Sentinels: Lynx Destiny

He took a step closer and she lost her words—she lost her glare, too, her eyes widening with belated understanding. By the time he cupped one hand behind her neck and bent to kiss her, she’d pretty much lost everything but the sense of him standing so close. Clean sweat and strength and the sweet tang of blood—it surrounded her. His mouth was warm and firm on hers, and his hand full of gentle strength behind her head, her body full of quickly rising heat. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the deepest of purrs resonated with satisfaction.

When he took a distinct bite at her lower lip and withdrew, she followed—until she realized suddenly that her lungs burned for air. She pulled back to fill them deeply, staring at him with utter loss to define what had just happened here—from the moment she’d found herself drawn to this dry pool, to the moment she’d so completely given herself to the touch of a stranger.

A stranger who had just fought off three goons and a gun, taking them down with a casual, violent competence. Taking them down with remorseless intent, his every move one of feral potency.

A stranger who stared back at her from a darkened blue gaze and now looked every bit as stunned as she felt.

Chapter 4

The fight had left him less staggered. Being shot had left him less staggered.

Kai Faulkes, thirty years old and never been kissed.

Never like that.

He made himself step back, made his expression rueful and his body still. Because he’d never known such want, and he’d never taken such liberties, and he didn’t begin to trust himself not to take more. He knew not to trust himself—not to trust the lynx that rode so close to the surface.

He’d been warned hard enough.

Regan touched her mouth, her cheeks full of flush, her brows drawn together in a faint frown. “I—” she started, while he was still far from able to find words. “You—” She started again, and then shook her head, impatient with her own struggle. Then she shook herself off, pushing a wayward strand of gold away from her face. “Later,” she said. “I’ll deal with that kiss later. Right now, I’ve got too many questions.”

For this, he met her gaze without flinching; he found words. “I might not answer them.”

“We’ll see about that.” But she scowled suddenly and turned to glare up the hill. “Will you just be quiet?”

He hadn’t heard it—not with his body still immersed in the feel of soft hair beneath his hand and soft lips beneath his mouth—but he understood. She’d heard some mutter from the land, some reverberation of what had happened here. And she not only didn’t understand...it distressed her.

She turned back to him with the conflict of it on her features. “Oh—damn! I didn’t mean you.”

“It’s all right.” But he left it at that, because he didn’t know how to explain his own connections, his own nature, to the first person who might possibly understand.

It wasn’t something he’d ever done before.

Guard yourself. Guard others against who you are.

Lessons once impressed hard on a vulnerable youth soon to be on his own.

Her obvious chagrin at reacting to the land passed, submerged in everything else that had happened here. “That needs care,” she said, latching onto the most obvious need—looking at where the Core bullet had furrowed along the curve of his biceps.

But the arm would wait; it would heal faster than she could imagine. Other things wouldn’t wait at all. For he needed to sweep through this area and make sure Marat had truly gone. No matter what his family had told him about staying out of sight—about what the Core would do if they ever learned of him.

They cannot suffer you to live, his father had said, his arm around his mother’s shoulders, his younger sister, Holly, lingering at his mother’s side, sniffling and confused—their things packed as they prepared to leave him. Never forget.

He hadn’t forgotten. But he was the only one here. The only one who knew the Core had finally infiltrated this remote and pristine area.

“Kai,” Regan said, aiming a pale blue gaze his way with intent, regaining some of her composure—but not without the hint of remaining uncertainty.

Self-retribution slapped home. This woman wasn’t Sentinel; she wasn’t lynx. She wasn’t born to be a protector. She’d been threatened and she’d fought back—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still frightened.

She didn’t need to walk back to the cabin alone.

She lifted one honey-gold brow, striking a note of asperity. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re bleeding everywhere.”

It would stop soon. He’d been hot, his system in high gear from the change. Already he’d cooled down, his injury throbbing sharply. Healing quickly didn’t mean not hurting.

Sometimes, he thought, it meant the opposite.

“I’ll come,” he told her. “But first I need to make sure they haven’t left anything behind.”

She climbed up the slope just far enough to reach the root and rock upon which she’d originally taken her stand and sat there, long legs thrust over the side, heels digging into the dirt.

“All right, then,” she said, grasping for an equanimity she couldn’t quite pull off. “But if you faint from blood loss, I’m going to find my phone—” she glanced around, already looking “—and find a signal and call for help. That’ll mean cops and an ambulance ride down the mountain to Alamogordo and the nearest hospital. And somehow I get the feeling that’s exactly what you’re trying to avoid.”

And Kai said nothing. Because Regan Adler saw—and heard—a lot more than she wanted to admit.

Even to herself.

* * *

Regan rested the walking stick against the porch railing, breathing a sigh of relief to realize she’d regained her internal balance on the way home. She was here—she was safe. The encounter in the woods was already fading, tinged with the absurdity of it all, diminished by the physical memory of Kai’s touch still tingling at her mouth, at her nape, at every single spot he’d so much as breathed on.

“So,” she said, as if it had been a casual hike on an average day, “what’s with the breechclout anyway?”

She turned to look at Kai and discovered him no longer just behind her. Discovered him, in fact, at the edge of the woods—waiting in patience and silence, as seemed to be his norm.

Discovered, too, that Bob the Dog had risen to his feet, his hackles a stiff brush down his spine and over his rump. Since when did Bob have hackles on his rump? And though he stared at Kai as he might assess any intruder, she saw no true challenge there—just concern and puzzlement. “What’s up with you?”

His low tail wagged once in acknowledgment, but he didn’t look at her. He didn’t turn his massive head from Kai’s direction, his nostrils twitching as he lifted his head slightly, hunting scent.

“It’s fine,” Kai said. “He’s figuring me out.”

“What’s there to figure? Bob, he’s a guest. Deal with it.”

Kai shook his head. “He’s probably scented me around. He needs to put the pieces together.”

Suddenly Regan understood. “Good grief—Bob, you’re afraid of him!” The hackles weren’t a threat...they were a sign of fear.

“Cautious,” Kai said, by way of both agreement and correction. And he sat, cross-legged, in the straggly grass of the clearing.

Regan reached for the door. “You two figure things out. I’ll be back in a moment.” She headed inside—and though she hadn’t locked the door that morning anymore than they ever locked the door in this remote place, she wondered if that had been a mistake.

She found herself glancing around the cozy living area, checking that the shotgun leaned where she’d left it, that the papers on her father’s desk had gone undisturbed, that the catchall drawers in the little dresser hadn’t been left ajar. And she thought not of the morning as she did it, but of the Realtor from the day before.

Huh.

It didn’t stop her from moving briskly through the house to the bathroom, where she rummaged through the built-in cabinet for first-aid supplies. She pushed aside the earthy ceramic teapot and set bottles and bandages on the tiny, wooden kitchen table before she went to the sink, washing up while she peered out the biggest window in the back of the house to spot the horse in the paddock.

He heard her and called out a suggestion of carrots, completely unconcerned with the oddities this day had wrought so far. Regan toweled her hands dry with a smile and returned to the porch.

She found Bob half in Kai’s lap, leaning that big head against Kai’s bare chest and...

Crooning.

Kai rubbed the dog’s ear with an expert hand, eliciting a moan of canine delight. “Either they love me or they won’t get near me.”

“Well,” she muttered, “he loves that old cat, too.”

And Kai smiled and patted the dog. He pushed to his feet, replete in his breechclout and buckskins, and stood there looking more wild and more masculine than Regan would have thought possible.

Mine...

She started at that—the insidious murmur in her head, offering not just the intrusive, but the unexpected. How did that make sense?

No more sense than the way he’d kissed her—or the way she’d kissed him back, this man she barely knew. Or that she’d responded to his touch as if she’d been waiting for it.

“Regan?”

She spoke a little more abruptly than she’d meant to. “Come inside. Let’s get you cleaned up.” And led the way.

He entered more warily than she expected, hesitating at the door just long enough so she looked back with impatience—and then, once inside, looking as though he might just step out again. His gaze flicked around the room to absorb the homey space, the unpretentious and utilitarian nature of her father’s small desk, the little chest of drawers, the couch and the small television. His expression lit up at the sight of the bookshelves that held not only books, but her mother’s ceramics, and the stark, engaging nature of his features reminded her all over again that he’d reached for her in the woods.

She squirmed away from the thought. She wasn’t ready for that honesty. She still had too many things to hide. From him...from herself.

“In the kitchen,” she told him, and watched while he again hesitated in the doorway, his gaze skimming the appliances, lingering at the window and finally landing on the barely big-enough-for-one table. There’d been more activity here during her childhood—a busy kitchen, cozy with the scents of homemade bread and baking casseroles, freshly washed canning jars gleaming in neat rows on the table....

When her mother was still alive.

Regan pulled ice water from the refrigerator and poured them tall mugs—also from her mother’s pottery throwing wheel—without asking if he wanted it. This might be a high desert with melting snowpack and tall trees and even dew, but it was still the desert. One offered water; one drank it.

Kai took the mug without hesitation, his throat moving and water gleaming at the corner of his mouth. Regan sipped, her gaze drawn again to the play of muscle over his chest and arms, still amazed at the definition there, the casually loose rest of his belt over hips and obliques. Up close—and with the time to think about it—she could see that the breechclout was of a soft, woven cloth, darker brown than the leggings and carefully edged. Buckskin leggings tied off to the belt, leaving a generous portion of his thighs free to the air.

Right.

“Seriously,” she said, clearing her throat as she turned away to the sink. She ran water over a clean washcloth and wrung it out. “What’s with the getup?”

“I didn’t expect to see anyone today.” Kai set the mug aside on the table, wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.

She gestured at the old wooden chair, trying to decide if he’d been deliberately evasive or simply offered the best truth he had. He sat, unaccountably awkward for a moment, and rested his elbow on the table to offer her access to the arm.

“Right,” she said. “But, you know...why ever?”

He sat silent for a moment, while she smoothed the cloth over the dried blood, dribbling water over the deep gouge in his biceps to soften the clotted areas. Finally, he shrugged. “It suits me.”

Yes. Yes, it suits you very well indeed.

He eyed her, absorbing the curiosity she couldn’t hide, ignoring the press of washcloth over raw flesh to soften dried blood. “You have questions.”

“I definitely have questions.” She pulled the cloth away, and this time he winced. “Ugh,” she said, looking at the ugliness of the wound.

“I heal quickly,” he told her again, but she saw a certain tension in his jaw, and she moved more quickly— flushing the wound, disinfecting it...slathering it with antibiotic ointment.

Rather than wrap an absurd amount of tape over the gauze pads she pressed over the ointment, she produced a faded red bandanna and snugged it around his arm, tying off the corners in a tight and tiny knot. “There,” she said, sitting down opposite him, and didn’t think she imagined his relief.

He might feel differently once she’d fired off her questions.

And she had plenty. “Who were those men? How did you know them? What did Marat mean when he talked about your family? Where is your family? Where do you live? What do you do?”

The gauze packaging sat between them, crumpled and crisp. He rolled the pieces in his fingers, tumbled them onto the table like dice, and flicked them absently from one hand to the other and back again. “I thought,” he said, glancing up at her and then back to the packaging, “you might ask why I kissed you like that.”

She flushed, an instant reaction—not flustered, not regret, but pure visceral reaction. It put a certain amount of self-aware humor into her words. “I’m pretty sure I know why you kissed me like that.” She put a hand over his, stopping the motion—surprising him, as if he hadn’t quite realized he’d been playing with the crackling paper in the first place. “I’ll go so far as to say that if we keep running into each other, it’s probably going to happen again.”

The look he gave her then—all his attention, all his intensity—pretty much melted her to the chair. She managed to say, “But that doesn’t answer any of my questions.”

He held her gaze just as captive as she still held his hand. “I don’t know those men. I do know what they were doing. I live nearby. I don’t do—I am. But people hire me to guide them. Hikers and sometimes hunters. Bow hunters.”

Regan jerked her hand away and sat back, crossing her arms. “That’s the biggest bunch of nonanswers I’ve ever heard.”

It didn’t seem to ruffle him. “Why have you come back?” he asked. “Where has your father gone? What do you do? What happened to your family years ago, and what drove you away from this place? Who are you talking to when you hold your head just so and look far away in your eyes?”

Bull’s-eye. The questions hit harder than she expected they could—maybe because of her instant impulse to respond to this complete stranger with whom she’d fought, who she’d kissed, and whose bloody arm she’d just tended. I left because my mother went mad here and I thought it was happening to me. And now that I’m back, I’m pretty sure that it is.

Wisdom overrode impulse. She huffed out a breath, and chose the only easy answer. “I paint,” she said. “I draw. I illustrate regional wildlife guides and publications.” She looked at her hands and abruptly stood to scoop up the detritus of her first-aid work, including the scraps with which he’d been playing. “Okay, I get it. Sometimes the big picture is too big. But those men...” She shook her head, rinsing the washcloth at the sink and watching the red tint of the water swirl down the drain. “I guess I’ll call the cops. Or the rangers. Or both.”

He stood with a scrape of chair, coming up behind her at the sink. For an instant she held her breath, waiting to feel his hands on her waist or shoulders. And then tried to squash her disappointment when it didn’t happen— because really, what was she thinking?

This man was dangerous in all ways. It struck her anew, clear in her mind’s eye—how he’d moved, how he’d fought—not just capable, but entirely amazing, using his body with a stunning effectiveness. Moving like she hadn’t known any man—any human—could. Not in real life.

Somehow she wasn’t surprised when he responded to her intent to report the men with a simple, “I wish you wouldn’t.” Not when he’d already declined help for a wound that would have sent her mewling to the closest urgent care center.

She realized the water still trickled over her hands and twisted the faucet with annoyed force—one did not waste water here. “Those men are dangerous,” she said sharply. “They threatened me, and they meant it. And they shot at you! Over a little bit of trash!”

“They shot at me because they fear me,” Kai said, and added in a low afterthought, “As they should.” Then, as she took a breath to argue, his hand finally settled on her shoulder. “The police will find nothing in that spot. They will find nothing of those men anywhere.” His hand squeezed gently. She supposed it was reassurance.

She didn’t feel reassurance.

Or if she did, it was entirely tangled up in other things.

Fear. Disbelief. Response. And somewhere, a whisper deep in her mind—one that came from without, and purred with possession and pride.

The whisper believed in this man.

Regan had no idea if that was a good thing.

Kai said, “They will not return to that spot. And they will not come here.”

She turned to him. She should have known he wouldn’t step away—that he still stood just that close to her, although his hand trailed down her arm to catch her hand. “And how, exactly, can you be so sure of that?”

He toyed briefly with her fingers, tracing them, running his thumb across her knuckles—touching her, until she suddenly realized he played with them just as he’d played with the crumpled paper—naturally and utterly without awareness. Her bemusement at it left her completely unprepared for his words.

“Because,” he said, “now they will come for me.”

Chapter 5

Regan hadn’t been convinced.

Kai knew as much, moving along the mountain on broad paws—pausing to inspect the dry pool, his head reeling with the intensity of the energies that had been released there, corrupting the ground, the air...the very essence of the land.

He knew she was right, too, about calling the police. From her point of view, it was the only response to dangerous and inexplicable behavior; he could still hear the impact of her incredulous words. They shot at you!

They had. But worse, they’d gone for her, too. Rather than quietly disengaging and returning to do their work another day, the men had defied the one single principle shared by both Sentinels and Core—that above all, they would bring no outside attention to themselves.

Not that he truly called himself Sentinel. He had not lied to them about that. He might have the blood, but he had no affiliation. No connections. No way even to get in touch.

The voice of the land stirred uneasily in his mind, as aware of the incursion as he, in its way.

Now they will come for me.

And they would. But they still didn’t truly know what he was—that they couldn’t hide from him, no matter how quietly they moved. That the merest whisper of a Core working would reverberate through his senses, alerting him.

If they knew, they would never suffer him to live, no matter that the ostensible détente between the two factions forbade such killing.

Kai left the dry pool to wend his way home, slipping into the subterranean structure he called home. More than a bunker, less than a house, it backed up to a tight cave system into which he rarely ventured. Once it had housed his family; now it was his alone—a strange dwelling of pioneer ways and modern innovations, of human needs and lynx habits.

So he walked barefoot past the scuffed hollow near the entrance where he napped when a lynx, and onto the barely raised wood-plank floor, grabbing a pair of clean jeans from a molded, military-grade footlocker and a plain dark blue T-shirt to layer over them. He stuffed socks into a pair of lightweight Merrell hiking boots and snagged a thin khaki jacket with a slim fit and an urban look to layer over the T-shirt.

Camouflage for a lynx in the human world.

After dressing, he walked still barefoot to the road, satchel over his shoulder, and struck out along the narrow shoulder until Greg Harris pulled his old pickup over to offer a ride.

It hadn’t always been like that. He’d walked the full distance to town many a time—but they’d grown used to him here and trusted him; they’d understood him to be safe if strange. Whether they saw him as a rugged individual or a crazy hermit, he wasn’t sure.... He suspected a little of both. And if they’d made a game of trying to figure out exactly where he lived, it was a gentle game that meant no harm. He was far from the only recluse in this area.

Greg Harris made small talk about his sheep and his orchards, offered the obligatory comments about the weather, the upcoming Apple Blossom Festival and the likelihood of a good season after the winter’s snowpack, then dropped Kai off in the center of Cloudview. With tourist season around the corner and a beautiful spring day of bright sky and brisk air, the entire town seemed to be out putting a shine on windows, trimming back brush and fixing the little things that always gave way before winter ended.

Kai had come into Cloudview for the library, another half mile and one steep hill away. But if he didn’t stop by the general store—an eclectic collection of goods housed inside an old barn—then they’d give him affectionate grief the next time he did.

“Kai!” said the stout woman behind the cash register, all gray frizzy curls and stumpy features in a padded face. “Hey, you guys! Kai crawled out of the woods today!”

“How’s business?” he asked her, having learned the safest ways not to talk about himself.

She snorted, waving a pudgy hand in a broad gesture. “What you’d expect this time of year. We should get ’em in soon, though. The valleys are already heating up. Hey, we just got in a big batch of that dried fruit you like.”

He held out his satchel in query. Mary Wells knew his ways—and she knew the question.

She nodded. “Fill it up then, Mr. Granola. We’ll get your tab started.”

He grinned at her. “The hunters kept me busy. I’ll pay my way.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You just be sure to keep some set aside. You can’t live day-to-day forever.”

Mary’s husband, Bill, made a throat-grumbling noise from where he and his wheelchair currently occupied the back corner of the store, a lap desk spread with papers and a calculator. “Don’t mother the man to death!”

“Someone needs to,” she said with sharp asperity. “Especially if he’s going to go around bleeding through his jacket like that.”

But for the cant of his numb legs beneath the desk, Bill looked the part of a hale mountain man—more so than Kai ever had. Grizzled hair, grizzled beard in need of shaping, grizzled voice and hardworking hands. He gave Kai his own sharp look, then relaxed. “Long way from the heart,” he said. “Ain’t that the truth, son?”

Kai twisted his arm for a look, surprised. As he’d told Regan, Sentinels healed quickly as a matter of course—far too quickly to pass off as normal. He’d accepted her bandaging in part so he could leave it in place, obscuring the fact that he no longer needed it at all. Now, looking at the spreading stain, he admitted, “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Pull that jacket off,” Mary said. “Leave it with me while you’re in town and I’ll get it clean. Otherwise you’ll be too long getting around to it, and a perfectly good jacket will go to ruin.”

Kai hesitated, glancing out into the sunshine of the crisp day.

“Better do as she says, son,” Bill advised him. “That sun will keep you warm until you’re ready to go back to your woods. And you are going to the library, I take it?”