Lynx Destiny (27 page)

And it was. The touch, the intent, the intimacy behind it. He turned his face into her hand, kissing the palm. “Because my family roots go back to Northern Ireland, and my father had the look, and so do I. Because how the
other
expresses itself varies.”

She narrowed her eyes. “That sounds far too sensible for a man who—who—”

“Takes the lynx,” he offered, saying it for her.

She opened her mouth...and settled, not quite able to say that much out loud. But her fingers never stilled, stroking his hair and tracing his ear and the line of cheek and jaw and nose until he couldn’t help but rasp out a sigh that edged on his lynx’s purr.

At that, she said, her voice low, “But...because of this
other
...now you’ll be okay? The bullet and its stupid poison is gone, and you can heal?”

“I am,” he murmured sleepily, “a very fast healer.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “So you’ve said. Me, I’m all normal and everything, and I need a serious nap now. After that...we’ll talk.”

“We’ll talk,” he promised her, even if not sure exactly what he would tell her. What he
could
tell her. Or whether it was simply too late to protect her from all the things she shouldn’t know.

* * *

Kai stirred from healing sleep, somebody else’s voice in his head—reaching through with a power and focus he’d never had, even without the interference of the clinging darkness.

My name is Annorah, I don’t know if you can still hear me. But we’re looking for you...and we’ll keep looking. We’re coming for you.

He eased his breath out on a long sigh.

He’d called them because he’d had to. Because without him here, there was no one to protect this place from the Core’s newly persistent invasion. Because he hadn’t believed he would be here to find at all.

So yes, they were coming.
The Sentinels.

But he didn’t know if their search felt like a threat, or a promise—or maybe just another enemy to face.

* * *

When Kai woke again, he found himself restless. He slipped from the bed and limped down into the kitchen, where he drank deeply from the cool pitcher and then headed for the porch, scratching under the chin of the marmalade cat on the way.

He stood for a long time, leaning on the railing...testing his legs, assessing the faint lingering ache in his calf—barely a wound now.

The high chest wound, he still guarded. That one would take time, even once the traces of the Core working had faded away. He tucked his thumb into his belt to keep himself from testing it, stretching it.

Instead, he looked out over the forest dawn, seeing it with new eyes—with human eyes and human perceptions, while his inner ears and voice still lay quiescent. And his ability to sense the Core—the unique sensitivity that had driven his family first to come here and then to leave him here—completely silent, even though he knew this area now to be steeped with activity.

Then he returned to the house—to Regan.

She still slept, bright blond hair escaping its braid, one side of her face marked with faint, fresh scars and a fading bruise.

Days, he’d been on the run as lynx—surviving only on instinct, and surviving only because he had so much of it. Days, she’d been under the Core’s influence—an influence they probably still didn’t expect her to break, never mind suspect that she had.

He felt a spark of surprising pride at what she’d done this past day—finding him, rescuing herself from the Core, facing the hunters...freeing him from the bullet that had trapped him in the working. She looked small beneath the quilt, curled around herself to make herself a landscape of curving hip and shoulder, her waist a valley between.

It was a simple matter to work his belt loose and step out of the loincloth and leggings to slip under the quilt behind her, and irresistible to run his hand along the length of her, even with the protest from his shoulder. Soft skin and smooth curves, toned muscle yielding slightly to the gentle pressure of his touch—a moment of worship, and of disbelief.

That she existed. That she’d come here. That she’d absorbed the nature of who she was after so many years of fearing it—of who
he
was. That she’d given so much of herself to him, abruptly changing his life from that of someone alone to someone who simply
wasn’t.
The pride swelled, filling him—blossoming into something else, something with which he had no experience at all.

Possessiveness. Aching. Wanting.

More than something physical, as much as he hardened against her bottom, so tightly rounded and pressed up against him. He sighed along her neck, bringing his hand back up to slip beneath her arm, caressing along the outside of her breast—thinking not of what he’d been taught or how he’d been warned, but simply of what might please her.

She sighed in sleepy pleasure and leaned back against him, offering herself with a murmur of welcome. He let his hand drift over her belly to find the little jewel and play with it, and then lower to cup her, fingers gently working.

“Mmm,” she said. “I take it you’re feeling better?”

“There are parts of me,” he told her, “that feel very fine.”

She said, “Uh-huh,” in a voice that meant she’d noticed, and then sucked in her breath, lifting her hips to his hand. Somewhat more breathlessly, she asked, “Seriously, you’re...?”

“Be gentle with me,” he said, smiling against the back of her neck.

She responded with a squirm. He slipped his good arm beneath her, easily lifting her to lie across his body— giving him beautifully unfettered access to everything and everywhere he might want to touch. She arched against him, her hands seeking him—trying to touch, trying to stroke.

He fended her off, absorbing the sensations of her body over his, the way he reflexively lifted to meet her and the building heat she provoked with little more than her presence and her response to him. “Please,” she said. “Please be inside—”

As if that didn’t test his sanity as much as anything could. A growl slipped out, vibrating between them. “I don’t have your protection.”

“I know—but I get it now.
You heal fast.
You said you were safe, and that’s why, isn’t it?”

Safe and never without the wherewithal to prevent conception—even if she hadn’t been. So he answered by shifting her to her side, drawing her leg back and up over his hip—sliding into her with a gentle
rightness.
She stiffened and groped for him, finally reaching behind herself to land a hand on his hip—trying to force the pace.

He was having none of it. Instead, he reveled in it—all of it, from the delicious tease of their slow, slow movement to her rising whimper to the golden hair spilling back over his chest and the wash of energies, a cool thrum of earthy color building slowly to the intensity of whirling red and molten fire. He let it feed the deep build of his own pleasure until she dropped her head back and cried out in a rush of climax—taking him right along with her, his pleasure bursting out from startled understanding.

As much as he had done this for her, she had given it
to
him.

Given herself to him.

And when he caught his breath, he would have sighed over the rasp in his throat that spoke of a purr, if he hadn’t also understood just that quickly—

The Sentinels would find him, would interfere with them—would take him into what amounted to custody, to make him one of them whether he wanted it or not.

And the Core would hunt them down—would do everything necessary to gain this ground, to keep their plans safe from him.

To keep them safe from a woman who could hear the land.

And he knew nothing of how to stop them.

Chapter 25

R
egan slept again, if only briefly. She dozed off with the luxurious sensation of Kai’s hand wrapped around her waist, his fingers tickling ever so slightly around the edges of her piercing. She woke to the absence of him, the quilt pulled carefully up over her shoulder but no match for his missing warmth.

When she cracked her eyes open, she found him standing in front of her unfinished painting, his head tipped as he pondered it, the late-morning light shining strongly down on it from above.

The lynx was subtle, but he wouldn’t miss it.

“Do you mind it?” she asked him.

He shook his head, a solitary motion. “You
knew,
” he said with a baffled wonder.

“Maybe some part of me did.” She crawled out from beneath the covers to sit cross-legged on the bed, patting around for her underwear—not even sure when she’d lost it. Eventually, she gave up and pulled the quilt up to wrap around her shoulders. “Not consciously. Sometimes, I just...paint.” Or at least she had done so, once upon a time. She tried to remember if she’d ever gone to that magical painting fugue while working in Boulder, and couldn’t. Not that she’d missed it then, working on assignments instead of her own pieces...

But in retrospect, she missed it now.

She thought of her mother, up here in the studio for hours, emerging with tired satisfaction and a certain distant peacefulness.

But Kai turned away from the easel to give her an uncertain look, and she thought she knew why. She didn’t shy away from it, either.

“What’s a Sentinel?” she asked. “What’s the
Core?
How do you do what you do and how do they do what they do and for God’s sake,
why?
”

“I said things,” he guessed.

“You did. You said the Core had poisoned you.
Arshun,
who calls himself a Realtor, and those men we saw at the dry pool...the men you killed. Not that it seems to have discouraged them.”

He turned away from her, looking out the window—the view of tree and rising ground, impossibly blue sky.
His life.
“I was afraid I remembered—”

“You did,” she said again. “They called you
Sentinel.
More than once.”

He took a deep breath, let it out with something of resignation. “It’s not something I should tell.”

“You didn’t.
They
did. And it’s too late, and I’m not going to stop asking.” It would have been easier if she hadn’t been naked beneath the quilt, but here she was, and she faced the man to whom she’d so completely surrendered her body not long before. Now they were both just as vulnerable—Regan, waiting for the truth...and Kai, guarding his secrets.

The corner of his mouth twitched, a genuine if transitory smile. “As if you didn’t already know what you know.”

“Lynx,” she said.

Something in him relaxed. He rotated his injured shoulder, so carefully, and then stretched, window light gleaming over the play of muscle in his torso, along his shoulders—the complete and utter abandonment of himself to the stretch.

He dropped his arms and returned to the bed, crossing to sit cross-legged behind her—where, to her surprise, he lifted the tangle of her hair from her shoulders and began to finger comb it.
Grooming.

She sighed deeply and tipped her head back to it, and was about to warn him that he couldn’t distract her from her questions when he spoke again.

“It’s called ‘taking the lynx,’” he said. “Or ‘taking the other.’ My parents were not strong-blooded—not what they called field Sentinels—but if my father had taken a change, he would have been a gray wolf. My mother would have been a lynx. My sister Holly...I don’t know.”

The shock of sudden truth hit her just as hard as her initial realization. “Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s not just you. It’s not just the lynx.”

“Wolf and bear and big cat,” he said by way of agreement, working his fingers through a particularly stubborn knot and then petting the hair down as if soothing it. “Sometimes elk, sometimes deer, sometimes other—but predators, mostly.” He picked up another knot. “Many more who can’t change than who can. All of them Sentinels.”

Them. They.
She didn’t fail to notice it, but she didn’t ask. Not with so many other questions crowding her tongue.

He scraped the hair away from her nape, sending a shiver of pleasure across her skin, and didn’t give her time to ask. “It started nearly two thousand years ago,” he told her. “Two half brothers, druid and Roman. The son of the druid, trying to protect his land, drew on it to become
other,
and his sons and daughters did the same, and his grandchildren. The son of the Roman called his brother dangerous, and assigned himself to stop those Sentinels, even though he—and his heirs—had to steal power to do it, corrupting its nature in the process.”

Regan tried to imagine an unfettered tribe of those like Kai—seeing how easily he had fought his way through overwhelming odds, how hard it had been to take him down at all. “Were they right?” she asked. “The Core? Were those Sentinels dangerous?”

Kai shrugged. “Not by intent,” he said. “But who knows what they would have become without the Core to temper them.”

This time, she did say it.
“Them.”

His fingers caught in her hair; he kissed her nape in apology and continued working, and she came to understand that the grooming soothed him as much as it did her—for she heard the difficulty in his voice when he said, “I am not one of them.”

“Arshun sure thinks you are.”

“So will the Sentinels, when they come.” Finally, his hands rested. He pulled her back against his chest and she let him, as much as it also pulled her off balance.
In every way.
“They have been in existence for two thousand years,” he said. “Maybe they’re necessary for one another. But they’re not necessary for
me.
I have my own ways.”

“So I’ve seen,” she murmured, and she thought how they’d worked together to make the forest uncomfortable for the poachers who shouldn’t have been there—and thought, too, about all the ways he’d welcomed her to those same woods. With such skills, he would hardly need to unleash the lynx.

In fact, if he did, he’d threaten his own existence as much as the ones he faced.

“Can they all do what you do?” she asked him, letting her hand drop back to skim along his thigh, where he cradled her against his crossed legs. “With the land?” She felt him growing hard beneath her, but he made no move to act on it and neither did she. It was just what they were, together—just as she felt the satisfying throb of response in her own tender body.