The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards)

by Holley Trent

  “Ugh!” She turned off the bedside lamp as he stepped in and yanked the covers up once more. Not that he saw anything.

  He folded his arms over his chest. “I gotta ask, Belle. Everyone keeps asking, and you won’t give a straight answer. Why can’t you just stay away from the hellmouth? I know you cats are sensitive to the paranormal shit, but if it’s as simple as staying off the ranch, why don’t you just stay away from it?”

  “What’s it to you? I didn’t ask for anyone’s help in keeping me away from it.”

  “So, what are you up to? Are you just going to run into it on purpose and have a little look around?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Someone should.”

  “What, precisely, are you trying to learn? I’m probably walking the winding path to hell already, and I certainly don’t want to get there early. What are you trying to achieve? I damn sure don’t believe it’s just a matter of curiosity.”

  Once more, she shrugged. “Believe what you want.”

  “So you’re not gonna talk? Not even gonna try to explain it?”

  “Most men would want me to talk less. There’s something wrong with you, I think.”

  Grinding his teeth, he lifted his hat and gave his hair a tug.

  He kept meaning to get a haircut, but the length drove his father nuts, and Steven enjoyed watching the man turn red in the face far more than a good son should have. Obviously, he wasn’t a good son.

  “All right. There’s something wrong with me,” he said, “which makes me fit in just fine around here, the way I see it. I guess you should count your lucky stars they’re gonna close that portal in a couple of days, and you won’t have to worry about me being in your face anymore.”

  She sat up a little straighter. Her irises were mirrors of gold in the dimness instead of their usual copper color. The part of her that was cat obviously saw better in the dark. “What do you mean, they’re closing it? No one’s said anything to me.”

  “Maybe because you won’t have an adult conversation with anyone.”

  “I speak to my mother every day.”

  “And Glenda knows for sure what’s going on.”

  “I think you’re bullshitting me.”

  “To what end?”

  “To try to get a rise out of me, just like all the Cougar men do. They get some sick, perverse thrill out of getting my temper up and making me scream.”

  “Okay, newsflash, dumpling—I ain’t a Cougar. All the mess that affects y’all with all the pheromones and hormones and whatnot? I don’t have it. If you’re pissed at me, it’s because you just want someone to be pissed at, and I’m sorry if I have the pesky habit of telling the truth about things. Not gonna lie to ya. Sorry.”

  When the comeback he expected of her didn’t come, he looked at her closely and found her eyelids half fallen, her lips parted, and head tilting back.

  “Belle?”

  Nobody fell asleep that fast, but then again, she was a cat. They seemed to have a knack for impressive sleep antics.

  “For Pete’s sake.” He put the back of his hand against her cheek and, finding it ice cold, gave her a frantic shake. “Belle!”

  Her eyelids snapped up, body jerked, and eyes slowly focused on him. Growling, she pushed his hand aside. “Ugh, go away.”

  “Are you kidding me? You just blacked out, didn’t you? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I said go. Away. Do I need to beg you like I do to my brothers, or are you actually going to respect my wishes and get the hell away from me?”

  “Seriously? Okay. You know what?” He stood and put up his hands. “Fine. Poking at a hostile, hissing cat isn’t my idea of a good time, and I’m too tired to try to sweeten you up.”

  “Good luck with that, anyway. You’ve been around long enough to have heard female Cougars can’t be tamed or trained, and you’d be stupid to try.”

  “Good thing I don’t plan to, then. I’m doing just as you asked, and am going to go away.” He jiggled her foot through the covers. “But when I do, I want you to give some thought to why you think you can’t tell anyone what’s going on with you.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks, for the therapy session. Do you enjoy spilling your guts to strangers? Personally, I only share with people I can trust.”

  “You don’t trust me?” Try as he might have, he couldn’t stop his laugh from bubbling up. There weren’t all that many ways to offend him, but she’d gone and found one without much effort at all. He bent over backward every damn day of his life to be a team player, and he didn’t appreciate the implication that he wasn’t worthy of confidence. He didn’t make a habit of letting folks down.

  “So, it doesn’t matter that your momma does or that your brothers do, I guess,” he said. “Seems that their judgment isn’t keen enough for you.”

  “This has nothing to do with them. Or you, in case that wasn’t clear.”

  “Nuh-uh, sweetness. Obviously it does have something to do with them, because we’re talking about a portal that’s been a problem for every last one of you for a year. It’s suddenly not their problem?”

  “The portal is. What I’m doing with it isn’t.”

  “What are you doing with it?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Oh, okay. We’re going to have to agree to disagree on that. I think there’s something wrong with you just like Mason said. You don’t want to talk about it? Okay.” He was long overdue for a shrug, so he did one. “But let me tell you this. I know how it is to not want to talk about the stuff that’s wrecking me. It’s easier to be silent, right? To keep your lips pinched and your thoughts to yourself because you think no one’s gonna get them? Honey, someone is gonna get it, just like you’re going to get whatever it is in the hellmouth that’s got you so pissy.”

  The room may have been nearly dark, but he caught her flinch—her surprise.

  “That’s it, right? You ain’t running to that hellmouth because you think us chasing you is fun. I hope you don’t, because beating girls in footraces stopped being fun for me around sixth grade or so.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” she said softly.

  “So give me some words so I can figure you out. I’m trying to help you. I’ve been doing the reading, learning everything I can about this paranormal stuff. Everything your goddess has put under my nose and everything else I can get my hands on, too. I like knowing what I’m dealing with.”

  And he wanted to know what that thing was that had grabbed him in Afghanistan. Lola and another goddess—an ancestress of Hannah’s witchy friend Ellery named Agatha—had been trying to find out, but they didn’t have many contacts in that part of the world. The fact the thing hadn’t followed him home was a good sign, though, they’d claimed. He didn’t know if he bought it.

  “Just hang in there for two days, puddin’, until they can seal that thing,” he said, “and then you won’t have a worry in the world.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so, but it’s nice to have your compliance for a change.”

  “Does it turn you on?”

  “Honey, nothing about you turns me on.”

  He could lie like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He’d learned that trick from his brothers, though it seemed to come a little more naturally to them. Lying was a pathological defect of theirs. It was their gift kind of in the same way Hannah’s gift was having precognitive dreams. They were born to do it.

  Clearing his throat, he added, “I don’t even plan on looking at you for another ten years or so. Maybe by then, you’ll have grown up a little.”

  She chuckled low—a sound that made his skin tingle and his nuts call him a liar.

  “Says the man who wears boxer shorts with cartoon characters.”

  He pointed at her. “Hey, now. They’re not cartoons. They’re mascots. Excuse the hell out of me for having some team pride.” He started for the door
yet again and, yet again, stopped. “And when the hell did you get a chance to see what was or wasn’t on my boxer shorts?”

  She slipped farther under the covers with a low, throaty laugh, effectively dismissing him.

  “You’re just trying to get my dander up, aren’t ya?”

  “If you say so,” she said sweetly.

  There wasn’t anything sweet about Belle Foye, and she obviously wanted him to know that.

  “If you like,” she purred, “you can show me now, and convince me those little wolves aren’t cartoons. Come closer so I can see really, really well.”

  “Nah. Only stupid people walk closer to hissing cats and expect not to get scratched up.”

  Some men liked getting scratched up. He did on certain occasions, but she didn’t need to know that.

  “I’m not going to scratch you. I’m not even going touch you. Chicken?”

  “Nope. Just smart.”

  “I think you’re chicken. You’re scared of a woman you’ve got six inches and probably sixty pounds on.”

  “Nope. I’m just damned good at discerning when someone’s trying to entrap me.”

  “If you know what I’m trying to do, then you won’t be susceptible to it. Come on. Show me your cartoons, and I’ll tell you a secret.” Her smirk looked like she held the clues to ancient mysteries of the world. He shouldn’t have fallen for it, but he wasn’t going to let the woman think she’d challenged him and won, either.

  He strode to the bedside, unfastened his belt, opened his fly, then dropped trou. “There you go,” he said, smirking, too, as hers fell away.

  “Jerk.” She settled back onto the pillow, and he zipped up his pants.

  “Haven’t had a chance to do laundry in the past couple of weeks. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do a load and start wearing drawers again.” He bowed low and tipped his hat to her. “And with that peep show, I’ll bid you good night. Keep your secret a little longer. I know you’ll need a moment to process what you just saw.”

  He padded to the door and said over his shoulder, “It’s okay to be confused and disoriented. It has that effect on most women. The feeling will pass in time, as long as you stay away from it.”

  “And if I don’t want to?”

  He stopped.

  Then he got moving again. She was just fuckin’ with him because he’d gotten into her head. That was all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Belle was usually pretty good at ignoring distractions at work. She had to be, if she was going to multitask at a proficient enough level to earn good tips. Normally, she could pick up a 20 percent tip with little effort, but that damned country cop at the diner counter digging into his second plate of pancakes and third cup of coffee was commanding nearly all the attention in the room, including hers.

  Folks weren’t ordering, and weren’t eating, because they were too busy listening to Steven recount his good ol’ boy exploits.

  Growling, Belle tucked her towel into the ties of her apron and strode to Alex, who was leaning onto the counter in front of the man of the hour.

  Alex straightened up, and her flirty smile waned. “Oh, God, what’s wrong now? Did a Cougar I don’t know walk in and aggravate your inner kitty?”

  Nope, the guy at the counter is doing just fine with that.

  Belle twisted the bottom of her apron and ground her teeth. Damn it, why him?

  As much as she hated to recognize it, she knew why—at least in part.

  She’d come so close to spilling the beans about that voice in the hellmouth, and she would have been relieved to tell someone, but she’d clammed up. It was as if he were a Cougar she needed to repel and not a plain-old human who was just fun to tease. She hadn’t been able to get the words out.

  Alex pushed up both eyebrows at her.

  Belle stuffed her hands into her apron pockets and straightened her spine. “It looked like maybe you needed something to do, and I was going to help you find something. The back counter’s a little greasy. Maybe you could scrub it.”

  “Or maybe you could scrub it. You obviously need to let off a little energy. Put your back into it. Productivity will do wonders for your demeanor.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my demeanor.” Nothing wrong that getting out of heat wouldn’t fix, anyway, going by her previous four heats.

  They didn’t come on a predictable schedule. She’d had her first soon after turning eighteen. The second came about a year later. Number three threw her for a loop nine months after that. The fourth one came probably six weeks after the third. Now she was in number five and had barely had time to forget how ugly the last one had been.

  She was about a week into her heat, and it was only going to get worse. Instead of peaking and tapering off, her sex drive would get more and more intense right up until day twenty-one, and then it would just stop. Each heat was a little worse and the drive to procreate was harder to ignore.

  Being a female Cougar, she’d be plagued by the damned things until menopause. She could make the symptoms—if not the condition—go away if she just found a nice guy willing to let her climb him ... but the tradeoff would be that pathetic, clingy attachment to him immediately afterward. She was biologically encoded to keep the guy around until she knew for sure if she were pregnant—two or three weeks at the very least. It didn’t matter if a condom was in play. That didn’t shut off the drive to grasp him.

  Freakin’ throwback genetics.

  Most of the women in the glaring didn’t go into heat, but Belle was a Foye. The Foyes might not have looked like it anymore, but they were descended from Lola’s first Cougars, and those Cougars hadn’t been pasty redheads. They’d come out of the jungles of Central America and made their way north.

  “Kitty zoning out again?” Alex asked. “I swear, I’m going to get a spray bottle and start spritzing your face every time you’re rude.”

  Belle sighed and pulled her hands from her pockets to tighten up her loose ponytail holder. “Really, Alex. I’m fine.”

  “Yeah? Because I’m pretty sure you told your goddess when she came in for her morning oatmeal to take a load off and that you’d get to her when you got to her. And then you never got to her.”

  Belle gaped, appalled. “I did not say that!”

  “You did.” Steven’s scoff segued into a sexy, low chuckle.

  “I don’t remember that. I don’t even remember her coming in here.” Damned hormonal, Swiss cheese brain.

  “For real?” Steven’s laugh fell off. He set his elbows atop the counter, and stared at her.

  She groaned. “Gods, what?”

  “You tell me. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on.”

  Only that she was obviously forgetting chunks of her life. Sometimes she had blackouts when she was in heat. It was a combination of her being unable to regulate her temperature and low blood pressure. Usually they were just for a few seconds. She’d fall out of a conversation and would have to have someone nudge her and remind her of what she was talking about. But things had been different lately. Often, she’d leave work and end up at home and not remember crossing the street. That wasn’t normal for any of the few Cougars she knew who had discernible estrus periods.

  She picked up the dirty dishes from the place beside Steven and carried them back to the kitchen. She needed some space to think and in a place far out of his orbit.

  Too often lately, she’d come out of that trancelike state feeling like something was leaving her. In recent weeks, she’d been angrier and angry more often. It was hard for a female Cougar to know what was normal anger and what was out of place. They were genetically coded to be cynical and untrusting, and sometimes they lashed out at inappropriate times. For once, she could tell something was out of place. There was something unsettled in her, and that anger wasn’t hers or the part of her that was cat. It was someone else’s anger, left behind for her to find like some kind of clue. It was righteous and indignant. Justified.

  What the hell is it?<
br />
  She didn’t even know who she could ask.

  She set the dishes and utensils into the basin and wiped her hands clean on her apron. Rubbing her eyes, she tried and failed to tamp down her dread at going back out into the diner. Looking at that man was going to ramp her up again to that agitated headspace she didn’t want to be in.

  She grabbed the carafe of hot decaf and made her way back out and to the corner table to refill the senior group’s mugs.

  You forgot to look at him. Backtrack and look at him, the horny cat in her said.

  While smiling at the little old ladies, Belle shook her head at herself.

  Shifters argued with themselves all the time. It happened when the animal parts and human parts of them didn’t agree on a plan of action, and apparently her cat part thought she should drag Steven off his stool into the back alley and yank down his pants. She wanted a second look at what he’d teasingly shown her the night before. He should have known better than to tease a cat.

  She dragged her forearm across her damp brow and laughed dryly. “He’s not even my type.”

  “Who’s not?” Clovis Seagram asked, peering at Belle over the top of her thick glasses.

  “Oh, don’t mind me, Clovis. I’m in heat. Again.” And possibly possessed by something.

  “Oh.” Clovis pushed her mug closer to the edge of the table and tapped it with her spoon. “Is that decaf?”

  “Yes. Don’t ask me for regular. I don’t want your husband yelling at me again.”

  Clovis waved a dismissive hand at her. “Oh, what does he know, anyway?”

  “He’s your doctor. I’m pretty sure there’s a reason you’re supposed to have decaf. Something about your pills, if I recall.”

  Minnie Garcia—possibly the oldest woman in the glaring besides Lola, though she would never admit it—entwined her bony fingers and fixed her dark gaze on Belle.

  “Oh, hell, the stare. What’s wrong?”

  Minnie always shot straight from the hip in that I’m old, I can say what I want kind of way. It wouldn’t have cut to the bone so cleanly if it weren’t for the fact she was so damned sharp. The retired librarian was generally right about everything.