Doranna Durgin - Sentinels - Lynx Destiny

“I’m here because this is a place that I come.” Kai set the book aside and lifted his arms in a startling stretch, one that took her by surprise both because of its casual nature in the middle of a conversation suddenly turned tense, and because of its utter unself-conscious completeness. His chest expanded; his shirt lifted, revealing a narrow line of unexpectedly pale, crisp hair. When he finally lowered his arms and tugged his shirt back into place, he looked at her. “And I got distracted by your paintings.”

Somewhat savagely, she stuffed her father’s bandanna back into the jacket pocket. “What does it matter what happened to my mother?”

Kai made as though to lean back on his arms, winced, and stayed as he’d been. “It matters to you,” he observed. “Maybe it matters to others.”

She snorted and abruptly got to her feet, shedding his jacket along the way and holding it out to him. “That’s no answer at all.”

“It’s an honest answer,” he told her, scooping up the book and rising in one fluid motion that somehow didn’t involve uncrossing his legs until he was already up. “It’s just not the one you wanted to hear.”

She found herself full of glare and bereft of words—of sensible words. So she held her silence and held the jacket out to him again.

“Just a minute,” he said as if she wasn’t angry at all. Perfectly civilized, this version of Kai Faulkes, as he jogged to the library, briefly disappeared inside and reemerged to join her again. “No ID,” he said upon returning. “No library card. Sometimes Miss Laura uses her own card for me, but I try not to ask too often.”

The enigma of Kai. She told herself she didn’t care, and tried to believe it. She had a righteous anger, by golly, and she wasn’t through with it.

“Take the damned jacket,” she said, holding it out a third time. “I’ve got work to do at home. I need to go.” She’d intended to stay longer—to nose around further. To reacquaint herself with the town and look harder for Arshun’s realty offices. But now she thought she’d call her father first.

Her father, who had known of Kai and not warned her.

Kai might have taken the garment, if he hadn’t stumbled—if he hadn’t nearly gone down, no warning of it on his face and none of his usual lethal grace in his staggering attempt to catch himself.

Regan caught him instead—a quick step, a shift of her hip against his, and it was enough so he found himself again, looking vague and baffled beneath the strain. Before he could object, she reached across his body and took his wrist, tugging enough to turn him—to see what she hadn’t noticed until now. “This should have stopped bleeding hours ago.”

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.