Time is running out for the Alpha to seduce his reluctant houseguest...

  Holly Faulkes’s entire life had been spent in hiding, steering clear of the Sentinels. But now she is their prisoner, kept by Lannie Stewart, an undeniably sexy alpha wolf determined to initiate her into their world. Lannie’s special gift of influence has never failed him, until Holly.

  The full-blooded field Sentinel, though, can sense her untapped power. It is a power he is deeply drawn to, a power they all desperately need. For a new enemy has risen, one determined to destroy their kind. Holly can reveal this danger, but only if Lannie can convince her to accept...to embrace...to release, what she really is.

  “I am not yours,” Holly proclaimed as she stood taller and straighter.

  She might even have stood on her toes, leaning into him physically just as he’d breathed in the song of her. “I am not Sentinel, and I am not yours, and nothing you can do will change that.”

  The pack song stuttered back to static, staggering him as much as the connection had done. Holly turned on her heel, going down the steps with the same authority with which she’d come up.

  And Lannie stood there with his side aching from her touch and aching for it, and knew she was exactly right.

  Dear Reader,

  Lannie Stewart knows who he is...and what he is. He’s always known. He’s a Sentinel alpha, a wolf whose particular talent is to merge individuals into packs...to bring them together in the pack song that always runs through the background of his thoughts.

  Holly Faulkes thinks she knows who she is...and what she’s always been. But her life as a fugitive from the Sentinels has abruptly come to an end, and now she’s not so sure any longer. Especially now that she’s been plunged into a conflict between the Sentinels and a brand-new enemy...one they’re only now discovering.

  An enemy who takes from Lannie what he’s always had.

  It’s been a privilege to watch Lannie and Holly’s story unfold—and to realize along the way just how much these two people of very different backgrounds need each other in order to not just discover, but rediscover who they are—as well as who they can be together.

  Thanks for joining me!

  Doranna Durgin

  SENTINELS:

  ALPHA RISING

  Doranna Durgin

  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: 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

  Dedicated to tree huggers everywhere! And with thanks to the Hitchin Post, where they not only help me take care of my own horse, they answer silly questions with a grin. The same could be said of my wondrous agent, come to think of it.

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Excerpt

  Chapter 1

  Lannie Stewart fell back against the brick wall with a startled grunt of pain and a rare flash of temper. Son of a bitch has a knife.

  His hand closed around the grip of the small blade now caught between his lower ribs; he twisted it slightly, releasing it...sending the white-hot scrape of sensation back at his attackers in the form of a snarl.

  All five of them.

  One of them cursed. The others didn’t have a chance. Lannie plowed into them, throwing the knife aside and drawing on the wolf within.

  Alpha. No-holds-barred.

  That made him faster than they were, and stronger, and riding the awareness of every pack he’d ever built. Not to mention infuriated by their assault of someone older and weaker and not looking for trouble.

  A quick flurry of blows—fierce, efficient, effective—and they fell back, stunned not just by the impact but also by Lannie’s unexpected participation in a fight that had started out as five men kicking around what seemed to be easy prey. The men hesitated—suddenly wary, not willing to come back at him and not quite able to run.

  Human submission. Or as close as they could be in this moment.

  Fury still gripped Lannie, swelling against every breath. He eased back one step, then another—and there he held his ground, breathing hard but still perfectly ready.

  The men got the message. They assessed themselves and their injuries, spat a few frustrated curses and bent to haul up their faltering friends. Lannie stood silent, letting them limp away—even if they did so with many a backward glance, not trusting Lannie to stand down when he’d gained such advantage.

  But that was what a true alpha did.

  Later, he’d find out who these men were and why they’d thought themselves safe not just to trespass, but to claim this space as their own. Most likely they’d come for a bro party involving six-packs and fisticuffs, but Lannie wouldn’t assume. Not with the recent threats—and losses—the Sentinels had taken lately.

  For now he watched until they were truly away, loaded up on their four-wheelers and bouncing away through the dusk as if they belonged on this remote and rutted dirt road. But this was Lannie’s own property on the outskirts of the tiny high-country town of Descanso, New Mexico, even if the road itself defined the easement to the old community well house behind him.

  Behind that hid the old man who had once again come out here to smoke his occasional joint—this time, apparently, also looking like tempting prey. Or maybe his whimsical coyote nature had once again gotten the better of him, and he’d approached and aggravated the men in some way.

  Not that it made any difference, with five against one, youth against age. But the old man knew better.

  “Aldo,” Lannie said, warning in his voice. He pressed a hand against his side, feeling the hot blood of a wound still fresh enough that it hadn’t quite pulsed up to pain.

  The injury didn’t worry him. Not when he was Sentinel, and belonged to an ancient line of people whose connection to the earth gave them more than just strength and healing and a variety of power-fueled skills. His heritage meant he carried within him the shape of his other—his wolf. His exceptionally strong blood meant that unlike most of his ilk, he could also take the shape of that other.

  Alpha wolf.

  So no, the injuries and the pain didn’t worry him—but they damn well annoyed the hell out of him.

  The thick scent of pot stung the air. Lannie said, “Aldo.”

  The old man came out from behind the well house, carefully pinching off his joint. “They made me anxious,” he said, and kept his gaze averted.

  Aldo had never been alpha of anything. But until lately, he’d been irrepressible, with a cackle of laughter and a strong side of levity. Now he bore his own bruises, and a vague expression of guilt. “I didn’t do anything, Lannie. This has always been an okay place for me.”

  A safe place, on feed-store land. Lannie’s cell rang, a no-nonsense tone cutting through the falling darkness—a rare connection up on this mountainside. Lannie didn’t even look as he silenced the call and shoved the phone back into his pocket. “It is an okay place for you.”

  Or it should have been, and now Lannie’s temper rode high on a flare of hot pain and swelling bruises. If Aldo’s recent alarm hadn’t slapped through the pack connection and drawn him out here into the fading heat of dusk, the old man would have gone down under that knife. Aldo was a strong sixty, but he was still sixty.

  “We’ll sort it out,” Lannie said, lifting his hand to assess the bleeding. Dammit, this was one of his favorite shirts.

  “Let me help,” Aldo said. “You know I have some healing.”

  “So do we all,” Lannie told him, already feeling the burn of his blood as the Sentinel in him took hold; the bleeding would stop and the wound would seal. And then it would leave him to grouch and ouch, wisely not spending resources on a wound that no longer posed a threat.

  Aldo ran a hand over thick, grizzled hair cut short, tucking his stubby joint into the pocket of a shirt that had seen better days even before its recent misadventure. “You know what I mean.”

  “It’s fine,” Lannie said. A vibration against his b
utt cheek signaled cell phone voice mail. “Let’s get back to the store. Faith is worried.”

  Aldo squinted at him, cautiously pleased. “She tell you that, or you just picked up on it...?”

  Lannie made an amused sound in his throat. “Do you think she had to tell me?” Not when he was enough of an alpha to take a stand when necessary, to back down when appropriate, to remain in the background unless needed. And to have a singular skill for building teams and pack connections, even among the mundane humans who had no sense or knowledge of his other.

  It was a skill so deeply ingrained that he’d learned to factor it into every part of his life—the depth of his friendships, the instant flare of his attractions, the strength of his anger.

  “Yeah, you just picked up on it with your pack mojo,” Aldo concluded, and rightly so. Faith’s rising concern had come through in an undertone, the taste of anxiety with the faint whisper of identity that belonged to the young woman named Faith.

  They struck out across the land of transitional high prairie, where ponderosa pine mingled with cedar and oaks and the land came studded with cactus and every other kind of prickly little scrub plant. The undulating slopes took them down to the feed-store lot with its storage barn, back corrals and low, no-nonsense storefront building.

  An unfamiliar car sat in the lot out front of the otherwise bare lot, and Lannie thought again about that unexpected phone call, his annoyance rising. Sabbatical from Brevis duty means leave me alone.

  Faith bolted out the store’s back door, all goth eyes and piercings. “It’s Brevis,” she said in unwitting confirmation, a little walleyed along the way—and so thin of Sentinel blood that no one knew just what her other might have been. A little bit rebellious, a little bit damaged, a whole lot of runaway just barely now of age.

  She had no idea that Brevis—the regional Sentinel headquarters—had once quietly nudged her in Lannie’s direction. She was one of his now. Home pack.

  “What are they doing here?” she demanded. “I’m not going back in there. Do you think they can tell I’m—that I was—oh, for butt’s sake. Look at you. What did you get him into, Aldo?”

  “Nothing!” Aldo protested, trying to sound righteously indignant and not quite pulling it off. Hard to, with the scent of pot still following him around. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Lannie told her, and she closed her mouth on a response sure to have been stinging, regarding him uncertainly. “I’m fine,” he said. “Why don’t you help Aldo clean up in the barn. The Brevis folks can cool their heels a moment.” Because Brevis or not, this was his turf. They didn’t get to upset his people.

  Especially when they hadn’t warned him of their arrival in the first place.

  Especially when they shouldn’t have even been here. Not after how things had gone down with the last group he’d pulled into pack status. Too little time, too many challenges...and one damaged individual who had fooled them all.

  He headed for the barn, where the stairs along the outside led up to a section of finished loft. Before he reached the top step, he’d peeled off the shirt and wiped himself down with it, heading straight to the bathroom to slap an adhesive strip over the now-barely-oozing wound.

  The bruises were what they were; he didn’t so much as glance in the distorted old medicine-cabinet mirror before heading out to the half-walled bedroom area to hunt up a fresh shirt, tugging it on with care.

  The phone rang again. He let the ringtones cut the air while he stood quietly in the rugged old barn loft...eyes closed, recent encounter pushed away...muting the underlying home pack song in favor of the Sentinel whole. Shutting himself away from his own people, in spite of their upset, to prepare himself for whatever Brevis had come to ask of him.

  For a strange, brief moment, the home song resisted his touch. It spun around him in a dizzying whirl, closing in like a warder’s web and throbbing with an ugly, unfamiliar dissonance.

  He took it as a rebuke. It was bad timing to interrupt pack song in the wake of such disturbance, and he knew it. He swallowed away the unease of it, settling into his own skin. Felt the aches of being there, and settled into that, too, accepting and dismissing them.

  The dissonance slowly faded.

  Finally, then, he reached for his larger pack sense, the one that made him ready for the outside world and whatever Brevis might ask from him. The bigger picture—the one that would ride him hard.

  More so, in the wake of Jody. In the wake of her death. In the wake of all their deaths.

  One more breath, deep and quiet, and then...he was no longer just plain Lannie. He no longer hummed to the tune of his own small pack but had set them—temporarily—aside, so existing pack song wouldn’t interfere with the formation of whatever was to come.

  He was the unentangled alpha that Brevis had come to see.

  * * *

  Babysitters.

  Holly Faulkes wanted to spit the words at them—the man and the woman who’d brought her to this tiny New Mexico town of Descanso. They’d driven an hour through the desert mountains, pulling her away from her family during a still-heated discussion about her past, her present and her future—and all so she could wait in this cool, shadowed feed store with its cluttered shelves and dry dust, its thick scent of hay and oats and molasses and leather.

  Sentinel babysitters.

  As if she hadn’t even been part of the recent Cloudview conversation, sitting beside her parents in silence—all of them tense, all of them terse. As good as prisoners in the old town hotel.

  And as if she hadn’t just missed meeting her brother Kai for the very first time since childhood, hearing of his feral beauty and of the lynx that peered out from under his skin at every turn, but being whisked away from both Cloudview and her parents before the Sentinels could call Kai in from the mountains.

  Sentinels. If not exactly the enemy, also not her friends. Not considering she’d hidden from them since she’d been born, sheltered first by her family and then by deliberate, active choice. God, she didn’t want to be here. And at twenty-four years old, it should have stayed her choice.

  “Are you all right?” The woman eyed her. Her name was Mariska, and she was far too knowing for Holly’s taste. Far closer to bodyguard than escort, with a short sturdy form both rounded and strong—not to mention a sharp gaze that gave away more than Holly was probably supposed to see. So did her complexion, a distinctly beautiful brown shade that might have come from south India but instead came from the bear within her.

  “You’re kidding, eh?” Holly said. “No, I’m not all right. Why can’t you people just leave us alone? Leave me alone?”

  Mariska transferred her gaze to Holly’s hands, where they chafed against her arms in spite of the distinct heat still overlaying the fading summer day.

  “Being here makes my skin crawl,” Holly told the woman, which was only the blunt truth. She’d felt it before, this sensation...on her Upper Michigan home turf, when she first started a restoration on an old clogged water feature. But nothing like this. One final squeeze of her upper arms and she let her hands fall. “You have no right to do this to me.”

  But she’d always known they would. Just as she’d known that her parents would pay the price for hiding their family to protect Kai.

  “Maybe we don’t,” Mariska said. “But we hope you’ll come to understand.” She lifted her chin at Jason, the tall man who served as her partner; they exchanged commentary in a silent but very real conversation, the likes of which Holly had previously seen only between her parents. Jason raised his phone, hitting the redial button. Again. Trying to reach the man they’d called Lannie with a strange mix of familiarity and deference.

  “If you’re trying to reach him, why don’t you just talk to him?” Holly gestured between them in reference to the silent exchange they’d just had, only peripherally aware that the crawling sensation in her blood had eased.

  “Lannie prefers that we don’t.” The woman gave her a wry look, one that said she had chosen her words diplomatically. “Besides, not all of us do that.”

  “I don’t,” Holly muttered. Because she didn’t need it and she didn’t want it. She had no intention of letting someone else in her head—