Lynx Destiny (33 page)

More shouting from the park presaged the
pow
of an exploding light, then another—

And then the world seemed to take a breath, a deep and momentary silence. It was followed hard on by an even deeper rumble, one that growled around them like water spiraling in on a drain.

Regan’s grip on Kai’s hand grew even tighter, a desperately frightened note in the land—and Kai battled what it roused in him, battled darkness and territorial fury and the lynx coming out to protect it all.

Leaning on her heart to stay himself.

The earth beneath the man’s hand popped, the sound of it sharp and startling. He let out a long sigh into the following silence and opened his eyes, shifting back to sit on one heel, his wrist resting over an upraised knee. “Sorry,” he told Arshun, a shrug in his voice. “I broke it.”

But the earth’s wound still rippled with darkness— rippling right through Regan and Kai. The man knew it; he shook his head at the woman. “I can try to do something with the leftovers, but I think we’re better off letting it heal on its own.”

“That’s fine,” she said tightly, her gaze pinned on Kai. “We’ve got other things to handle.”

Kai knew threat when he saw it. He snarled, felt it well up out of him along with the lingering darkness right along with Regan’s sharp fear—radiating through the rush of bloody warmth from a wound just as reactive to the Core working as the land.

“Hey,” Regan said, starting a little as she turned to him.

From such beautiful eyes, the woman’s expression turned hard. She glanced at the gathering—Kai’s friends, so suddenly exposed to worlds they never should have seen—and her mouth flattened. “Joe, we need to take him and the minions and go.
Now.
Before—”

Before nothing.
Kai gathered himself—

But even as he pushed away from the ground, Regan jumped up before him—her back to him, her arms outspread to keep him—blocking him, blocking them. And where Kai growled deeply, his body vibrating with all the forces trying to shred him from within, Regan’s voice came sharp and hard.

“No,”
she said. “You may not take him!”

“You,” said the man named Joe, shaking his head, “are something else we have to figure out.”

“You can’t take either of us!”

Her panic hit Kai’s fragile control like a blow. He wrapped his arm around her, as if pulling them so closely together might somehow save them both.

And maybe it did.

Regan steadied. “You want to protect? Then
protect.
That includes what’s best for your people. If that was ever true, then Kai wouldn’t have been alone against these people—and he wouldn’t have had to hide from you in the first place!” In her steadiness, she reached out—to Kai, to the land. Soothing. Shepherding.

And gathering.
Finding the roiling dark ripples...pulling them in, and then pushing the accumulated darkness back out at the Sentinels who had come not just to help save the day, but to turn on one of their own.

“Lyn,” said the man, looking suddenly wary.

“I feel it,” she said, putting out a hand as if that would make a difference. Flinching. “
Stop
her.”

But Laura had seen enough, and she scrambled to her feet, coming up beside Kai—shaking with fear and reaction, but holding her ground. “Kai and Regan are ours,” she said. “I don’t care why you’re here!”

Mary said, “You can’t just
take
them.”

Phillip pulled himself to his feet, unsteady—putting a hand on Kai’s shoulder to anchor himself and letting his very presence speak for him.

“He’s
mine,
” Regan said, and her touch on the land came through to Kai as firmer, calmer—and tasting of his own lynx, as if she’d drawn on that, too. “And I’m his, and neither of us belong to
you.
”

With some desperation, the small woman said, “Joe Ryan, if ever there was someone going dark—”

But Joe Ryan reached out to touch the side of her face and said, “This is defensive, sweetheart, not aggression. And bullying the land isn’t what I do.” He looked at Regan, wincing at the ongoing push of the lingering pain and darkness and then held Kai’s gaze. “Bullying our own people, Lyn...it isn’t what we
should
do. Even with all of this.”

“God,” she said again, pressing the fingertips of both hands against her brows—partly in pain, partly in obvious defeat. “What a
mess.
” She turned away from them, tucking herself up against her partner and welcoming the arm that came around her. “Yes. All right. We’ll work it out. Now
stop.
”

And Kai let his legs go out from beneath him as Regan released the land, turning to throw her arms around him—with Phillip’s hand on his shoulder and Laura’s hand on his arm and Mary’s hand on his back and Bill’s wheelchair humming up to close in behind.

“We belong to
us,
” Regan said, and he rested his forehead against her shoulder and let the lynx breathe in of her.

Chapter 30

“D
o you think they can find us here?” Regan lay on a blanket over flat rock, her bare skin soaking up the high altitude sensation of cool air and tingling hot sunshine. She let herself float in it, still replete with her response to Kai’s love—her body still sensitive from his fingers, still pulsing intimately from the moments she’d twined her legs around him, her heels digging into the hard curve of his low back and lean flanks, his name on her lips.

His breath gusted out, not quite so much sigh as the expression of a frown. He rolled smoothly to his feet and moved a few steps away, stretching with languid grace.

She didn’t open her eyes; she knew where he was. That he stood on the edge of the outcrop, looking out on the land from the very same place she’d stood not so long ago—the place from which she’d finally found him...and in the process, found herself.

Eventually, he said, “Now that they know of me, they can find me anywhere. They can find us.”

She took a moment to absorb the truth of that.

Not that she hadn’t known it. Joe Ryan and Lyn Maines were more than just reasonably local Southwest Sentinels. Joe Ryan spent his time in Flagstaff, Arizona, monitoring the San Francisco Mountains...
shepherding
them. As Kai did, he spoke to the land...if not its essence so much as its power flows, and on an entirely different level.

A much bigger and louder level.

It was hard for him to hear what Kai could do; it was impossible for him to perceive the Core as Kai did. But given purpose, he could and would track them down.

Whereas Lyn Maines would never lose them. Not the woman who could taste the merest hint of a Sentinel’s personal trace.

Regan wrinkled her nose under the sunshine. If there were two individuals
more
capable of tracking them down, she couldn’t imagine it.

“I guess I knew that,” she said, brushing a hand across her stomach in reminiscence of his recent touch.

“If they were going to follow us, they would be here by now.” His voice sounded distant; her mind’s eye filled in his expression—eyes half-closed, his face a thing of wild beauty, hair glinting black and the lines of his cheek and jaw strong beneath the sunshine, hard muscle strong beneath gleaming skin.

“I guess I knew that, too. I just can’t help...” Restless, she sat, wrapping her arms around upraised knees.

They’d been nonplussed, Joe Ryan and Lyn Maines—and a man named Nick Carter, who was their Southwest consul boss, and who spoke to them from Tucson through an equally bemused woman named Annorah, whose communication skills made her the hub for the entire region.

Brevis,
they called that.

Regan had a lot to learn. And so did Kai.

But it seemed that they would, for now, learn it right here.

Lyn Maines hadn’t liked it. “One
hell
of a mess,” she’d said, there in the long-distance conversation that everyone but Regan could hear—even Kai, now that he’d been found and included, had a sense of Annorah’s mind voice. “Not one but
two
of them. And one of them a fully blooded field Sentinel.”

By then, they’d all retreated to Phillip’s dojang, having delivered Bill and Mary to their home and Phillip along with them.

They’d left behind them the shaken remnants of the festival, the damaged trees and damaged vendor booths, and the festival organizers rushing to wrap things up so cleanup from the inexplicable earthquake could be tended during daylight.

They’d also left behind the poachers, who’d come rushing out of their cabin in response to the gunshot and the earthquake, loaded for bear and instantly understanding that they’d stumbled into something bigger than they were—deciding, on the spot, that they’d help with the next day’s cleanup and save their hunting for the moments when it became legal.

They’d left Miss Laura at the library, where so many of the books had fallen from the shelves—and she’d assured them that she was fine, and that reshelving the books would offer her time to absorb what she’d seen. She and Phillip and Bill and Mary had perceptibly made the decision to accept the token flash of badge from Lyn and Joe, leaving questions unspoken.

To Regan’s surprise, they’d left Arshun in the care of his men—such as remained. “We each police our own,” Joe had said simply. They’d retrieved the hidden cartridges and headed out with the gun and its invaluable ammunition in hand.

At the dojang, things hadn’t gone so smoothly. “A hell of a mess,” Lyn Maines muttered, pacing the padded floor with all the energy Regan didn’t have. She’d stabbed a sharp look at Kai, and by now Regan knew to expect that from her. “You need training. It’s not optional. You need protection while you get that training. You need to be in the field—a Sentinel who can trace the silent amulets! Do you even know how many lives you could have saved over the past eighteen months? Do you even know what’s been
happening
with us over that time?”

Kai—exhausted and hurting and reeling—had said nothing.

Regan understood, better than Lyn Maines, better than Joe Ryan, that he had gone to a place within himself where he was likely to say nothing.

Joe sat on one of the spectator benches, elbows propped over his knees, wrists relaxed.
All
of him relaxed, for that matter. Easygoing, even in the middle of it all. “Lyn,” he said, “we all have reasons for the secrets we hide.”

That had brought her up short—but not without a scowl aimed his way.

“He’s got to have training,” Joe agreed. “
She’s
got to have training. But this isn’t one of those times when being a hard-ass is going to work.” At her narrowed eyes, he smiled—just there, around his eyes—and added, “As much as I love the ass in question.”

“Not,” she ground out, “appropriate.”

But Regan found herself smiling for the first time, and Joe had seen it and nodded and said, “Don’t worry. We can see how it is. We’ll make it work.”

A funny, wistful look crossed Lyn’s face. “They do love him here,” she said, looking at Kai. “They have no idea what just happened, and if I have anything to say about it, they never will...but...”

They do love him,
Regan had finished for her. Just for who he was. And so did she.

In the two days since, while Regan and Kai reassured Frank Adler and holed up at the cabin and healed, the Sentinels had done little more than leave updates on Regan’s voice mail—brief words concerning the arrangements being made, the discussions of the incoming tutor...their attempts to locate Kai’s family, who no longer had any reason to hide.

Regan thought she’d meet them soon. And she could only hope she passed muster, because she wasn’t going anywhere. Sentinels aside, her life had changed irrevocably; she could never leave this land again.

She never wanted to.

She took a deep breath of the pine-scented air, lifting her head to focus on the here and now. Kai still stood where he’d been, his head slightly turned in response to her—the sun gilding his naked back, his stance everything that was primal and wild and
other.

“I’m going to paint you like this,” Regan said without even thinking. Her painting would go on—so would her career. Maybe it would even take a turn for the better, given this new inspiration. “Big, broad strokes, all insinuation and implication. Wild. Like you.”

He turned his head a little bit more, sharing his smile. “I think it’s time to go down,” he said. “To them. To see what happens next.”

She rose to her feet—never as graceful as he was, but comfortable in her nudity, comfortable with the woods, comfortable with him. “All right,” she said, sliding her arms around his waist, pressing up against his warmth. “Let’s go, then. Together.”

The lynx purred.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from ONE NIGHT WITH THE SHIFTER by Theresa Meyers.

We hope you enjoyed this Harlequin Nocturne story.

You harbor otherworldly desires….
Harlequin Nocturne
stories delve into dark, sensuous and often dangerous territory, where the normal and paranormal collide.