Sentinels: Lynx Destiny

He looked down on it. “Yes,” he said distantly. “But it’s not that bad.”

She glared at him. “One stupid man thing after another. You’re losing all the points you earned this morning, Kai Faulkes. Did you or did you not almost just pass out?”

He seemed to come back to himself. “Stupid man thing?” he said, and not without humor.

“Don’t even try to change the subject. Yes, stupid man thing—refusing to see a doctor, checking me out behind my back, pretending you’re not really hurt.”

“Regan,” he said, “just because a bullet made that scrape doesn’t—” But he stopped, and his gaze jerked back out to the mountain—back toward home. For the briefest moment his jaw tightened; his nostrils flared. When he spoke, it sounded like more of an effort to keep his voice even, and she would have given anything to understand where his thoughts had gone. “That doesn’t make it worse than it really is.”

With reluctance, she had to concede that point. It had been a deep gouge and ugly, but she’d done as much to herself in childhood falling out of a tree. She released his arm—noting with some absent part of her mind that he’d given it to her without resistance, that he’d allowed her to keep it.

She thought perhaps that particular surrender had been a gift on his part.

Now she didn’t wait for him to take the damned jacket—she pressed it into his hand. “Fine,” she said. “But humor me. Don’t drive yourself home—let me take you.”

“I walked,” he informed her. “And Greg Harris picked me up on the way.”

She wanted to give herself a head slap. “Of course you walked,” she muttered, and then glared at him more directly. “And now you’re going to ride back with me.”

He hesitated, standing there atop one of the library terracing boulders as though it had been made for his personal use. Regan slid down from the one on which she’d been standing, and held out her hand for him to follow. He said, “This would be another stupid man thing.”

She couldn’t help the smile that twitched the corner of her mouth. “Right. If you don’t come.”

He sighed in another obvious surrender, and joined her on the road—no sidewalks here—and even gently slid his hand into hers, so they walked together toward the old hotel and its boardwalk shops. And if once she thought he faltered—and if shortly after that she felt that deep, grating perception of something else’s pain, neither of them spoke of it.

At least, not out loud.

You can’t have me, Regan told that voice in her head. You will never, ever have me!

Even if it meant forever leaving behind this world that had once been hers.

Chapter 7

Kai woke the next morning with the feel of Regan’s hand lingering in his and his head full of cotton. His arm ached sharply, which still took him by surprise. But after drawing water from the hand-bored well at the back of the dugout and scrubbing himself down, he flipped the hair out of his eyes and looked at the inflamed wound. Significant injuries healed preternaturally fast—but only to a point. Such healing exacted its own price, and his body knew when it wasn’t worth the trade-off.

Like now.

He glopped on the herbal unguent—prickly pear, sage, and juniper in bear grease and jojoba—that he’d learned to make in his family’s first days here, and wrapped the arm with cotton, tying it off with split ends and the help of his teeth. After that came Regan’s second bandanna, the one she’d left in his jacket.

Simply because he wanted to wear it. And because he thought she’d like to see it.

Not that he had any true clue what women liked or wanted. Only instinct, and a day with the lady Sentinel who had brought him through initiation at the age of fifteen.

You’re strong, she’d said. You’re unrelentingly lynx. You really need more time than this to learn control or you’ll end up hurting someone. Be careful. Never forget.

As if he could.

And then she’d left...and shortly after that, his family had followed.

His gaze strayed to his father’s unopened letter. Some small part of him cursed himself as a coward, but the lynx knew differently. The lynx lived in a world where things came in their own time—where Kai did what was necessary, when it was necessary.

Yesterday, ghosting along the mountain ridge from Regan’s driveway, he’d been distracted and ill. He’d slipped into this home, shed his clothes and rolled up in the nest of a bed to sleep hard and right on through the night.

This morning, the home set to rights and a breakfast of dried fruit behind him, he’d go see if he could make sense of what had happened the day before—heading for the dry pool with the letter tucked away for a later moment.

He should have known Regan would be there and on the same mission.

Maybe some part of him did. For he’d dressed not only in breechclout and leggings—the all-natural materials that would shift with him if he took the lynx—but had also covered his torso with the loose, long-tailed cotton shirt sewn to pioneer patterns and belted with flat, plain leather. He approached the dry pool as a gliding lynx, but Regan—when she finally realized he was there—found only the fully clothed human.

She wore work jeans that fit loosely enough for active movement and yet somehow rode across her hips in the perfect spot to draw his eye—to make his heart beat just a little bit faster, before he even knew he’d responded to the sight of her at all. Her shirt was red again—red with a field of tiny blue flowers—and it only brought out the bright gold of her braid, the pleasant flush of exertion across fair skin. In her hand she held not the walking stick, but a shotgun.

“Kai,” she said, as if seeing him here had been inevitable.

As maybe it had. Given her deep connection to this land, whether she understood and acknowledged it or not.

She said, “You left that handgun at my place.”

“I have no use for it.” He’d carried it as far as her house and left it there with the vague thought that it was a thing of the human world; it did not belong in his. Now, if he couldn’t find what he needed here, he might ask to see it again.

She sat on the throne of roots that had served her so well the day before and looked down on the dry pool, laying the shotgun across her knees. “I guess I had to come make sure they hadn’t come back. Or to clean up after their mess if they had.”

“You would have felt it if they’d come back,” he told her, easing around the base of the pool until the butt of the shotgun, not the muzzle, pointed his way.

She didn’t fail to notice. “Nothing in the chamber,” she said. “You think my dad let me grow up with a long gun in the house, and no gun safety?”

“I think every gun is loaded,” Kai said—not speaking from the perspective of a Sentinel who’d been shot by a Core minion the day before, or from that of a human who’d also been taught gun safety on the way to adulthood, but from the perspective of a lynx who never assumed on the safety of his skin in the woods.

But Regan winced, and he knew she’d taken it the obvious way. The day before way. “How’s your arm?”

“Healing,” he said. He crouched by the side of the dry pool, letting his splayed fingers push through crackling leaves to feel the faint dampness below—moisture left from the spring melt. He let his awareness filter outward, a whisper of a question.

He pretended not to notice when Regan stiffened, lifting her head—searching for what she’d heard without quite understanding from where it came.

“Here,” he murmured, and lifted his head in invitation.

She frowned, not quite certain. He gestured again, and she set the shotgun aside, sliding off the roots to land at the edge of the dry pool.

Kai beckoned her closer and nodded at his hand. “Like this.”

She crouched beside him, slowly imitating his reach for the land—stiff and wary and closed away.

Not from him—Kai understood that right away. From fear of hearing again that faint whisper.

But it wasn’t something to fear. It was something to celebrate. It was something to breathe in and exhale and feel alive about.

He eased closer, his arm reaching out beside hers, his hand covering hers, his fingers gently reaching between hers to touch the ground. “Easy,” he said. “Quiet.” He brushed his thumb over her hand, soothing her.

“What—” she said, her voice at normal volume—and then cut herself off, chagrined. When she spoke again, she did so quietly. “What are we doing?”

“Listening,” he told her.

“Why? To what?”

“Shh,” he said, close to her ear and barely putting sound behind the words. “To learn.”

“I don’t—”

“Shh. Learn.” He stroked her hand with his thumb again, and went back to the land.

Gentle burble of precious water soaking deep, feeding roots, damping ground. Hints of icy cold below, the touch of warmth above. The great, thrumming heartbeat of networked life, scampering little nails...the crunch of a seed, the hull left behind...

And the dark blot of the spot that felt nothing at all. Cold metal, a whiff of corruption—

Hurts...

Regan’s hand jerked beneath his.

“Shh,” he said, coming back to himself. “You’re safe. You’re...” He trailed off, suddenly aware that his head tipped forward against hers, that her pale gold hair tickled his face and the beguiling scent of it tickled his nose. His hand had slipped around her waist to press across her stomach, now suddenly aware of the flutter in her breathing. “Regan,” he murmured and nuzzled behind her ear.

“Not,” she whispered, freezing under his touch. “Not safe at all.” And she turned in his arms, her hand coming up to cup his cheek. He leaned into it as she leaned into him, mouth closing in on his.

Instantly, he tugged her closer, bringing them together so she suddenly straddled his thigh; she gasped into his mouth and twined her fingers through his hair, holding him so she could tilt her head to touch his lips with her tongue, a flirt that led to ferocity and his shudder of response.

He hadn’t planned to tuck one hand under the firm muscle of her bottom and tip her so she could have received him, but his body made that choice for him. He hadn’t planned to tumble over on his back so she sprawled across him—but she made that choice for him, levering him over and freeing herself to roam her touch across his chest and down his ribs and right down to rest where he strained for her. He pushed against her, and his eyes rolled back as sweet, fiery warmth gathered deep within him, beckoning a growl from his throat.

He flipped them around, his hand cushioning her head before it could hit the ground. He stalked her from there, showing tooth and showing prowl and showing the power of the lynx. Her eyes widened and her hands stilled, and suddenly they were two people aware of themselves again, breath gusting against each other’s faces and bodies trembling.

“Oh,” Regan said, as taken aback as Kai felt. “My.”

Remorse hit him—and concern. The sudden awareness that he’d let the lynx in—that he’d been just exactly what he could never be.

But she wouldn’t understand that, either—so he made himself grin, easing back to give her space as he struggled with the fact that in spite of the remorse, in spite of the concern...there was no regret. Only a kind of glory in how much he’d wanted this woman.

He couldn’t reconcile the two.

Regan gave her shirt a futile tug, twisting it back into place. “This is the part where I say I’m not this kind of girl,” she told him, brushing a stick from her hair. “And that I’ve never done this before.”

“This?”

She looked slightly taken aback. “You’re not following the script. Now you say ‘Yeah, yeah, we shouldn’t have done that.’”

He removed a final twig, caught just behind her ear. “Why would I do that?”

Because he didn’t regret a moment of it. What he’d let slip through to her, yes. What they’d done, no.

After a moment, she snorted gently. “Right,” she said. “Why would you? Truth is, I’ve done this plenty. But never just like this.”

Kai wasn’t sure how to untangle that one. “I don’t really understand.”

He understood one thing well enough: never—ever—had he felt what Regan brought out in him. Not as a teen; not in his early years alone. Not when brazen female tourists brushed against him on the town boardwalk, or when the hunters’ lonely wives opened their blouses down one more button.

Not when the Sentinel woman quietly hired for his initiation took him for the first time, unlocking all that was lynx within him—and then stayed for days, teaching him control, teaching him responsibility...teaching him how to please. Mia, staying for an extra several days to do the impossible—trying to show him everything she thought an isolated youth should know about being a man, and about being a man with a Sentinel’s strength.

But not how to love. Now he sat with Regan in the dry pool and caught his breath, his body stuck in relentless and unfamiliar turmoil. This was response; this was pure physical yearning. It was beyond anything he’d learned with that fleeting encounter.

It just possibly was everything she’d ever warned him against.

* * *

Of course Kai didn’t understand. Of course Regan would have to spell it out.

Or else pretend she hadn’t heard him.

But looking at Kai’s lightly furrowed brow, she could hardly do that to him. And still trembling as she was from his touch, she could hardly do it to herself.

“Like this,” she said, “means that I’m feeling overwhelmed. There’s a difference between kissing a guy I’ve only recently met and...what just happened. How much it happened.”

He watched her with a quiet intensity that made her want to squirm away—even as her body cried, Yes! That’s what I want! He asked, with more caution than she expected, “Is that good or bad?”

“It means I don’t know what to do.” She shook her head, climbing to her feet. “You are a strange man, Kai Faulkes.”

He lifted one shoulder in what looked like concession, still sitting—more comfortably now, she thought—as he drew his knees up, hung his arms around them and looked up at her. “About yesterday,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Yesterday. At the library, when she’d been so busy enjoying being with him that his prying had felt like a slap. “It was nosy.”

“Maybe. But it’s important.”

She gave him a cross look. It seemed altogether unfair that this gorgeous and entirely out-of-place man could stir her up so when she had so many other things to think about. “I don’t see how it could possibly be important.”

“Because it’s still with you. Because there is a thing between the two of us, and I want—” He shook his head, looking at a frustrated loss for words.

She knew the feeling. “That’s no excuse.”

He didn’t argue it. “You felt it, too, just now.”

Yes. She had.

Much as she wanted to deny it, as much as it frightened her, she had. And there he was, watching her...and understanding. Comfortable with it, comfortable with himself. Comfortable here.

Not out of place at all. More in place than anyone she’d ever known. Including herself.

Regan knew she should run from this man. She knew he wouldn’t stop pushing. Or asking.

She knew she didn’t want to answer.

Only moments since that kiss—that encounter—and she sat back up on the roots, looking over the dry pool. Looking at Kai.

He crouched, one knee to the ground and his fingers pushed against the silty, packed soil, just as he’d knelt beside her—around her—but in a different location. Triangulating.

What and how—that, she didn’t want to know. She let herself watch, and let her mind roam.

He remained motionless—his eyes closed and head slightly tilted—for so long that when he finally stood, she came to sharp attention. He took three certain steps into the rock-strewn detritus and bent to prod the ground.

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