Page 40 of A Cougar's Kiss
“You are who you are, Shya, not what life has decided to toss your way.”
“Really, Keller? So, the pain of losing your parents and of knowing that Mackey killed Janet Matias has nothing to do with the man you’ve become?”
He dropped his head at her words because he’d just been thinking along the same lines.
“Her name was Sendy,” he said in a voice so low he wasn’t sure she could hear him. We lived in a small town just outside of Kansas City. “There’d been some talk of a new drug on the streets being pushed by a rogue shifter, but we didn’t pay a lot of attention to that since our town only had about twenty-five hundred citizens. But one day when my mother was coming home from her job at the supermarket, she was approached by a rogue who wanted her to move some of his product through the store. She told him no and he attacked her. My mother was a good fighter and she fought back. I was five years old and that day my father, Boyd, had to pick me up from daycare. When we got home, I saw my mother bleeding on the couch. For weeks my dad took care of her and I helped a little, but she wasn’t healing, and my dad couldn’t figure out why.”
He cleared his throat and continued. “There was no curandero near our town, so we had to get on the road to find help. We found one in Missouri who admitted her to his hospital, but he couldn’t save her. After days and days of sitting in that room watching her lay perfectly still without opening her eyes, hearing all those damn machines that were supposed to be helping, she died.”
And so, did a part of him.
“We had no money because my father had lost his job weeks before when he stayed home to care for my mom, so we couldn’t afford plane tickets to take her body back to the Gungi and we couldn’t afford a simple burial ceremony here in the States. There was a public assistance program that would cremate her body for free and that night my father and I were set to sleep at the morgue so that we could be with her one last time. We didn’t have any place else to sleep anyway. But while I lay on that cold floor knowing that my mother’s dead body was stored on one of those shelves, my father left to find the rogue who had injured her. Twenty-four hours later, I became a ward of the State of Missouri and put into foster care. My father had been killed by a human cop who came along while three Shadow Shifters—two black and one white--argued in an alley. The cop hadn’t known what they were then, he’d only presumed it was a drug transaction at play and used his gun instead of his handcuffs.”
“Keller,” her voice was a soft whisper, but the touch of her hand on his back was a warm welcome. The comfort that five-year-old Keller had longed for yet never received. “That was your building that Mackey brought the rogue into wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “I was angry after my parents’ deaths and hated every second of living in foster care. By the time I was ten, the Unveiling happened, and I wanted nothing more than to hook up with the Shadow Shifter leaders and help them fight. But that’s not what happened, Oasis was created, some Shadows went into hiding while others died. I stayed above ground going to school and building a company so I could one day have enough money to make a significant change for the shifters. Ewan Mackey wanted to buy my computer engineering firm, but I knew who he was and what he was doing so I refused. When he grew tired of my answer, he thought outing me to the world as a shifter was a better option. That rogue shifted right there in my office and went on the attack, I had no choice but to shift as well.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Every year on the anniversary of their death I make deposits into the bank accounts of the families who lost someone because of me.”
“No, because of Mackey,” she said.
He frowned. “That’s why this is so important to me, Shya. Opening these safe houses and taking a stand for the shifters is all I’ve been able to focus on for years. And then I got caught up at Headquarters and sentenced to babysitting duty.”
“Which I’m guessing you didn’t have to do if you really didn’t want to be caught up at Headquarters.”
She wasn’t wrong about that, but Keller didn’t want to talk about himself anymore, he still needed to make sure she was okay. He turned slightly, looking at her propped up on one arm, the other hand still moving over his back.
He shifted his position so that he could wrap his arms around her waist and ease her back down on the bed.
“Tell me what I can do to make you feel better.” Because seeing her act as if she wasn’t in pain was killing him.
“Stay with me,” she said and reached up a hand to touch his face. “I don’t know why but I always feel better when you’re around…and when I’m not shifting into a giant jaguar.”
She chuckled and the sound sifted through all of Keller’s conflicting feelings until he felt like there was light somewhere at the end of the tunnel.
“Until you get used to the shift it will take a lot out of you. But you did good pulling it back.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said and shook her head against the pillows. “I had no idea what I was doing when I was finding out all that information and recording it in my journal or on that board. Even those files on Cole and Jacques were confusing, just a bunch of stuff about their DNA. I just liked the idea of knowing something for a change.”
He sighed, unable to find the strength to warn her about knowing too much. Things hadn’t exactly gone the way Keller wanted them tonight and he was feeling exhausted with the effort and with the weight of the new emotions he was carrying. He wondered if Shya knew they shared thecompanheiro calor. If she did, how did she feel about it and most importantly what would they do from this point on?
“Come here,” she said.
It was his turn to chuckle. “If I come any closer, I’ll be on top of you.”
Her lips spread into a slow smile. “I know.”
He could protest, bring up how she already looked like she was in enough pain without worrying about the weight of him on top of her, but he didn’t want to. Instead, Keller took his time undressing her, easing her boots off her feet, peeling her pants and socks off and then removing her shirt.
“Turn over,” he told her as he moved off the bed.
When he was standing on the side of the bed, he removed his boots and his clothes except for his boxers before climbing back onto the bed. She’d done what he instructed, and Keller straddled her back, touching his hands to her shoulders where he began a slow massage.
“Oh, that feels so good.”
The words were a soft whisper, half buried in the pillow before she moaned. He continued to move his hands over her shoulders, loving the feel of her muscles relaxing beneath his touch. He eased down her back, unhooking her bra and massaging his fingers over her spine. When a Shadow changed from its human to cat form, the spine was the hardest to meld into the back of the cat. He recalled his first few shifts, in an alley behind one of the foster homes he was in during his fourteenth and fifteenth years. He’d cried out in agony, but nobody had heard him. After a while it became easier, until taking the cat’s form was as simple as breathing to him now.
At the lower part of her back, Keller eased off her so that he could give this area specific attention. The bending and cracking here was also painful which was probably why she’d rolled into the fetal position the moment she lay on the bed. Her muscles were tight here and he worked them until they felt pliant and she was moaning softly again.
He worked on her legs and then her feet and by the time he finished and came up to join her on the pillows, Shya was sound asleep. His lips tilted in a smile at the sight of her thick dark eyelashes brushing against her much lighter skin. Her hair was a messy ball on top her head and he gently pulled it free of the band she’d used to hold it together, letting his fingers sift through the soft curls. She didn’t stir when he pulled the comforter back and lifted her so that he could tuck her under it, or when he slid in behind her and eased her back securely against his front.
That’s how Keller fell asleep after such a tumultuous night, holding her—his mate—in his arms and trying not to be alarmed at the possibility that this wouldn’t last forever.
