Cougar's Gift: Pacific Northwest Cougars: (Shifter Romance)

C
ommunicating
with others didn’t require the use of a lot of words in Stryker’s mind. He was a man and a cougar…what more needed to be explained. But when the fates give you a mate that needs to be talked into forever a cougar needs to man up and start talking.

Tucked away in her tiny town, Libby was happy with her job at the library, her epic book collection, and her kooky parents. Until one day a mystery man rides into her little world on the back of a motorcycle.

Libby knows all about sex and love in romance novels, now she has to figure out how that translates to real life. A rough biker shifter and a sweet innocent librarian find that a new world of passion can open up with the turn of a page.

Prepare to read about a hot grunting shifter who has to convince the shy librarian that he’s not only her mate, but the right man to be her first. There may not be enough sage and crystals to enlighten this cougar.

S
he heard
the roar of the motorcycle and her heart started racing. He was out there again. Sure, there were times she would sprint to the window and it wouldn’t be him. But sometimes, sometimes he’d be there.

He was different, something about him made her want, no… need to see him. He was a magnet pulling her to him, and it was more than his dashing good looks.

The usual bikers that came through town were rough, hairy and more than a little scary. This one though, this one looked like a rough version of the boy next door.

She could see him sometimes, recklessly riding without a helmet. Sunglasses on with a small smile playing across his lips. He was so good-looking she felt her heart stutter when she saw him. Her attraction to him was at the fan-girl, squealing and fainting level.

Sometimes he drove past the small library where she worked. Liberty would hide by the window casing peeking around the edges to catch a glimpse. Most often he’d stop at the mechanic’s shop a few doors down on the opposite side of the street.

She’d seen him spend his days there working on cars and motorcycles. Business seemed to be booming and she had to imagine it was due to the new hunky mechanic. Then he’d roar off at twilight, his bike’s motor fading into the distance. To where she didn’t know.

Liberty didn’t think she could be charged as a stalker. If she never actually followed him anywhere it didn’t count, right? She had rights as a citizen. Observing the goings on in her small town wasn’t against the law.

And if she leaned out the window and held on tightly to the sill she could often see him through the branches of the trees. His white tank top smudged with grease. Wiping his hands on a shop towel as he shook his head at someone like he was annoyed. She hadn’t taken a picture or anything. Yet.

She would sigh and let her mind drift off into imagined scenes of him roaring up on his motorcycle, running into the library and sweeping her off her feet! Then she’d realize she was probably not his type. Motorcycle chick, she was not.

Her flowered skirts and peasant tops were probably not conducive to riding on the back of a motorcycle. Her mousy brown hair and bland hazel eyes were no comparison to the bleach blonde, heavily made up woman her brain conjured up for him.

“Libby, you need a life,” she whispered to herself. It had been a few weeks since she started watching him. She hated that she didn’t know when he’d first arrived or even his name. She’d missed valuable ogling time.

A few weeks ago she found herself kneeling at the second-floor window sill as she caught sight of him on the sidewalk.

The old building that housed the Port May library had two floors. The exterior was a classic red brick with all of the window casings were original wood painted white. There were even window boxes full of geraniums that the ladies auxiliary planted every year.

The downstairs held all the children’s books along with a room with computers for the patrons and a conference room. The rest of the books were upstairs and Libby had gone up to do some re-shelving.

She watched as he approached three trashcans on the sidewalk and stopped short as he was reading them. He looked back and forth between the item in his hand and the containers before him.

She couldn’t help but giggle. Without being able to see what he held she couldn’t begin to guess what had him so confused. Trash, recycle, or compost. Simple.

Libby saw him do a few double takes, then look over his shoulder like he was seeing if someone was watching, then casually slip his hand into the trash can.

He turned and walked away quickly as if the garbage police were going to be right behind.

After that day Libby had assigned a number of probably completely inaccurate character traits to him. A lone biker lost from some tragic past. Passing from town to town, hardened by life, but with a heart of gold. Along with an inability to properly sort his trash.

Sigh, just like a hero in one of her books. Libby’s normally voracious romance reading habit had taken a serious uptick since first spying her mystery man. What must it be like to be with a man like that?

L
ibby Berkowitz sat staring
at the double-decker cart stacked full of books that needed to be lugged to the second floor to be re-shelved. The local birdwatching association had been in and decimated her non-fiction section. But her will was not in it.

He was gone.

It had been three weeks since she’d spied him last. Almost a month! The first few days she chalked up to just missing him while she was working. Then a few days more passed and she was actively watching for him to show, but no signs. She was obsessed she had to admit.

A few more days passed, then a few more. A week turned into another then another. She started to face the inevitable. He’d probably gotten bored with their little burg and moved on. Libby was sad; there was no other way to describe it.

She had built up so many stories in her head about him that he was like a TV show for her. Her life wasn’t very exciting as her parents were usually against television and movies. They preferred she spent her time outside communing with nature. Watching her mystery man was now her daily entertainment.

The door opened and Mrs. Jenkins and her two children came in. They often spent quiet days in the kid’s section reading to each other.

“Libby!” The children screamed, running up to her and giving her big sticky hugs.

“Moses, Sparrow, I’m so happy you came to see me today!” Libby didn’t enforce any quiet rules in the library. No sshhing or tsking. There were quiet rooms for those that wanted to study in solitude. She felt the library was a place of community and she wanted people to connect with each other there.

“We wanna read jokes,” Moses said in a loud six-year-old voice.

“Yeah, yolks!” Sparrow repeated in her cute three-year-old lisp.

“Well, we have lots of yolk books,” she teased them. Their mother looked on indulgently. Libby was much loved in the small town and she loved everyone in return.

Turning to the children’s area she led them in and showed them the joke section pulling out a few that she knew would get the giggles going. Returning to the desk she pondered the stack of books again.

Being a librarian in a small town wasn’t a particularly taxing job. She’d gone away to school to become a librarian but had no intention of ever leaving the town she grew up in.

The aging librarian, Mabel, was someone she had grown to love and would spend every day after school with. When Mabel decided to retire she convinced Liberty that this was the job for her. She’d wait until Libby graduated so she could take the position.

Liberty, or Libby to most people, was a reader. From an early age they were some of the only windows she had into the outside world. Her parents were strict in a religious sort of way. They had a moral code melded together from their own religious upbringing and their newfound conversion to all things earth, universe and patchouli related.

They still had a fear of things they didn’t understand and things they couldn’t make work in their lifestyle. The big bad outside world seemed to confuse and befuddle them.

Because the world as a whole scared them, they’d moved to the small town of Port May. It took years for Libby to realize they didn’t live near any sort of port. But instead were on the outskirts of a larger Portland suburb.

It was the kind of place where families had grown up for generations. There were still family owned farms and the lure of big retail hadn’t invaded their tiny borders. Her father Reginald had graduated from Bastyr University and was a now a naturopathic doctor. He stayed busy in their little town. The community loved his style of herbal homeopathic treatments.

After they moved and settled into their quiet life her mother Carol had found a way to incorporate her love of gardening, and to be honest an uncanny skill at it, into providing most of the herbs her husband used.

After a few years they decided they needed names that fit with their new lives. Reginald was now Freedom and Carol was now Primrose. When her mother became pregnant with her they decided she was going to live a life of Liberty. Whatever that meant. And she had the awesome luck of being born on a full moon.

So Liberty Moonlight Berkowitz was born at home, and spent her early years smelling of fennel water and playing in the dirt in her organic hemp cloth diapers.

She was an only child as her parents were older when they had her. She sometimes wondered if it was Immaculate Conception that caused her to come into being. Her parents tended to co-exist more than live together. They seemed to orbit around each other most days, lost in their own little worlds. Occasionally crashing into each other like asteroids.

Going to the library was her way to escape her crazy parents. She loved them, they adored her, and thought her choice of careers was “deep.” She wasn’t sure being a librarian was deep. She knew it gave her time to read when it was slow.

Her parents never questioned when she said she wanted to walk to town. She’d bring home books like Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie. What they didn’t know was she would hit the romance section as soon she got there and would find a comfy chair to read the hours away.

Knights and Earls saving damsels in distress. Hot steamy love scenes even if they were always clouded in euphemisms. She still got the idea. Libby’s first experience with masturbation was reading a classic romance with a dastardly duke while hiding in her tree house.

Her parents talked free love, but they thought it should be kept spiritual not physical. They also never wanted to let their daughter grow up and drilled into her at a very young age that her virtue was precious. And from all of the books she read she easily understood why. The heroes in her books always seemed to be amazed and honored when their true love was still a virgin.

Libby didn’t think she was a prude. She also had never met a man she’d even consider sleeping with. The boys at college were oddly focused on sports, mountain climbing, and their latest protest. Their town was lacking in anyone close to her age. Most young people went to school out of state and then stayed away to start their lives.

So she’d wait for her knight in shining armor to come along or maybe a rough motorcycle rider.

Grabbing a handful of books she trudged up the stairs to re-shelve
A History of Ornithology
.