Lynx Destiny (17 page)

“Okay?” she asked him, her lips against his neck and sending hot chills down his spine, his skin both furnace-hot and goose bumping in the cold air slicing through a gap in the blankets. He shivered and sucked air into his lungs and forgot to respond. She took his face between her hands, her mouth brushing his. “Okay?”

The question felt more profound than it seemed but he couldn’t think beyond it.
Okay,
he managed—and only when she stiffened slightly did he realize he’d done it silently, letting assent filter through the land. He managed to find his voice. “I am what I am,” he reminded her, words and tone fraught with warning she wouldn’t and couldn’t understand.

“Yes,” she breathed. “Right. You are.
I
am.” She kissed him—a light brush of her lips.

“No,” he said, more desperately yet. “I mean—”
What I am. The lynx. The Sentinel.

“Kai,”
she said on a breathless huff of frustrated laughter, not understanding at all—but holding back, her lashes brushing his cheek. Waiting, with the question of it hovering between them like a live and vibrating thing.
Ready?

“No,” he said, because he wasn’t and couldn’t possibly be ready for this. But then, desperate again, “Yes!”

She laughed and brought her mouth down on his. They rolled within the blankets, mouths demanding and closer to biting than caressing, kissing deeply one moment, scraping teeth against skin the next. Kai made no careful seduction, had no plan from one instant to the next. He bared his teeth and gave way to white-hot sensations, driven by her eager hands and gasping response. Her damaged shirt tore away under his hands; the bra somehow gave way before him.

He found the strength then to hesitate—
barely—
buffeted between desire and pounce and the sharp, gripping need to keep her safe from what he could be. She tugged him forward with a suggestion he couldn’t resist. With a growl in his throat, he bent to lick at tender skin and pebbled nipple.

Regan arched into him with a cry of welcome and just as quickly rolled them over to sit atop his thighs. Both of them fumbled with her jeans, finally shucking them away and her panties with them.

When she settled on his thighs again, already fondling him, it was all he could do to keep from grabbing her, putting her hips just where he wanted them and thrusting deeply into her. He went so far as to reach for her, feeling the snarl of intent on his own face—

The feel of it stopped him short, slapping at him with his own loss of control and his own greed for sensation, the heat coiling around to overtake his mind.

“Shh,” she said to him, her hands on his chest, then his stomach—stroking his tension, stroking the tremble. “Shh, Kai...it’s
okay.
”

But he couldn’t think, and he had no idea what she meant—only that he’d gone wild inside in a way he’d never experienced and didn’t know how to handle. He thought she’d be far from okay if she could see his face in the darkness the way he could see hers—if she could see how close he was to taking her in a way it couldn’t possibly be okay to take a woman.
Control,
the Sentinel had said.
Restraint. Please her, don’t
take
her.

And so he froze, his fingers clamping into her skin and his shoulders slipping back off the blanket, grinding into the pine needles and stones as he arched beneath her, his body betraying him by just that much.

“Kai,” she said, and it felt like a caress; it
was
a caress, soothing over his soul and his trembling body. She stretched over him, reaching, and he didn’t understand until she’d rummaged briefly in her small pack and pulled out something crinkly.

“Ready for you this time,” she said, leaving him no more wise, no less desperate. She tore the thing open and reached for him, shattering what he’d regained of his control—rather than clamp his fingers too harshly at her hips, he slapped his hands to the ground and dug in there, feeling the tight prickle of lynx claws within his fingertips and with it a sudden rush of fear.

He’d been warned. In no uncertain terms, he’d been warned.
Stay gentle. Stay in control.
But Regan...

Being with Regan...

The fear of it struck deep—that with his body in such extremes, the lynx would take him, just as he habitually took the lynx. With his mind in such turmoil, he’d turn—if not into fur and claw and tooth, into the wild thing that ran so close to his human nature. But with her hands on him, caressing him, enclosing him—

“What—?” he managed, a strangled travesty of a word.

“Shh,” she said again. “Condom. Almost... There. Okay?”

“Regan,”
he said, because he couldn’t find anything else and because
what if—

“You’re thinking too much,” she told him, with no idea how little he was thinking at all. She moved above him, positioned them together...slid over him with a warm and enclosing welcome, tipping her head back on a blissful sigh.

“I knew it,” she murmured. “Oh, I just knew it.” She tightened around him, a flutter of internal muscle, and Kai bowed up against her, creaking with the strain.

“Kai,” she said, creating a gentle rhythm that belied the breathlessness in her voice, “it’s
okay.
This is what we are. Just let it
go.
”

His control slipped, a dangerous thing—one hard thrust before he found himself again, the sensations rocketing through him
.

Her breath warmed his chest; her tongue lapped around a nipple. “Kai,” she said. “Let it go.”

Kai flipped her over, a growl in his throat, a pounce in his movement,
wild pounding strength....
He kept to his knees and yanked her up at an angle, pounding into her with a fierce abandon, a creature of sensation seeking the hot gathering coil of pleasure and only vaguely aware of her rising cries, her hands clutching at him. He curled down over her, fingers tangled in her hair and propped on his forearms to seek her mouth with his, to drag his teeth down her neck and over her shoulder—to twist his head aside to avoid biting her.

Her cries escalated into a soundless scream, and she went wild against him, and when he snarled it turned
wild pounding hot,
nothing but sensation and reaching and clawing for that completion. It was a rush that crept up far too slowly and then at the end took him utterly by surprise, twisting him in a snarl of rigidly exquisite perfection that meant nothing would ever be the same again.

Nothing.

Chapter 16

R
egan throbbed in a haze of sensation, Kai’s most wondrous, final gasp of astonishment echoing in her ears, in her mind...in her heart. Still propped on his elbows, his forehead dropped to her shoulder, his breath warming her skin—panting hard, in a way that running across a mountain had not wrung from him.

Another gasp and his body released from its climax to collapse—but not quite on her. Somehow he rolled aside, and then there she was again, straddling him—this time with the cold biting at her skin.

She let herself fall over his chest, groping for the blankets. He offered an unsteady hand in assistance. The whole of him was unsteady, as far as she could tell. Where she lay over him in cuddled bliss, he seemed less certain, fingers moving through her hair to guide the strands of it away from her face—and then continuing to stroke just for the feel of it.

Just as he drew breath to speak, she understood. “Hey,” she said. “I’m all right, you know.”

He drew another breath, let it out slowly, and said, “I was not gentle.”

She laughed, a single huff of air. “You were just what I asked you to be.”

In his following silence, she raised herself off his chest enough to look at him—or as much as she could, in this darkness, and she realized out loud, “You’re really worried.” As if she hadn’t been the one to start things, or as if she’d ever so much as hesitated at the fervor that had gripped them both. Surely he’d—

Or maybe not. Slowly, she said, “You don’t get into town much, do you?”

After all, he was gorgeous. He was brimming with vitality. And he was a man.
Surely—

Kai stroked her back beneath the blankets. It felt as though he was memorizing her, a slow path down her spine, a hesitation as his hand encompassed the curve of her bottom. It felt as though she was being...

Worshipped.

It felt wonderful.

And then he startled her by skipping the entire cautious conversation to respond to the gist of her question. “I was with someone, once... I was young. She said I should take care. That I could too easily hurt someone without—” He hesitated. “To hurt a lover.”

Someone.
Singular. She couldn’t imagine what that woman had said to him to leave such concern over lovemaking that had been vigorous, but not rough. Responsive and unfettered and completely, resoundingly perfect.

Not to mention so touchingly vulnerable that it had reached her in ways she hadn’t expected...wasn’t sure she even truly understood, just as she understood so little about Kai or the forest or this entire situation.

But she didn’t want to think of Kai with anyone else, not even long-ago Kai. Instead, she said, “Well, I’m fine. No, you weren’t gentle—and neither was I. Reach for my pack over here, and I’ll show you
gentle.
”

He’d been quiescent inside her; at those words he stirred. “Uh-huh,” she said, and grinned into the darkness. “But not without a fresh condom.”

“Birth control,” he said. “But I can—” He stopped himself and left it at that.

A man with secrets.

But he didn’t yet stretch out to snag the pack, a dark lump just out of her reach and just within his. Instead, he scraped his fingers gently through her hair—petting her. “I want you again. I’ve wanted you since I met you, and I think I’ll always want you.”

Always?
It nearly distracted her from the rest of what he said, that single word.

It hadn’t distracted him. “But this isn’t why you came here.”

“Maybe it is,” she said, putting a little edge in her words. “Maybe it’s an important part of why I came here.” Even if she hadn’t thought it to be true at the time. But she’d tucked those condoms into the day pack, hadn’t she? Earlier in the day, to be sure, but she’d known of them when she’d grabbed the pack and headed out into the woods.

“It’s an important part of what happened here,” he agreed, following her hair out to its unruly length and continuing the caress down her back, just enough of fingernail against skin to make her squirm in tingling response, and just enough squirm so his hand closed more firmly across her bottom, fingers pressing skin as he shifted against her. He floundered and found his words again. “But it’s not why you called to me or found me. You said...you have to leave.”

The events of the evening washed back over her in an overwhelming swamp. She rested her cheek against his shoulder and let herself feel buffered by darkness. “Yes,” she said. “I do. I can’t deal with...”
Whispers. Shouts. Thoughts that aren’t my own. Living my mother’s life...and dying because of it.

He stiffened as though he’d heard her. “You are what you are,” he said. “Embrace it. Find balance in it.”

Or lose yourself to it.
Regan opened her mouth in protest as that thought pressed against her—one that didn’t feel like her own. She shook her head, rejecting it. “I don’t want to have that conversation,” she told him. “But I couldn’t just leave. I needed you to know—”

“This?” he asked, sounding unconvinced as he pressed them closer together yet, his hand spread over the small of her back.

“Maybe in part.” She breathed in the scent of him, absorbing everything she could of him and letting that buffering darkness magnify the sensations—the crisp feel of his chest hair against her breasts, the planes of his body; the strength beneath her and the strength within her. “But more. Because I was in town today, and I saw those men from the dry pool. The two muscle-bound ones.”

He grunted, his chest moving against her. “So did I.” His voice darkened, offering more danger in those three words than in anything she’d heard him say yet. His hold on her tightened.

But not uncomfortably.
Protectively.
Or so she told herself.

Not that she wasn’t seeing glimpses of him that reminded her of lessons long learned in childhood—things wild and untamed were never truly safe, no matter how it seemed. No matter if they were trained and nurtured and meant to be pets. Eventually they bit down hard in one way or another.

They were what their natures made them.

Don’t you go counting on him,
her father had said.

But here she was...and she had no choice. Not anymore. “They were with Matt Arshun when I saw them,” she said. “They tried to pretend they weren’t, but they’re not very subtle people.”

She heard the frown in his voice. “Matt Arshun.”

“The Realtor. Or actually, the man who’s pretending to be a Realtor. If he actually is one, I haven’t found any sign of it.” She tried to remember if she’d mentioned it to him, couldn’t recall. “He’s been at us to sell the property—first my dad, then me. He’s damned pushy.”

He made a sound in his chest; she realized with a start that he’d growled. He seemed to realize it, too, for the sound cut abruptly short. “You’re not safe there.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m leaving, remember?”

From the way he briefly stopped breathing altogether, he’d lost that detail to their lovemaking. “Regan,” he said, and kissed the top of her head, his arms wrapping around her in gentle possessiveness. “What happened?”

Right.
As if it was possible to explain her family, here in the middle of the night in what should have been the afterglow of passion. As if it was possible to explain her mother,
ever.

As if it was possible to explain Regan Adler.

“I need to go,” she said, the only words she could find. “I was hoping...you might... The horse. The dog and cat. I need to find someone to feed them.”