away the least advantage, even if he wasn’t all he’d been made out to be.
What the hell was that?
Good God, he’d almost lost control of the shifting, right in front of her. That hadn’t happened since…
Since puberty, when it happened to them all. Joe lingered there, sitting on his heels, knowing she was thinking about it, too—seeing the wariness hovering around her.
As if it mattered. She’d had her mind made up long before she’d met him. She had an intensity about her, a burn…Before this was over, he’d find out what had lit that fire. It might be focused on him, but it hadn’t started with him. Way too much momentum there. Alluring, shimmering intensity…
He lifted his face to the fine spray of water reflecting off the edge of the porch, let it mist over skin that felt hot. “If you’re so sure it’s me,” he said, “why not trail me instead of coming to me?”
She snorted, but the question did what he’d wanted—took her mind off his shifting stutter. She sat, bringing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. “I couldn’t trail you here without your knowledge, and you know it.”
Ah. In this, at least, she was sensible enough. She’d hidden her power from him at first, but no one could keep that up for long. Perceiving power shifts was what he did.
“Besides,” she said, still sensible, “whether you’re innocent or guilty, you want to prove me wrong, right? The best way to do that is by helping me. Or pretending to help me.”
Joe laughed. “So you’re betting you’re smarter than I am.”
“Yes,” she said, and shivered. The cleverly layered open weave of her shirt wasn’t much for keeping in the heat. Nor for obscuring the tightening of cold nipples, when it came to that. “It’s just a matter of which of us plays the game better.”
She shivered again. The storm—already moving eastward over the Peaks—had dropped the temperature by a good twenty degrees. Typical. Joe climbed to his feet. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go get warmed up.”
In response, he received a skeptical look. Eloquently skeptical, with one winged brow arching upward.
He shook his head. “I don’t care about your games. I just want to keep this mountain safe.” If they’d decided he was guilty of something, he’d be considered guilty whether they could prove it or not. If anyone knew the meaning of inevitable, it was Joe Ryan. No point in turning himself inside out over it.
“Keep the mountain safe,” she repeated flatly. And then she nodded, rising gracefully to her feet in spite of her shivers. “Okay. We’ll play it that way. Especially if it means coffee.”
Joe gave her coffee. He offered her a down-filled lap quilt, which she pulled over her shoulders, and he stopped short of offering her dry clothes. He’d long since dispersed of his sister’s clothing. No point in hanging on to it, now that she was gone. And thank God she had passed before they’d used her illness to ruin his life; thank God she’d never known.
Not that he’d much cared at the time. Too busy grieving and all that. By the time he started thinking straight again, the Sentinels had tried him in absentia, declared him not guilty but not innocent, and packed him off to this mountain where the deep, stable power was supposed to be big enough to keep him busy—taking advantage of his ability to influence slow swells of deep power—yet too big for him to mess with.
Apparently they’d changed their minds on that last part. He supposed he should feel flattered.
Instead he made coffee for a woman he didn’t know but who was already his enemy. Damn shame, that. Those eyes—
Don’t go there, boy-o.
Besides, he’d be in real trouble if they found out just how wrong they were when it came to his limits.
“We just have time to make it to Snowbowl,” he said, words she didn’t quite seem to absorb as she wandered the most public parts of the house—the entryway with its skylights, the soaring space of the great room with its cathedral ceiling and the wood stove set neatly in the corner. She’d spooked three of his four cats into brief appearance and now she drifted back to the kitchen, an area defined by half walls and countertops and otherwise completely open to the great room. “I can’t believe you have cats.”
“I don’t have them. They just live here.” He shrugged. “It amuses them.” In fact, cat number four, a little black shorthair, wound between his ankles as he pulled coffee mugs from the cupboard, her tail high and quivering. They’d all chosen him…followed him home, refused to go away, and now lived under his protection, indoors and safe from the predators of the area. “But four,” he admitted, “is the absolute limit.”
“Four,” she repeated, looking bemused. And then, finally registering his words, “Why Snowbowl?”
Coffee gurgled in the background, his sleek little onecup coffeemaker valiantly churning out a dark French blend, the very aroma of which ought to be enough to warm her right on the spot. “Because the Skyride is the fastest way to the top. Because one way or the other, that area is at the root of this problem.” He shrugged, and added almost against his will, “Because I want you to see the view. To see what this place really is.”
That stopped her. She hesitated, a moment in which he couldn’t read her at all. Even that whisper of silken power faded. And then she seemed to shake it off, and she moved in as he pulled the first mug from the brewer and pushed it across the polished charcoal granite counter. “I’d planned to do some tracking today.”
“So do I.” Different kinds, no doubt—she was a trace sniffer, someone who could find and follow specific individuals. It wasn’t even a guess. Only someone with those skills could have found him on the trail today. Joe himself felt the deeper power, could nudge it around to a point, detour it on occasion, follow it if the flow was sustained. Officially, anyway.
He was perfectly willing to take advantage of her complimentary skills while he was at it.
Chapter 3
Agassiz Peak. Lyn squinted upward into a bright sky; the rising mountain filled half of it. It didn’t look like all that much from here.
Ryan gave her a look. “You haven’t really seen it yet.”
Had she said that out loud? She couldn’t be certain. Standing here at the modest ski lodge and gift shop, the tortuously winding drive up Schultz Pass behind them and nothing but pines and bare volcanic cinder slopes up ahead, she’d let something of herself get lost in the thrumming of the mountain. No wonder the Atrum Core wanted this place. No wonder Ryan wanted it.
Although, as she left the solid-plank porch of the lower lodge and stepped out onto sparse native grasses, it occurred to her that he already had it, just by living here.
No. Wrong thinking. He was what he was; she couldn’t forget it. If he’d once made his trade-offs for his sister’s life, now he made them simply for power. For that desperate attempt to balance his life. It wasn’t as though he had anything to lose.
After all, he’d already lost his sister even after he’d paid her bills with blood money.
He came up behind her. His solidity made her feel weightless, as though she stayed grounded only because he stood behind her. Over her shoulder, he gestured toward an open space and its ski lift—the barely green grass of a natural meadow, sloping sharply upward and lined by woods. “Hart Prairie,” he said. “We can access a number of trails right here. But there are too many people for shifting, and you’re not dressed for hiking.”
At least she was dry, her wet clothes barely more than a memory in the resurging heat. As was he, in a basic T-shirt and jeans, a black leather vest completing the look in a way that should have been pathetically poser but instead looked perfectly natural. He looked