Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (15 page)

The room misted, and Cara realized that when Grand-mère wept, even the long-cut trees that made up the cabin wept with her.

Rafe spoke, his voice a dark, angry growl, “They may have killed my parents, but they won’t touch my child.”

“Our child.” Jude rose from the hearth, and he no longer looked lazy at all. He looked dangerous.

But possibly the most dangerous-looking one was Elissa. She didn’t say a word, just gathered Jocelyn into her arms, but her aura suddenly filled the room.

Jack touched Cara’s arm. “You remember when I was trying to talk you out of going back to Toronto? Forget everything I said. This is going to get ugly, and I’m not sure I can get you up to speed fast enough to keep you safe.”

She couldn’t stop herself. Cara stood as she looked from face to face in the cabin. “Hell no. This sorcerer and his thugs killed my fiancé and my friend’s sister and my other friend’s kid brother. Besides, this is my mother’s village, and you’ve made me feel more at home than I ever did in Toronto. No one is breaking in here and kidnapping any babies. No one. Not even some ancient enemy even Grand-mère has trouble handling. This may have started long before we were born. But it ends with us. I’m in.” She patted her hip. “I may be clueless where magic is concerned, but I still have a gun. Though I may need to order more ammo.”

One by one, her new friends nodded. Grand-mère jumped to her feet and darted to Cara with amazing agility for someone her apparent age. “I knew you came home for a reason,” she proclaimed and hugged her.

“We have a lot of work to do, fast, to get Cara and Rafe up to speed,” Jack remarked. “I hate work. But it’ll give me something to think about other than revenge—while working on the revenge.”

Chapter Nineteen

“See that pile of kindling?” Jack pointed at something she could have hardly missed. “See if you can set it on fire.”

“I don’t want to set
kindling
on fire.” Cara chose her emphasis carefully.

“Powers, another student with violent tendencies. I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve told Rafe a dozen times, not that I expect you to listen either. Our powers don’t work well for killing. We’re supposed to use them to teach, and if someone’s dead, they can’t learn anything.”

“If they’re dead,” she said, her voice soft and savage, “they can’t hurt anyone else.”

“How very un-Canadian of you.”

“Lately, I don’t feel like the soul of polite moderation. I feel like setting someone on fire and roasting marshmallows over his smoking corpse. Though I suppose it would spoil the marshmallows.”

Jack made himself laugh. He knew the bleeding wound behind each glib word because he had them too and was masking them in the same way. He wanted to take a chunk out of the people who’d killed his brother, wanted it bad. And he wanted Cara, and he wasn’t good at being patient. The spring equinox had come and gone, and they were no closer to finding the sorcerers—and he was no closer to winning Cara. But he was doing his best to hide the anger and frustration with humor. “It’s a Trickster thing,” he mused, only dimly aware he spoke out loud.

“It’s a mask,” she responded, energy crackling like lightning in the icy air around her. “You make people laugh, you make people think, and you make them think you’re harmless even when you’re not.”

“Got it in one. Which is pretty good, because I was thinking out loud and not making much sense even to me.” He stepped closer, drawn by the energy and by the woman herself. Cara was pale, hollow-eyed, probably ten pounds thinner than she had been when she arrived in the village, and she hadn’t been carrying much spare weight to start with. She was pushing herself and the magic hard, trying to master in a few weeks what most young shamans learned in the course of several years, and the strain was showing.

And she was still beautiful. Still could give him an innocent look that went right to his cock.

“Feel the wood, Cara. Make it want to burn. Tell it it’s fun.” She closed her eyes, concentrating.

Concentrating too much. Her whole body was stiff, tense. Common beginner mistake.

“Relax,” he intoned, stopping himself at the last millisecond from putting his hands on her shoulders. That wouldn’t help either of them relax. She didn’t shy away from a friendly touch—but neither had she given any hint she was ready for more.

“Relax,” he repeated. “If it’s not fun to call the fire that lives in the wood out, you’re thinking too much. Ask Lynx for help, if you’d like.”

“She’d think this is beneath her. Wouldn’t want to dirty her beautiful paws. But she might get a kick out of it if I beg enough.”

I’d get a kick out of you begging.

Where the hell had that come from?

Once he thought it, he couldn’t get the image out of his mind—Cara stretched out on the bed, restrained by nothing except her will and his, her body lit from the outside by flickering firelight and from the inside by a fire he’d stoked with care until she burst into flame. He’d tease her until she was slick and sweating, sucking and nipping her nipples, lavishing all the attention on them that he hadn’t taken the time to do that first and last frantic encounter. Kissing each rib. Licking each scar until she knew the scars too were beautiful. Worshiping the plane of her stomach and the curve of her hip.

Only when he could smell her arousal reaching a point of madness would he work his way down so he could breathe deep of the scent of her wet pussy, ruffle the rich, thick pubic curls so she’d feel his hot breath caressing her. He’d open her labia, take a good look at what he’d been too blinded by lust to study before. A few light caresses, nothing more.

Not until she begged. And then he’d taste her, lick her clit and pussy until she came…

Cara elbowed him in the side. “Earth to Jack. Come in please.” He blinked, forced himself back to reality. “I hope whatever you were thinking about was interesting.”

Altogether too interesting.

“Look! The fire lit this time!”

The pile of kindling was blazing wildly. “Excellent! Do you know what you did differently?” Slipping back into the teacher role was the safest thing he could do.

Cara shrugged. “I started talking to the wood, trying to convince it that it wanted to burn, that it would be more fun than rotting, an extreme-sport thing. And then—poof! Goofy, isn’t it?”

Jack wasn’t sure, but he thought she was blushing. “Hey, it worked. We all find our own way to work with the magic, and a lot of the time it is pretty goofy. Are you sure that’s all you did?”

Now she definitely was blushing. “Okay, I thought about sex and fire. Fire as a metaphor for sex. I can’t explain it better than that, but as I was trying to come up with a way to convince the wood to burn, I got all these crazy images, snippets of old songs. You know, ‘Light My Fire’ and all that. I figured I was going to flub again because I was distracted, but it worked.”

“You,” he said with all the dignity he could muster while thanking the Powers his jacket hid his hard-on, “have been spending too much time with Elissa.”

“No, it’s just that I let myself think about sex again, and now it pops into my head at the damnedest times.” She stepped closer to him, within touching distance.

There was a pause that seemed to last a year. Jack’s body vibrated with need, but he willed himself still. There was no magical interference going on now, he was pretty sure, just desire. But if he made a move, he might spook her, undo the progress they’d made toward trust and friendship.

Cara wrapped her arms around him. “Thank you,” she said, her voice husky and smoky. “Even with all the tragedies, all the weirdness, I feel like I’ve come back to life. And you’ve helped.”

Jack wanted to say something deep and wise, or, failing that, something witty yet suggestive. Instead, he groaned, “Cara…” and pulled her close. She felt so good against him, so right. But he still made himself hold back.

She was the one who initiated the kiss.

Desire flooded him. Already aroused, he became as hard as steel. His cougar growled need, and everything in the world vanished except Cara’s lips on his, Cara’s tongue slipping into his mouth, Cara’s body undulating against him. He gripped her ass with one hand, fisted her hair with the other. But Cara put one hand on the back of his neck, slipped the other into the back of his pants so her cool hand cupped his hot ass, and instead of taking control of the kiss, Jack found himself in a sensual battle of wills, one that neither of them could lose.

All too soon, though, Cara pulled away. She smiled as she looked at him. “Consider this a promise for later,” she said. “I don’t think I’m ready to take this too far yet. I’m still sort of a mess.”

“Not to mention we’re a little busy with the crash course in magic,” he conceded.

“But I’m interested. Definitely interested. I’m still not sure this is a good idea. But I want you to know I want to figure out if it might be. And that’s not magic making me say it, except maybe for my magic and yours.”

Chapter Twenty

Cara dreamed she had a cougar in her bed, and she knew it was Jack and she was safe with him, but sharing a bed with a full-grown, horny cougar seemed like a bad idea. She bopped him on the nose and exclaimed, “Bad kitty!” and he became wordy Jack again. Wordy, naked Jack, and she was naked too and…

For a second, Cara’s conscious mind butted in:
I don’t like where this dream is going. Maybe I should wake up.

Then:
Bullshit, I love where this is going. I may not be ready to jump Jack in real life yet, but we both know it’ll happen eventually. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy the dream.

She let it take its delicious course.

When she woke, it was just after dawn, and her heart was racing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the good kind of racing heart, the kind she’d expect after waking from a sexy dream, but the kind that came with a side order of sweaty palms, a taste of copper in the mouth, and a fierce sense of wrongness. She all but fell out of bed and into her clothes, possessed by a crazy urgency to be in the forest.

Her head pounded. No, something pounded her head, as if someone drove a spike into it. The air tasted thick and foul. Her old injuries, including the burns from digging in the sorcerously charged snow, all throbbed, but not enough to slow her down.

She ran out the door, still struggling into her coat, her boots unzipped, heading toward…toward she didn’t know what, but she knew what direction it came from, knew where she had to go.

She would have suspected she was still dreaming if she hadn’t run into Jude, Rafe and Elissa. The latter had the baby in a carrier on her chest and plaid flannel PJs peeking out from under her coat, which made the whole thing even more surreal.

Cara felt like she should say something but couldn’t find her voice.

A hundred yards or so later, Gramps joined them, a coonskin cap plunked down on his wild gray hair.

Then Jack, walking with purpose but looking distinctly bewildered. Walking with purpose, but the purpose might not be his own. He was barefoot in the snow.

So was Rafe. They didn’t seem to feel the cold—duals had the high body temperature of their feline sides—but it was eerie.

Together they marched, a silent, mismatched, oddly dressed phalanx, toward the darkness of the woods. The air, which should have been crisp and cool, was thick instead, redolent of sulfur and blood.

Just as they left the recently built stockade around the village, Jocelyn woke, fussing. Elissa pressed her hand over the baby’s face without slowing her stride.

Then she halted. “Stop!” Her voice wasn’t loud but carried on the still, fetid air. “Stop this,” she repeated, and the air began to clear.

One by one, they did, Jude first, then the cougars, then Cara, who’d wanted to stop long before that but somehow couldn’t.

Gramps went on a little farther after the others stopped.

Jude took the simple expedient of tackling the old man, who laughed as he went down and again as he rolled back to his feet. “Well isn’t that the damnedest… Cara, what are you doing here? What are we all doing here? And why’s the baby with us?”

“Someone’s playing us,” Elissa said. “Probably a lot of someones working together, because it takes potent mind magic to affect a dual or a shaman at all, and I’ve trained to defend against it since I was tiny. Targeted magic too—it’s only us. Someone wanted us to leave the safety of the village and come out here. And they wanted me to bring Jocelyn.”

“Then we’d better go back.” The old man, surprisingly spry, bounded over and took her arm. “Damn sorcerers anyway. No use doing what they want us to do. And we certainly can’t risk the baby.”

“We’ll be all right if we go in freely, not bespelled.” Cara didn’t know how she knew that, but she did, and Elissa’s nod confirmed it. “They’ll expect victims. We’ll give them…us.”

“But not the baby,” Gramps repeated. “Elissa, you’ve got to bring her back to town. Nella will watch her, or Mrs. Lazy-Lynx. You stay there yourself. It’ll be safer. My grandkid’s a cop, so she’ll probably be all right in a dust-up, but fighting sorcerers is no work for a green witch, ’specially not a little bitty one like you.”

Cara stifled an entirely inappropriate chuckle. You’d think he’d know better than to treat Elissa like a generic helpless female, but with the baby snuggled against her, Elissa did look too petite and cute to be as dangerous as she really was.