by Terry Spear
“Ha!” Shannon said. “Well, maybe that’s why Roger didn’t kill me. He could have. Maybe he figured he’d injure me enough, and then they’d force me to tell them what they wanted to know. But he would have killed me afterward.”
“Just my thought,” Dottie said. “I wanted to be the one to make the call to Rick so I could say something that would alert everyone that something was wrong, but the older man just texted Rick, pretending to be Dan and must have said he couldn’t reach my house in time to pick us up. They knew about the traffic accidents and that Dan had been at the clinic. I suspected Hal might be driving because he has a heavier truck, but I didn’t say anything. I hoped if they asked if Chase would come and get me, Rick might figure that something was up.”
Rick shook his head as he served more wine to everyone. “I didn’t give it a thought. My only concern was that everyone was late getting in. I had never considered Hennessey and his uncle might be there. We thought it was a case of you getting stuck somewhere in this snow.”
“How did they know to go to your place? Even if they were monitoring Dan’s calls, how did they know who you were exactly? And where you live?” Chase asked.
“You know that reporter? Carl Nelson? He learned of the accidents and was still wanting more information about those cougar sightings,” Dottie said.
Dan grunted. “Hell, he was pestering me at the clinic right before I left to see you. I heard him tell his boss that he was checking out an accident that Stryker was working and that he’d gotten nothing from me about the cougars as he hurried out of the clinic.”
“Hennessey said something about usually hating reporters, but they got lucky with that one in town. Since the reporter isn’t a shifter, he wouldn’t have been suspicious of them asking him about me. So that’s how Hennessey and his uncle learned just where I lived,” Dottie said. “They must have talked to him, and left town right afterwards before Dan departed the clinic. Only a few minutes after they arrived, Dan parked out front.”
“We were just lucky Carl hadn’t come around to your house about that time or what a mess that would have been,” Dan said.
“Agreed,” Chase said. “I don’t think any of us want him to join our exclusive cougar club.”
Shannon explained how she’d run out of the house, stripped, and shifted so she could draw one of the men away and give Chase a chance to get the advantage inside.
Chase took a deep breath and looked at Hal, who was forking out a potato onto his plate. “When Hal fell beside me, I was certain he was dead and that Shannon and I were next. I saw her dash back outside and I dove for the couch. I had my gun out and came around the corner of the couch to shoot the shooter, but he had dashed toward the hall, and I knew he intended to grab a hostage to use as a shield. I fired a couple of shots and took him down. Then I heard Hennessey and Shannon fighting in the snow and I quickly stripped and shifted and took off after them. I’d briefly thought of trying to shoot him, but I believed I’d have a better chance killing him in my cat coat than if I took a chance shooting at the two cats fighting.”
Everyone was eating in earnest when Hal cleared his throat and said to Shannon. “So… where is the money?”
“Like I should know.”
“Did he have a safety deposit box?” Rick asked.
“I wouldn’t know. He paid the bills. I still had my own personal checking account, but once I stopped working, I didn’t have any more money coming in that I could call my own.”
“Did he spend a lot of extra money on stuff?” Chase asked. “Maybe he spent it all.”
“He said he had expenditures, but Hennessey didn’t believe him. He was certain he’d lied about it.”
“Did he garden?” Yvonne asked.
“Garden?” Shannon asked.
“Like he might have dug a hole and hid it.”
She shook her head, trying to remember if he’d been doing anything different lately.
“Grand Cayman accounts?” Stryker asked.
“Not that I would know about.”
“He hunted and fished with his brothers and uncle, right?” Dan asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did he have a freezer?” Chase asked.
She stared at Chase. “Sure, but I never went into it.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “He said he had organized it his way and if I went in there and began digging around, I’d end up pulling out the wrong meats to eat first.”
Rick was on his phone immediately. “Hey, Jenks, we think we have a lead on where the stolen money is.”
“I can’t believe I had been so naïve,” Shannon said as they left the table and helped to clean up.
Everyone there gave thanks for the people in their town, for the feast they shared, and for Shannon coming into their lives. She snorted at that. But everyone smiled at her, and Chase took her in his arms and kissed her, telling her just how much he had to be thankful for.
“When’s the wedding?” Dottie asked, all smiles.
“Next week,” Chase said.
Shannon had opened her mouth to say a couple of weeks, but when he looked at her, she sighed and said, “A week. And then he’s taking me to an island for a honeymoon.”
He looked down at her and smiled. “I did promise that, didn’t I? But we have to be home for Christmas.”
“I’m all for that.” But she wasn’t sure what she was going to get him to show him just how much she loved him.
“We got some bottles of champagne, and they’re chilled, just in case,” Yvonne said and Rick helped her to get them.
The glasses of champagne were passed around.
“To a long life and happy marriage,” Dan said, raising his glass for a toast.
“Here, here!”
Toasts continued until everyone had their say. And then later, they enjoyed some of Shannon’s chocolate cake and Stryker’s pecan pie. As they were cleaning up again, Rick got a call and smiled.
They all waited in anticipation. “Thanks. I’ll let everyone know.” He ended the call and said, “A million and a half dollars.”
“In the freezer in the basement? How could he have even had that much money in there?” Shannon asked, incredulous.
“He had a whole slew of Grover Cleveland thousand dollar bills in a secret compartment in the basement floor underneath the freezer. He was taking a lot of sudden trips out of town. Probably depositing the illegal gains at different locations, then transferring them to an offshore account. Only this time he didn’t have time to before his brother confronted him.”
“So they hadn’t needed to go after me in the first place. Except that I had witnessed Hennessey killing Ted,” Shannon said.
“And they needed a scapegoat,” Chase said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders.
Dottie glanced at her toddlers sound asleep on the couch cuddled up against Hal, who looked like he was having a difficult time staying awake. “Looks like it’s time to call it a night.”
Stryker offered to take Hal home with him, and he’d watch over him for the night. Dan was taking Dottie and her kids home.
And Shannon was going home with Chase, only this time it was going to be her home, too.
She still was afraid she’d have the nightmares, but she hoped they’d soon go away. This was the first real home she’d had since her parents died, but more than anything, Chase was who made it home for her and she was happy to set down roots.
First, they had to drop by Dan’s house and exchange Hal’s truck for Chase’s hatchback. She hoped they would make it to the cabin all right in the snowstorm.
“I have to admit for the first time in four years, I’ll be sitting in the cabin with a fire going and the snow coming down outside with a wild cat in my arms. You can’t know how good that makes me feel,” Chase said.
“I haven’t had a real home since my parents died,” Shannon said. “You can’t know what it’s like to be going to a home of my own with a cat who’s one of the good guys and as
close to being the perfect hero as a woman can get.”
“Close?” he asked, smiling.
She smiled. “Yeah. You shot me the first time we met, remember?”
And it was the best mistake he’d ever made.
###
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my beta readers—Donna Fournier, Bonnie Gill, Dottie Jones, and Loretta Melvin, for helping make the story the best it can be!
About the Author:
Bestselling and award-winning author Terry Spear has written over fifty paranormal romance novels and five medieval Highland historical romances. Her first werewolf romance, Heart of the Wolf, was named a 2008 Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year, and her subsequent titles have garnered high praise and hit the USA Today bestseller list. A retired officer of the U.S. Army Reserves, Terry lives in Crawford, Texas, where she is working on her next werewolf romance, continuing her new series about shapeshifting jaguars, and having fun with her young adult novels. For more information, please visit www.terryspear.com, or follow her on Twitter, @TerrySpear. She is also on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/terry.spear. And on Wordpress at:
Terry Spear's Shifters
http://terryspear.wordpress.com/
A short excerpt for the next in the Heart of the Cougar series:
Call of the Cougar
Heart of the Cougar, Book 2
Terry Spear
Call of the Cougar
Copyright © 2014 by Terry Spear
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Discover more about Terry Spear at:
http://www.terryspear.com/
Chapter 1
FBI Agent Tracey Whittington placed the ad for her contact in the Denver paper:
SINGLE FEMALE seeks male companionship. I'm a very good girl who LOVES to play. I love long mountain climbing, hunting, camping, and fishing trips, and cozy winter nights curled up in front of the fire. Candlelight dinners will have me eating out of your hand. I'll be at the front door when you get home from work, wearing only what nature gave me. Ask for Sara. I'll be waiting.
Now, all she had to do was wait for her contact to get in touch with her, and then, they’d nail the man behind the organization involved in money-laundering, arms deals, drugs, and murder.
Patience wasn’t one of her strong suits, but when she got her first call, she was excited. And by the one-hundred and fiftieth call, she was ready to kill the next man who wanted to see her in what nature gave her. A sleek, golden cougar with big teeth and claws—that’s what.
***
All winter, Hal Haverton had worked on his ranch, realizing that winter wasn’t the best time to have bought it and moved in. Sheriff Dan Steinacker had still called him in on assignment when he’d needed an additional deputy, mainly because his other part-time deputy was busy with his new wife, with twin babies on the way, and a resort full of guests lodging at his cabins for the summer.
The summer had been busy for him when Deputy Stryker Hill called him up and invited him into town to have a beer. Hal figured something was up, so he drove into Yuma Town, cougar-shifter capital of the world, they called themselves—but only in private.
Stryker and Dan were having a beer when he joined them. “What’s up?”
“Does anything have to be up?” Dan asked.
Hal eyed the sheriff. “Yeah.”
Dan and Stryker laughed. They’d all been Special Forces army buddies and seen a number of harrowing missions together, had been born and raised here, and returned here after their stints in the army. He ordered a beer and noticed Stryker reading the personals.
“I didn’t know they had stuff like that in the paper anymore. Thought it was all online dating stuff now,” Hal said. “Besides, what do you need to look at those for?”
Stryker smiled at the ad.
“What’s it say?”
“She’s just what you’re looking for.” Stryker handed him the paper.
“Okay, so what we called you about is a problem we’re having with… We’ve heard that …”
Hal only heard half of what Dan was saying. He was too caught up in the ad. “So, did you call her?” he asked Stryker.
“What? No. It’s a con. What woman in her right mind would place an ad like that and be for real?”
“One of our kind?” Hal said, raising a brow.
Stryker said, “Let me look at it again.” He reread it. “Yeah, maybe. Yeah, probably. Okay, so it’s not what I thought.” Then he smiled.
###
Call of the Cougar coming Fall, 2014