Shield of Winter

Chapter 22

Kaleb Krychek may have mandated the fall of Silence, but he gives us no answers for who we are without the Protocol. He leaves us to drown.

Anonymous PsyNet posting

COMFORTABLY ENSCONCED IN the sun-drenched breakfast nook, Sahara completed the lesson she’d downloaded and considered the question asked by the lecturer. “What is the meaning of good governance?”

Kaleb looked up from the counter where he’d just finished preparing two nutrient drinks. Drinking from the glass he passed her, she blew him a kiss. “I love you.”

“You only say that because of my cherry flavoring.”

She almost splurted the drink out of her nose. “And to think people say you have no sense of humor.”

Having finished his drink, Kaleb did up a cuff link. Sahara’s stomach heated as it always did when she watched him dress or undress.

“Why are you studying politics when you’re living it?”

She walked over to finish buttoning his shirt and do up his tie, the strip of deep blue, almost black silk lying around his neck in readiness for her touch. “Because,” she said, delighting in this small ritual that had quietly become a part of their lives, “people who think they know everything end up becoming despots.”

Kaleb’s hands on her hips, his thumbs brushing over her skin after he nudged up her knit top as he had a way of doing. “Good governance,” he said, “is acting for your people rather than for your own gain.”

Her fingers stilled on his tie. “Yes,” she whispered to the man she adored, a man who’d been brutally scarred by “leaders” acting for their own selfish interest.

“That is your definition.” His fingers squeezed her hips. “Mine is to do nothing that would make you ashamed to be mine.”

Sometimes, he broke her heart. “Never will I be ashamed to be yours.”

Kaleb bent his head toward her, his eyes a moonless night. “Don’t say things like that, Sahara. What will I become if I don’t fear losing you through my actions?”

“You’ll always be mine.” She cupped his face, his jaw smooth. “And I won’t let you cross those lines.”

He said he had no conscience, but he loved her with a wild devotion that made her feel safe, feel whole, feel cherished. In that love she saw hope for who they’d become together.

His kiss was raw, sexual, his hands lifting to place her on the counter. Standing between her spread thighs, his shoulders beautifully muscled under the fine fabric of his black shirt, he kissed her as if she was his air. She thrust one hand in the damp strands of his hair, cupped his nape with the other, and kissed him back with the same hunger. They’d both been deprived of touch for so long, and now they denied themselves nothing.

When he tugged up her top, she lifted her arms to allow him to pull it off. Wrapping those arms around his neck afterward, she luxuriated in the feel of his hands on her skin. “I thought you had a meeting,” she said, kissing his jaw, the line of his throat, the masculine scent of him overlaid by the clean bite of his aftershave.

“I’ve told Silver to postpone it.”

Leaning back, she simply looked at him, her dangerous lover who always put her first. “We’ll beat it,” she said, conscious the infection was a problem about which he never quite stopped thinking. “With the empaths and the Arrows and our race’s will to survive.”

Kissing the upper curve of her breast, Kaleb bracketed her rib cage with his hands. “The Arrows and the empaths—perhaps. But you have more faith in our race than I do. Right now most are burying their heads in the sand, hoping I’ll tell them who to be, what to become. They’re sheep.”

She tugged up his head with a hand fisted in his hair. “If they are, it’s because they’ve been trained to be that way for a century. A good leader will lead them to true independence. You’ll lead them to freedom.”

Kaleb might not be a white knight, but he was the knight the Psy race needed. Strong, fearless, and willing to make the hard decisions. And he was hers. Wrapping her thighs around him, she sank into the kiss, into him.