The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards)

by Holley Trent

  “What the hell?” Steven asked. “Are they demo’ing?”

  “Yep. The guys are reclaiming the wood for furniture, and they’re clearing the plot.”

  “Why?”

  Hannah’s grin was completely sincere and all trouble. “Those Foyes always have plans.”

  “Why does hearing that not instill confidence?”

  “Because sometimes their plans have ... unexpected casualties during implementation.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t sound ominous at all.”

  “Says Mr. Beacon-to-the-Dead. I shouldn’t even be sitting next you right now. You could get me in trouble.”

  “Okay, Ms. I-have-violent-dreams-and-like-to-hit-people.”

  She punched his bicep.

  “See.”

  “Shut up, Steven. Hitting people is my job sometimes.” She parked the four-wheeler near the fence that separated the pasture from the path, and two redheads on horses came over.

  Glenda could barely grab Belle’s reins before they fell out of reach. Belle had jumped down and hurtled toward him, and somehow, he managed to stand clear of the four-wheeler before she pounced on him.

  “Are you ... purring?” he whispered and stifled a chuckle.

  “I guess I am,” she muttered against his neck and tightened her legs around his waist.

  He couldn’t help but to laugh. Glenda was trying not to watch, Hannah was wriggling her eyebrows suggestively at him, and there were a bunch of Foyes who’d suddenly stopped working.

  “I thought only dogs got excited to see their people when they came home.”

  “Obviously that’s not true, ’cause you don’t seem all that excited to see me.”

  “Oh, burn, kitten. I’m plenty excited.” But there was the small matter of there being witnesses and him wanting to keel over at any second from exhaustion. He didn’t even remember the last couple of hours of driving before he hit the ranch road. He’d been on autopilot.

  “Why don’t you show me how excited?” she whispered.

  “What’d you have in mind?”

  She rubbed down the hair at the top of his neck and purred a little longer. “Oh, I happen to know the stables are empty. Perhaps I could show you there.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “I hosed them down myself. We’d only get a little dirty.”

  Looking at the staring Foyes, Steven cleared his throat and adjusted his grip on Belle’s rump. “Uh. Need to go grab something real quick. Be right back.”

  He plopped her into the passenger seat of the four-wheeler and didn’t look back as he raced them up the path.

  She fidgeted her fingers and bounced her legs. “I just wanted to let you know that ... I’m not out of heat. If anyone’s told you otherwise, it’s because I lied.”

  “What?”

  “It was easier. Should have ended by now, but I think I had little respite so I could deal with you.”

  “Deal with me, huh?”

  “Yeah, so just ... do me a favor and ... forgive me.”

  “For what?”

  She didn’t answer.

  She just yanked him from the vehicle, shoving him into the shadows in the stables until his back touched a wall.

  Growling, she clawed at the front of his shirt, hands shaking too badly to unfasten the buttons. “Take this off!”

  “Okay. Take it easy, kitten. I’m not gonna tell you no.”

  “Gods, you better not.” She kicked off her muddy boots as he unbuttoned. Shed her shirt as he heeled off his sneakers. Wriggled out of skintight jeans as he dropped his fly.

  “Hurry,” she hissed.

  “Can I at least get a kiss out of this? You didn’t even give me a proper hello.”

  She stood in front of him gloriously nude with her hands on her hips and a glower on her face.

  Chuckling, he stepped out of his boxers.

  She pushed him to the ground and onto his back, and straddling him, reached for his jeans. She snatched his wallet from the pocket and rooted through it, finding the condom tucked in the billfold. He never wanted to be caught unprepared again. He had rubbers tucked in every damn place he could think of. His wallet. His suitcases. His glove compartment—just in case.

  Tossing the wallet aside, she squeezed his thighs between her knees as if she feared he’d get up and run, but he wasn’t that kind of stupid.

  He was going to lie there and take whatever she dished out. Still wanted that kiss, though.

  Her hands might have been unsteady and her inner cat eager, but Belle somehow managed to get the condom onto him without too much fumbling.

  He scooped her down by the back of her neck and brought her lips to his, holding her there until she opened up.

  Groaning, she did. Her tongue slid between his lips, and his hand slipped between her thighs, rubbing the satiny skin gently, teasing just below her sex.

  She ground on top of him, seeking his erection, but he didn’t want to give up her lips, her tongue.

  He kept kissing her and savoring the little moans that vibrated in her chest whenever his tongue pinned hers.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  He didn’t want to hear her beg. She could have had anything she wanted, if she asked. And she had, so he slipped into her, gripping her hips to slow her eager movement down his shaft.

  “If you want this to last, you’ll behave yourself,” he said.

  Her body thrummed with laughter, with need, and squeezed him tightly inside her. “Me, behave?”

  “Forgot who I was talking to, I guess.” He pushed her down onto him, speared her as far as he could go and yanked a gasp from her throat. “Is this my rodeo or yours?” he asked.

  “Mine. Gods, mine.” She pushed herself upright, pulling her knees up more beneath her and pressing her hands to his chest.

  She notched her lower lip with her teeth as she rode him, her fangs half deployed and her pale skin flushed a pretty pink that made him want to touch her everywhere all at once.

  He couldn’t, though. He had to let her get what she needed from him without interference. Perhaps the next time they made love, it’d be less frantic—more thoughtful. He laced his fingers behind his head and let the sensations soothe his tattered nerves and quell his anxiety about the move.

  That ten days without her had been damn near unbearable.

  She rode him hard and fast, letting him hit the end of her with almost every stroke, and he wanted to thrust, too. Wanted to increase the friction and stoke the frenzy, but if he did, they’d be done. He’d come, and she’d roll off him, and she’d go back to work.

  Even looking at her made him want to come, so his closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.

  “Look at me!” she demanded.

  “Fuck, woman. It’s too much.” And damn it, he couldn’t help himself. If he had to look, he was going to touch. He gathered her beaded nipples between his thumbs and forefingers and squeezed, them, rubbed them.

  And she squeezed him even harder as she rode, her fangs all the way out now and a sheen of sweat glistening on her lean muscles as she worked.

  “G-gonna be worse ... next time,” she ground out.

  “The sex?” He wasn’t seeing anything bad about it. He pulled her down a little and pulled her breast into his mouth.

  “Oh, gods. No! No no no.”

  He stopped sucking. She pressed her nipple back to his lips. “Don’t stop that.”

  “Oh.” He gladly took it back in and smoothed his hands down her back to her ass. He gripped her tight, helped her ride.

  “The heat.”

  “Mm-hmm.” He loved the way she felt in his mouth. The taste of her.

  “It’s gonna be worse.”

  “I see.” He scraped his teeth gently across her flesh, and she cried out, her fingers digging deep into his shoulders, her body milking him for all he was worth.

  All he could do was try to keep breathing as his cock expended its seed, and that edge of pain from her nails seemed to keep him comin
g.

  “It’s going to b-be so much worse.” On a sob, she put her head down to his shoulder. Her body shook, and it wasn’t from nervousness or orgasm, but from her crying.

  “Shh, shh. Kitten, it’s okay.”

  “I can’t predict it.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “You’re going to hate me.”

  “Not gonna hate you. We’ll deal with it.”

  Sitting up a bit, she dragged her forearm across her damp eyes and frowned at him. “I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “You’re right. I don’t, but neither do you. You want me anyway, right?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You sure?”

  “I haven’t changed my mind.”

  Well, we’ll see about that. He pulled her down for a kiss—a slow one he could savor and put some feeling into—and swiped the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs. “Pretty lady. Better head back or folks’ll start putting two and two together.”

  She scoffed, but carefully peeled herself away from him.

  He watched her until she’d wriggled her panties up and fastened her bra. Then he got up and disposed of the condom.

  As he pulled on his jeans and she batted straw out of her hair, he asked, “So, when you say worse ...”

  “Like, you’ll probably have a chafed dick by the time it’s over.”

  Yikes.

  When they returned to the woodpile, her brothers had drifted back to work and Glenda and Hannah, with the horses, looked on. The Foye men paused long enough to cast knowing looks to one another.

  Steven groaned. On the plus side, at least they didn’t seem interested in kicking his ass for what they probably suspected he’d just done.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked Sean.

  Sean stuffed his hands into his work gloves and crooked his thumb to the thing that had once been a house. “It’s a perfect location for Belle. She’ll have a good view of the back of the property and the staff housing that’ll be renovated eventually.”

  “And back here, my brothers won’t be in my hair,” she said.

  Sean closed one eye and rolled the other.

  “You’re building a house back here?” Steven asked.

  Hannah grunted. “Sean’s jealous. He wants a new house now.”

  “You’re gonna want a new house, too, blondie. My house is going to get really cramped really fast.”

  “Why?” Steven narrowed his eyes at his sister. “Something you need to tell me?”

  “No. I think he’s speaking in general terms. For Cougars, these guys are old to not have kids.”

  “Hey!” Mason called out. “I have a kid.”

  “Not a kid with your mate.”

  “Oh. Well, yeah ... I mean ... I’m working on it.”

  “See?” Hannah said.

  Steven rubbed his chin against the top of Belle’s head and looked to Mason, who was arranging wood planks in the bed of one of the trucks. “If you’ve got a drive to procreate, how come so many of the men in the glaring haven’t yet?”

  “Oh, they have,” he said. “We’ve got lots of unattached baby-daddies. Most end up floating back to their kids’ mothers eventually, but the pattern seems to be that they hold out for their fated mates for at least a little while.”

  “Really? So, Darnell ...”

  “No. Darnell’s younger than you probably think.” Belle futzed with the angle of his baseball cap and smoothed his sideburns with her thumbs.

  Made him want to purr a little, too.

  “What about Edgar Sheehan?”

  Glenda snorted. “From what I heard recently about Edgar, he’s got twins with a Coyote.”

  “That explains some things,” Hannah said.

  “What about Tito?”

  Three Foye men scoffed in unison.

  “Tito probably has more descendants than he can count,” Sean said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Steven muttered. “Glad I don’t have that so-called procreative drive.”

  “I think most of Tito’s descendants are in Mexico,” Sean said, “and I’d guess that most are pretty much pure human at this point.”

  “He doesn’t have the procreative drive anymore,” Hank said. “All he needed was the one kid to shut it off.”

  “And he had that one kid, when, four hundred years ago?” Belle asked dryly.

  “I think so,” Sean said. “I think that’s one of the reasons he won’t pursue December.”

  “Who’s December?” Glenda asked. “Not someone local, I’m guessing.”

  “She lives in Tucson,” Hannah said. “She’s cute. Apparently, she’s been after the big guy for a while.”

  “If Tito’s putting her off, that means he likes her,” Mason said. He hopped down off the truck bed and tossed a pair of gloves toward Steven. “If you can free yourself of your cat accessory for a couple of hours, we can be done with this by nightfall, and you can sleep the sleep of the dead tomorrow.”

  “You mean, until the sheriff finds out he’s here,” Glenda said.

  Hannah cringed and looked guiltily away.

  “Hannah,” Steven warned.

  “What?” She chewed her cuticle.

  “Did you tell the sheriff I was coming?”

  She shrugged. “I might have mentioned it in passing when I went to check on the Sheehans.”

  “Yeah?” He laughed. “And what did the good sheriff say?”

  “He ... might have said that he’s going to be out this way around lunchtime tomorrow.”

  “Are you trying to get me in trouble?”

  “No! I’m just trying to keep you busy.” She grinned. “Make you a productive citizen and all.”

  “Yeah? And what are you doing to be so productive?”

  “Lots of stuff. Just because I’m not being paid doesn’t mean I’m not getting stuff done.”

  “Must be nice having a sugar daddy.” Sean winked.

  “Hey, I’ve got a fat check at your place. I made a good investment on that house. Once I pay off my mortgage, I’ll have enough money in my savings account that I won’t have to work for a year.”

  Sean tossed a plank of wood into the truck and paused to rub his scruffy chin. “A year, huh?”

  “Don’t go getting any ideas.”

  “Well, I’ve got a procreative drive, you know. I graduated from high school a lot of years ago, and maybe my biology knowledge is a little rusty, but a year sounds about right. And I wasn’t joking when I said twinning is common in our family. That’s not a bad thing. We need a new generation of cheap labor to train up to work at the woodshop.”

  Hannah’s face suddenly went very pale.

  “Did Claude get in touch with you?” Belle asked, laughing.

  “Nah, we’ve been playing phone tag for the past couple of weeks. I guess he’ll catch up with me eventually.”

  “He made it sound like whatever he had to say was important, but not necessarily earth-shattering, so that’s probably a good plan. He’ll probably be here over the weekend. Mom needs more hands on deck to get some stock out of here, and the beauty of being a freelancer is you can take off whenever you want.”

  “Y’all would recruit pretty much anyone, wouldn’t ya?”

  Mason chuckled and brought his booted foot down on a corner of wood to loosen the nails holding the two planks together. “Including Ralphie. Belle’s idea. She tends to think outside the box a little more than anyone else here. She’s either going to work that kid to death or make him wish he was in juvenile detention. He’s out with one of the Woodworks crews tearing down old cabinets.”

  At the mention of her name, Steven turned to look at her.

  She was back on her horse and heading slowly up the path with her mother, both looking across the range to where the hellmouth was.

  He had a sinking feeling. “It’s not open again, is it?”

  “No,” Belle called out. “I can still see the glow marking where it is, though.”
/>   Steven couldn’t. He looked to the brothers. “Can y’all?”

  “Yeah,” Hank said. “Cat eyes pick up all kinds of aberrations. Useful knowing where it is since stomping on it would be the paranormal equivalent of stepping on a fire ant hill.”

  “I thought things couldn’t get out now. It’s sealed, right?”

  “In the same way Jell-O self-seals. If you make a slit in it, it’ll close, and nobody on that side can or particularly wants to try to move through the seal. It’s bad for their health.”

  “Got it.”

  “That said, if certain people accost the seal from this side, it could be like holding a screen door open for a while.”

  “Certain people like me, huh?”

  Hank shrugged.

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about me holding any doors open or stepping on any fire ant hills anytime soon. Give me some time to get settled before we talk about me doing any more frolicking through the brimstone-scented mist.” Steven handed a long plank of wood up to Sean and went back for more, then headed to the fence where someone had left some boards piled. He figured he might as well grab them since he was on the ground.

  “Hey, Steve,” Mason started, “once you get settled in—”

  “Fuck!” Steven fell to one knee, and not because he’d stumbled or went faint, but because he didn’t have a choice. His right foot was sucked into the earth as if he’d stumbled onto a patch of quicksand in the middle of New Mexico.

  “What the hell?” One of the Foyes—Steven couldn’t say which because he was too busy kicking his leg and trying to shake off whatever it was that had a grip on it.

  Strong arms clasped his and under his shoulders, but it wasn’t enough. The grips on the other side were stronger.

  Steven pressed his hands to the earth and tried to shove himself back to his feet, but something reached up and grabbed his other ankle, too.

  He struggled, scratched the earth, and swore as if there was some magic in cussing, but he still got dragged down, and not even Belle’s hands added to her brothers’ at the end before his head was sucked under could give him an edge.

  “Steven!”

  Her voice was muffled and frantic, and he couldn’t see shit.

  Just dirt, and then smoke, and then a bunch of ugly motherfuckers standing on the path to their own personal hells, waiting to drag him along with them.