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Mary nodded shortly, her wiry curls bobbing. “I thought not. Not after the way you ran from this place.” Regan winced, but Mary paid no mind. “Take care with Kai Faulkes, Regan.”
Regan took a step closer, suddenly aware that she didn’t want the toddler’s mom hearing this conversation, either. “But he’s perfectly...” Safe, she was going to say, and then thought better of it. If there was one thing Kai Faulkes wasn’t, it was perfectly safe. Instead, she said, “I trust him,” and that felt right. Solid.
It came with a purr in her mind, and she squelched the impulse to swat at it—swatting empty air would not help this conversation.
Mary raised a meaningful eyebrow. “As well you can,” she said. “But you won’t change him. We know better than to try, those of us who have been here all along. No good will coming of trying—not for you, and not for him.”
Regan understood, then. Mary wasn’t worried about Regan and her safety—Mary was worried for Kai. She shook her head in befuddled protest. “I only just met him—”
And Mary snorted. “He wears your favor.”
“The bandanna?” Regan could only stare at her. “Mary, that’s just the only thing I had on hand, and he was bleeding—”
“He still is,” Mary said shortly. “But you can bet he’d have lost that thing as soon as he was out of your sight if he didn’t want it there.”
Regan couldn’t process it—not what Mary was saying, and not all the things she wasn’t. Finally, she threw her hands in the air. “I honestly don’t know what to say.”
“Of course you don’t,” Mary told her matter-of-factly. “But it’ll all make sense eventually.” Then she lifted her chin, looking behind Regan—and Regan knew that she’d find Bill wheeling up the aisle behind her. “Anything else we can grab for you today?”
Regan took a deep breath, reordering her thoughts. “As a matter of fact...” She dug Arshun’s business card from her back pocket. “You heard of this fellow? Or the office?”
Mary glanced at it, shook her head and handed the card over the counter to Bill, who stretched to trade it off with a gallon-size zipper bag of jerky. As he shook his head, Mary slapped her hand down on the newspapers stacked up on the counter and thumbed one off the top for Regan. “Check in here,” she said. “If they’re trying to pick up business in this area, there’ll be an ad.” She gave Regan a wry and knowing look. “Along with all the others.”
Bill grunted. “If your dad is trying to sell the cabin, he’d best go with someone who’s been here awhile.” But there was a question layered beneath his advice, and concern.
“As far as I know, he’s not,” Regan reassured him. “But I’ll give him a call tonight.”
“And let us know,” Mary said firmly.
“And let you know,” Regan repeated dutifully, and then couldn’t help but smile. For all she’d run from this place, there had been things to miss, too.
“Fine. Now go off and find Kai. From the look on his face when he left, he might just need someone’s ear to bend. Either way, he definitely needs that jacket. Soon as the sun starts down, it’s going to chill up out there.”
“The library?”
Bill grunted again. “Or Phillip’s dojo thing, or with Martin Sperry if he’s in town, or off doing something, somewhere, that needs to be done. But the library is always your first bet. If he’s not still there, Miss Laura will know where he’s gone.”
Laura, the librarian. She’d been a vibrant young woman a decade ago, pouring over art and illustration books with an awkward teenager who couldn’t wait to get out of this town.
Mary shoved the jerky an inch toward Regan, bringing her out of the past. “Now, take this, and welcome back. You can pay for the next batch.” And then, when Regan blinked against the sudden sting of tears, startled into emotion by the gesture, Mary smiled. “Welcome home, girl. Maybe you’ll stay a bit, eh?”
Chapter 6
Regan found the library as it had been a decade earlier—terraced up from the street, bordered by massive local boulders, and set apart from the smattering of homes by its redbrick and white trim.
Kai sat on one of the boulders, legs crossed, a book in his lap and an envelope in his hand. Pensive and looking out over the town below them. She was surprised to see him in jeans—in shoes—and to find that glorious torso tucked away into a dark blue T-shirt. And though she thought at first that he was too immersed in his ponderings to notice her presence, she should have known better. As soon as she was close enough for casual conversation, he glanced her way, the smudge of darkness around his eyes making his deep blue eyes sharp and...
Don’t stare, Regan.
But she thought herself a lost cause.
And she thought again that he wasn’t the kind of man who would smear kohl along his lids, and that somehow, in spite of his otherwise tanned but fair skin, that smoky effect was natural.
She thought she’d probably never quite figure him out.
Then she noticed the book in his lap. “Things that Sting,” she said. “You’re checking me out.”
“The library has internet,” he said, as if that explained it all. In a way, it did. A simple search on her name would turn up her website, her gallery affiliations, her bibliography. Her paintings.
She sat beside him, touching a finger to the glossy pages of the book. He’d been studying a full-page image in the middle-school book, a depiction of a cool desert morning with every possible stinging insect slyly inserted to be found by curious young eyes. Rich earth colors, subtle shifts of color, the luxurious smears of blues and reds so often hidden away in a desertscape, so seldom seen. And each creature, perched on cholla or hidden beside rock or climbing a pale prickly pear flower, subtly limned to make the search easier.
She remembered painting this one—remembered what had been going on in her life at the moment, just as she always did. The ex-boyfriend who’d just learned she wouldn’t tolerate the emergence of his inner bully, the caress of wood flute piping in her ear while she wielded the brush, the pleasure of signing the contract to do the work...the faint feeling of familiar isolation as she buried herself in it.
She remembered feeling young and free and just beginning to believe she would escape what had happened to her mother after all. Realizing that it hadn’t followed her north to Colorado.
“Why painting?” Kai said, shifting the book slightly to share with her.
She took a sharp breath, pulling herself out of those past moments. “Why do I paint?” she asked him. “Or why use paintings instead of photographs?”
“The first is who you are,” Kai said, startlingly sure of himself. “I mean instead of photographs.”
Safe ground. “Because of its illustrative nature.” She flipped to the next page, an Arizona giant hairy scorpion. “It would be hard to take a photo that shows the setae—those bristly hairs along the legs and tail—this clearly. And because we wanted to show the differences between this scorpion and the bark scorpion, I chose some key spots to exaggerate them. Not to be misleading, but to make it more obvious what to look for.”
Kai ran his finger over the printed image—a big, bulky scorpion with a dark body and blunt head, stiff individual hairs bristling along its appendages. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
She started slightly. “That’s not what I expect to hear when people look at this one.”
He glanced at her. “The care you put into it makes it beautiful. It shows respect.”
She hugged her arms, surprised at the tingle that ran along her shoulders and spine. “I think...that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said about my work. Thank you.”
“You’re cold?” He set the book aside, tugged his jacket from her grasp and shook it out to put over her shoulders. “Now I know how you found me.”
“I haven’t been gone so long that I don’t still know the gossip hub for this town,” Regan agreed. She pulled another of her father’s bandannas from the jacket pocket, unrolling it to pick out a piece of thick, spiced jerky and offering it to him.
He grinned and took it, biting off a chunk with efficiency. Regan had to work harder on hers, and for a moment they simply savored the burst of flavor, the spring air growing cooler as the low sun settled farther, the quiet steps on the library walk behind them and the squeak and scuff of the door.
When Regan swallowed, she said, “There was a Realtor out nosing around the house yesterday.”
“He bothered you?” Kai went still in a way that felt more dangerous than quiet.
“Not like that,” Regan said hastily, divining his thoughts from that expression. “But yes. Just a feeling...thought I’d see what I could learn about him.”
Kai’s silence was as good as a question.
“Nothing so far. But I’m just getting started. I’m afraid I’ll have to bother my dad about it.”
“Say hello to him for me.” Kai closed the Things that Sting book and smoothed a hand over the protected cover.
Regan couldn’t hide her jolt of surprise. “You really know my dad?”
Kai grinned. “Frank? Yes. Do you think you’re the only one who walks out into the woods from your home?”
Regan wanted to blurt “Yes!” because when she’d left this place, Frank had done most of his appreciating from the porch with a young Bob. And before that, her mother had walked the land. And Regan herself, but less so as her mother grew ill, and—
Kai closed his eyes, and for the moment his face was full of pain. His breath caught, his body stilled—for an instant, he was everything that was quiet, his striking face turned slightly to the mountain, his body beneath its camouflage of blue T-shirt and jeans a thing of wild beauty.
For a dumbstruck instant, she stared. And as she opened her mouth for a concerned question, she heard it. Deep inside her head, nearly subliminal...the faintest ponderous moan, a sound that carried all the weight of the world.
She closed her mouth on her question. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And Kai now looked at her as if nothing had happened at all—as if the extra cast of pale strain around his eyes was only an effect of the light.
And while she tried to discern if he’d been in discomfort from his arm or if he’d felt what she’d felt—sooner and deeper, for this man who lived in the land that spoke to her—he asked her, “What happened to your mother, Regan?”
In an intuitive rush, she understood too many things. That her father had never answered this question for Kai, if indeed Kai had asked it. That Kai had come here not to look at Things that Sting, but to check the news archives for background information.
She didn’t quite get up, but the space between them had grown less companionable and more like the stiffness of strangers.
“Look it up,” she told him shortly. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“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.
