Lynx Destiny (18 page)

He didn’t respond—at least, not directly. “What happened?” he asked. “Not just now. But
then?
”

She tried to roll away from him; he didn’t let her. Not when she pushed against his chest, and not when she tried to throw off the blanket and outright bolt. For the first time, she felt his strength when she didn’t want to. Instant panic flashed over her, tinged with anger—and then subsided.

Either you trust him or you don’t.

With her body...with her mind.

“Damn you,” Regan muttered, not sure she was talking to Kai at all. She didn’t expect to be kissed in return. Not to be pulled down with strong gentleness and into something tender and caring, soothing against lips bruised by recent passion.

She sighed, not so much beguiled by the gesture as immersed in it, and subsided to again press her cheek against his shoulder.

“It matters,” he said. “Maybe more than you know.”

“Trust me,” she told him, and couldn’t keep the edge from her voice. “Not more than I know.” And then, since he hadn’t done it yet, she rose just far enough to grope for the pack, dragging it close to find familiar pockets by feel, briskly unzipping what she needed. He never quite relinquished her—his hand on her arm, resting against her leg, her hip...his fingers running through the trailing ends of her hair. She tucked the condom in one of the tiny plastic bags she kept for trash and used a wet wipe to clean them both up before jamming her legs back down into her jeans.

By then she was thoroughly chilled and glad to snuggle up close again—beside him this time, her head on the pack and her hand roaming across his chest—finding the sharp definition of muscle, running her fingers down the center of a six-pack that twitched beneath her touch. Before he could ask again, she said, “When I was twelve, my mother admitted to hearing voices. She said she’d heard them since she’d come here and that they’d never bothered her...but she thought that since I was getting older, I should know. In case maybe it wasn’t just her.”

“Voices,” Kai said. Not with curiosity, or judgment...but with a certain care.

“Not
voices,
” Regan admitted. “That’s just...well, shorthand. Whispers, maybe. Intentions. She said it was as if the woods were speaking to her. She used to spend hours hiking on her own, and Dad couldn’t get her to stop—he could barely get her to leave a note saying where she’d gone. She said she felt safe.”

Safe...

“That doesn’t sound like a bad thing.”

“It wasn’t.” Regan looked out into the darkness and saw her mother instead—saw the serenity in her, the smile on her face—her gentle distraction as she plied her craft, hand spinning and weaving fine alpaca wool scarves and hats and art pieces. A sharp breath brought her back to the here and now, the press of a rock through the fleecy blanket that carried Kai’s scent, the awareness that her jeans barely rode her hips and hadn’t yet been fastened.

“It sounds like a good thing,” Kai suggested, if carefully.

“Maybe it was,” Regan said, and made herself say the next words. “Until the rest of the world heard about it from a teen who couldn’t keep her mouth shut, and decided she needed to be cured.”
I’m so sorry, Mom. I wouldn’t have said anything to her if I’d known....

“Cured,” Kai said flatly. “Is that a thing from which one can be cured? Living fully in the world?”

Regan’s throat tightened up on her, and her words came out strained and raspy. “Apparently not.” She took a deep breath—or tried, because it suddenly seemed that she’d forgotten how. “There were drugs...they only made things worse. And worse. And my mother stopped being happy, and she stopped walking in the woods, and she stopped weaving and she started hurting herself. And then they took her away, and I...”

She stopped, gulping against the words as they lodged right there in her throat, and this time when Kai tightened his arm around her, she welcomed it. She barely managed to say, “I always thought maybe she’d killed herself because no one would tell me. Dad just said there’d been an accident. I only just—” Another deep breath, or what passed for one. “She was trying to come home, and she was hit on the road. She was
walking
home, Kai—back to the voices! There was nothing left of her, only those damned voices!” Her voice broke on the sob she’d never meant to allow, and then on another, and he held her—murmuring to her, humming some tuneless thing with a rasping undertone.

She didn’t let herself cry long—she didn’t dare tap that deep well of grief. She wiped her face on her torn shirt and said thickly, “So I have to go. I can’t let that happen to me.”

His voice sounded a little too careful. “Why would it?”

She made a derisive noise. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. I hear things, too, Kai.
Voices.
”

“I do know.” His voice held an intractable note she hadn’t expected...maybe even a touch of impatience.

She flung it back at him. “Then you know that’s why I left this place? I went to Colorado and I had
peace
in my head. Right up until I came back here.” She would have pushed away from him if the night hadn’t been so cold. “No, that’s not even really true. Right up until I first saw
you.
”

He rolled up on his elbow, his leg resting over hers, his hand at her waist and tugging her closer. She couldn’t see his expression clearly, but everything about him—the renewed tension in his shoulders, the harsh note injected into the normally gentle rasp of his voice, even the pressure of his fingers against her skin—spoke of an intensity. A kind of desperation. “And was that truly bad? To have some sense of me?”

Sudden caution struck her hard—and not just because of the power in him, the unbidden flash of memory encompassing how he moved in a fight, how easily he overcame not one but three armed men.

She could hurt him now with her words—that was the power in her, and the gift he’d just given her. It loomed between them, a fluttery and breathless thing.

She measured her words carefully. “If that was all this was...maybe not. But this isn’t like what my mother experienced. This is...” She couldn’t help a shudder at the cold brush of those moments in the loft. “It’s horrible,” she said, forcing the words out. “It’s horrible and frightening and it takes over my mind.”

“Workings,” he said, but not as if they were words meant to be spoken out loud. “You came with the taste of workings.”

Still, she asked, “The what?”

He shook his head, just visible in the darkness. When he lowered his mouth, she thought he would kiss her—but instead he brushed against the side of her face. “Listen,” he breathed.

By the time she understood, it was too late. She felt the wash of green and blue and brown, not so much color as a cool thrum of energy. She wanted to roll in the green, let the blue brush against her skin, and sink into the brown. A faint warble of high notes teased her ears above the distant warning yowl of something wild, and she sucked in a breath so deep, so fresh, it sparked waves of tickling energy along nerve and bone.

Just when it started to become too much, when she would have panicked, the sensations eased. She became aware of a more stable presence—warmth and spice and an undertone of raspy purr...a work-rough touch on the bare skin beneath her shirt, a solid, unwavering presence with hints of all those previous sensations woven throughout.

“Kai?” she whispered.

He responded with a wordless affirmation, adding texture to sensation. Only then did she realize that her hands roamed his body, and that he’d grown hard against her—that she already lifted her hips to him, gripped with a mindless yearning for more. More of what she’d just experienced, more of
Kai.
That she held a quiet emptiness more than just the physical, and that the need to fill it suddenly consumed her.

She found his face with her hands, turned it...kissed him deeply. Not as fiercely as before, but in a more encompassing way, a more personal way. She slanted her mouth against his and explored him, feeling his body change against her and feeling the lick of fire around a new intrusion of reds and golds, her being awash with rich color and reverberating with his deep groan.

She played him, her hands wandering his sides, caressing his flanks, tightening around his buttocks—tugging him within reach to explore firm muscle, to cup him and fondle and realize that with his gasps came a change in pitch and color. The golds spun from the burn of an ember to the deep glow of fire, the reds crept to orange, and the cool blue breezes turned sultry. He’d shoved his way past her pants to find the heat of her—touching and exploring. White heat shot through her nerves and through her mind, and even as she realized that part of the song came from her, Kai made a startled sound in response, his body encompassing hers.

She lost track of who was what. Kai’s presence mingled with her response, mingled with the song of color and sound and feeling that twined around them. When he entered her, they both cried out in joy. When she met his gentle thrusts, they sighed together in pleasure. When her fingers clamped down around his arms, gold threads wrapped them in a tightening spiral, and when he trembled, his pleasure wrenching from him with each startled breath, the fire slapped against her in a series of waves that built into a twisting spire of suddenly fearsome potential.

She would have moved faster against and around him, clutching wildly, her ankles hooked as if she could somehow pull him beyond
close
to make them physically one. But he didn’t let her—and the colors and sounds and vibrations didn’t let her, controlling the pace so the feelings swelled. The intensity of potential swelled, spilling between them and wrapping them up, and still Kai moved with deliberation, with a control she hadn’t expected. He paced them, building them, leaving Regan sobbing with need until she flung her head back and cried out loud with it.

The sound turned to sharp energy, shredding through sensation with shards of spiking pleasure and shredding right through Kai’s restraint. He snarled, a sound that struck both memory and primal response, and Regan cried out again, a plea beyond words—but he didn’t increase the pace so much as he simply slammed into her, hard and steady and just...

One...

More...

Time.

The golds turned to fire and the reds to lava and Regan spun helplessly in the center of it all with Kai twining around her and through her, his body jerking with release and his snarls gone harsh in her ear.

When sensation faded, leaving her awash in paler color and the faintest larklike melody, conscious thought started to trickle back in. Kai’s breath panted across her skin; the cold night air cut through a gap in tangled blankets. She’d lost her pants again, her feet were cold...and Kai still pulsed quietly inside her, flesh within flesh and no barrier between them.

Safe...

She sighed across his shoulder without the energy to disbelieve. “What did you do?” she asked him, something of wonder in her voice. Not to mention the faintest edge of accusation. He didn’t answer—at least, not with anything more than a nuzzle he probably didn’t even realize he’d given her. “Kai,
what—
”

“Nothing,” he said, but with an unfinished sound that kept her temper from spiking back into place. That and the languid waves of fading gold still lapping through her body. Finally, he amended, “Nothing more than I ever do.”

She knew he wasn’t talking about the love he’d just made to her—she knew well enough it was no familiar thing to him, as naturally as they’d come together the second time. As
completely
as they’d come together.

“I listened,” he said. “And I shared it. I wanted you to know...how it really is.” He rubbed his nose against her shoulder, a thoughtful gesture. “I wasn’t expecting it to take us like that. That was a...” He hunted words and finally offered, “Surprise.” But his voice held the dry awareness that he would never find a word adequate to describe what had happened between them.

Regan knew, because neither would she.

And she knew, too, that buried within all that sensation and response and ecstasy, what they’d done had gone far beyond the physical and straight through to the very human connection of emotion and mutual vulnerability and silent commitment.

She might not truly know this man. She might never truly understand him. She might not see him again after this night.

But she loved him.

And it didn’t change a thing.

Chapter 17

K
ai stayed awake into the night with his body more alive than it had ever been, the land whispering contentment across his skin...absorbing the memories of what had happened here.

And at the same time finding himself far too aware that Regan had arrived coated with the taint of the Core, and that what she’d described—her fear, her horror, the changing voices—had not come from the land.

Not directly.

He didn’t fully understand what had happened to Regan’s mother, only that it had not gone badly until civilization had interfered, damaging what lay between the woman and the land. He knew it to have been unnecessary...to have been tragedy.

He held the living scars of that tragedy in his arms, warm and sated and—for the moment—trusting. And between the land and this woman, he had never felt the imperative more strongly—the need to protect them both.

To stop the Core.

If only he knew the first thing about them. He needed more than just his innate ability to sense them; more than what Aeron Faulkes had been able to imply in his letter. More than what he could learn in his patrols and in a few short encounters.

But this Core presence wasn’t about wiping a few amulets clean; it wasn’t about lingering to reclaim a gun with special properties, one they couldn’t afford to have fall into either Sentinel or mundane hands.

No, they’d turned invasive and they’d launched harsh workings. And they had a distinct interest in Frank Adler’s land.

He’d have to get help.

Going to the Sentinels meant painting a target on himself for both Core and Sentinel interests. It meant the end of his way of life, even if he somehow managed to evade both factions in the end—for it meant the rest of his life would be spent doing just that. Not here, with the home he’d always known and the land he’d always protected, but higher, deeper...further away from the world.