Jaguar Night by Doranna Durgin Read Free Book Online Page A

besides…she simply didn’t want to leave him behind.
    Not that she wouldn’t have enough explaining to do when she got back.
    She dropped the halter lead and went to him, where he pretended to stand in the doorway, and slipped inunder his arm. “Oof,” she said, under her breath. And then shrugged off the shiver that ran down her back.
    Luka stopped his tree-grazing to regard Dolan with a wary eye, pulling himself up with a high and warning neck. “Not now, ” Meghan muttered. But still, she gave the horse a moment to accept Dolan’s nature. Dolan leaned heavily on shoulders made strong from ranch work and training—and she would have borne it easily had not another shiver run down her back, following each leg all the way down to the soles of her feet, to her toes. And the flush that followed, and the empty ache, building inside her chest.
    Maybe just what she deserved for running out into the middle of a Sentinel/Atrum Core squabble.
    But surely it hadn’t been catching. And she’d felt Dolan’s pain; she’d felt it clearly. This wasn’t painful…wasn’t even truly uncomfortable. Just…unusual.
    Dolan’s arm tightened around her shoulders—for-bearance, she thought, as Luka offered a stretch of his neck, a disgruntled but accepting snort. Dolan reached out to the saddle, steadying himself that way. She would have bent to lace her fingers together into a “leg up” for him, but his hand fell on her arm, sending tingles of warmth and demand through the limb. Her jaw dropped; she looked down to his hand in disbelief.
    Quite suddenly that hand moved to the back of her neck, half cradling her head. He pulled her to him—right up against him, her head tipped back and that ache nearly exploding inside her, separate pinwhirls of energy making her light-headed and joyous and terrified all at once. She gasped, fighting it, and his hand tightened behind her head, fingers catching in her hair. And when he asked, again, “What did you do?” this time there was a growl to it.
    Except when she found his eyes, she found shadowed desperation.
    What had she done?
    She realized her lower lip trembled; she put fingers on it to still it, and the uncontrollable swell of emotions suddenly infuriated her as well. She tore away from him, losing half her ponytail but freeing her head, and she channeled all her fear into defiance. “I don’t know, ” she said. “And I don’t care. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the aftereffects of—”
    Of mingled blood and mingled memories and mingled pasts…
    “It doesn’t mean anything,” she repeated, but her voice had lost its defiance. “It’ll fade.”
    “You think so?” Hoarse and full of pain, those words. “Because I’m not so sure, Meghan Lawrence. I think there’s more to you than you know. I think there’s more to what’s between us than you’ll admit. And I don’t think this is going away.”
    The absurdity of his words put her back on solid ground…dampened the pinwheels. “Get real,” she said. “There isn’t anything between us. I met you once, three days ago.”
    “I know,” he agreed, and when she tried to look away she found her gaze flickering back to his despite herself. Still full of that dark desperation, purest, deepest blue flaring bright in the rising sun of a desert sky. “It happens that way with some of us. But this…this is beyond.” He closed his eyes, sucked in a breath.
    He released her. “Some of us?” she said, stepping back. “I’m not us —and you know it.”
    He didn’t open his eyes. “You’ve got the blood, whether you want it or not.”
    And the ache, which had intensified now that she no longer touched him, intensified and swelled in protest, but now…faded.
    And like that, she shook it off. She took another step back, clinging to the absurdity of it all. Shape-shifters, coming into her life these fifteen years later. Her enhanced herbs and old wards and a night with a black jaguar trying not to