“I’m not sad.” He released her, and the sensation was gone. “Look. I’m the yeti everyone warned you about. I live alone. I eat rats raw. I capture innocent women and use them for my own pleasure. I’m crazy.”
“Are you trying to scare me?”
His eyes narrowed on her as if trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. “Apparently not.” He walked on.
She followed. “Because if you are, you shouldn’t have saved my life.”
“That makes no sense. If I hadn’t saved your life, you’d be dead. I couldn’t scare you.”
“It seems like a lot of effort to scare someone.”
He grunted.
She felt more cheerful. If she had driven him back to speechlessness, then she’d won that round. Now to win another. “You’re an orphan.” Or he was if the legend was true, for Father said John was Chosen, and the legend had been quite specific—the Chosen Ones were abandoned as infants.
She didn’t believe in the legend, in any legend. Lord of the Rings was a great book, but it was only a book. The sensations which John had passed to her were figments of her imagination. Yet she held her breath, waiting for his answer.
“A boat on its last trip before the Kara Sea froze found a newborn floating on an ice floe. The ice formed my shroud; the fishermen thought I was dead.”
“I don’t believe it!”
He misunderstood, of course. He didn’t realize that the story he was telling paralleled the legend she so longed to discount.
He stopped, and turned to face her. “Such circumstances aren’t unique to me.”
“No kidding.”
“There are other instances of an infant surviving a drowning in cold water, unharmed.”
“All right. That’s true.” She had heard of babies shutting down and living through such trauma. But that didn’t disprove the legend of the Chosen Ones. Quite the opposite. “What happened next?”
“The crew put me in the captain’s quarters. They intended to bury me when they got to land. But the ice melted. I woke and squalled. They fed me milk and fish they chewed for me. I lived.” John spoke in short bursts, as if the effort of so much speech exhausted him. “One of the fishermen lived in Rasputye. Olik brought me back to his wife.”
“So you did grow up here!”
“In the winters. In the summers . . . no.” He started walking again.
Now she understood why he knew the area so well. But did she believe he was one of the Chosen? Did she believe in the legend?
To do so would be ridiculous. And yet . . . surely what he had said and what she had felt bore testament to the myth?
“In the summers, did you work on the fishing vessel?” Her eyes grew round as she tried to imagine him as a little boy on a boat in the frigid Kara Sea.
“No. What was so important that you had to risk your life to take those pictures?” Subtle he was not. He wanted to change the subject, and he had.
A small, resilient bubble of excitement worked its way up through her residual fear, her anxiety of tracking John Powell, and the exertion of keeping up with him. “I’ve been watching for the Ural lynx, and it was my first sighting. Or rather, almost my first sighting.”
He grunted.
“I know!” She laughed a little. “There was a lynx on the road, and that was beyond cool. But nothing since. Nothing. Not for the whole team. So far, this year hasn’t been nearly as successful as anyone was hoping.”
Certainly not as successful as her father had hoped.
Her mouth drooped. If she let him, her father’s ran-cor would ruin this summer for her.
The path split and John swerved away, taking the narrower trail, down the hill, leaving her headed in the wrong direction.
Not for long. She jumped a fallen log, slipped on the pine needles, and sprawled across the trail in front of him.
He stopped. Sighed. Grabbed her arm, lifted her and set her on her feet.
He was right. He was a big man, strong and hearty.
And she’d followed him into the woods. They were alone. From her father, she’d learned John had a problem with his gift. Since she’d arrived here, she’d learned he had a reputation as a soldier who suffered PTSD, that he captured women to use them for sexual purposes.
True, to her he seemed normal, if normal included wearing skins and dreadlocks and having extremely pale blue eyes. But really, how many times had she heard the neighbors say to the press, I had no idea he was a serial killer. He seemed so ordinary!
Maybe she should rethink this.
Then he spoke the magic words. “You want to see the Ural lynx.”
She nodded.
“Then come on.” He let her go. He started off down the path again.
She stood in place. “What do you mean, come on?”
“I mean—I know where Mama Cat has hidden her kittens.”
Chapter 14
John didn’t know why he was bothering to lead Genesis to the big cats.
He didn’t know why he let her follow him.He didn’t know why he watched her every day . . . except that he couldn’t seem to stop. He couldn’t believe she was for real. He scrutinized her, waiting for her to yell, to swear, to complain about the rough conditions or the boredom so much a part of a wildlife observer’s job.
Instead, when she thought no one was watching, she skipped through the forest. She sang songs from movies like The Sound of Music and Annie, and she sang like she believed them. She watched an eagle fly, spread her arms and pretended to soar on the breeze. When the wind blew, she closed her eyes, lifted her face to the sun—and he would have sworn she was silently worshiping the day, the place, the joy.
She seemed almost frantic to absorb the essence of the mountains and the woods.
He hated that.
Because he wanted her, and everything she did made him want her more. He craved her the way a drowning man craved oxygen.
He couldn’t have her. Because what he felt when he looked at her was a passionate fascination, a longing and a need.
He didn’t dare yield to that depth of feeling.
He didn’t dare lose control. The last time he’d lost control, death had followed.
Today, he’d been ready to turn away from her forever.
Then she’d crawled off her platform and hung out over that hundred-foot drop to take pictures.
My God. He hadn’t felt that desperation since . . . well, just since. He’d jumped off the boulder at the top of the cliff and made it down to her almost in time to catch her as she fell. Almost. Using his power had been instinctive, a brief burst that caught and deposited her without thought or finesse.
Stupid woman. She didn’t even realize what she’d done to him.
She’d made him use a power he had barely acknowledged for the last two years. Then she’d thanked him. She’d touched him. She’d followed him being perky and grateful and cheerful, like a creature who believed in the goodness of mankind. In his goodness.
So that was why he was taking the girl to Mama Cat’s den. He wanted her to have what she wanted, to take her pictures and see her glimpse of the wildness . . . and then go away. That way, he would never have to see her again.
But . . . what the hell? The girl wasn’t behind him.
He knew she wasn’t, because when she was close, she was talking.
He stopped, turned.
She stood where he had left her, staring at him, her golden brown eyes wide and heartbreakingly innocent.
Ah, to be so young again . . .
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-four.”
“You look younger.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
She said nothing.
“Aren’t you going to tell me I look older?” he asked.
“I can’t tell. You’re so hairy I can barely see your face.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “You sound like my drill sergeant.” He laughed again, then stopped, surprised at himse
lf. Where had that brief spark of humor come from? “Are you coming with me?” he asked.
She blinked, and her long lashes fanned the air.
He half expected to feel a breeze.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Is there really a lynx, or are you really crazy?”
So it had finally sunk in for her. She had realized she was alone with the yeti. “I’m definitely crazy. But yes, there’s a lynx.” He waited, sure she would turn back now.
Instead, she said, “Okay, as long as I know the score,” and started toward him.
He didn’t really believe he was crazy.
But she sure as hell was.
He didn’t wait. He strode off toward the riverbank.
Before he knew it, she was on his heels. “Brandon would laugh if he knew how thoroughly he had scared me with his stories of the yeti.”
“Sure.” John remembered Brandon from last year. Short, loud, obnoxious, without interest in the animals unless he could torment them.
John had not been happy to see Brandon return.
Genny was still chatting. “About the lynx—there are babies, too, right?”
“Yes. Two.”
“That is just too cool.” She sounded like an eighties teenager at a Michael Jackson concert. “I would do anything to see those kittens.”
Anything? He clamped down on the thought before he could take it any further.
“Probably I shouldn’t be doing this,” she said conversationally. “Maybe you’re taking me into the woods to slaughter me.”
“Maybe.” He fought the urge to grin.
“On the other hand, if you were going to kill me, why not simply let me fall?”
Remembering the things he’d seen during his missions at war and with the Chosen, his face settled into its normal, grim cast. “You really are a babe in arms, aren’t you?”
She answered too quickly. “You mean a fool.”
Her small, acrid bitterness caught him by surprise. So this seemingly sunny girl had suffered at least a few disappointments. “Who calls you a fool?”
“My father. He doesn’t admire my constant chirping about saving the world one creature at a time.”
“Is that what he calls it? Chirping?” Clearly, her father was an asshole.
“Dad’s not so bad.” She defended him in a knee-jerk reaction. “He’s had disappointments in his life.”
“Who hasn’t?”
“At least he isn’t a hermit.”
John’s mouth twitched again. Another grin at her lively spirit—a grin that faded as he remembered. “It’s safer this way.”
“Why is it safer?”
“It just is.”
John’s cabin had been an abandoned building when he arrived in Rasputye.
For years, a hermit had lived there. The villagers had called the old guy the Mad German, because he was foreign and possessed a gift like John’s—odd, otherworldly, and destructive.
The German had built his cabin with his own hands, and John knew why he had chosen that site.
All the hut’s windows faced north. Every day, when the sun rose, it first touched the glistening rock towers of the Seven Devils. The Mad German’s daughter told John they didn’t know what had happened to the hermit.
John knew. The German had finally surrendered to the crossroads’ beckoning. He’d gone to the Seven Devils, to the middle Devil, and done what the gifted had done for centuries. John only hoped the hermit had lived through the transition from this world to that.
John had bought the cabin from the daughter. He cleaned out the one-room hut, fixed the thatching, put new glass in the windows, filled the cracks with mud, and packed straw weighted with stones around the base of the walls. He had moved in, and every day that first winter, John stared at the Seven Devils, studied them, wondered if the stories were true—if somewhere in there was the gate to the rasputye.
No one in Rasputye had expected him to survive, because at first they didn’t recognize the gaunt, stern-faced, shaggy American. But he had survived the winter. He had survived the spring. He had walked into town in the summer, and by then, they had all known who he was—because the first of the letters had arrived.
The people of Rasputye had been afraid, and they were feeling guilty . . . as they should have been. Never during his lousy childhood had any of them interceded on his behalf.
Now they hated him for merely being there, the living proof of their failure, their fears and their greed.
If he tried to explain that, Genny would never understand.
Chapter 15
The trail turned suddenly downward, plunging off the mountain toward the river, and John let the work of descent finish the conversation. As it was, he’d just spoken more words in fifteen minutes than he’d used in two years. And told Genesis Valente far too much about himself.
With any luck at all, once he was done today, it would be another two years before he repeated the experience.How odd that she had known he was watching her. Did she possess that small, extrasensory knowledge some ordinary humans enjoyed, or was she gifted, too?
John would have protested that God could not be so cruel.
But he already knew that wasn’t true. God was cruel beyond all conception. God tormented a man, broke his heart and his will, and then sent someone like Genny to dangle hope like a diamond on a platinum chain.
No. No, John refused to hope.
Yet Genny said she felt his sorrow.
What did she mean? He didn’t feel sorrow, and even if he did . . .
“Are you an empath?” he asked.
“What?” She sounded sincerely confused.
He stopped in the path in front of her, two steps farther down. That put them eye to eye, and he stared at her, compelling her to tell him the truth. “I asked if you were an empath. Do you routinely feel what other people feel?”
Her gaze fell away from his. “I try to be empathetic, if that’s what you mean.”
Was she being evasive? He couldn’t tell.
Perhaps it wasn’t she who should be cautious here. Perhaps she presented more danger to him than he to her.
“John . . .” She put her hands on his shoulders.
He stiffened, so sensitive and so unaccustomed to the touch of another human that her touch was almost painful.
“Listen,” she said, “I need to tell you something.”
Maybe it wasn’t his own pain he felt. Maybe it was hers. Or maybe he saw it—those big golden brown eyes were filled with the weariness of a woman who had seen far too much anguish in her life.
He cupped her chin in his hand, smoothed his thumb across her lips.
Her face was innocent. Her mouth was not. It was made for kissing . . . and more carnal pleasures.
Her lips parted. Her breath swirled in his palm. He leaned close, closed his eyes and inhaled her scent: harsh soap, orange lotion, the fresh scent of loam and crushed pine needles—and beneath it all, the scent of a woman at the peak of her glory.
Did this woman even realize the power she held? What heights of foolishness to which she could drive him?
“John?” Her lips moved against his thumb. Her voice was cautious. “Are you okay?”
He opened his eyes.
She looked apprehensive.
Perhaps in his time alone, he had lost the finer points of polite behavior. As he recalled, a man didn’t sniff a woman within an hour of meeting her.
He dropped his hand.
“John, listen, I wanted to tell you—”
He didn’t want to listen. He wanted to lay her down in the forest and taste her mouth, her breasts, the sweet cleft between her legs, until she was wet with climax, until he was so deep inside her he would die of bliss.
He turned on his heel. He adjusted himself—his stupid fantasies were causing him pain and havoc—and started down the hill.
“Wait!” Gravel showered down on the path like a dirt waterfall.
Yeah, she was following.
They reache
d the last drop before the river and the view opened up. Genny slipped. She skidded as she tried to stop herself from going over the edge. She grabbed at branches, then slammed into his back hard enough to make both of them go, “Oof!”
She wrapped her arms around him, pressed herself against him, and everywhere her body rested, he would swear the leather melted under the heat of their bodies.
Damn it to hell. He’d just gotten his erection under control and now it was back, bigger and better than ever.
Silly woman—she was oblivious.
She held him in her arms long enough to catch her breath, then peeled herself away and stepped out from behind him. She looked down at the river rushing past the rocks five feet below them, then out at the wide channel it had made during its years of wandering along the flat at the edge of the cliff. “Wow.”
She looked up and over at the trees that grew like a fringe of bangs on the tall, rocky face, and located the platform that she had used for observation every day since she’d arrived. “My God.” She clutched his arm. “That would have been a long way to fall. I could have . . . have . . . died . . .” Her voice wobbled on the last two words, and she sat down hard, as if she’d suddenly realized how close she’d come to a bloody, painful demise.
Ducking her head, she sniffled.
Suddenly, he remembered one reason why he had become a hermit.
Because he sucked at personal relationships.
“Are you crying?” He sounded horrified. Was horrified.
“No . . .” Out of her coat pocket, she retrieved one of those little flowered packs of tissues, pulled one tissue out and used it.
“Because I don’t know what you do back in the U.S., but out here in the Ural Mountains, we don’t cry.”
“I hold a business degree.”
“You do?” What moron career guidance counselor had suggested this softhearted, outdoorsy girl go to business school?
“Graduated from NYU. That’s why I don’t cry.” She sobbed, then held her breath as if she had the hiccups instead of a legitimate reason to cry. “In business, that’s a weakness I can’t afford to show.”
“Who the hell told you that?” Like he didn’t know.
She sobbed harder—a summer storm that struck out of the blue and left him feeling weak, alarmed, and helpless. At the same time, she held her hand over her mouth, struggling to stop.