Lynx Destiny (11 page)

“Well, I’m doing fine. Thanks for asking,” her father said drily. “So is your uncle Cal.”

“I expect you are,” Regan told him, finding her feet again—understanding that something ineffable had changed between them. That something in the past week had changed in
her.
“And we’ll get to that. Along with why you never mentioned Kai.”

In true surprise, Frank Adler said, “I didn’t think you’d ever see him.” And then his voice became more resigned than implacable. “Rae, you know what happened to her. As much as anyone does.”

Regan didn’t hesitate. “I don’t know how she died.”

He replied with silence.

“I know I was twelve years old, and she went away—and she never came back. I know
why
she went away—that she didn’t trust herself any longer and she wanted to get help. She wanted to make sure we were safe with her. I know everything was fine before I said too much to my friend Kathleen, and then she said too much to everyone else.”
And I never spoke to Kathleen again....

She hadn’t heard him sound subdued before. She heard it now. “I didn’t realize you understood so much.”

“What do you think I’ve been afraid of all this time?”

“There’s no reason to think it’ll happen to you,” Frank said sharply. “Not a single doctor thought it was something to be passed along.”

Regan took the plunge—without thinking, which was a mercy. Maybe that meant it was time. “Dad, it
did
happen to me. That’s why I left. It’s why I stayed away. And now that I’m home—”

“No!” The word came harsh with anger, torn from him.

“What,” Regan said, “happened to Mom.” No longer question, but demand.

She heard his deep intake of breath—and his capitulation. “She was hit by a car.”

It stunned her. “What? A
car?
”

“She went out of her mind once she left our mountain for the facility in Las Cruces. She talked only of returning home, of being broken. The drugs weren’t helping—they made things worse. She even agreed to electroshock therapy—but before that could happen, she escaped the facility. She was hit by a car.” He paused, gathering his thoughts...and seemed to give up. “It wasn’t the driver’s fault. She was walking down the middle of the road in the middle of the night.”

Regan whispered, “She was coming home.” It wasn’t a guess.

Frank said, “She was coming home. And so am I. There’s no way I’m leaving my little girl there to deal with this alone. I swear, Regan, I never believed this would happen. I was so sure you just needed to come home—to spend some time there, so you could see you belonged. Then it wouldn’t matter if you left again for Colorado because I’d know you always
could
come home.”

“I know,” she said, and they weren’t empty words. She did know—she heard it in the misery of his voice, and knew it of the man she called father. He was stubborn, generally taciturn, and to a large extent had let her finish growing up on her own, but he loved her.

And he’d adored her mother.

She shook off the sadness of the moment—the need to hug him and to reassure them both. “You couldn’t know,” she said. “I never told you, did I? That before I left...I felt the start of it. I didn’t think you needed to know. And once I left for the university, I was fine.”

She’d left early, in fact, after crunching her high school credits into three years. She’d immersed herself in her painting and she’d never looked back—because she knew she couldn’t. She admitted to him now, “It’s been so long...I really hoped...”

“Yeah,” he said heavily. “So did I.”

“How
are
you doing?” she asked. “Is the therapy helping?”

He snorted. “I went miniature golfing last night, believe it or not. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

A thread of delight found its way through the ramifications of what she’d just learned. “Then it’s helping!”

“It’s helping.”

She took a deep breath. “Then you stay right there, you hear me? I’ll work something out. Maybe Kai—”

“You
have
seen him,” Frank said, sounding surprised all over again.

“Yes, several times.”
More than.
She flushed and struggled to keep it from her voice—her sudden physical awareness of Kai and his effect on her. “He hurt himself, and I patched him up.”

“He hurt himself,” Frank said flatly, making Regan think she’d picked the wrong thing to say after all. But her father dropped it, and instead picked up the thread of the message she’d left days earlier. “Listen, Rae, you asked about this Arshun...guy.” She knew from his tone that he’d wanted to say “asshole” and had kept it clean because he was talking to his little girl. “He came around, all right, and I sent him packing.”

“No kidding,” she said, using the same flat tone he’d just used with her. “Well, I think he’s upped his game a little.”

She hadn’t had time to think about it—the satisfied sound of his voice on the phone, his complete lack of surprise that she’d been upset.

Not that it made any sense. But her initial distrust of him had turned into something stronger.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Frank demanded.
“Upped his game?”

“Nothing,” Regan said lamely. She tapped her fingers against the phone, considering Arshun. “It means he thought he could take advantage of me.”

Frank snorted.

“Exactly. And I don’t think he counted on Bob.”

“Good old Bob.” But he added, “Call Jaime Nez. Fill him in.”

The sheriff.
“I will,” Regan promised. “And I mean it. Stay there. If...if I have to go, I’ll head down the hill to Alamogordo—I won’t go far. And not without making sure things are okay here. Kai—”

Frank snorted again, and Regan hesitated, giving him room to speak his mind. “Don’t you go counting on him,” Frank said, but where Regan expected warning, she heard only concern—and she wasn’t sure it was for herself. “Sometimes you see him twice in a week, and not again for a season. He’s his own man, Rae—doesn’t need the rest of us. He’s...” The hesitation wasn’t characteristic of her father. “Not like other people.”

Regan shrugged. “Apparently, neither am I.”

* * *

Kai knew, without a doubt, that his life had again changed forever.

Not because he’d just heard from his da. Not because the Core had just arrived—and they clearly weren’t passing through.

But because of the way Regan had reached him. How deeply—how naturally. How it happened in spite of their intent...and how the land embraced her along the way.

He ran on, absorbing the rugged ground, his toes curling around rock—reaching there, leaping here. In human form now because he was too close to trails and wandering hikers to risk running blindly as lynx. And because the human could fall into a steady, loping pace that ate the miles, although Kai was no more meant for extended running than that lynx.

But he could do it. And did. Until Bob barked sharply—not as distantly as Kai thought he’d be, and his tone held a warning. Kai took the chance that Bob would recognize him and ran on. He came upon the cabin from above, glimpsing the strike of sunshine against gold.
Regan.

Finally, then, he slowed to a trot—loose-limbed and still contained, but feeling the fatigue of miles across the mountains. He grew warier, looking for the cause of Regan’s fear—whatever had pushed her to reach out across that distance and touch him, when doing so seemed to scare her as much as anything else.

Bob stood at the back of the house, tail waving in slow welcome as Kai stepped down off the mountain and came along the side of the small shedrow barn, finally getting a good look at the paddock where Regan stood beside the horse. A saddle lay in a disorganized heap outside the metal-pipe corral, and a hunter-green blanket hung over the top of one corral panel. The horse stood with his head low and his eyes half-closed, a bucket of oat-scented water in the corner and another bucket by Regan’s feet. The horse looked rode hard and put up wet—and so did Regan, her face flushed, her nose reddened and her hair in golden disarray.

“Kai!” she said, and she sounded both surprised and as if she’d expected him all along.

“Regan.” He didn’t have other words for her—hadn’t planned any. He came to a sore-footed stop beside the saddle, his lungs aching for air, his mind and body still reeling from the reverberating cry of the land—from
her.
So when the words came, they were blunt. “What happened?”

She dropped a big round sponge into the bucket and ducked between the corral’s rails to come to him—and stopped there, seeing the tremble in him. Her eyes widened, seeing what he already knew—that the greater part of his reaction came from what he’d experienced those miles ago as opposed to the obvious effort of his run. What they’d experienced
together.

“What
happened?
” It was all he could manage. Now that he’d stopped moving, he felt the heat of his body and the cool air against it, the trickle of sweat down his back. His thighs and shins burned, and a muscle flickered in and out of a cramp along his ribs.

She pressed her lips together; fresh tears shone in her eyes. “I hardly know,” she told him, and then shook her head at his instant anger. “Yes, we have to talk. But...Kai, I don’t even know where to start.” Pale blue eyes searched his for the briefest moment, then flickered away.

He saw the defeat there and caught her arms when she would have turned from him. “We start
here,
” he said. “We start
now.
”

She shook her head, but this time he saw pain rather than resistance. He released her, but only so he could touch her face, smearing away a tear with his thumb. “Here,” he repeated. “Now. Because something is happening to this forest, and it matters.”

“Something is happening,” she said quite bitterly, “to
me.
”

“And me,” Kai told her softly.

He didn’t know women. He barely knew people. But he knew instinct better than anything at all, and instinct told him that only honesty would reach her—and only honesty would serve him.

She might have felt the same. She tipped her head and eyed him more thoughtfully. “My father says not to trust you.”

The words caused a little twist of hurt; her features softened. “He says,” she told him, “that you don’t need anyone.”

“I haven’t,” Kai admitted, sticking to that truth.

“That’s why Bob didn’t know you, isn’t it? You’ve never been here before—even though it doesn’t seem as though you live all that far away.” It was true, and he knew it showed. She took a step away from him, a token distance. “Mary and Bill know you, but I bet not really. I bet they know
of
you.”

“They know me as well as anyone does,” Kai told her, not sure what that truly said of him. “And your father.”

“Here,”
she said pointedly. “In this place where people do for one another, because that’s the way it has to be. We’re too remote not to be our own safety system.”

But Kai’s safety lay in another path, so he said nothing.

“If it wasn’t for those men at the dry pool, would I have ever seen you more than the one time? And even then, if the roan hadn’t bogged on me?”

He hunted for the truth behind that. He might have coincided with her in town, but not again in the woods. He’d never have come to her yard, met her father’s dog...held her in his arms.

Kissed her or yearned for her.

Except that in recalling the moment they’d met, the spark of the jewel at her briefly glimpsed belly button, the spark in her eye as she’d come up from the ground not shaken from her fall, but furious at his interference, the startling glint of sunlight on the pale gold of her hair...

He didn’t truly know the answer to that one at all.

She read his hesitation for the uncertainty it was. “Not all answers are easy, are they?” she asked him, and brushed a strand of hair from her forehead with her wrist. “God, I need a shower. So do you, I gather. Where’d you run from?”

He found unusual solace in the matter-of-fact nature of her words. Unusual relief. So maybe he wasn’t quite thinking when he nodded over his shoulder and said, “The peak.”

She only looked at him. She looked at his bare feet and at the legs that felt leaden beneath him, and then up the mountain, a most meaningful glance. Then she said, “Let me finish with this horse. We’ll take turns in the shower.”

And as if it was something he’d ever done before, he said yes.

* * *

Regan led the way through the back door, feeling as battered as she ever had—emotionally, physically...conceptually.

There was only one way to live with all that had happened...and that was not to live with it at all. To wall it away.

But here was Kai, reminding her. Not just because he wanted to talk about it, to
face
it...but because he’d been such a deep part of it all in the first place.

His woods. His touch, reaching through the panic and dread to touch her—at first giving her an anchor, and then simply making it all that much harder.

It made her blunter than usual...stripped away the fussy civilities of having him in her home, and of sharing the casual intimacies of physical needs.

Of course, first he had to come inside.

He still stood behind her, lingering at the threshold. No particular wariness or alarm, just...looking. Inside, then out, and then in he came.

“Ice water,” she said, and pointed first at the refrigerator, then at the cupboard beside it. “Glasses. Make yourself at home. I’ll be out in fifteen minutes.” He did not, she realized then, wear a watch. So she pointed at the stove and added, “Clock.”

And then, because he just stood there, she asked, “Okay?”

But in truth, she didn’t care if it wasn’t. Not when she was so grimly trying to deal with the twists in her life.

He seemed to realize it—or he wasn’t bothered by it. “Yes, fine,” he told her, a calm response that made her squinty-eyed scrutiny of his every action seem damned silly.
He’s not like other people,
her father had said.

Right.

The kitchen led to the wide, short hallway and the living room beyond that. The main bedroom sat at the end of that hall—once a private sanctuary for her parents, now full of her father’s presence alone. Along the way, opposite the loft stairs, stood the cabin’s single compact bathroom. It had barely enough room for a step-in corner shower, a toilet and a sink set in a rough, handcrafted cabinet.