Sentinels: Leopard Enchanted (Harlequin Nocturne) Read online

  Her sworn enemy...or her fearless protector?

  Ana Dikau is on a mission to gather information about Sentinel technician Ian Scott—the man she’s been deeply conditioned to fear. But Ana doesn’t know that the amulet she carries will slowly kill not only Ian but also every Sentinel with whom she comes in contact. Or that she shares a common bond with the Sentinel enemy.

  Ian Scott is a restless, brilliant man who takes the snow leopard when he shifts form. He knows that Ana is a puzzle he can’t resist. But he doesn’t realize she could cost him his heart—or even his life. For he’s soon working on what amounts to an epidemic among Sentinels. The only way to save his people is for the leopard to take control and work with the very woman he should despise...but cannot help desire.

  Ana froze.

  She heard Ian’s unspoken message—the potential that there were things she might want him to do. His eyes told her as much, seeing her absorb the meaning, confirming it—smiling just there at the corner of his mouth.

  Run away. Run fast.

  Run to safety, where the flush of her awareness wouldn’t expand into a flush of wanting—of wondering what it would be like to be touched by such strength and consideration. As if this man might just give back as much as he received.

  Ana took a sharp breath, using it to slap herself back to reality. There would be no running, no matter how smart it would be.

  Doranna Durgin spent her childhood filling notebooks first with stories and art, and then with novels. She now has over fifteen novels spanning an array of eclectic genres, including paranormal romance, on the shelves. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds web pages, enjoys photography and works with horses and dogs. You can find a complete list of her titles at doranna.net.

  Books by Doranna Durgin

  Harlequin Nocturne

  Sentinels Series

  Sentinels: Leopard Enchanted

  Sentinels: Alpha Rising

  Sentinels: Lynx Destiny

  Sentinels: Kodiak Chained

  Sentinels: Tiger Bound

  Sentinels: Wolf Hunt

  Sentinels: Lion Heart

  Sentinels: Jaguar Night

  Claimed by the Demon

  Taming the Demon

  Visit the Author Profile page

  at Harlequin.com for more titles

  SENTINELS:

  LEOPARD

  ENCHANTED

  Doranna Durgin

  Dear Reader,

  So often, our lives have a kind of unacknowledged duality about them. We’re complicated beings. We can love someone and still be furious at them; we can struggle to understand someone else and still want the best for them. We quietly juggle these small conflicts in the privacy of our own thoughts, sometimes not even acknowledging that they exist—or that even while in conflict, both things can still be perfectly true.

  Ana Dikau doesn’t have the option of struggling privately with her dualities. She’s an Atrum Core operative who finds herself irrevocably in love with a Sentinel she’s been taught to fear—and she’s still deeply committed to her life’s work even as she learns that the Core might just be a worse enemy than those the organization reviles. Ian Scott finds himself equally attracted to the woman who ultimately betrays him. Together, theirs is a journey of acceptance and unflinching honesty...and a love that prevails. I hope you enjoy it!

  Happy reading!

  Doranna Durgin

  The Sentinels

  Long ago and far away, in Roman/Gaulish days, one woman had a tumultuous life—she fell in love with a druid, by whom she had a son. The man was killed by Romans. She was subsequently taken into the household of a Roman, who fathered her second son. The druid’s son turned out to be a man of many talents, including the occasional ability to shape-shift into a wild boar, albeit at great cost.

  The woman’s younger son, who considered himself superior in all ways, had none of these earthly powers and went hunting to find ways to be impressive and acquire power. He justified his various activities by claiming he needed to protect the area from his brother, who had too much power to go unchecked...but in the end, it was his brother’s family who grew into the Vigilia, now known as the Sentinels, while the younger son founded what turned into the vile Atrum Core...

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Seduced by the Moon by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Prologue

  Ana Dikau saw him before anyone else did.

  The rest of the Atrum Core team crouched behind a camo blind in the pines uphill of the narrow, rocky trail, watching the camera feeds on a laptop encased in a rugged military shell. The wireless cameras pointed down along the trail, one of the less popular tracts of New Mexico’s high, looming Sangre de Cristo mountains.

  But Ana watched the trail itself, and she saw Ian Scott first—a shock of bright silvered hair, long and spiky and pretty much unreal in the perfection of its fall across his forehead. Crazy lean features and cheekbones to match his jaw, a rangy body to match his face, and a way of moving that made her feel quiet and small and very much like prey—a flush of warmth and awareness.

  Then again, she had practice at feeling like prey. And she was far too aware of this man’s Sentinel nature. The fact that he was so much more than human.

  Snow leopard.

  Walking into an Atrum Core trap.

  Not to capture him—they knew better than that. There were far too many strictures between the Core septs prince and the Sentinel consul, between their factions as a whole. Direct action meant trouble. Even indirect action such as that they were about to undertake...

  It was risky.

  So they were hedging their bets. Filming this staged encounter to justify their need for action.

  Ana’s new assignment.

  She’d long begged for this opportunity, a mission that would prove her worthy of more than her usual personal assistant work for Hollender Lerche, her supervisor since she’d been transferred to active Core duty at the tender age of thirteen.

  Ian Scott bounded a few effortless steps uphill to clear a scattering of hard-edged rocks embedded in the trail, and she drew a deep, sharp breath—holding it, all unaware, until her lungs ached. He was beautiful in an uncivilized way, muscle and lean form perfectly evident under a casual shirt and the dark gray cargo pants riding low on his hips, shaping the strong curve of his bottom.

  He was the enemy.

  The team leader murmured into his field mike, “You’re on.” She didn’t know his name. It didn’t matter; she hadn’t expected the courtesy of an introduction. All that mattered was what came next.

  The mountain lion, barely caged just down the trail from their position.

  The animal had been caged for days, starved and prodded into a frenzy. The hiker was one of their own, a man familiar to Ana who was working off a disgraceful failure—and he was already scented with blood and mountain lion urine.

&
nbsp; Ana wasn’t sure he knew it, though.

  The mountain lion knew.

  Freed, the beast didn’t hesitate. It charged onto the trail in a snarling blur of tawny motion, claws already reaching to bat the man down.

  The big cat screamed and the man screamed with it—a bloodcurdling thing with all the authenticity the team could have wanted. Convincing, because the man hadn’t known these details of his work.

  “Here we go,” murmured the team leader. “Watch the bastard.”

  Ana watched, all right. Scott didn’t hesitate. He sprinted forward as man, all coiled strength and energy, and then leaped—a dive, as if he intended to take cover in the scrub of the pine-shaded mountainside.

  Instead he dove into a blinding roil of lightning and sharded energy, and when he emerged from the thick of it he landed on the two massive front paws of a snow leopard. Lush white fur splashed with black spots, staggering blue eyes, a thick length of tail—Ana held her breath again. He leaped forward almost before he’d fully found his feet in that form—smaller than the mountain lion but never hesitating.

  Ana’s handlers had said that the Sentinels looked for any excuse to unleash their violent natures.

  He blindsided the mountain lion, latching on with claws and teeth so the two animals rolled off the hiker and right down the steep slope, spitting and snarling and breaking brush along the way. Fierce growls rose from below, and the mountain lion’s angry scream split the air.

  Ana strained forward as if she’d be able to see; the team leader’s hand closed around her arm in a harsh and warning grip. She wanted to tell him she wasn’t so stupid as to risk their cover, but she bit her lip and kept her words inside. She couldn’t afford to be blamed for anything that went wrong, even an errant whisper—no matter that this man had already broken their silence.

  The hiker rolled to his feet, stunned and unsteady—and marked with fresh blood, but remarkably unharmed in the wake of Scott’s swift reaction. He staggered on up the trail to rendezvous with the other half of the Core team, where they’d dig in out of sight until Ian Scott had moved on, protected with the same silent amulets that hid this camo blind.

  The conflict below broke away into a few hissing spits, and then the sound of running retreat—and the quieter sounds of one of the animals returning, his footfalls more deliberate and almost silent. Ana watched the trail, waiting to see which of the big cats would emerge.

  Not that there was any doubt. The mountain lion had been weakened, and Ian Scott was more than animal and more than human. Utterly beast, too dangerous to live unfettered.

  The leader’s hand closed more tightly around Ana’s arm. “The team will finish recording. He’ll be looking for trouble when he gets back up here.”

  She resisted his pull. “This is why I’m here,” she said. “To see this. To see him. So I know what I’m up against.” It was, in fact, the purpose behind this entire operation, although the footage would also be used to study the enemy in a way they’d never accomplished before. “I’m safe, as long as we’re quiet.” None of the Sentinels could detect the perfected silent amulets—not even Ian Scott, the Sentinel bane of many an amulet working.

  The man made no effort to soften his derision—at her, at the Sentinel. “You’ve seen enough to know he’s not human—he’s nowhere near human. And we can’t risk you. We don’t have the time to start over with this op.”

  Because they didn’t have another woman in place to fill her role. Not because she mattered, personally. It shouldn’t still sting, after all these years.

  But it did.

  So Ana allowed herself to be led away, doglegging back to pick up the trail in the direction from which the Sentinel had come. Eventually the team leader released her arm, and she forbore to rub away the marks his fingers had made.

  She’d wanted to see Ian Scott again. She’d wanted to see more closely the look in his eye when he took himself back to human—to get a glimpse of what lay beneath. Without it, her mind’s eye showed only his instant understanding of the mountain lion’s attack, and his instant response to it. Efficient ferocity. And somehow, she could think only of the warm flush of her reaction, and the fact that if she’d been that hiker, she would have wanted someone coming to her rescue, too.

  But then the team took her back to the Santa Fe mansion that served as the local Core installation, and she learned that Ian Scott had returned to the trail and bounded after the Core hiker with only one thing in mind.

  To finish what the mountain lion had started.

  Chapter 1

  “‘Take a vacation,’ he said,” Ian Scott grumbled, lifting free weights as he sat out in the gorgeous landscaping of the gorgeous Santa Fe property under the gorgeous blue skies in the gorgeous fall weather. “‘You’ll like it,’ he said.”

  “You could like it.” The woman’s voice from the patio sounded anything but repentant for her eavesdropping.

  Ian found her standing on the porch with her arms folded over her motherly shape, her expression a mix of affection and exasperation.

  His own face held nothing but exasperation, he was certain of it. “He took away my team. My computer. My tablet. My lab!”

  “Pfft.” She made the noise with no sympathy at all. Her name was Fernie, and she ruled this retreat with nothing so overt as an iron fist. An iron spoon, perhaps. With cookie batter on it. “That’s what happens when you work yourself sick.”

  Ian’s grumble grew closer to a growl. “Field Sentinels,” he said distinctly, “don’t get sick. And I wasn’t.” He hefted the dumbbell for a quick set of curls, proving the point.

  “You,” she said, just as pointedly, “were injured. And Nick Carter knows better than to let his people wear themselves down.”

  “Right,” Ian said, switching the weights to his other arm. “Can’t have that. Can’t have people getting tired when there are lives to be saved.”

  His angry sarcasm was meant to drive her away. Instead she came down the three porch steps, past the towering, bloom-heavy hollyhocks and into the yard, her body language neither aggressive nor submissive—a woman with an extra touch of empathy who well knew the full-blooded Sentinels with whom she often worked.

  Especially the cranky ones.

  “Ian,” she said, and the soft lines of her face held understanding, “you can’t do it all. Maybe you can do most of it, but not all.”

  Something in his temper snapped; he felt the hard coil of it in his chest. “I don’t have to do it all. I just have to do this one thing! One thing, to keep my friends safe!”

  The best amulet tech in Brevis Southwest, and he still hadn’t devised a defense against the Atrum Core’s rarely detectable silent amulets—a failure that had cost them all dearly. Repeatedly. And which had given the Core time to devise other new deadly workings—while also leaving them vulnerable to new third-party interlopers, as of yet undefined in spite of their recent activity in the Southwest.

  Fernie stood her ground. “That working is a fearful thing, no doubt. But the man who made it is dead now. You have time. And you’ve only been here a week.”

  He glared. “They have stockpiles of silent blanks. Sooner or later, they’ll reproduce his work. And then the rest of us will die.”

  “Let it go for this moment,” she said, quite steadily. “Don’t you think that’s why you’re here?”

  That hard spring coiled tighter. Ian left the weights on the ground and gave way to his leopard, letting the prowl of it come out in his movement—pacing away to the tall latilla coyote fence and back again, feeling the strength of four legs and solid big cat muscle lurking beneath his skin. Out and back again, thinking that although he could detect any normal amulet within a mile, identify its nature, even trigger it if he wanted, he still didn’t have a thing on the silents.

  Until Fernie said, in understanding admonishment,
“Ian.”

  He snapped a look at her. Her eyes widened; she took a sharp breath. But she held her ground, because that’s what she was here for. “Ian.”

  His snarl was as much acquiescence as temper. He paced onward...but tucked the leopard away.

  Mostly.

  “All right, Fernanda,” he said, pausing by the fence. He found his fingers tapping against the rough, pinto bean bark of the hand-peeled latillas; he stilled them.

  Maybe a run. Better than a hike up in the Sangre de Cristo trails, at least until he was certain the previous week’s activity hadn’t roused any interest. Strange that an aggressive mountain lion hadn’t been reported.

  The narrow Santa Fe River Park ran east-west before them, a riverbed greenway full of cottonwoods and trails. He drifted to the front of the compact yard, through the groomed pines to the thick old adobe wall—four feet near the open gate, stepped up to five feet and then six to meet the tall latilla poles at the corner; another group of stout blooming hollyhocks festooned the transition from adobe to the old fashioned poles. The rest of the fencing was just as idiosyncratic, done in stages to include a high adobe corner in the back and token rail fencing along the property line. Typical of these old Santa Fe properties, where bits and pieces had been added over time.

  A dirt road stretched out before them, defining this barely developed privacy in the middle of Santa Fe. The Sangre de Cristo mountains loomed to the east, marching northward to Taos and Colorado—over fourteen thousand feet high, full of bear and cougar and pristine air, tall pines and craggy outcrops. Perfect for a snow leopard.

  That had pretty much been the whole point. Nick Carter, Southwest Brevis Consul and definitely the boss of Ian, could have sent him to any one of the Sentinel retreats, from oceanside to low desert scrub. Instead he’d sent Ian from their Tucson base of operations into the high cool mountains for his snow leopard to love.

  Ian had simply been too preoccupied with what he’d left behind to truly walk away from it.