Sentinels: Lion Heart. Doranna Durgin

his hand closed around the carton, it hit.

      Not a bad one, just sudden—his hand spasmed around flimsy cardboard…for an instant he lost awareness, swamped in the harsh atonal power, a slow, thick ooze filling his lungs so his vision grayed and prickles of pain and weakness raked him from inside.

      Lyn pushed in beside him, prying the carton from his hand, muttering a curse. But by then Joe had control—or at least partial control—pushing away the power so he could fumble for shields.

      But Lyn had no hesitation, and no fumbling. She reached for that same centered place she’d created up at Snowbowl—he felt it build around them, gliding into place like a balm. And then his head snapped up and he sucked in his breath, because she’d gone that one step further—done that which breezed through him from within, caressing those very nerves that had been scraped with pain only a moment earlier. The contrast shocked him, wobbling his knees, and he snatched at the edge of the sink for support. In her smudge-lined eyes he saw reflected shock; she stiffened, jerking slightly. And then she narrowed her eyes, and the connection slammed closed.

      He lost his knees entirely, falling back against the cabinets beneath the sink, breath grunting from his body and mixed up with an inarticulate, involuntary noise of protest.

      That, too, startled her—she looked as though she wanted to skitter away, putting distance between them. But she stood straight and still, and after a moment she let out a long sigh of breath.

      “Well, damn,” Joe grumbled, trying to ignore the incredible emptiness she’d left behind. There was no graceful way up from here, jammed back against the cabinets with his bare feet propped too close and his knees askew at chin level. “No offense, but whatever you’re doing…I think it needs practice.”

      “I could say the same for you,” she responded tersely—but she stepped forward to brace herself and extend a hand. A small hand, but he didn’t make the mistake of supposing it lacked strength. She was, after all, Sentinel.

      He took the hand and he took the strength she loaned him, and soon enough he was back on his feet, looking down at her again. He said, “Shielding…not my best thing.”

      “No,” she agreed.

      That stung a little. “Hey—it’s my job to keep track of what’s going on around here. You think I can do that if I fling up shields at every opportunity? When I was in Nevada, Dean—” He stopped. He didn’t want to talk about Dean Seacrest with her. He didn’t even want to bring it up. Not knowing she thought him guilty of Dean’s death.

      Well, hell, maybe he was. But not in the way they thought. So he cleared his throat and said, “I was in better practice then.” Back when he hadn’t been isolated, when he’d had more cause to shield, and more tightly defined duties. Now it was all his, a lightly populated area considered so stable that one Sentinel could handle it.

      At least, one Sentinel of Joe’s skills. Because, let’s face it, there weren’t many. And he had plenty of reason to rue it these days, when it seemed brevis consul and his posse had decided they couldn’t quite trust what a man of such skills could—or would—do. Even when they didn’t know it all.

      But Lyn’s brows had quirked up. “That makes sense,” she said. “Although you should put in some practice.”

      He couldn’t help but hope as he settled back against the edge of the sink. “So now you believe me?” That he’d have reason to shield, that he was as much a victim of what was happening here as anyone.

      She gave him the driest of expressions; the hope died. “I’m riding a line,” she told him, blunt as she had been when she first approached him in the woods below. “For all I know, you started this thing and now it’s out of hand—or the Core went their own way and left you hanging.”

      “Whoa.” He couldn’t help it; he shook off the words—physically, literally. “That’s a hell of a way to go through life. Thinking like that.” He thought about it; still didn’t like it. “I’ll stick with my way, thanks. But you’re right about the practice. I’ll get to work on that.” As if they’d been discussing the weather, he turned back to his partially crunched carton of juice and unscrewed the little plastic cap on the side. “Hope you like your eggs cold. I think that’s how we’re going to get them.”

      “Eggs cold, bacon burned. Just as it should be.” She said it with such deadpan perfection that he jerked around to look at her and caught the barest glimpse of a smile tweaking the corner of her mouth as she turned away to take the plates to the small round table in the tree-dappled sunlight of the breakfast nook.

      His answering grin came in spite of himself. Because whether he liked it or not, whether she knew it or not, his heart was right out there for her to see, as it had always been.

      It was just a matter of how hard she crunched it before she was through.