Jaguar Night by Doranna Durgin Read Free Book Online Page B

die…and now she stood, flushed and unsettled, by Luka’s head.
    She straightened. She pulled the overstretched hair band free; she gathered her hair up and scraped it back into containment. “I think,” she said, pulling the band into place again, “that you’d better get into that saddle on your own.”

Chapter 5
    D olan managed it somehow, crawling into the saddle with all the grace of a bread pudding.
    She might hope the connection between them would fade. He wasn’t expecting it.
    Hell, he didn’t even want it.
    She admonished him not to touch the reins, which she’d clipped to the saddle’s grab strap. And she didn’t bother with the halter rope, tied in a loop around the horse’s neck. “He’ll follow me,” she said simply, and he did.
    A man whom most horses wouldn’t approach didn’t get much time in the saddle. A man who could take the jaguar had little use for it in the first place. He clutched the flat swell of the pommel, and half the time he wished for a horn to grab and half the time, as he slumped and bobbed, he was grateful for the lack of it.
    As they hesitated before the lip of a steep slope, sheadvised him to lean back, but halfway down the slope she stopped them and adjusted his legs with the confident touch of an instructor—except she just as quickly snatched her hands away, glaring at him. “Figure it out,” she said, and resumed her sliding, sideways progress down the rocky slope.
    He didn’t need to guess at her discomfort. He’d felt it, too, the moment she’d touched him. A flow of energy, something greedy and demanding…wanting more. He’d wanted more.
    Luka followed Meghan in mincing steps, and Dolan did his best simply to stay out of the animal’s way until they reached the bottom.
    But bottom was a relative term…it simply meant the narrow trail now wound sideways along the slope. Meghan stopped again, patting Luka’s sweat-soaked shoulder—for although ambient temperatures were still modestly cool, the high-altitude sun stabbed down hard.
    Meghan hesitated, looking down the vista below them—the tiny dots of the ranch house and barn, the swell of the hill from which he’d once watched for her. She glanced back at him. “God, you’re a mess,” she muttered. “Maybe I should have left you…” But she didn’t finish that thought. She took an audible breath and reached for him, steadying him; straightening him. She wound his fingers firmly around the grab strap. He knew she felt the surge of energy there—her hand tightened briefly around his. Not consoling, not reaching out, but a white-knuckled attempt to push through it.
    “There,” she said, and her voice was hardly steady. “We’re almost there.” Then she looked down the hill again and gave a short laugh. “Well, maybe not. But thehardest parts are over.” Her hand, free of Dolan’s, trailed down the horse’s neck. Luka turned his head and tilted it just so, and Meghan gave a little laugh. “I don’t have any. Get us back home again and I promise you a bucketful of carrots.”
    But as she stepped out in front, she hesitated, and said somberly, “It’s never really going to be the same, is it?”
    “No,” he said, hating the weakness in his voice, the vulnerability it exposed. But she deserved an answer…she deserved the truth. “You know too much now.”
    “I’ve seen too much,” she said, and glanced back at him—no recrimination there now, just sad awareness. “I’ll have to lie to my people. My chosen family. Or not answer them. Either way, they’ll know something’s wrong. And changed.”
    “Don’t think about the big picture,” he said. “Screw the future. Think about getting down this hill. I know I am.”
    She gave a short laugh. “I’ll bet. But you know…if you didn’t find what you came for…if the Core didn’t get it from you…then this has really all just begun.”
    And here he’d thought she’d been so deeply in denial that she hadn’t been paying