Tayla stood a little straighter, lifted her head a notch higher, and dragged herself through the moment with sheer strength of will and a stubborn chin.
“I mean it,” Carter said. “Don’t pretend you don’t see the problems lately. If you want to stay in the field, you’ll listen—you’ll let Mark be your partner, not just someone you pretend isn’t there.”
Mark snorted gently beside her. So he’d noticed, had he?
“And Tayla,” Carter said, not easing that hard wolf gaze of his one little bit, “the Sentinels need it to make the difference, too. This summit is critical—more critical than I can even tell you. We must have this information.”
Mark leaned forward. “This have anything to do with the leak on that Tucson operation?”
Carter stiffened. Ever so slightly, if only for an instant. He said only, “It’s important. Too important to let personalities and feelings rule what happens next. Do you both hear me?”
“Yes,” Tayla said. She’d caught a snatch of equilibrium in that scant exchange, moments when the spotlight had turned away. She might not agree, she might hate this, but she understood clearly enough—this choice was no choice at all. She’d come to terms with the details once she had some space to herself. She could ground herself in that, find a certain calm there.
In the next instant, Carter shattered it. He said, “Starting tonight.”
She’d been stunned.
Mark didn’t need an empathetic connection to know it—he’d seen it on her face, in every stiffened muscle of that long, graceful body.
Only that body could wear those clothes—biker geek—and make him instantly hard, there in the office of his field supervisor plus.
For Nick Carter didn’t bother with the average field assignment. He knew about them all, he watched over them all…but sending Mark and Tayla out to scour the Vista del Camino in the late spring heat of the desert? Not an assignment that needed his personal attention.
Unless it really was all that important.
Almost important enough to get Mark’s mind off his own body. Off her body.
But not quite.
Carter gave him a mildly amused gaze, there in the wake of Tayla’s departure. Chin tipped high, green eyes fighting to stay cool and floundering with panic, fiery red-gold hair unruly in the wake of the helmet, the perfect mussed look.
That panic told him what he needed to know. She wanted nothing to do with him. Not his non-shifting self, not his very human reaction to her.
Carter waited for the door to latch firmly behind her and speared Mark with a direct look. “That went more easily than it might have.”
“You think?” Mark said flatly.
“You know, don’t you, that she hasn’t been initiated?”
Flat out. Carter just said it flat out. As if he wasn’t talking about Tayla Garrett’s very private sex life.
“Uh,” Mark said. In the back of his mind he heard gusty panting, a cry of pleasure, a demand for more; the tingle of his nape as fingers traced the cowlick pattern there and the delicate touch of a tongue—
He closed his eyes, swallowed hard.
After a moment—during which Carter left him suspiciously alone—Mark said, “That sounds like her business.”
“Under the circumstances?” Carter offered up a snort that might have passed for amusement. “Until she finds herself a Sentinel bedmate, she won’t fully mature into her abilities. It’s slowing her down, and it’s integral to her confidence issues. So at the moment, it’s very much my business. And yours, as of now.”
“I…” Mark said, giving Carter a look of patent disbelief. “Uh. What?”
Carter shook his head, shoving paperwork aside to clear his desk as if this conversation was the most important thing in the world. This conversation about Tayla Garrett, Mark Burton, and sex. “I’m not blind, though the two of you just might be.” Another hard look, unyielding. “Sort it out, Burton. Because the root of her problem is you.”
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Chapter 3
Empty condo. All theirs.
Not damned empty enough. Not with only one bedroom. Oh, and a kitchen, already stocked. A sparse living room, with couch and recliner and no television but a laptop with a secure connection to brevis. And that one bedroom, with one bed.
The root of her problem is you.
Or so Carter had said.
Looking at Tayla now, Mark wasn’t convinced. She stood in the living room, temper flaring as bright as her brilliant red-gold hair in the Phoenix sun, flush riding high on her cheeks, eyes hidden behind sleek trendy sunglasses but expression not hidden at all.
Mortified. Humiliated. Resigned.
And determined.
“It’ll be Vista del Camino,” she said, nodding out the double doors of the private balcony—enclosed, its corner filled with a terra-cotta pot containing an impossibly groomed and healthy rent-a-plant, the second-floor height looking down on the perfect view of cultured green landscape, tree clusters, and improbable ponds. “Eldorado is too busy—between the skate park and the baseball diamonds and all that night lighting, I don’t see our snitch feeling at home there. So we should focus on clearing del Camino.”
“He’d do better to hide in his hotel room,” Mark said.
She cast him a look of surprise. “There’s no way we’re letting him bring in active amulets—and that means he’ll have to do protective workings on the spot. He’ll want to be where he can steal from the earth for that.”
He’d known that. If he’d stopped to think about it. But thinking still wasn’t his best thing. Not with prescience—gusty panting cry of pleasure—tickling around his nape.
Or wishful thinking. Possibly a little of both.
“Let’s head out,” she said. “I need some real ground under my feet.” She’d changed from her biking gear and now looked perfectly ready for a power walk in the park in sporty capri pants that made her legs look longer than ever and settled on her hips in just the way to taunt a man—don’t you wish your hands were here—along with tidy walking sneaks, neat sport socks over trim ankles, and a sleeveless pale green shirt with a slender empire tie that made her perfect breasts just…
“Perfect,” he murmured.
“What?”
“Perfect idea,” he told her. “The park.”
She sighed. “Look,” she said. “This is hard enough, being thrown together on an op with no chance to warm up to it. Carter may have a layered agenda, but I think we should just forget it. Go for the op. That’s the important thing, and, anyway…Carter’s full of crap.” She said it again, more assertively. “He’s full of crap.”
“We trained together,” Mark pointed out.
“We trained in the same place,” she corrected him, voice exquisitely dry. “You would have to have looked at me once or twice to say that we trained together.”
He’d looked at her, all right. Seen what she was. Cheetah. Glorious speed, wild abandon, feral grace. All wrapped up in emerging from herself, back then, crying out for the space to do that—but unmistakable to anyone with eyes.
Mark Burton had always had eyes. The prescience had helped even then, layering in visions of what she would be.
It hadn’t been wrong, either.
But she hadn’t seen any of that, it seemed. Hadn’t felt his regard, only his distance. If she now gave that distance back to him…
He could hardly blame that, no matter what Carter thought or said or wanted.
He cleared his throat. “The park,” he said, and reached for the condo keys he’d tossed on the counter upon entering. “Show me around.”
“I wonder what’s really going on,” Tayla mused, taking Mark to where the park’s second pond trailed off the teardrop shape of the first. “Carter’s been tense. And for once it’s not about Dolan going rogue down in Tucson regional.”
“If something’s wrong down south, blame Dolan Treviño…that’s the party line,” he said. “Not one I buy.”
> “Whatever it is, it’s turning the heat up on our summit,” she mused. “The snitch is going to choose a place where it’ll look natural to settle in for an hour, maybe two. We can anticipate that. He’s going to want vantage, defensibility…but not predictability.” She walked them along the wavering, incongruous asphalt path that followed the trickling ponds through the long, narrow park, and if she had any awareness of him—from the unrelenting echo of blood pounding in his ears at the sight of her in those ass-hugging pants or the uncomfortable restriction of his jeans—she gave no sign of it.
No sign of it at all.
Damn Nick Carter, anyway. Mark had a lot of practice in giving Tayla Garrett space…
He had no practice at all in being close.
“Here,” she said, stopping outside a copse of trees, turning to him—and something in her voice gave her away—a bit of tightness and a bit of tremble. Nothing he would have seen if he hadn’t been…
Wishful thinking.
“It’s a good place,” he agreed, putting his mind back to the work. The afternoon heat sat heavily on him, dampening the edges of his hair even in the low humidity. It’s a dry heat only went so far; after a certain point, hot was hot. Tayla seemed more at home in it, with barely more than a flush on her cheeks. But something else…
Something else had her uneasy.
Mark did a quick check of their surroundings; he did a quick dive into less obvious senses, hunting for a suspicious trace—for the sour taste of the Atrum Core. He found only the sweet tingle of subdued personal power beside him.
Her trace wasn’t particularly strong; it was private, as was she. And yet as he looked closer at her, the trace grew stronger, invading him from the inside out—hot savannah grasses and musky dry air and lurking, wild speed….
“Do you smell that?” she asked, and the tension in her voice brought him out of his tracking focus. “Do you feel that?”
“Nothing but—“ you “—us,” he said. “If the Core is here, I’m missing it.”
“That dog,” she said, her gaze pinpointing a big goofy, hairy animal on the other side of the narrow pond. A little bit camel, a little bit Rastafarian, a whole lot Disney. Tayla took an unconscious step away from it—away from the narrow little arching footbridge that would take them over the thin neck of the pond before it widened out into the next teardrop in the chain—and Mark remembered, suddenly, how she’d avoided the dog at the park. Remembered, vaguely, that she’d simply never liked dogs. “It should be on a leash,” she said. “Do you see its owner?”
“Must be here somewhere,” Mark said, sounding, he thought, reasonable and not the least bit amused.
She drew herself up in affront. “If you think I’m frightened of that thing, then you don’t know me very well.”
“If you think I’m that easy to fool, then you don’t know me very well.”
Tayla watched the dog. It hesitated long enough to slake its thirst from the pond, and moved on. “I don’t like dogs,” she admitted. “It’s a—“
Mark let out a startled snort of laughter. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “It’s a cat thing!”
She glared at him. “That doesn’t mean I’m not right. Look at it, out there in the heat. It should be holed up in the shade somewhere right now. And did you see the way it looked at us?”
“I saw the way you looked at it,” Mark observed.
She pulled her attention away from the dog, anger growing. “I knew this was a bad idea,” she told him. “I don’t know what Carter was thinking. He should have known you’d ignore me—it’s what you’ve always done. Tell you what, Mark—you do your thing, I’ll do mine.” She turned away from him, heading for the footbridge—toward the dog.
Surely not. “Tayla—“
“What are you worried about?” she asked, turning around but not stopping, the net result of which was swift backward progress, unerringly aimed at the little bridge. “You’re right, I’m wrong. The dog’s nothing and I’m just a scaredy-cat. Literally.”
Now, said the prescience. Make the difference.
Not how; it never told him how. Only that nudge—time to act.
He startled off into a run. A few quick strides and he was past her, grabbing the footbridge railing and swinging around to plant himself in front of it—in front of her. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Whatever.” Her attempt at casual wasn’t the least convincing. She almost stepped closer; she almost stepped into him. But she closed her eyes and she set her jaw; she shifted back—imperceptible but definite. “Look, just go back to ignoring me. It worked better for both of us, don’t you think?”
“It didn’t work for me at all,” Mark told her, and he wanted to pull her close again. Never mind the dog snuffling around on the other side of the pond, or anyone else who might just be watching, or the work they were supposed to be doing out here. “I only ever did what I thought you wanted.”
“Oh, sure, because having my heart slowly ripped out is just what I’ve always wanted!” she snapped, and then clapped her hands over her mouth.
Mark’s mouth opened; no sound came out. His throat constricted—hope, or maybe fear, or maybe—gusty panting, a cry of pleasure, a demand for more, the delicate touch of a tongue—
“What?” she demanded, all drawn up and drawn into herself, about to retreat into the very distance that had fooled him for so long. “Did you say tongue?”
He shook off the prescience—hell, let it be prescience—and tried, less successfully, to shake off the net of sensation tightening around his body—hope and anticipation and aching want, so much that he almost found himself pulling her in as if he had every right, kissing her hard and taking her down—
With his mind fighting such things, it took him by no surprise at all when his mouth said, “Son of a bitch, Carter was right. He was right. It’s me.”
She gave him a wary look, ducked beneath the arm he had planted on the footbridge railing, and slipped past him to the center arch of the bridge. “What’s you?”
He whirled to face her, gesturing at her, lost to discretion. “This. What’s going on with you.” What he’d seen the night before. What he’d seen in her just then.
Because she’d wanted him.
She’d always wanted him.
She’d been protecting herself all this time, and tearing herself up inside—keeping herself from her own potential.
If he’d figured it out for himself, he might well have been with her by now. Never mind Carter’s damned assignment—this was about Mark and Tayla and what they could be. “Not you. Us,” he corrected himself, and hooked a finger over the nosepiece of her sunglasses, plucking them free and exposing her eyes. He tucked them into the V neck of her shirt. “What’s going on with you is about us.”
She sucked in a breath. “No,” she said. “I mean—no! What are you even thinking?” But those green eyes looked trapped and wild as she backed up against the railing, hands blindly seeking out that support.
He closed the space between them. Beautiful early spring day, romantic little footbridge, quiet park. Meant for it. He closed the space and he took her shoulders, holding them tightly, drawing her forward slightly with his emphasis, feeling the intense fullness of prescience throbbing heavily between them and about to turn into truth. “Tell me,” he said, his senses swimming with her, “tell me you don’t feel this.”
She shook her head, short and sharp and with a flare of panic. She shoved at him, if not hard. “I never said I didn’t want you.” She snapped out the words with such emphasis that he almost missed them. “I’ve always wanted you. It’s just not messing with me. I had to learn to deal with it, didn’t I?”
“Problem is,” he said, throat tight around the words, “it’s messing with me.”
She froze. She stared at him, wide-eyed. “Oh!” she said. And “Oh!” And, fingers suddenly in his hair, mouth on his and kissing him hard, back arching into the play of his fingers on her back, no words at all.
She was kissing Mark Burton. Mark Burton, for whom she’d yearned these past ten years. Mark Burton, who’d never seemed to look twice at her, who always had a date in the wings or on his arm, who’d walked past her so many times over so many years that she’d developed a huge coping callus and resolutely developed her mediocre dating life outside the Sentinels.
Mark Burton, wrapping his arms around her, all but wrapping his body around her, suddenly noticing her very intently indeed. Unmistakably. Thoroughly. With all the fiery hot, sparky special effects her own body could produce, from the tingling down her spine to the whirl inside her head to the hot, heavy gravity gathering in the very center of her.
But…
She was kissing Mark Burton out in public on the middle of the footbridge when she should have been hunting Atrum Core trace, fully learning the park.
Screw that, I already know the park.
What she didn’t know was this. Strong hands stroking her back, exploring the curve of her waist, heading up for her breasts. She leaned toward anticipated touch—and then ached at the loss when he returned to her waist. She hadn’t known, either, that two mouths could anticipate and tease and promise with such intensity. That she could lose herself in the moment so completely.
Or that she could affect him just as deeply. Mark Burton, the distant…the casually aloof lion secure in his domain. And here he was, his breath made of jerky little rasps and everything in his body straining toward hers—everything in his energies twining up with hers—
And then someone laughed nearby and they froze, lips still touching and breath mingling, just as their energies had done and their bodies yearned to do. Together, they remembered that they stood in public—on the exposed arch of the bridge at that. After a moment, he pulled back far enough to rest his forehead on hers. “You do feel it,” he said, voice so rocky she barely made out the words.
“I…”
She’d meant for there to be more words after that, she was sure of it. But none came, and she mutely shook her head. “We…”
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