Doranna Durgin - Sentinels - Lynx Destiny

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.”