Sentinels: Jaguar Night. Doranna Durgin

Dolan’s legs on the bed of the creaky-floored little box of a guest room and starting in on the leather laces of his boots.

      Anica hesitated, still aware she hadn’t been given all the answers here, aware that Meghan was giving off a muddle of mixed signals, and nodded shortly. “Call out if you need anything. I’ll give Luka a good rubdown and get the quarantine stall ready for our newcomer. You’ll be out?”

      “That’s the plan,” Meghan said, doing her best to keep the grim out of her voice.

      Anica hesitated in the doorway as if she might say something. When she finally murmured, “Call for help if you need it,” Meghan knew those weren’t the words that had lingered on the tip of her tongue. Those words would have been something more like What’s up with you, woman?

      Just as well Anica hadn’t asked. Meghan had no answers.

      She finished pulling off Dolan’s boots and did her best to straighten the twisted leather jacket; then she grabbed a quilt off the foot of the iron bed frame and spread it over him, here in the cool interior of the house. All the while, her blood thrummed and heated, and she had a weird duplicity of perception, as though she felt Dolan’s vague impression of the moment along with her own.

      And even though she tried to busy her mind with such practical matters, she found herself lingering at the side of the narrow bed, watching the little flickers of movement in his face. At the moment she should have walked away, she instead crouched by the bed and watched her hand touch his cheek, trembling along the contours of his brow and the dark hair at his temple.

      Not all of the shifters reflected their other form. Her mother hadn’t. Her mother had looked like Meghan, all dark hair and dark eyes and sharp jaw in clean, exacting features. The coyote showed only in her laughing eyes. But Dolan…Dolan somehow looked exactly like what he was. Blue eyes, holding all the shadowed power of his past. Black, sleek hair, falling across his forehead just a tad too long. But mostly it was in the way he moved, the way he held himself…and now all the sinuous power hidden beneath the incantations she’d fed into his system with her herbs.

      Her fingertips tingled. Her body throbbed. She touched his jaw; she ran the backs of her fingers along the stubble there. She let herself feel what came from him.

       Longing and need and…

      He growled, deep in his throat; he tensed, a quiver passing through his arms and torso. She held her breath, startled as arousal reverberated through her, uncertain if it was him or her or both of them. She closed her eyes; bit her lip. She had the sudden, startling revelation that if she stayed here with him, if she kept the contact between them, she would quiver herself right into an orgasm, right here beside the bed with both of them fully clothed and barely touching and barely knowing each other at that.

      She wrenched herself away, so hard that she lost her balance and tipped over to land on her butt. After that, she didn’t linger. She climbed to her feet and marched out to the kitchen with long, deliberate strides, pulling chipped ice through the refrigerator door and grabbing a spoon. She returned to the bedroom and made short work of spooning a few chips into his mouth. And when the plastic tumbler was half-empty, she left it on the bedside table and marched herself off to the shower, shedding filthy clothes along the way.

      A nice, cool shower. She might even be tempted to call it cold.