Falling for the Cougar

by Terry Spear

  She wasn’t about to give up her career and lose sight of her own dreams. She was going to make lieutenant colonel. That was her goal, and nothing was going to stop her. Well, bad Officer Evaluation Reports, maybe, but she’d done well this far, and she wasn’t going to worry about that now.

  The wait staff served the food and she concentrated on her broiled shrimp while Scott worked on his shrimp pasta. When she looked up from her meal, she caught him studying her. Her whole body warmed in embarrassment. How long had he been watching her? Had her comments about the retirement check made him reconsider being with her? The notion gnawed at her. She wasn’t sure she could handle the bad guys on her own.

  He rolled his fork in his noodles dripping in white cheese sauce. “I’m serious about this situation with your girlfriend. What do you know about her?”

  “She’s not Russian.”

  He smiled. “No, but I’m wondering if there isn’t something more to her backing out of the vacation. Can you try and get ahold of her?”

  “I tried her cell phone before I left town, but no response. I can try again.”

  “I wouldn’t let her know you’re back in town if you get ahold of her. Just maybe talk about the bad weather, and oh, by the way, how are things going with your family’s emergency? Maybe even ask a question or two concerning Major Tom, if she knows anything more.”

  The way he always called him the major, made her think Scott was annoyed she’d dated a higher-ranking officer. Did he think it gave her privileges or something? Or did he feel inferior? She couldn’t tell, only that his voice was on edge whenever he mentioned Tom.

  “Yeah, I can do that.” She speared a shrimp with her fork. “Are you sure my staying with you for a couple of days won’t put you out? It seems like kind of a crummy deal for you that you have to end your vacation so suddenly and then you’re saddled with me for the rest of the time.”

  “Hell, we’re dating.” He smiled.

  Scott stretched his legs out under the table. She couldn’t be serious. Spending the rest of his week alone in his home with her was the kind of vacation that worked well for him. But when he looked at her, he realized she was totally serious.

  He reached across the table and took her hand in his. “We have to resolve this situation with you, but I’m not in it just for the short run. I’ve never had so much fun with a woman before in my life. In fact, this will probably be the first vacation I’ve ever taken I won’t feel I have to rest up from afterward.”

  She smiled the same sweet smile that got him all worked up in the first place. Sure, he could be a gentleman and offer to sleep on the couch while she stayed over. But they’d already spent time in bed together. Even if she had been a cougar for most of the night. Couldn’t they continue in the same mode as before? Of course now wasn’t the time to talk to her about it. Somehow, he had to convince her his old couch wasn’t a viable alternative for him to sleep on. He’d slept there before when his sister visited and the coils in the couch made him feel like The Princess and the Pea, every ring of metal bruising him.

  When they finished their meals, Nicole asked, “Dessert?”

  He couldn’t help smiling. Of course, the first thing he thought of was enjoying her naked, squirming beneath him in the throes of passion. That’s what he wanted for dessert. Take out. He chuckled.

  His laughter was infectious as she laughed in response. He reached over and squeezed her hand. “Maybe later.”

  Smiling, she shook her head.

  After she paid for their meals, they walked outside, and he was delighted to see the sky clearing and no more rain. They climbed into his car and began the remainder of the trek home.

  Only three more hours, and they’d be back in sleepy Killeen. First, they had to retrieve Bambi. So did Bambi have some kind of nuclear warhead secrets stuffed into his fiber-filled body or what? He figured they should contact the FBI or CIA or somebody who might be able to handle the matter. Maybe his uncle who lived in Dallas. But they wouldn’t make the call until he was sure they had something they could prove. So far, except for her stolen car, there was nothing they could prove. And even that was just their word that they had the car in Galveston in the first place.

  Twenty minutes later, traffic along the highway slowed down to a beetle’s crawl. “Must be an accident,” Scott said. “Do you want to pull off and get a room?”

  “You know, you can keep bringing it up, but I’m not going for it.”

  He chuckled. “I keep hoping I’ll wear you down.”

  “I’m not the wearing down kind.”

  He reached over and slid his hand over her silky-smooth thigh. “Me neither.”

  She patted his hand. “Both hands on the wheel while you’re driving.”

  “I’m not driving. I’m rolling along at the pace of a toddler on a tricycle.”

  Squirming in her seat, she tried to see what the obstruction was. She opened her window and peered out. “Oh, my God.” Her face turned ice white and she was trembling.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “A car has plowed into that concrete overpass about half a mile ahead.”

  “It probably hydroplaned on the wet roads. They’re drenched even with the sun trying hard to dry them.”

  “Nobody could have survived that mess. There are at least four police cars, an ambulance, and a tow truck parked up there.”

  Her fingers gripped the seat tighter as they inched closer. He rubbed her shoulder, not sure what else to do to decrease her worry.

  She strained to see the sight and then he remembered her premonition. He hoped to God it wasn’t Nicole’s stolen car and if it was, that Jackie hadn’t been driving it. “Nicole…”

  She waved her hand to silence him and he figured they’d know before long.

  “It…it looks like a blue Grand Am. Like my Grand Am. Only it…it’s an accordion now.” Her voice shook and he took ahold of her hand.

  “Maybe it’s just another,” he said.

  Shaking her head, she reached for the door handle. “Not after the premonition I had.” They were still about a quarter of a mile away from it and rolling along the wet pavement.

  He squeezed her hand. “When we get closer, you can check the license plates. If it’s yours—”

  “It is mine.”

  He pulled off the highway onto the shoulder and drove to the accident. A policeman waved him away, but Scott parked and hurried out of the car to meet him. Nicole was by his side before he realized she’d even left the car.

  “Folks, you can’t help anyone here. You need to move along,” the policeman said.

  Nicole said, “It’s my car.”

  He stared at her in disbelief and Scott spoke up, “Her car was stolen in Galveston sometime earlier this morning or late last night. We reported it stolen.”

  “Just a minute.” The policeman walked back over to one of the squad cars.

  Nicole grabbed Scott’s arm. “What if there’s a body in it like the other policeman said?”

  “He was just being a jerk. They wouldn’t have put his body in the trunk of your car. They didn’t steal the car until long after the body vanished.”

  When the policeman returned, he said, “Yeah, I just verified your claim. You’re Nicole Welsh?”

  She nodded as her hand slipped down Scott’s arm and interlocked with his hand. He held her fingers firmly in his as she said, “What about the men who stole it?”

  “Men? There was only a woman driving it. No ID though. No cell phone, nothing.”

  “Is she…is she—”

  “She wasn’t even wearing a seatbelt. Speeding in these bad weather conditions, her—your car—hydroplaned. We keep telling people to wear seatbelts and to slow down in inclement weather, but well, you know how it is. Her head went straight through the windshield. She died instantly, the paramedics said.”

  Scott put his arm around Nicole and pulled her close. She was trembling slightly, but she wasn’t collapsing. Her next question surprised him thou
gh.

  “Can we see the body?”

  The policeman frowned.

  “If I see her, I might be able to identify her.”

  He led her to the ambulance. The technician pulled back the cover over the victim’s face and Nicole’s face turned ice white.

  “Who was the woman?” the policeman asked.

  “Somebody she must recognize. I don’t know the woman.” Scott didn’t want to say it was Jackie until Nicole verified who it was.

  “Jackie Huntington,” Nicole said weakly.

  Scott wasn’t sure what to do next. This was a deadly game and Nicole and he were bound to get killed playing it.

  The policeman turned to Nicole. “She had no ID on her. We only found this note on the passenger’s seat with your license tag number and a note to take it to a body shop.”

  “Can I see the note?” Nicole asked.

  The police officer showed it to her.

  “Tom’s handwriting.”

  “You know him?” the officer asked.

  “Thomas Cromwell, a major who works at the same office I work in.”

  “We’ll talk to him. Did you know her well?”

  “She was a captain stationed at Fort Hood. She was assigned to the G-1, 1st Cavalry Division.” Nicole gave him their work phone number.

  “Do you know why she would have stolen your car?”

  Nicole closed her eyes, then opened them, and shook her head.

  The policeman said, “We’ll notify next-of-kin. The car’s going to be only good for the wrecker’s yard. You can get anything out of it that you want.”

  Scott took Nicole’s arm. “All right. I’ll take Nicole back to my car, and I’ll come get her things.”

  He helped Nicole back to his car and crouched at her side as she sat in the passenger’s seat. “I’m going to get everything out of your car I can and then they’ll haul it away to the wrecker’s yard. Until your insurance pays up, I can drive you to work. You’ll stay with me too, for safety sake.”

  She nodded. He patted her shoulder, then kissed her cheek. “Be right back.” He felt terrible for her. It was bad enough that unknown assailants were after her, but it was worse when one of them turned out to be a so-called friend.

  Nicole watched as Scott hurried back to what was left of her car. Her knight-in-shining-armor. And then her thoughts turned to Jackie. How could she have been involved with the killers? Now Nicole knew Jackie had never had any intention of vacationing with her. Or maybe she did to begin with. Had she been bribed to steal the car? They had to hide the evidence of Nicole running over the man, just like Scott said. But why did Jackie say she had a family emergency? To stay out of the killer’s way when they came for Nicole? Why hadn’t they just broken into Nicole’s apartment and gotten Bambi, if that’s what they wanted?

  Maybe they didn’t know venison was Bambi.

  And too, they might have figured Nicole knew something. That her father had told her, or even that Boris had given her a clue about the whole sorted mess. They wanted to get rid of her and now Scott too.

  Scott walked back to the car with an armload of CDs. After depositing them in the back seat, he took her hand. “Are you all right?”

  “I think we might stop at a hotel along the way.”

  His eyes widened.

  “I’m not sure we should go straight back into the rattlers’ nest.”

  “Sure. We can do that. Just a few more things I need to grab out of your car, then the tow-truck driver needs for you to sign a release form.”

  He leaned over and brushed her lips, not pressuring this time, just reassuring. They felt nice and warm against hers and she wanted the feeling to last longer. Instead, he hastened back to her car, and made two more trips before she signed the release. Afterward, they were on their way again.

  Detouring, he drove another hour and a half, and arrived at the historic town of Salado where early in the nineteenth century, cattle were driven through the main street, at one time part of the Chisholm Trail route. Nicole took a deep breath as she studied several of the gift shops, their windows decorated with the latest fashions or unusual garden ornaments and other kinds of unique trinkets. “How did you know this was one of my favorite places to shop?”

  He smiled. “Male intuition.”

  Her father never had any intuition. She shook her head at Scott.

  His smile broadened. “My mother used to drag us down here to shop when we lived in Hillsboro for a time. They have some nice restaurants and several bed and breakfasts here. I think it would be safer than a hotel.”

  He drove into the gravel parking lot of a Greek-Revival two-story mansion painted in sunflower yellow. Windows across the front of the inn were trimmed with forest green shutters. A white picket fence encircled the grounds including the inn and several smaller cottages and cabins. Towering old live oaks, elms, and persimmon trees shaded the grassy lawn and the entire estate backed up against the Salado Creek.

  After parking, he escorted Nicole into the mansion. “We don’t have any reservations,” he said to the woman running the establishment, “but we are looking at getting a room for a couple of nights.”

  The woman glanced at Nicole and then back at Scott. Nicole knew her cheeks had to have been bright red as hot as they felt with embarrassment. “Names?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Scott Weekum.”

  Nicole bit her lip as she hid her hands in her pockets. Scott noticed her hiding her hands and smiled.

  “There’s a special rate for weekdays and the price depends on the place you choose to stay.” She handed Scott a list of the accommodations. “Because of the bad weather, we’ve had several cancellations so just about everything on this list is available.”

  Scott took Nicole’s arm and led her into a sitting area where the sun streamed in through several windows across the backside of the house. They sat down on a sofa for two. With their heads nearly touching, they looked over the pictures of each of the rooms, from the first Texas lady governor’s and an early Texas German log cabin to a three-bedroom Victorian home, a cottage, and rooms in the main mansion.

  Nicole considered the photos of each of the rooms. In the main house, one of the rooms upstairs had a private entrance. It was the least expensive of any of the rooms at ninety dollars a night during the weekday. Would a private entrance be important to them if they needed to make a quick escape? Or would it make it easier for the bad guys to get to them?

  The next room had a veranda and lace-canopied, Victorian-styled, queen-size bed. It also had a twin-size bed. It was more expensive, but she’d never slept in a canopied bed before and she thought she’d feel like a princess.

  The next upstairs room had a veranda too, but just one queen-size bed and no canopy. Downstairs, the room was like this one, only it had a private entrance. Downstairs would make them more vulnerable, she felt.

  A 1915 sharecropper’s house had a queen-size bed and living area, kitchen, private bath. A converted outdoor kitchen was now a cottage. The rooms of one of the log cabins were connected by a dogtrot.

  Scott leaned over and kissed Nicole’s cheek and whispered, “Which place?”

  She pointed at the room with the canopy bed.

  “All right, let me see if it’s available.”

  Scott spoke to the woman as Nicole peered out the window. The creek, swollen from the torrential rain, flowed over the rounded stones past the house. After they were settled, she wanted to go wading in the creek.

  She walked back over to the counter to see if he got their choice of rooms. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She smiled back at him. Looking down at the counter, she checked the breakfast menu while Scott used his credit card to pay for the room. She wrinkled her nose as she read the menu. Pineapple French toast with ambrosia salsa, baked French toast, egg casserole and cinnamon butter.

  “Looks good, huh?” the woman asked Nicole.

  Nicole smiled back. She was skipping breakfast.

  After hauling their luggage to
the Sweet Serenity Room, Nicole ran her hand over the star quilt on the queen-size mattress. He sat down on the twin bed. “You know, I was trying to keep up appearances and you blew it by getting one of the only rooms with two beds.”

  She laughed. “We could have stayed in the nineteenth century log cabin and had separate bedrooms.”

  “No, this will do nicely.”

  “I just had to sleep in a canopy bed.” She ran her hand up the mahogany bedpost.

  “Ahh, I just thought you wanted me to have the little bed. I was afraid maybe I’d disturbed your sleep last night.”

  “I don’t remember a thing.” She looked over to see his eyes full of mischief. “I mean, I slept well.”

  “So what do you want to do first?”

  “Play in the creek.”

  He smiled. “I expected you’d walk my legs off shopping for the rest of the day.”

  “We can do that tomorrow. This afternoon, I want to play in the creek.”

  He took her hand and pulled her to sit on the twin bed. “Sorry about the marriage thing. I just didn’t think you wanted me to give two separate names.”

  His leg rested against hers, warm and firm. “It was the lack of a ring I figured she’d notice right away.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, I saw you stuffing your fingers in your pockets.”

  His fingers worked between hers, warm and soft, caressing in a gentle manner, making her lose her train of thought. All she could think of was his leg caught between hers while she struggled to get off his slippery body in the sand. She finally looked at him, his gaze intent on their fingers as he worked his magic.

  She cleared her throat. “Ms. Eagle Eye probably looked to see if I was wearing any when we first entered the building. I wasn’t prepared to be Mrs. Scott Weekum, or I would have hidden my hands earlier. You know, this isn’t the kind of place that rents by the hour.”

  He reached up and touched her cheek. And she knew what he wanted. His eyes had a kind of clouded-over expression as if his mind was on hold and a more important part of his body was now in charge. When he pressed his lips against hers and leaned her against the mattress, she parted her lips, willing him in.