Missing Lynx Read Online Free PDF Page B

flung myself face first on to the winter-white linens.
    Striker followed me in and handed me one of his T-shirts. “Here. You won’t get any rest bunched up in your street clothes. I’m taking the girls for a run, okay?”
    “Yes, thank you.” The pillow muffled my words. I pulled myself back up and yanked off my boots and socks. Mazel tov for wanting to run in the snow. I thought the girls would be just as happy on the treadmill in the gym downstairs.     
    I heard Striker in his room changing into jogging clothes, while I climbed under the covers. He came back in and gave me a kiss on the forehead and turned out my lights, softly calling the pups to go with him.
    I burrowed under the covers and shut my eyes. I liked being in Striker’s apartment; it felt like Striker to me. Striker makes me feel good. Mostly. Sometimes I felt compressed by him, uncomfortably wedged into an odd posture. Our relationship was both years old and brand new. 
    Striker and I had met on many occasions. But when I was Spyder’s side kick, Striker didn’t even know I had girl parts. He thought I was a teenaged boy named Alex.
    It was a shock when Striker walked into my hospital room after Wilson’s attack and introduced himself. Striker Rheas was to play knight in shining armor to my damsel in distress. My teenaged fantasy, in the flesh, acting itself out. Okay, well, there was no dragon, but Wilson made a fair approximation. 
    While Wilson acted as an external dragon Striker could slay, fighting the internal dragon that roiled up the sediment of my past desperation for Striker’s attentions belonged to me alone. I thought those fantasies would lie dormant after I met my husband, Angel. But there they were, all of those Striker emotions, clouding my perception of my husband and of my marriage. Though I never acted unfaithfully while Angel was alive, I wasn’t without sin. Was it so different to think things a faithful wife shouldn’t?
    Guilt poisoned me as Striker and I wove ourselves more tightly together. While Striker has never talked to me about where he thought all this was going, his feelings hung in the air, palpable at times, thick like a Tar-Baby catching and holding me tight. Not to say that Striker was ever outwardly anything less than a gentleman, anything less than professional. . .
    Gah! Where is this going?
    We were friends and co-workers…And then Christmas, and the mistletoe, and that kiss. I have never been kissed that way before. When I think about it, I can still taste him, his soft lips against mine asking for more. Not demanding more. Asking. And as I complied, he asked for still more until my head swam drunkenly with him…
     
      I took my muddled emotions into my sleep with me. Strange dreams danced in my brain. At one point, I was spinning around until I fell just to get up and do it again, and again. I was relieved when Beetle and Bella prodded me awake with their wet noses.
    Striker stood over me, breathing heavily from his workout. “I’m getting in the shower. Are you sure you want to get up now?”
    “I’d better or my sleep patterns will be all off. I’ll be fine. Are you going to the hospital with me?” I pulled his T-shirt down modestly before I threw off the blanket.
     
    Twenty minutes later, Striker steered an Iniquus Hummer onto the highway. I stared out the window at the mountains of black snow shoved aside by the plows to let the bumper-to-bumper traffic pass.
    “Lynx, I know you’re exhausted, and your mind’s on fast forward, but I’m going to throw something else into the mix,” Striker said. I twisted my body around to face him and waited.
    “I got a call from Lynda, yesterday.” This got my attention. Striker’s sister, Lynda, and his three-year old niece, Cammy, narrowly escaped from a drug lord’s rage back in October. They beat Lynda until she was all but dead, with a dozen broken bones. Iniquus saved them with sliver thin timing. Now Lynda was learning to walk again