Lynx Destiny (13 page)

She somehow fathomed that they weren’t talking about the same thing. “No, I mean—” and sighed happily as his tongue neatly traced the outside edge of her ear, a shiver running through her body to pebble her skin and tighten her nipples, spreading a tingle of warmth in its wake. His hand closed around her breast, gentle but firm—learning the feel of her, she thought. He still moved against her, but more gently—and with a hitch in his thrust and in his breath that told her how hard he worked to keep it that way.

Uncertainty.
She realized it through the haze of increasing need—and realized anew what it probably meant. “No,” she said, nonetheless hooking her leg around his to pull them in close, this time expecting his momentary freeze at the new sensation—she wore those thin panties, but nothing else between them. “I mean
protection.
I’m on birth control, but...we need a condom—”

“For what?” he asked, no guile in his voice as he found her nipple with his thumb, circling it.

“Protection!” she said desperately, because she already knew what the answer was.

“You have me for that,” he murmured. “You have Bob. You have the land...you have yourself.” He followed her collarbone with his breath, his movement gentle and controlled and completely at odds with the tension thrumming under her hands, where her fingers pressed into his flanks—feeling every quiver of muscle, feeling every tremble of thrusts controlled.

“Not
that
protection,” she said, and groaned as his breath warmed the upper slope of her breast—couldn’t stop herself from tightening her leg around him, from arching into the resulting spear of heat or reveling in his low, involuntary grunt of response. “Safe sex kind of protection! In case one of us isn’t as healthy as we obviously think we are!”

At that, he hesitated, pulling back to eye her—his face full of naked vulnerability in his need for her, his response to her. “I have my health,” he said, without any obvious understanding. “But I have no—”

“—condom,” she supplied for him, disappointment threading through her voice as she tried to slow her response.

Her body was having none of it. She wanted this man—had wanted him the moment she’d seen him. She groaned in frustration.

“Shh,” he said, and if he didn’t understand, he still accepted—even tense unto breaking, even with a groan in his throat. “There will be tomorrow.”

Maybe.
And maybe she wouldn’t be here. Maybe she’d lose what she had with this man before she even had it.

And if she didn’t? He wouldn’t follow her to Colorado. She might have laughed at the thought of it if she hadn’t been so certain it would turn into a sob—if the morning hadn’t rushed across her all over again with all its high emotion. “Tell me again that you’re safe,” she asked him, running her hand along his arm in a desperate caress. “Tell me again that you’re—”

But she stopped, for she’d encountered the bandanna—the one he still wore like a token, covering the deep gouge the bullet had rent in his flesh, freshly applied after the shower. Only now, under her touch, it slipped down from the upper curve of his biceps.

And there was no wound there. There was no deep gouge, no ugly edges, no scabbing or inflammation.

There was only the pink remnant of healing, thin and tender skin that would soon fade without any apparent scar at all.

I’m healthy,
he told her.
I’m safe,
he’d said, and the forest had echoed with it in her mind.
I heal fast,
he had assured her when he’d been hurt, not nearly enough days ago to have healed at all.
Not like other people,
her father had warned her, and she thought she’d understood. She’d thought of herself, and his reaction to the things she thought they’d heard together, and she thought she’d seen enough of him to know.

“Not like other people,” Regan whispered out loud, and suddenly knew she understood nothing at all.

Chapter 12

R
egan left Kai alone on the slope behind the barn. He ached for her touch, alone in a way he’d never felt before—in a way that baffled him and left his body in turbulence and his heart confused.

His body, he could deal with. The Sentinel who’d initiated him had been as blunt about that as in everything, teaching him the ways of her body—and teaching him about his. “Keep yourself satisfied,” she’d said. “Learn yourself. When you leave this place and join up with the rest of us, you’ll need to know your own needs so you can be a good partner. And you’ll need self-control. You’ll be stronger than most of us—stronger than anyone just plain human—so you’ll need practice, or you’re going to hurt someone.”

And she’d shown him, bringing him to the brink of release, leaving him unsated—demanding his attention before she would allow him completion.

If he’d been surprised at the intensity of his response to Regan, he hadn’t been surprised at his control. But the twist of emotional pain—the
need—

That, he’d never felt before.

That, he didn’t know how to manage.

So he sat on the hill until he thought he could keep the struggle inside. At least until he figured out those feelings—or until he made it away from this place.

Regan briefly tended the horse and disappeared inside the house.

After a very long while, Kai stood, made his way back to the corral and gave himself the luxury of a long, stress-releasing stretch. Then he donned the damp loincloth—not so damp as all that, after the dry air and sunshine—and pulled on his leggings, and made sure the letter from his father was still wrapped securely around the belt that held it all up. He rewrapped the bandanna around his arm.

Then he went to the door and stood. He had the feeling that she’d come—that she’d kept track of him.

After a few moments, she did. She’d combed her glorious hair and straightened her shirt and fastened her jeans, but high color still sat along her cheeks and sparked in her eyes.

He said, “I don’t know how to disarm the gun. It’s not safe—I’ll find a place for it.”

She frowned. “Unload it, you mean?”

He shook his head. “
Disarm
might not be the right word.
Cleanse
it. It’s dangerous...it shouldn’t be here.”

She crossed her arms, and he immediately grew wary—knew he’d overstepped some boundary, but didn’t know where it was or what it was called. She said, “I guess I can make that decision for myself.”

“I could take it,” he said, reluctant and seeing no way around it. Forcing his way inside to take the gun...there was no coming back from that. And whatever the turmoil of being here with her, he wanted to come back.

Even if she otherwise spurned him. And even if she had no idea of the forces that had come to center on this place—or that regardless of what drove her fear, her connection with the land, he could help with that, too.

If not without giving some of himself away.

Her frown grew to a scowl. “And how do you think that would go for you?”

“I think it would be hard, and it would break things between us.” He returned her gaze with a steady reluctance. “But it’s my fault that it’s here, so I’ll do what I have to.”

She stared at him, then disappeared inside—a few obvious steps to the kitchen table, a few back again—and returned with the gun. “Fine,” she said, her face still hard with her anger. “I don’t need this particular fight. But I’m really pissed. I don’t need you to take care of me.”

He accepted the gun with a distaste he hadn’t anticipated, finding it heavy and cold in his hand—a metal that didn’t warm to his touch. “Maybe if someone
had,
” he said, treading dangerous ground, “you wouldn’t be afraid of things now.”

Her mouth thinned. “Smart of you to get the gun, before saying something like that.
Bastard.
”

The words didn’t sting like they might have—he heard the hurt behind them, and knew it came from that fear, too, from the understanding that he might just be right.

He needed to learn what drove her—how she heard the land, but had no sensation of Core workings; how she had no understanding of that blessing. Why she feared it. But when he opened his mouth to ask, the words wouldn’t come. Her fragility in the moment came through clearly enough on her face, in the tension of her shoulders—in the way her arms hugged her slender torso as much as they crossed in defiance. So he only nodded, then turned to go.

She stopped him. “Why have you still got on the bandanna?” When he glanced back, she nodded at his arm. “You obviously don’t need it any longer.”

He couldn’t keep the mild surprise from his voice. “Because it’s yours,” he told her, and headed off into the woods.

* * *

Kai cached the gun in the woods and found himself dissatisfied—knowing it could be found by chance, or that anyone with any faint, subconscious sensitivity to Core workings might find it with something less than chance.

Or that it might draw the Core back to this territory.

But it took him several days of pacing through the forest before he was prepared to leave it to find a safer cache. He patrolled the dry pool; he patrolled the edges of the Adler property. He sat in high places, looking down over the land—listening to it. Hunting signs of the Core, faint clues to their presence and purpose.

When he finally ventured onto the Adler property again, greeted by Bob but unnoticed by Regan, he walked it with a deliberate thoroughness—one that he should have applied much earlier, had he not been—

Avoiding her.
Avoiding this land. Too uncertain about the emotions floundering between them, too afraid of hurting her. Too afraid of the strength of missing her, and of his endless impulse to return and pull her into his arms and do the most unthinkable thing of all—to explain to her what he was. To let her understand.

He knew himself for a coward, when what she needed was someone strong enough to help.

And on the Adler property, he found signs of the Core. The faint stench of their passing, of minor workings triggered and already faded. Not of activity so much as
interest.

He’d have to tell her—to warn her. To explain, as he could, how she should beware.

Beware, Regan,
he thought at her as he sat in the scrub of her back hillside with lynx ears flicking.
Take care, Regan.
And then, before he left—before he considered the wisdom of it—he sent her his longing.

Bob the Dog barked sharply, and Kai took to his feet and trotted away over the ridge.

* * *

Regan set her paintbrush aside and looked out the dormer window of the loft—the space that had always been hers, and the window beside which she’d always painted, the skylight pouring light across her work and the forest spread out before her.

Beware...

She gritted her teeth, ignoring that echo in her mind—the nudge that had caused her to look up in the first place, even if she wanted to pretend it had been Bob’s single and unusual bark.

Just as she had pretended to ignored the startling wash of emotion that followed—the sudden sting of tears behind her lids, the stupid impulse to say, “I miss you, too,” even if there was no one here to hear it.

But she set the paintbrush aside and looked out the window—and if she thought she saw a flicker of movement up in the scrubby oak, it was gone before she could be sure.

Chapter 13

K
ai dropped the gun into his satchel, pulled on his jeans and shoes, then made his way into town and the general store—too many hours and days of patrolling behind him, too few hours of hunting. And, until Mary silently handed him her own hairbrush from behind the counter, he realized he’d been too distracted to have completely put himself together for town.

After that he borrowed the store’s bathroom and mirror and tidied up, but Mary still frowned at him, and she pushed a sandwich at him while Bill agreed there’d been an unusual number of early visitors lingering in the area—scouting for hunting season, they’d told him, and staying for the Apple Blossom Festival. “But they didn’t look like hard-core hunters,” he added. “Too spiffy.”

“Spick-and-span,” Mary agreed. “You eat that sandwich, Kai. You heading to Phillip’s?”

And since he was, she reached behind the counter and handed over a crinkly grocery bag heavy with material. “I fixed his uniform,” she said. “Tell him we’ll settle it out later.”

So Kai, the sandwich sitting heavy in his stomach, headed over to the small Tae Kwon Do dojang—and the small and unassuming man who taught discipline and self-defense and who never spoke of his past.

Maybe that was why he’d always respected that Kai never spoke of his present.

Phillip Seamans had a face of experience but indeterminate age, a wiry jockey’s body full of wily strength, and a dojang full of young children. Kai hesitated at the door, taking that moment to evaluate the interior. Then he slipped inside, gave his bow toward Phillip, and sat cross-legged against the wall to watch chubby bodies learn to roll and fall and offer proper etiquette, their short limbs all but swallowed by their
dobok
uniforms. Not so many of them in this tiny town, but enough to keep a smile behind Phillip’s eyes as their mothers sat along the wall opposite from Kai, emerging to participate as necessary.

Kai watched them with some fascination, as he always did. They were a thing so far from his world, and yet in many ways reflective of it—their blunt honesty and joy and faces screwed up in fierce concentration.

As the class finished, Phillip drew their attention to him and directed them to bow, their solemn little faces bent without precision over randomly placed feet. And then he turned them loose in a pattering stampede. They threw themselves on top of Kai with giggles and shrieks of delight—except for the ones who didn’t.

Some children were like Bob—drawn to him, quickly trusting him. And some stood back and watched with large, wary eyes while their mothers puzzled over their unusual shyness.

When the children had been hugged and returned to their mothers to don their shoes and leave, Kai rose to his feet. Had he been a true student, he would have stood as long as Phillip was standing, but here—as everywhere—he was neither one thing nor another, neither master or student. Phillip—like so many in Cloudview—accepted him on his own terms and simply called him Kai.