Sentinels: Alpha Rising by Doranna Durgin

Author:Doranna Durgin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-04-11T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

It didn’t matter that Lannie hadn’t quite finished what he’d been about to say at the conservatory. Holly didn’t need to hear it with her ears in order to know it in her heart.

I’m alone.

The bleak despair in his face, in his eyes...the way he’d turned from her to hide those things.

Or to try.

It hadn’t worked. Holly had seen it then, and she’d seen it as he’d stood and held out his hand so they could put themselves back together and walk out into the breaking sunshine. She’d seen it back at the store where he’d taken over until closing, chasing Faith out when she would have questioned him—and she’d seen it in her mind’s eye during the night’s dreams.

Faith, it was clear, had seen it, too. And blamed Holly for it—her piercingly resentful look upon departure left no doubt.

It’s not my fault!

It wasn’t. She hadn’t done anything except be here, and she hadn’t even wanted that.

Except maybe if she’d handled being here with a little more grace, Lannie wouldn’t have been so caught up in meeting her needs that he hadn’t realized his own.

And boy, she’d expressed her needs. She wanted more than initiation; she wanted Lannie. She wanted the way he made her pulse pound in every nook and cranny of her body, and she wanted the way he evoked that sensation of unfamiliar emotional warmth—even as she feared it at the same time.

“Maybe it is my fault,” she told the half-grown barn cat winding between her feet. Morning broke bright and early around her, not even a hint of a building thunderhead. She sat on an upended oval stock trough at the front of the store where the porch overhang just barely put her in the shade, working on the last of a yogurt cup with very little interest. “Maybe I could have seen it sooner, if I wasn’t so hung up on my poor little self.”

“Probably not.”

She jumped; she hadn’t expected that creaky voice. Aldo stood off to the side under the same overhang, when she would have sworn she’d been utterly alone out here.

He didn’t apologize for her surprise; he more or less seemed to take it for granted. She reminded herself that this man, too, was Sentinel—no matter his age or his increasingly ragged nature. He said, “Lannie keeps to himself.”

She gave him a sound of skepticism. “We’re talking about the same Lannie? The one who holds so tightly to his packs?”

“Leading,” said Aldo, “isn’t the same as sharing.” He cocked his head, several days’ of gray whiskers bristling around his mouth and chin. “Except with you, I think. So then, yes. Maybe so, after all.”

She jabbed her spoon down in the yogurt container. “I don’t follow that.”

“I can’t find my toenail clippers,” Aldo said after a moment.

“I—” Okay, what? “I’m sorry, I haven’t seen them.” And all she did was look down at the cat in her arms, briefly rubbing her face against the top of its head. But when she looked up again, Aldo was gone just as quietly as he’d come.

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