Silence that Sizzles (18 page)

It had been a week. A week since Kyle had told Kelly everything that happened. Since then, he had not heard from her. He knew from Sophie that she hadn’t left Copper City yet. Sophie refused to give him any further details, though. She said that anything that Kelly told her was in confidence, and she didn’t want to betray that confidence. It seemed like somewhere along the way, Sophie had switched alliances. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that.

As he stood in front of the new wing of the hospital and looked at it, he did feel a slight swelling of pride. All of the refugees from the facility had been brought to this ward and were getting treated for the abuse they had suffered. Here they had received the proper care and treatment that they deserved. He knew that Kelly had been an instrumental part of that. The boy, Peter, stood beside him now as he gave his dedication speech. He looked at all of the members of the media and faculty and staff standing in front of him on the steps. It was a momentous occasion. And yet even as he said the words, smiled and shook hands with Peter, and waved to different people in the crowd, he felt that familiar emptiness inside. For a brief flash of time, while Kelly had been an intricate part of his life, that emptiness had been gone. He didn’t even realize it until she was gone again.

He couldn’t hold it against her. He had a dark past. He could have a dark future as well. He knew that there were still issues that he had to deal with. He had scheduled an appointment with a new therapist. It was one that Tony had recommended. He decided it was finally time for him to face his past in the hopes that he could have a future now. He was becoming some type of symbol for the veterans in the shifter community. After his speech at the gala, he had received letters and emails and an outpouring of support from all over the world. His experience had not been unique. He had known that at the time, but he had been so self-absorbed that he didn’t realize that there was a whole community out there of shifters who had been afraid to come forward. They had been afraid to get help. By him sharing his story, they felt like they could share their stories too, and they were choosing to share them with him.

He felt humbled in a way that he had never felt humbled before. Eric and Tony had been on his case, though. Ever since the story about what had happened at the Army’s facility had started making the rounds, they had had a new outpouring of converts coming into the Copper City. It seemed that for all of their talk of not having a clan, it was time for them to organize one at least somewhat more formally after all. That had made for several very tense phone calls with one Lukas Kasper.

Kyle was set to fly to Greyelf the following day. He knew that now that he had other people to worry about other than himself, he needed to figure out a way to make some kind of resolution with the very vocal Greyelf Grizzly Clan alpha. Kyle would not bend to another alpha’s will as long as he lived. But he hoped he would be able to find a way to coexist with Lukas in a way that would allow both of their people to be safe. The last thing Kyle wanted to do was create any further enemies beyond the ones he already had.

He smiled as he cut the red ribbon for the flashes of light going off from the cameras in front of him. He heard Peter thank him again, and he smiled gently at the teenager. He had promised that if Peter had any questions about what was happening to him in his first phase, he would be able to talk to him directly. It was an offer he made to all of the refugees from the facility. He knew better than anyone what it felt like to wake up with nightmares of people poking and prodding his body. He knew the terror and the vulnerability that brought. He wouldn’t wish that on anyone else.

As the people began to scatter away from him, he found himself alone standing inside the doors. He stared at the facility, knowing that soon it would be filled with patients and doctors and a bustle of activity that he hoped spelled a new future for his species. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t hear her approach. It wasn’t until the waft of her perfume filled his nostrils that he knew that she was there. He was cautiously optimistic. He knew that when Kelly made her decision, she would come to him. But he had no idea which way she was going to go.

“It’s impressive.” Her words crossed the distance between them. He wanted to reach out and touch her. He wanted to pull her into his arms. But he knew that he couldn’t do that. It was very likely that she was going to leave and had come to say goodbye. And every part of him in his logical brain knew that’s what she should do, but he didn’t want her to go. At the same time, he needed her to want to stay because she wanted to stay, but not because he had forced his will upon her.

“It is impressive. I feel like I have talked more in the last two days than I have in the last twenty years,” he replied.

“It seems like you have a new career in front of you.” Kelly chuckled lightly. She stepped next to him, and they stood there staring at each other for what seemed like forever. He didn’t want to say anything. She looked beautiful. His heart hurt looking at her.

“I appreciate that you respected my wishes and gave me time to think,” she said the words carefully as if she had been practicing them in front of a mirror. She didn’t look at him then but at a place over his shoulder. “I thought long and hard about everything. You knew that I got an offer from Stanford. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity. Exactly the kind of position that I’ve always wanted.”

Kyle felt his heart starting to fall. She was going to leave him after all. He felt a rush of anger. “So I guess that’s that then,” he said.

A look of chagrin crossed her face. “I wasn’t finished yet.”

“If you came here to rip my heart of out of my chest and stomp on it in front of me, I would like you to spare me that. Just go.”

He saw Kelly cross her arms over her chest. She cocked her head at him. “That’s it then.”

“What else do you want from me?”

“I want you to tell me how you feel about me.”

Kyle looked at her as if she’d grown another head. “I’ve already told you how I feel about you.”

“No, that’s what I’ve realized in all of this thinking. Everything you’ve told me has been very technical and very process like. You talked about things so matter-of-factly. What you haven’t told me is how you really feel about me. I don’t know how I’m supposed to make a decision when I don’t know that. That’s why I came here today. If you can just tell me how you feel about me, I can make my decision.”

Kyle ran a hand through his hair. “Is this some kind of test?”

“Not a test. Just tell me.”

She was going to drag it out of him whether he wanted to or not. He felt like this was so unfair. How was he supposed to go on if he told her exactly how he felt about her, and she rejected him? He didn’t think he’d be able to live with himself after that. “Fine. You want me to say that I wake up every morning thinking about you and wanting you in my arms? Is that what you want to hear? Do you want to know that every single favorite dream I have has you in it? Is that going to make you happy? Is it knowing that I go through my day thinking about the little things that I can do or say that will make a smile appear on your face, and when you smile at me I feel like I am the richest man in the world? Is that it? Is that what you need to hear so that you can stomp on my heart and leave me?”

Kelly took it all in. He stopped and waited for her response. Then a slow smile crossed her face. “I think that’s a really good place to start.”

He moved closer toward her. He was starting to catch her drift. He reached out and put his finger under her chin so that her eyes were drawn up to his. “If you’re asking me if I think that my feelings are true, then I would say yes. Yes, Kelly Malone, I believe that you are my mate. I believe that with all of my heart because the very first moment I laid eyes on you in the middle of the desert, I knew that I was in love with you. And I feel it from the depths of my soul, which you will be destroying, by the way, if you decide to leave me. You will leave me an empty, broken shell of a man. Is that what you want to hear?”

He saw the tears streaming down Kelly’s face. He wasn’t sure if they were tears of happiness or sadness. He felt a momentary flare of fear when she looked at him then and said the words that made his heart sing. “Don’t worry. They’re tears of happiness.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Every word. And yet there are still three that I haven’t heard.”

Kyle suddenly realized that this was not going to turn out with her leaving him. He had been so stupid. He was talking about fate and destiny and somehow he had managed to completely miss the part that was most important. The words that she needed to hear in her humanness to make it feel real to her. He had a lot to learn about what it was going to be like to be mated to a human. But he felt joy inside of him. He drew her into his arms, and she didn’t resist.

“Kelly Malone, I love you.”

A long sigh and small giggle escape from her lips. “Oh, thank God. Because I love you too.” Kyle couldn’t resist the urge anymore. His lips covered hers, and their bodies intertwined with each other. He knew that for the rest of his life, he intended to tell her every day that he loved her so that she would never forget it.

Kelly walked out of the lab and locked the door behind her. She turned in surprise when she saw the limo waiting at the bottom of the steps next to the curb. Cal stood next to it. She smiled and gave him a wave. He nodded back at her but didn’t say anything else. As she walked up to the limo’s rear door, the window came down. She saw Kyle sitting there with a smirk on his face. She was delighted to see him. He had been away on a business trip for the last several days, and she had missed him.

“Need a lift, Doc?”

“I’m not supposed to take rides from strangers,” she said with a teasing smile. Her body hummed with anticipation at being with her mate, and it took everything she could not to grab him through the window to start to show him how much she had missed him. This past trip had been too long.

“Good thing I’m your husband then,” he said ruefully.

Husband. She loved hearing that word when she defined her relationship with him. Still, she couldn’t help but give him a hard time. Kelly peered into the limo pretending to study him closely. “You look like my husband, but he wasn’t supposed to be back for two more days. How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

“You don’t. I guess you’ll just have to find out,” Kyle said. He pushed open the door, and Kelly slipped inside.

Cal had barely closed the door behind her when she found herself pulled into Kyle’s arms. It was clear from the message his lips and hands were sending as they ravaged her body that Kyle had missed her as much as she had missed him.

It took several long, delicious moments before she could tear herself away from him. Her breath came in short gulps. She loved how he made her feel both mentally and physically. “So the hearings are over?”

“They are. At least for now. You should be proud of how utterly persuasive I am,” Kyle said as he nuzzled the crook of her neck.

After the incident at the Army’s facility outside of Copper City, Kyle had publicly come out speaking against the treatment of shifters in the armed services, based on his experience as well as others. He had been called upon to give testimony against the officials who were in charge of the lab.

In just a few short months, he had become a pseudo-ambassador for all shifter veterans. This last round of testimony, and she knew it had been the most difficult. Although he had been eager to tell the truth about everything, when it was his own father staring at him across the defendant table, it had been incredibly difficult. But her alpha had taken it all in stride.

“No recurrences of the nightmares?” Kelly had been concerned the stress of the trial might cause a relapse in Kyle’s symptoms. She had been closely monitoring his medication, and there had been a remarkable improvement ever since he had taken over the alpha claim for the Urban Dwellers. It suited him to be in charge.

“None,” he said. “It appears that I just had to meet the right doctor to take care of me.”

She smiled at him again as she brushed his hair out of his eyes. The new confidence that she saw in him was overwhelming. He had taken on responsibilities that she had no idea that he would ever want to do, but he said it was because of her that he did. He said it was because of her that Lukas Kasper had grudgingly agreed to work with his new clan. The Greyelf alpha was curious about medical advances that benefited all shifters. Kyle had also made it clear that the Urban Dwellers were the clan of the future. He told Lukas that if he truly wanted to unite the shifters under one flag, he was going to have to get with the new program, because Kyle refused to swear an oath to anyone ever again.

No one in the Urban Dwellers was required to be bound to Kyle by a blood oath. That was the biggest thing that Kelly had been shocked to learn about and was an area she planned to study once Kyle gave her the greenlight. Kyle wanted people in his clan who wanted to be there, and they were coming to Copper City in droves to join him. She knew that was another reason Lukas knew that he had to careful about how he was dealing with the Urban Dwellers now. Of course, it helped matters a great deal that they were family through Eric’s stepsister Thea and Lukas’s right-hand man, Billy Miller. But, she knew there was still a long way to go.

“So do you need to go back? Or was that it?”

“I think it’s finally done. At least, for now. They have offered me a consulting position to help keep an eye on things. I’ll think about it, but I feel like we have a lot of work to do here.” Kyle leaned back into the plush seat, and Kelly leaned against him and put her head on his shoulder. She listened to his heartbeat under her ear. These stolen moments of silence when it was just the two of them were her favorite.

“So what’s next?” she asked. It seemed as if there was a world of possibilities open to them now.

“I’m kind of excited just to get back to my regular job,” Kyle said.

She looked up at him with a frown. “I thought Sophie was the new manager at Urban Dwellers.”

Kyle’s arm tightened around her as he gave her an amused but tired smile. “Not that job. I told you that we have a lot to do here. I’m talking about running the CAF Foundation. It’ll be a non-profit corporation that uses the medical funding we receive for health and medical research designed specifically for shifters. The doors open on it tomorrow, but only on one condition.”

Kelly was shocked. It was the first she’d heard of the foundation, and she gently punched Kyle on the arm. “I can’t believe you kept that from me! What’s the condition?”

“I know what you gave up to stay here with me. I agreed to do this only with the expectation that I’d be doing it with you as my partner. I’ll run the day-to-day operations, and you can be in charge of the research division. It’s all yours if you want it.”

Kelly felt a lump in the base of her throat. Somehow, everything had come full circle, but in a way that was so much better than she had ever imagined. She had the job that she always wanted. She had the career that was going to satisfy her for the rest of her life, and she was going to be able to help humans and shifters alike. More than anything else, she had the man that she loved forever.

“I’m going to need a verbal yes or no on this partnership,” Kyle teased her.

She smacked him in the arm again. “How did you get away without telling me about any of this? I’ve been with you almost every day for the last six months.”

“I do have my ways,” Kyle said with a twinkle in his eyes.

“How did you talk Eric into it?” Kelly didn’t relish the idea of having Eric as a business partner. They had come to a grudging kind of respect over the last few months, but she knew that it had more to do with the fact that Eric had finally realized that she wasn’t going anywhere, and she loved Kyle with all her heart.

“Believe it or not, again, I can be very persuasive when I want to be.”

“Don’t I know it?” Kelly pushed back closer to him and gave him a gentle kiss. Now it was time for her to ask the other question that she wasn’t so certain about.

“I got a call from Dr. Monroe.”

Kyle nodded. “I know. I told him it was okay for him to do that.”

Dr. Monroe was Kyle’s new therapist. They had been working on various techniques to bring Kyle’s memories forward. Of course, that was with the permission of both Tony and Eric as well. So far, they hadn’t had any luck. It was as if those twelve hours were going to continue to elude Kyle and the rest of the Urban Dwellers for the foreseeable future.

No matter what Kyle thought, Kelly was convinced that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. She knew her husband, and she knew that he was a good man. No matter what happened, or what they eventually uncovered, she firmly believed that. That was why she had agreed to marry him. She reached up and touched the crook of his neck. She knew that although she couldn’t see the small bite mark there, it was there visible to any shifter female that bothered to look for it. It made her feel bold and possessive in a way that she knew didn’t quite sit with her humanness. Perhaps that’s because there it was more than likely a small part of Kyle’s DNA that had mingled with hers when he claimed her with his bite. It was something else that was on her list to study. As soon as she found the time.

Kyle took her hands in his. “These last six months have been the happiest of my life.”

“Mine too,” she responded as she let him gather her up in his arms. No matter what, she knew that as long as she was with Kyle, things would be okay. She didn’t have to worry about the future anymore.

In Kyle Frost’s arms, she would always be safe, and she would always be loved.

THE END

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Remember the ghostly redhead haunting Kyle’s dreams? She’s not done with the Urban Dwellers yet. Not even close. Sparks fly between Urban Dweller, Anthony Atwood and Assistant DA, Maggie O’Hara when Maggie receives an anonymous package which contains incriminating evidence of a cold case that points right at Tony and the rest of the Urban Dwellers.

Will she help him? Or turn him in?

Secrets that Simmer (Urban Dwellers #2)
can be ordered by clicking
HERE
!

Want to know more about Lukas Kasper and his rise to claim the alpha seat of the Greyelf Grizzly Clan? Read more about Lukas and his fated mate, Maren, by clicking
HERE.

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