Outcast by Cheryl Brooks Page A

back to her empty house.
    Lynx stared after her, her aroma wafting back toward him on the wind. There had been a time when a scent like that would have had him running after her, his cock as hard as diamonds and dripping with eagerness to mate. He would have let her run, then gone after her, pouncing on her playfully out of the darkness and ripping her clothes in his haste to bury himself in her body. But there was nothing; no matter what his senses told him, his body ignored the signals and would not respond. Lynx returned to his refuge to eat the food she'd left for him, but for once, it seemed to have no flavor.
    That night, sleep eluded him long after he would normally have slept, but when he finally drifted off, he slept fitfully. It was nearly dawn when he awoke, drenched in sweat and trembling with fear and anger. In his dream, Bonnie had seen him — naked and exposed — and, realizing his failing, had laughed.

Chapter 6
    Staring at her dinner sitting there on the table, Bonnie felt an overwhelming urge to throw it against the wall. What was wrong with her? Why was he affecting her this way, and why had she let it happen? Worse still, how could she hide her desire for a man when he could actually smell it?
    The answer to that was to do the same thing he was doing: avoid him — and since he was already avoiding her, it wouldn't take much effort. If she never saw him, she couldn't feel desire and couldn't ever actually love him, could she?
    The answer to that was probably that, yes, she could still love him — if that was, indeed, what she was feeling. It might only have been lust, but she couldn't recall unrequited lust ever making her feel like her heart had been ripped out — despite numerous failed romances. She'd felt bad enough before, but now, she felt even worse, and it seemed impossible to stop crying; as soon as she would dry her tears, believing she was over it, she would remember the things he'd said to her and start all over again.
    Bonnie had never felt so helpless. Lynx wouldn't love her no matter what she did. She could pay him, feed him, clothe him, love him, even hand over the deed to her land, and it wouldn't make any difference. She couldn't make him love her, and if she even got close enough to him to speak, he'd just catch a whiff of her desire and be repulsed all over again. Bonnie was normally pretty tough, but just then, all she wanted to do was crawl under a rock and die. His rejection of her was so complete, so all-encompassing; he not only despised her, but her entire gender!
    Unfortunately, they still needed one another. Bonnie knew that one call to Drummond might get Lynx a different job, or even deported, but that was one of those things that only a woman scorned would do. Bonnie wasn't about to have him kicked off the planet just because he didn't like women.
    She would get over him. She knew she could. She always did.
    Sleep was a long time coming that night, but when it finally crept over her, Bonnie had another dream about Lynx. In it, he was walking away from her, and she was calling to him, but he never looked back and never even slowed down.
    Awakening with cold tears on her cheeks and feeling a despair that went far beyond what she should have been feeling, the rational part of her mind knew that the whole thing was just plain silly. He couldn't possibly mean so much to her after such a short time. He might have saved her life and helped her out a great deal, but he'd never been nice to her. She'd never even seen him smile. It was illogical; she should have grown to hate him, not love him! Still, it was impossible for Bonnie to imagine ever truly hating Lynx. The man had been a slave; at the very least, he deserved her compassion.
    She was doing her best to understand him, but it was hard to understand a man who wouldn't talk.
    He must have had some bad experiences with women, but what kind? Bonnie hadn't had much luck with men, either, but she had always managed to come