Jaguar Night (15 page)

Her surprise echoed gently through the both of them; she hadn’t realized the hunger lingering in her eyes. She picked up the second earring, closing the top drawer of the scarred old chest of drawers with her elbow. “Certain?” she said, a stall in response to his question, though it seemed like forever since he’d asked it. She just as quickly realized she’d never fool him, and sighed. “I guess I’m not certain of a thing,
except that we need to protect this ranch. No—” she shook her head “—that’s not true. I know I can’t stay away from you. I know that even standing here in the same room stirs up all kinds of things in me—and
that
—” she looked pointedly at his groin “—is the least of it.”

He mimed a blow to his heart. “You wound me.”

She grinned. “Okay. Maybe not the
least
of it. There’s a thing here between us. I get that. I just haven’t figured out exactly what it is or what it’ll be. But I do know we have this ranch to protect, and that manuscript to find—and that means figuring out the rest of it later. They’re okay out there, aren’t they?”

Her sudden change of subject threw him for a moment—but he could never truly be confused over meaning where Meghan was concerned. Not any longer. “The Core prefers to attack at night. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be watching, but the risks are lower…and I’m betting there are animals to be fed.”

“I’m betting they’ve already been fed,” Meghan murmured. “That reminds me…we had the farrier on the calendar today. I’ve got to cancel that…and Chris was going to come out and work with Jenny to settle the new gelding. I don’t want him anywhere near here—or the two who were coming to help shift hay—”

“Warn them off.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Drama,” she said. “Right from the start, drama. Showing up at the round pen with your dire warnings, taking the jaguar right there in front of me when you left…the world’s a stage, huh?” But when he merely looked at her, entirely unused to being called on such things, she grinned and
said, “Never mind. I’ll just phone them and reschedule. I think it’ll raise fewer questions, don’t you?”

“Right,” he muttered, still off balance.

And she seemed to damned well know it. She leaned against the chest of drawers and crossed her arms. “Speaking of the Core,” she said, “Last night, I got the distinct impression that there’s more at stake than the manuscript. In fact, it sounded a whole lot like there might be a grudge thing going on with you and the local Core’s prince.”

Dolan frowned, the edge of his thumb passing idly over the faded scar on his side—not one she’d seemed to notice, and he caught himself, letting that hand rest low on his hip. Confrontational. More his style. “He finds me annoying.”

“You might have said something. I’ve got a couple of traded memories, and sometimes I hear you pretty clearly in my head, and sometimes I just get little hints. Your mind isn’t an open book or anything.”

Thank God for that.
“Would it have changed anything?” He lowered his voice, nearly hitting gravel…hiding defensiveness. He wasn’t used to that, either.

She shrugged. “That’s not the point.”

“Coffee,” he said desperately. If she’d flung the words at him, he’d have known his role—the same role he’d had since his brother died. The defiant one. The rogue. Dark and dangerous. But this civil conversation left him no easy knee jerks, no easy patterns into which he could fall.

“Sex would be better,” she said, heading out to the kitchen. “But I don’t want to wear you out. Big day ahead. Fixing the ranch, fixing the wards…”

Sex would be better.
Holy damn cow. She’d done that on purpose.

And to good effect.

Newly warned not to underestimate this woman, Dolan rescued the shirt he’d washed in the shower and flapped out the wrinkles, hanging it to dry in her open window. He reached for the phone by her bedside, but only until he heard her voice in the kitchen—a matter-of-fact message-leaving voice.
The farrier.
The smell of brewing coffee hit his nose as she made another call, this one to Chris. He’d thought her tone casual enough, but the kid somehow caught whiff of trouble; she had to convince him not to come out and make sure everything was okay.

The moment he heard her finish the call, he picked up the phone. No better way to reestablish his balance, his dark and dangerous rogue attitude, than to have a sweet conversation with brevis regional.

“Carter,” he said, barely giving the man time to answer the phone. “Where the hell is that team?”

Carter came back at him just as quickly. “Is this where I remind you that you went in early? That the consul didn’t want you out there at all?”

“Two days early,” Dolan said, falling into a near growl—and finding the familiar role to be a relief even as his ire rose. “We’re long past the consul’s timeline, and you know it. I don’t give a damn if you’ve got the whole team there—send them on! Your latecomer will only be two hours away once he finally gets there.”

“She,” Carter said absently. Dolan heard the
ticketytick
of a keyboard, knew Carter was checking up on the missing team member. “You’re not the only one with
things going on. She’s in the middle of something else. It’s wrapping up—”

“Forget her! Didn’t anyone at brevis feel what happened out here last night? The Core took this to civilians, Carter.”

His response was dry enough. “We felt it. I have the reports to prove it.” The rustle of said pages reached Dolan through the phone line. “No doubt they were coming after you. As far as we can tell, Gausto has his little contingent hunkered down in Sonoita. I’m not so sure last night wasn’t a ploy to drive you to the manuscript.”

“Yeah?” Dolan’s voice slid down to a true growl. “Then it’s working. Finding that thing is exactly what I intend to do. As soon as possible.”

“To lead them straight to it?” Carter asked coldly. “No need to ask how you are, I see. Classic Treviño.”

“Classic consul,” Dolan shot back at him. “Leaving a Treviño hanging out in the field alone.”

Carter didn’t respond directly. He noted, “The consul had good reason to believe you were back on your feet. As it happens, we also caught a surge in ward view from that area. I don’t suppose I need to tell you what it was—or that we can’t leave someone of that power out in the cold.”

Dolan paced the room—strong, angry strides that took him from one side to the other with brutal efficiency. “You stay away from her, dammit. She wants nothing to do with brevis!”

“That’s not an option,” Carter told him. “The team will be there soon, Dolan. Try to keep things quiet until then.”

“For the consul’s convenience?” Dolan laughed, short and hard. “Tell him to—”

Carter interrupted, his voice gone just as hard. “Don’t go there,” he warned. “No one here is in a mood to humor you.”

“Then come out and stop me,” Dolan said, and hung up.

“Coffee!” Meghan called into the back end of the house, putting the carafe back onto its heating plate as she snagged her brimming mug. Hot and black and as strong as possible—but not so strong that she wanted to face Dolan at the moment. Not after a phone call that went as badly as what she’d just heard.

Or not heard, really. But the waves of anger coming from Dolan were loud enough. She didn’t fear him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use a little space. She left the house, letting the screen door squeak and slam so there’d be no mistake about it, and she hitched one hip up to sit on the porch rail and survey the damage from the night before.

She hadn’t realized that hard caliche ground could scorch. Or that the flame devil had come quite so close to the house. And even from here, the sheep shed was a complete loss. She caught a flicker of movement, found Jenny’s dog trotting along the pipe corral runs adjacent to the barn, and soon enough caught sight of Jenny and Anica in one of the runs, discussing the horse between them. Jenny moved with a limp, but not a big one. Anica glanced over to the house and Meghan lifted her hand in a wave, but Anica’s nod of response was perfunctory, even at this distance.

Anica would be more angered by the fact that Meghan had been keeping secrets than the details of
those secrets; she’d hold on to that anger.
Something I should have kept in mind this past week.

A whole week since Dolan had come into her life. From their first encounter to this morning’s most recent, much more intimate encounter…it felt as though it had been a lifetime.

She knew for certain that her life would never be the same. Even now she felt the trickle of his anger, the faint pain of abused feet…even his thankfulness for the coffee he was pouring. And even now, she felt the latent presence of the power newly available to her. The earth’s power, available at a volume she’d never even considered…
right here, right now.
If she reached for it.

And she was tempted…but she also instinctively felt the wrongness of such a thing, to reach for power for which she had no purpose.

She stretched again. The last twenty-four hours had used her hard, even though she’d considered herself strong with her active ranch lifestyle. And Dolan…he was still recovering from his near-death experience, as much as he seemed to take himself for granted at this point.

She closed her eyes, tipping her head back ever so slightly to listen more closely to him—to see if he was as well as he pretended to be. The feel of him instantly broadened, giving her glimpses of his lingering pain, of muscles that still sometimes unexpectedly failed him. And there was something else, too—something new, a strange tingle in the periphery of her perception. Not alarming…not particularly meaningful at all. She lingered there a moment, and then moved away from it. One more new thing in her life that didn’t quite yet make sense.

Like Dolan himself. Meghan wasn’t sure yet whether
she regretted what had happened—the fierce lovemaking, the strength of what had happened so suddenly between them.

She did know there was no walking away.

Dolan emerged from the kitchen, wearing a damp shirt not yet buttoned, his feet clad where he might otherwise have gone barefoot. She knew why. She said, “Things okay?”

A scowl lingered behind his eyes, in the set of his jaw. “Just delays,” he said. He took a sip of the coffee, looked at her as though he might say something else and then didn’t. “How about out here?”

“I need to go check on them.” She nodded at the barn. Her two friends had removed the horse from the run-out and now walked it out, studying its movement. Even from here, Meghan could see the limp. “After that, can we get started on repairing the wards? I want this place safe from those people.”

He caught her gaze, held it. “Repairing the wards won’t necessarily do that. They want that manuscript, and they know your mother is the last to have seen it.”

“Because you led them here.” She flattened the words, trying to squeeze away any blame. It didn’t work.

“Probably,” he said, just as flatly. “But I’m not sure brevis is secure any longer, and neither is the adjutant—that’s one reason I didn’t wait for the team. Besides, they always suspected your mother had last possession of the book. She and Jared would still be alive if that weren’t true.”

Meghan lifted her chin. “My mother was the best at warding and hiding. The Sentinels never should have wasted her as they did. Only a coyote, you know.”

“She wasn’t
only
anything,” he said shortly. “She laid enough trails to convince everyone that she’d passed the manuscript off to some unsuspecting mule. Both the Sentinels and the Core gave up on this area long ago.”

“Then what changed?”
Why come back again now?

“Time,” he told her. “Our techniques. We’ve refined them.” He took another sip of the coffee, obviously appreciative. Meghan enjoyed watching him enjoy it, enjoyed the play of the breeze in his open shirt and the glimpses of skin it showed her. Scars, too, in this bright daylight—smooth, tight scars, well healed but significant enough to have hurt like hell. Thin, precise lines that didn’t make any sense to her.

She might well have asked had he not stiffened, his attention leaving the conversation to center on the woods past the charred sheep pen, the little spit of flatland that curved around the rising mountain. That was warning enough; that he set his coffee on the porch rail was even more so. Meghan put her own mug aside, sliding off the porch rail to her feet.

But Dolan relaxed slightly before Meghan had even heard what got his attention, and when he turned to her it was with a grin. It startled her, that grin—genuine, carefree and for the moment, injecting lightheartedness into what had become a persistently grim situation. It was then she heard the cadence of hoofbeats.

Luka.

She barely caught her mug as it slipped on the porch rail, and then quickly set it at her feet, heading for the steps as Luka cantered into view through the woods, shying wildly at the charred sheep pen and kicking out at it on the way past. Right into the yard, as Jenny’s dog
caught sight and came charging up, barking a scolding at the wrongness of a loose horse.

And what would you have done with a flame devil?

Died, that’s what.

But the quick grim thought didn’t keep her from grinning like a fool at Luka’s return, not even though his entire body spoke of his alarm—tense muscles, neck flung high, nose tipped to the sky, eyes rolling and ears canted back. His sleek grayed coat was marred with stains and one scrape along his shoulder, hair peeled away and skin raw, and never had Meghan understood more than at that moment: this was a creature bred for war. His hooves thundered against the ground, and at that moment she believed what Luka had always believed—that whatever stood in front of him, be it fence or house or mountain, it would damned well get out of his way.

But Dolan saw it, too, and lost his grin; he moved to step in front of her, not knowing—how
could
he know?—and Meghan reacted both out loud and silently,
No!
and “No!” making a double hit against Dolan, slowing him enough so she could push him back onto the porch. And although Dolan, too, was also clearly the sort who believed men and mountains would move before him, he allowed it—and she followed up quickly. “Not now. He killed a man, once. He was being beaten, but it’s part of him now.” Once sure he had heard her, she looked over to Luka—frozen in place, trembling, waiting for something to send him off or calm him down. Asking for her help, with the courage it took to overcome the stench of death and the flame devil and his wild night just to stand there at all.