She remembered the lioness, whose body had been gone when Ian went to look for it. She too would have a grave somewhere and it was a certainty that Arrhan had vowed vengeance against Sierra and Ian over it.
“Don’t you go anyplace alone, either,” Sierra said fiercely. “Stay with Abel and Nick.”
“Of course,” he said lightly, but she couldn’t be sure he meant it.
“Ian…” She reached out to him but he drew back sharply, avoiding her touch.
“I’d better get back to work. Do you need anything?”
“No. Annie and everybody have been wonderful. Ian, I…”
“Is that temporary studio working out all right?”
“It’s perfect.” All the things she needed had been brought over and Sierra was able to continue working as if everything were normal.
“Good. I’ll see you later, then.”
But she wasn’t seeing much of him. He was there and not there at the same time. She was always aware of him, that she was living in his house and he was somewhere around. But he was never actually in sight.
If he wasn’t out searching with Abel and Nick, he was off with the hands, working on the spread. She remembered saying scornfully just a while ago that Simon did all the work. Now she was ashamed to have said that, because it was so clear how wrong she had been.
Ian was right out there doing hard labor with the hands, riding six days a week, moving cattle through the several pastures on the ranch and in the forest. Each pasture was a couple of thousand acres of rugged and varied terrain, and was intensely grazed for around five days. After that, the cattle were rounded up—it usually took about three days to find all the mavericks and clear the pasture in its entirety—then they were moved on to the next pasture to allow the first to re-grow. And since cattle seemed to think the grass on the other side of the fence was always greener and had an incredible talent for spotting holes, one of the daily chores was to check and repair fences and bring back strays.
Once one factored in having to ride through the herd every day, checking their health, doctoring the sick ones, setting out salt and minerals and doing all the myriad other chores required on a working ranch, there was almost no time left in a workday that started at seven thirty in the morning after breakfast and ended with dinner at sundown.
“Doc said Ian was supposed to take things easy for a while,” Sierra muttered to Annie, who made a wry face.
“He thinks he is. After all, he’s taking time off to go hunting with Abel and Nick every day. In his book, that’s rest and relaxation.”
That wasn’t rest. That was a deadly risk.
“Dinner is when those three boys usually relax. But now…” Annie came to a rueful halt with an embarrassed and faintly puzzled glance.
Sierra flushed a little, knowing what Annie was carefully not saying. Ever since that first night, Ian hadn’t turned up for dinner. Sierra ate in solitary splendor in the dining room while Ian ate in the den, saying he was busy with paperwork. Sierra had overheard Ian and Annie arguing about it, Annie saying that it was not polite to leave a guest to eat alone and Ian flatly retorting in an adamant tone of voice that with Simon and Neal gone he had too much work to get caught up on.
But she knew that wasn’t the real reason. He was avoiding her. She had made her discomfort with his presence all too plain on that first evening. She hadn’t meant to. She had just been running scared. Still was. But she wished she had been able to hide it better. Now she would have changed things if she could, only Ian didn’t seem to notice her tentative attempts to apologize and always found some excuse to be completely absent from anywhere she was.
She was glad she was at least helping Annie with the housework and the meals for the hands. It made her feel she was contributing something, though in all honesty, after all these years, Annie had it down to a science and didn’t really need her help.
Once the huge dishwasher was loaded and the kitchen made ready for breakfast the next morning, Annie went home to the small house she and Taylor lived in on the other side of the barns and outbuildings. Ian had gone hunting with Abel and Nick after work. The main house was empty except for Sierra.
She sat watching television edgily. It wasn’t that she was scared to be alone. She could hear the quiet footsteps of the man on guard that night as he circled the house. It didn’t seem likely that Arrhan would openly attack the place. What she was waiting for, she realized with a shock, was for Ian to come home.
She thumped the arm of her chair angrily. Was she stupid or what? She shouldn’t be letting him get to her this way. It was just that she was lonely.
No, it wasn’t. She was used to being alone. She hadn’t looked for a roommate when she had gone to train with Naomi Wakanda or when she had returned to Wade County after her mother’s death. She had been comfortable on her own. Solitude didn’t bother her.
What she was lonely for was Ian.
That was a scary realization. She had been here for little more than a week, but she was already getting used to having him around. No, more than that. She
needed
him around.
Even though he kept out of her sight and spent the evenings working in his office, coming out only briefly to ask politely how her day had gone and to say good night when she went to bed, she could
feel
him there in the study. She was that aware of him. She could sense when he went down the hall on his way to his own bed, cat-silent though he was. She knew when he paused outside her door. He always hesitated there and she always held her breath even though the door was carefully locked. The truth was she wanted him to come in, wanted to unlock that door and drag him into bed with her.
She was far too conscious of him. She would be helping Annie put out breakfast for the hands and be aware of Ian talking to them or to Taylor Weekes. The sudden flash of his smile, turn of his head, slant of his back, tilt of those lean hips would abruptly take her breath away in a flash of fire. And her limbs would go heavy and lax as if it weren’t blood running through her veins but honey, rich and sensuous, and she would find all her movements slowing, becoming languid and drifting, her whole body throbbing and tensing with that primal heat, that hunger.
She wanted…she wanted…
Him.
It was not to be borne. She didn’t know whether to be furious with him for making her feel this way or with herself for reacting to him so intensely.
The eleven o’clock news had come on by the time she heard the kitchen door open and close. Ian was home. There was a click as the back door lock was thrown, then the scrape of a chair being pulled back. Then there was only silence.
Sierra frowned. She should have heard him putting the dinner Annie had left him into the microwave or at least the gurgle of coffee being poured. But for the longest time, there was no sound at all.
It made her uneasy. After a while, she turned off the TV and went to check things out.
The light had not been turned on in the kitchen. With his cat’s night vision, Ian didn’t need it. But he always turned it on anyway so that anyone who didn’t know he was a Shifter wouldn’t notice anything unusual. It wasn’t like him to leave it off.
She snapped on the light. Ian was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging. His head was down and he was staring at the floor between his feet.
“Ian?”
He looked up at her, his eyes blank and unseeing. She caught her breath in shock at the pain in his face.
“Ian, what is it?” she exclaimed, hurrying toward him. “What’s happened?”
“Alison Lowe’s been killed.”
“Oh, no!” Little Allie wasn’t even fourteen yet.
“She was just a child. The Lowes thought she was safe in the middle of the pride and she didn’t want to be sent away out of the state to some strange pride for the duration. But Kurt should have insisted. She was lured out somehow and…” He rubbed a hand blindly across his eyes. “I’ve known her since she was a week old, just a cub hardly bigger than my hand. She had so much promise, could have been… Oh God, Sierra! She was only a baby!”
“Oh, Ian, I’m so sorry!” She gripped his shoulder. She had once thought him uncaring. She knew better now.
His arms came tightly around her waist and he dropped his head against her to hide his pain, his temple pressed against her hip. She held him, her arms around his shoulders, and felt him shaking with either grief or rage.
“They just tore her apart.” It was both grief
and
rage, she realized, harsh and bitter in the grate of his voice. “By the tracks, there were three or four of them. She fought, but even as a lion she didn’t have the weight or the strength. She wouldn’t have had a chance against adults. Nick wants to make Arrhan into a rug. Me, I want to flay him alive.”
“I could too,” she said with feeling, her heart twisting with anger and sorrow. Arrhan deserved to be killed.
He drew a shuddering breath, then his grip loosened. “I wish you weren’t here. I wish you weren’t mixed up in this.”
“If it’s easier for you, I’ll go. I’ll leave Colorado like you wanted.”
“It’s too late. You killed one of them. He’d only have someone follow you. And then there you’d be in some strange city with no one to help you. You’re safer here. Just don’t go anywhere alone for any reason. Promise.”
“I swear.”
“Don’t let yourself be tricked into it. You get some phone call saying you’re urgently wanted for something, you talk to me about it and I’ll check it out. If someone says he’s passing along a message from me, don’t buy it. Especially if it asks you to go someplace by yourself. I’d never ask you to go anywhere alone. If they say it’s me who’s hurt, you get hold of Abel or Nick or one of the Lowes and take them with you. No exceptions to that rule. You go nowhere without one of us with you.”
“All right.”
“And if they try guilt-tripping you by saying they’ve got me and they’ll let me go if you trade yourself for me, don’t buy that either. He’d never let either of us go. He wants us both dead.”
“Understood.”
“And I want him dead. This is not going to be over until Arrhan is meat for the scavengers.”
His fangs were out and the eyes looking up at her were feral and lethal, the eyes of the leopard he was, the light reflecting green in their pupils. She should have been scared but she wasn’t, even though his face was so alien and frightening like that. She knew him now, even that side of him.
He suddenly became aware of his partial shift. He jerked to his feet, shaking his head violently. The fangs disappeared and his eyes went human again.
“It’s late,” he said. “We’d both better go to bed.”
“Annie left your dinner in the—”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You should eat something.”
“I can’t. I just…can’t. Not right now.”
She reached out to him but he drew back. A shutter had come down in his eyes, closing her out. She wanted to put her arms around him but couldn’t. He had shared his grief with her, but this was something else, some pain she didn’t understand.
“Let me in,” she wanted to say to him. But she didn’t have the right to ask that of him when she wasn’t ready to do the same. She couldn’t let him past her guard. It was far too dangerous. And yet he
was
getting past her guard despite all her efforts, sliding through the gaps in her defenses.
It was impossible to sleep. She lay in the darkness, thinking, reevaluating all the long years of their animosity, amiable on his side, antagonistic on hers. She had been so wrong about him, built up such a wall of prejudices and preconceptions. To protect herself. And for some reason, he had encouraged that anger with his constant mockery and provocation. He had done that on purpose. She saw that now. But why?
Because he too felt that pull. Because he too felt that heat between them and knew she didn’t want it.
She needed commitment. She had thought she had it with Peter, but she hadn’t. Peter had fooled her. If she couldn’t expect it of Peter, how could she expect it of Ian Raeder? The player. She’d spent so many years despising him for that, years thinking him uncaring and incapable of commitment.
But he did care and he was capable of commitment. To his family and to his friends. Just not to his women, she thought with lingering scorn, then caught herself up sharply. That was her old way of thinking. He had spoken of Peg Kindle and the Gevlin girls with affection. They were within that circle of fierce protectiveness he cast around the people he knew—not only Shifters, but full-humans like her and Doc, or Annie and the hands, or even Millie who worked at the coffee shop. He’d fight and die for them if he had to. She knew it. He was so much more than she had thought.
She couldn’t afford to be thinking that way. She couldn’t let him get to her.
And yet there was that heat between them, getting worse and worse by the day. More urgent, more imperative, almost impossible to resist.
She couldn’t give in to it. She mustn’t.
But why not give in to it? She caught her breath sharply. It had been building between them for years. Sexual curiosity, that was all it was. Satisfy that curiosity and it would all be over. All that UST finally resolved. She could put it behind her then, get it out of her system. The trick was not to get emotionally involved. That was the mistake she had made with Peter.