Lynx Destiny (12 page)

But it had her mother’s tile. Handmade Talavera-style tile, a watercolor wash of color in cool blues and greens and whites with a scattered punctuation of design sets throughout. Her mother’s touch, still kept pristine.

Regan shucked her clothes into a heap on that pretty floor, hit the button for the on-demand hot water and stepped into the corner for a quick navy shower. She exited a few moments later still dripping, slathered on body lotion with the faintest hint of peppermint scent and shrugged on a green waffle-weave robe. She dropped a wide-toothed comb in the robe pocket to tame her tousled hair later and gathered her things, detouring to her father’s room to dig up a pair of sweatpants and drop them off in the bathroom before climbing to the loft rooms to pull on clean jeans and an oversize T-shirt.

When she returned to the kitchen she found Kai with half a glass of water in hand, looking out the big kitchen window and idly ticking the blinds cord against the glass. The sweat of his run had already dried, and she saw clearly enough where branches had whipped across his upper arms and ribs, the snug wrap of the bandanna still protecting his arm.

For the first time since she’d met him, he didn’t brim with energy, ready to bounce into action. The run had worn him down into merely quiet.

She leaned against the door frame and watched. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard her, but he gave no sign of it. She knew exactly what he saw through the window—the mustang in his paddock, the barn behind it, the mountain rising behind that. He studied it with a calm scrutiny bordering on the meditative—and then dropped the cord against the window, letting the wood knob bounce
tick-tickety-tick
on the glass before he reached for it again.

She was just about to clear her throat when he turned to look at her, his clear, hard focus making it obvious that, yes, he’d been perfectly aware of her presence. “This is a nice home,” he said as if it surprised him. “Closed where it should be closed, open where it should be open.”

“Right,” she said, as if that had made any sense at all. “So, hey, the shower’s ready for you. I left some of my dad’s sweatpants in there, if you’d like to borrow them. Only thing is, we’re on well water here, so if you could make it a navy shower—”

His expression made her laugh; he clearly had no idea what she meant. “There’s a hand spray,” she said. “Get wet, turn off the spray to soap up, then rinse.” She cleared her throat, beset by the sudden image of Kai in the shower, water beading the crisp, pale hair of his chest, running across his shoulders and down his torso. She made herself finish, “Don’t leave it running the whole time.”

He made a little noise of amusement in his throat on the way past. She thought maybe he’d gone punch-tired and added, “Push the button over the sink to preheat the water.”

He made that noise again, though he was down the hall and this time she barely heard him mutter, “Hot water.”

“There’s a towel in there for you!” she called as he closed the door. If he laughed at that, she couldn’t hear it.

She shook her head, bemused, and refilled her perpetually lurking plastic travel mug with the filtered ice water, then replenished the pitcher.

Kai came out within moments, scrubbed and gleaming, his hair roughly toweled dry and the sweatpants sagging low—too big at the waist, snug across the butt, too short in the legs. He carried his leggings, belt and freshly rinsed breechclout and headed out to drape them all over the nearest corral panel.

“I don’t suppose you wash the leggings,” she said as he returned to the back door, briefly lingering at the threshold.

“I scrape them sometimes,” he said. He raised his head as though listening to something, and Regan stiffened, wary of what she, too, might hear—and how—but her head stayed silent.

Kai scrubbed both hands over his face, ruffling his damp hair even further. “The gun,” he said. “I left the gun here. I wouldn’t have done that if I’d realized it was—” He stopped, looking at her as if caught out in something he hadn’t meant to say, and finished in a tone that made her think he knew just how lame the words sounded. “It has a bad air about it. It should be in a safer place.”

It had a bad air about it.
Right.

But because she didn’t truly want to know what that meant—not on this morning, of all mornings—she promptly pulled the saddlebags off the back of the kitchen chair and handed them over.

Kai set the gun on the table, a gentle clunk of solid metal against wood. He came up from behind to rest a long-fingered hand on the back of her neck for a silent moment. When that touch fell away, it was only because he’d gathered up her hand as he headed back out the door.

She responded to his gentle tug without question, only belatedly realizing just how much his touch warmed her.

Chapter 11

K
ai led Regan past the paddock and the barn and right on up the scrub-covered hill. He didn’t take them far; she could feel the weariness in him as much as she felt the lingering kick of fear adrenaline in herself. He wound a path through the elbow-high Gambel oak studding the south-facing slope, and found them a gentle perch within a cluster of tall ponderosa pines, as if he’d always known it was there.

There he sat, and pulled her down to sit in front of him. Still in silence, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders from behind and rested his cheek on her head and...

Simply sat.

“What—”

“Shh,” he said. “Thinking. Or not thinking.
Being.
Holding you. That’s what I’m doing.”

She thought she should protest—or that he should have asked. Or that she should wake up and make her own decisions instead of following blindly along, too shocked by the earlier trauma to do anything else.

But the forest spread out below her, a few sharp ridges jutting out among aggressive folds of land. Her father’s little cabin—her
family’s
little cabin—nestled comfortably in the snug scoop of ground just before them, with the barn right up against the rise of ground. Beyond it, she could just barely see the top of the mustang’s head in his paddock—the flip of his ear as he finally emerged from his exhausted daze, the faint flick of tail off to the side.

She realized she’d relaxed against Kai, feeling the safety in his embrace, his strength supporting her. His thumb stroked the exposed skin of her arm, absently comforting.

“There is nothing to fear in this land,” he told her.

She stirred herself to disagree. “Mountain lions,” she said. “Bear. And something else I haven’t figured out yet. Big tracks down by the seep.” Had she seen those only this morning? It felt a week ago. A month. A lifetime, divided in half by sanity and the momentary loss of it.

She thought he’d ask about the tracks. He didn’t. He said, “Those are
of
the forest. Not
in
them. Not as you and I are in them.”

“I’m
not—
” she said sharply, and then stopped, because she thought maybe she was, even if she didn’t want to be.

Her mother had died trying to return to this forest.

He briefly squeezed her shoulders, ducking his head beside hers to kiss the curve where her neck met her shoulders. It was meant, she thought, to be comforting.

She shivered. And scowled. “Do you ever think first?”

He stilled, but didn’t respond.

“Before you touch me, I mean. Because as far as I can see, the answer is not so far. Do I even really know you?”

He tucked his head up against hers, breathing deeply; she had the sudden revelation that he took in the scent of her. The movement of warm air across her skin brought up goose bumps—it froze her there, anticipating the next gust of breath, the gentle movement of his thumb over skin she hadn’t until this moment considered an erotic zone. She’d nearly lost herself to the subtle sensations by the time he responded.

“Sometimes not,” he said. “Sometimes, I just
do.
But not
to
you, Regan.
With
you. Or will you tell me I’m wrong in this?”

She discovered her hand over his on her arm, her fingers twining with his. “No, dammit. And that doesn’t seem right, either. I just met you. My head’s a mess, and I think I might be going crazy and now is
not
the time—”

He nuzzled her neck, moving a little closer—his feet propped on the hill alongside her thighs, one hand moving splayed across her belly. His weariness had made way for a new tension, one she felt in the brush of his legs, the faint tremor in his arms, his body gone male and hard against her.

“Do you ever
not
think?” he asked.

“Mostly not,” she admitted in a whisper. “Mostly I never stop. Mostly...I’m beginning to realize just how much it’s always there.” The fear, she meant. The underlying assumption that she would lose her grasp on reality, the one she’d had since she’d first heard the whispers those years ago.

“I can make it stop,” he told her.

She laughed shortly. “Is that reason enough?”

“I don’t know,” he said, words of vulnerable honesty. “Is it?”

She thought of how right he’d been—that he’d never reached for her when it hadn’t been waiting in her, too. She thought of how his presence stunned her, and how she’d already come to look for it. That in some way, he was entirely self-contained.

She had the sudden, blinding insight from that vulnerable honesty, seeing what he risked in reaching out to her. Far, far more than she, who already knew how to have a relationship without truly letting the other person in. More than she, who had lived her life with the assumption of such casual relationships, from friends to employers to lovers.

She twisted within his arms, rising to her knees, threading her fingers through sleek sable hair still damp from the shower. “Kai,” she said, and thought it would be answer enough.

His blue eyes had darkened; his hands rested on her hips, and had grown possessive. “Is
wanting
reason enough?” he asked again, forcing her to honesty.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But this is more than that.”

He released a breath shakier than she’d expected. “I thought so.”

But for the first time, she was the one who kissed him—and for the first time, she felt a tentative nature in his response—as if she was the one who’d made
him
think, and he didn’t know what to do with it. She scooted closer, running her hands along his thighs, across the play of muscle in his torso—back down the crisp smatter of chest hair that somehow wasn’t black like that on his head, but silver-gray.

And she kissed him hard.

Her reward came in his groan and his shuddering breath—and the way he lay back along the hillside, pulling her with him until she lay sprawled across him, her oversize T-shirt of no impediment at all when it came to keeping his hands away from her skin. She’d donned only a light bra—but that did stop him, his hands suddenly uncertain again.

She straddled him to sit, not at all coincidentally moving against him along the way—stopping to catch her breath at the sharp, unfettered response that flooded heat between them. He thrust up against her with eyes gone wide and then narrowed with pleasure, his lip drawn up in fleeting grimace of startled pleasure.

“I can make it stop for you, too,” she told him breathlessly, fumbling between her shoulders for the release on her bra. She should have known he’d take advantage of the moment—her torso stretched, her belly exposed—but she didn’t expect him to snatch her at the waist, flip her over and effortlessly control her descent onto hard rocky soil, his mouth closing on her....

Yes, on the tiny diamond glint of her navel piercing.

He tongued it, and she laughed at the tickle and at his warm breath—and then she stopped laughing, for he had no trouble at all when it came to the button of her jeans. He pushed the zipper down, and while she quite suddenly held her breath and waited for his touch, he only rested his hand over her panties—distracted, she thought, by the belly button piercing, by the tangle of shirt and bra, maybe by the tangle of her fingers in his hair.

If he thought she was going to lie here
waiting—

She kicked off her paddock clogs and then, as he raised his head with his expression gone somewhat dazed, she kicked her jeans off, too—keeping them between her and the tiny sharp-edged rocks scattered among the pine needles beneath them. He might have reached for her then—but she got there first, easily shoving the loose sweats off his hips and over his magnificent butt, and pretty darned certain a man who had arrived in a breechclout wouldn’t have come up with underwear after his shower.

Right she was.

He didn’t see it coming. He
should
have. He should have known from the look in her eye, from her assertive movement, from her little smile at the sight of him, hard and ready. Most likely he was distracted by her exposed breast, to judge by the whispering, sandpaper brush of his fingers against her sensitive skin, the way he traced the curve of flesh. She arched into him, impatient for a firmer touch, and reached to do her own caressing...such softness, such hard and quivering response.

He made a sound of astonishment and froze, his whole body shivering now, and his lip lifted in that quick snarl of response. He pushed against her hand, losing his breath in a startled huff as she closed her fingers around him.

She laughed in breathless pleasure—and a little of her own surprise. If you were a man who didn’t need anyone else, maybe time passed between lovers. Just maybe it had been a while. He probably wasn’t truly prepared—

“Oh,” she said. “Damn.”

He didn’t respond with words—just a sharpening of his gaze on hers before he lowered his head to her neck and nuzzled her.

“Protection,” she said, tipping her head so his tongue could trace along the soft skin there, hesitating at the little hollow beneath her ear. “I don’t suppose you—”

“We are safe,” he told her, whispering the words against her ear.

Safe,
whispered the voice in her head, for once not inciting panic—not so quiet and lulling, not compared to what she’d felt only hours ago.