ruefully, and kissed the top of her head.

  “The brevis team should have an amulet specialist.” She stretched, scraping the hair back from her face, and if she had any awareness of what the sight of her tight, half-clothed body did to him, she showed no signs of it—at least, not until she shot him a single sly glance from beneath slitted lids. He ran a hand down her torso—part admiration, part possession. He almost missed it when she said, “I’ll ask about it when the team gets here—see if there might be some new technique we should watch for. But that area…it’s just not convenient enough for them, Ryan. No matter how you come at it.”

  “Mmm,” he said, as his hand acquired a mind of its own and slipped beneath the comforter to caress her bare ass.

  “Surely not,” she said.

  “You started it,” he told her, quite abruptly tugging her closer.

  “I didn’t think—”

  “Ego,” he warned her. “Delicate, delicate ego.”

  “Wouldn’t want to damage that.”

  “Oh, now you’ve done it.” He rolled over her, licked her belly from navel to sternum, and eyed her breasts in a most pleased and predatory manner. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “Now you’ve really done it.”

  And she laughed.

  But not for long.

  Chapter 14

  L yn thought he was still asleep—Joe was almost sure of it. She’d eased out of bed, made use of the loft’s bathroom and hunted down her clothing—none of which had remained on her body by the end of the night. The shirt, he thought, was pretty much a goner anyway. She seemed to think so, too, by the look of dismay she gave it as she held it up to the bare light of dawn.

  “T-shirt,” he suggested, as the black cat settled by his head. “Middle dresser drawer. Not that the neighbors are close enough to see if you make a mad dash back to the casita, but I wouldn’t want any of your important parts to take a chill.”

  She whirled, dropping the shirt, and momentarily crossed an arm over her chest—but then dropped that, too, straightening.

  Still, it made for a sad little tight spot in his throat. Second thoughts, all right. “You okay?” he asked.

  She stood there a long moment, then came to sit on the edge of the bed, casually displacing the old brown tabby. She half crossed her legs to accommodate the bed’s low direct-to-floor setup, her back straight, her body looking somehow slighter than he remembered. Vulnerable. Her bare shoulder held a perfect curve, lean with muscle; her waist nipped in and flared out again well above the level of those low-riding cargo pants they’d both roughed up so badly the night before. A single breast peeked out from beyond her arm, held high by her straight back. Not a shy breast, oh no.

  She said, “I’m okay.” But she didn’t sound it. She sounded puzzled, and maybe even a little fragile. “I’m just trying to sort out my work thoughts from…this.” And she made a vague waving gesture.

  “Hmm,” he said. “And here I am, trying to sort out this—” and he repeated her vague waving gesture “—from the way you were so hot on my trail when you first arrived here. And not, I would like to point out, in any way the same fashion you were hot on my trail last night.”

  She laughed, faintly, as he’d hoped she would. But she didn’t turn to look at him. Her shoulders lifted in a sigh and she said, “You really deserve to know,” and he didn’t think she was quite talking to him. But then she said quite clearly, “My brother.”

  He thought it best to give her some silence, so he said nothing, his fingers automatically reaching to scratch the little black cat behind her ears as she eased closer to bump his head. Her brother. So many places that could go. Her brother had been hurt by a dark Sentinel, perhaps even killed…her brother had tracked dark Sentinels, as well…her brother had—

  “He was human. My half brother, just as with your half sister.” She bent to pick up the T-shirt and slipped it on. “My brother and I grew up together. We always knew I’d go off to a ‘special boarding school,’ but those early years…I’m not sure we could have been any closer. And really—” she turned to look at him, her expression puzzled, her face still bearing one distinct patch of whisker-burn “—I’ve never been able to figure out when it started. When just being him wasn’t good enough, because of who I was. When he started playing with drugs. When he started cheating and lying and—”

  “All the way back to the beginning all over again,” Joe said, with a tremendous ache in his throat for her. “The Druid and the Roman. But you know, as far as we can tell…the Druid didn’t do anything to get the Roman started, either.”

  “And yet here we are, feeling responsible for the Atrum Core,” she said, dryly enough to give him an inner grin. One tough woman, hidden ticklish spots notwithstanding.

  The black cat licked his ear and Joe absently flipped her over and closed his hand over her belly, so she turned on him in a big ball of fierce, biting without teeth and clawing with bare paws. “And so you feel responsible for your brother…” He let the words trail off because he didn’t quite see how the pieces fit, not yet.

  “Felt,” she corrected him, the word precisely formed. “He’s dead now. The details…don’t really matter. An inevitable result of the cheating and lying and etcetera. Mostly the etcetera.”

  Joe frowned. Definitely not seeing how the pieces fit. The cat leaped up, dealt his hand a series of wicked death blows and sprinted away, tail cranked.

  She acknowledged his puzzlement with a weary shake of her head. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “Well…” He took her hand, still flat on his back and thinking, from the way that effort trailed down his arm and ached at his shoulder, that perhaps he might just stay there. “I could offer up some understanding babble. But, er, no. I don’t get it.”

  “All those years he said he’d straighten out and didn’t…I watched him break my parents’ hearts until they died, I financed his schooling, I found him jobs…I tried tough love. Finally I just let it happen—I limited our contact as much as I could. But even then…I never quit hoping. Never. You’d think anyone with half a brain would figure it out, but not me.” She turned away from him, just enough for the pretense of privacy.

  “Lyn…” So much packed into that one word—the need to sweep her up and hug away that hurt, the need to make it all right again. The need to kick her brother in a beauteous parabolic arc right over the Peaks.

  “You still don’t get it,” she said, turning on him—and if her huge brown eyes glimmered with unshed tears, they also darkened with anger. Not at him, not this time—but he’d seen that particular anger before. “I know what it’s like when someone you love goes dark. Now add the very real damage a Sentinel can do to this world. Never mind that every dark Sentinel gives the Core their justification for existence—”

  He snorted, but held his peace, for she was right enough.

  “—a dark Sentinel is every bit as dangerous to the world as brevis regional thought you were to the Peaks.” She disentangled her hand from his, regarded it as if it belonged to a stranger, and said, “And I can stop it. I’m one of a very few of us who can stop it cold.”

  Joe got it then. He got it good. “Because you can track us. Which of us is doing what. Someone else might suspect, but you…you know.”

  She closed those big eyes, lashes sweeping her cheeks, the smudge of natural color at the edges of her lids more stark than ever, and she nodded.

  “Except with me.” He tried to infuse humo
r into his voice, and didn’t quite make it.

  Her eyes opened into frustration. She said, “Yes, dammit. Because the trace in the power surges is already set in motion. It’s not about you sneaking out in the middle of the night to go do something nefarious.”

  “I could try that, if you want,” he offered. “But I think you’d probably be the target of my nefarious intentions, so it really wouldn’t be very sly of me.”

  She laughed, thank goodness. She laughed and she twisted around to startle him with a resounding kiss on the lips, and then she was up again, light and graceful on a morning when he could barely think about moving at all. “So now you know,” she said. “It wasn’t personal. Except…it’s always personal.” She stretched hugely, and added, “Well, except when it’s like Sonoita, which was actually a welcome change of pace. Brevis flew me in from Europe—Spain, actually. You’d have liked my partner—big guy, black as night, packed more muscles into one body than I’ve ever seen before. He took the lion.”

  Joe, still flat on his back, managed a convincing growl.

  She grinned. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Hit the shower, why don’t you. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m thinking we’ve got work to do today, and if you use up all your hot water, you might just loosen up some of those stiff muscles.” And she moved out of reach, away from the bed and headed for the stairs.

  He groaned. “You’re all heart.”

  But he was beginning to realize it was true.

  She should have stayed with him. Stayed and massaged out those sore muscles—some of which she’d contributed to, and some of which she’d simply watched helplessly as it happened.