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
