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.
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