The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards) (36 page)

“I’ll certainly try.”

“Good. ’Cause I’m just gonna lie there and be soothed about the mess y’all have gotten me into.”

“What kind of soothing are we talking?”

“Of the nonchafing variety, preferably, but I reckon beggars can’t be choosers.”

She pressed her face to his shoulder and laughed loud and hard. Gods, she loved that man for all his wry charm.

“Bet you’re wishing you’d moved to Washington, huh? Away from all this?” He gave her another little jostle.

“Quit that! And no way. I got everything I wished for once I started asking for it. You’re the one who told me to demand what I wanted. You like the way that worked out?”

He reached back and gave her ass an arousing squeeze. “Between you and me, I like it a lot, kitten.”

“I think I like it, too. Move faster.”

Holley Trent is the author of more than forty works of diverse contemporary, paranormal, and erotic romance. Although raised in rural North Carolina, she currently resides on the Colorado Front Range. A southern girl at heart, she occasionally wears flip-flops in winter and still sometimes forgets which time zone she’s in.

Learn more about her Desert Guards and Sons of Gulielmus series at her website, www.holleytrent.com. While you’re there, sign up for her paranormal romance newsletter so you don’t miss news about stories set in the ever-expanding world of the Cougars and angels.

“Find him someone more suitable.”

The edict echoed in Hannah Welch’s memory like church bells in a deep valley—loud and startling as it first chimed, and then increasingly softer, lulling her into a false sense of security just before it harkened again.

“Find him someone more suitable.”

She flinched and slid down the wall in the dark corner. Sighing, she allowed her legs to go limp beneath her, and as her ass hit the linoleum floor, she let her head loll to the side.

So tired.

She hadn’t been able to sleep with that wild animal in the room, and because she’d made a bargain regarding him the day before, she couldn’t leave. She had to fix him.

He
was Sean Foye, a goddess-cursed Were-cougar who had been trapped in his animal form for several weeks now, because Hannah hadn’t wanted to be his mate.

Per his goddess’s instruction, he’d abducted her from a campground, just as his brothers did to her friends Ellery and Miles, and held her captive on the New Mexican ranch his mother owned. Hannah had put up a good fight for six weeks because she’d wanted to go home to North Carolina—where she had a family and a nursing job—but she’d failed. Once Sean had officially named her as his mate, he’d had exactly two weeks to get Hannah to agree to be with him forever—and
he’d
failed. So now he was suffering the consequence of being eternally doomed to his animal form.

As if that weren’t enough, now Hannah was a Cougar, too. During a recent fight, a young Cougar who’d needed to make a distraction had accidentally infected her. She’d become a kind of monster she never knew existed up until two months ago, and the learning curve had been unkind.

At least she didn’t hurt anymore unless she tried to shift, and she avoided that at all costs. She was made to do it the first time so she could force her body to rest in its animal form, but there’d been nothing restful about that shift. Her new alpha had had to hold her down as her bones slipped out of their natural positions and curved into new ones. She’d wanted to die, and even when it was over, it still hurt. She wasn’t as strong as the born Cougars.

It’d been nearly a month since she left the hospital with a cheek and jaw full of stitches and with so many people looking on with pity. She didn’t want pity. She just wanted to be left alone, really, so she could make sense of this thing she was now.

The animal in wait inside her frequently muddled her thoughts and slowed her reactions. She was no longer comfortable in her own skin because she didn’t know what she was anymore. She’d been trying to accept herself as she was for almost thirty years, and thought she was starting to get somewhere.

Now she had to start all over again … but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

She put her hand to her face and rubbed the scar, watching the animal in the corner watch her.

He bared his fangs and a low growl resonated from his chest, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to move. She’d been in his basement for a day and a half, and he’d hardly moved, not even to eat.

He’d been growing increasingly erratic in his prowling, and his brothers Mason and Hank worried that Sean’s consciousness was currently on the wrong end of the cougar-human spectrum. Usually, a shifter thought like both man and beast at the same time, but the longer he stayed in his animal form, the more his impulses changed. The more memories he suppressed.

He would tamp down everything he knew about being human so his conscience didn’t get in the way of primal practicability—of
survival
.

They needed to bring him back.

Worried he would soon be too far gone, Mason and Hank had jumped him out in the desert and forced him downstairs three days prior. As he hadn’t eaten what they’d tossed down, the big cat was probably famished.

Hannah wasn’t sure if it was the man inside looking at her through those cat eyes or if it were some wild beast that didn’t care about the man’s memories, but it didn’t matter either way. It didn’t matter which form he was in. The curse’s cure was non-discriminatory.

She wrapped her long braid around her thumb again and again, twirling it while plotting her move. She hadn’t had a plan when she’d entered the basement, and had only known that she couldn’t leave until she brought the man back out with her. To get him up and going, she had to accept him as her mate. She didn’t want that any more than she had two months ago, but she had to live amongst his brothers now. Whether she liked it or not, she was a part of their clan, and she couldn’t look at them without feeling so fucking guilty. Sean wasn’t a fate worse than death, but she didn’t want him. Didn’t want
anyone
.

So, she’d made a bargain with his cunning deity who was now
her
goddess, too.

“Find him someone more suitable,”
the Were-cougar goddess
La Bella Dama
—informally, Lola—had said before Hannah had descended into Sean’s basement. She’d stared down her nose at Hannah and said it in a quietly terrifying tone that Hannah had known meant she’d be making no further concessions. She’d made too many already.

Lola would let Sean and Hannah off the hook permanently if Hannah found him someone else. For the time being, she’d have to claim him—accept him—and pull the man out of the cougar’s shell because she couldn’t market a man who wasn’t technically a man anymore.

“What am I supposed to do with him?” she whispered to herself.

He bared his fangs again, sharp and frightening, but of course they were. Sean was a Foye and the Foyes were all big, beautiful,
scary
cats. They were only slightly less imposing on two legs. If she ever told anyone how scared of them she was, even now that she was also a Were-cougar, they wouldn’t believe her. She’d been doing too good a job of pretending to be unbothered.

At the vibration of her phone in her borrowed flannel shirt’s pocket, she sat up straighter and silenced the sound before it agitated the watchful beast. She didn’t want him to pounce, because even if she shifted, she wouldn’t be strong enough to fight him off. Even in his weakened state, he would have been stronger than Hannah at full capacity, and she was tired of picking fights she couldn’t win. In spite of what her father believed, sometimes it wasn’t just a matter of
trying
hard enough. A lady needed to know her limits. If that made her a coward, so be it. She was a fraidy cat.
Literally
.

“How’s it going?” her friend and fellow Cougar mate Miles asked when Hannah whispered, “Hello?” into the phone.

Hannah locked her gaze at the snarling cat across the room and swallowed hard. He’d lifted his head and the fur on his neck stood up.

Oh. Shit.

“Um, about as well as could be expected,” she said.

“Hang in there. It may not seem like it, but Lola says Sean’s still inside that cat.”

“I guess Lola would know, huh?”

Sean snarled at her again, and she resisted the urge to grab the sprayer from the nearby kitchenette sink to hose the hissing cat down … if that even
worked
on cats his size. Were-cougars had the lengths of their human counterparts and all muscle mass expected of powerful cats. The reddish hulk in the corner had to be over two hundred pounds. Hannah had already been scratched up by one Cougar, and didn’t plan on adding any new scars to her collection.

The white jags on her left cheek would probably never completely fade. The first time she’d shifted into her brand-new cat self, they’d healed some, but there was a limit to how much her weak magic could do. When she’d been pitying herself in the hospital after the attack, she wouldn’t let the one person who could do her scar any good touch her. Sean’s brother Mason was her alpha now, but in her opinion, he was just one more man in her life who’d make her feel like she wasn’t enough. It was easiest for her self-esteem to just stay out of the intimidating cat’s orbit.

“Are ya hungry?” Miles tried to put some sunshine into her voice.

Ever the optimist.

Miles had always had optimism in spades, though. In the ten years since they’d met in college, Hannah had never really seen the woman down in the dumps, and Lord knew she had the right to be. Miles had no family, and for a long time, had no one in her corner. Now she had a Were-cougar for a mate, the favor of
La Bella Dama
whom Miles acted as ear and emissary for, and an adopted family comprised of witches, shapeshifters, and a demigod or two. Hannah envied Miles for her family-by-choice. Hannah’s family-by-blood paled in comparison lately. They’d always been dysfunctional, but the funny thing about space was how it made perceptions change. The longer she stayed away, the less she blamed herself for relationships not working. In the past, every negative family exchange had seemed like her fault.

Now, she knew they weren’t her fault, but that didn’t make her feel any better about how they were.

“I’m a little bit hungry, yeah.” Hannah put her head back against the wood paneled wall and watched Sean settle onto his belly. His heavy eyelids drooped, but she knew he wouldn’t sleep. Neither of them had slept since she’d gone downstairs, which was just as well. If she didn’t sleep, she didn’t dream. She was tired of the nightmares. They’d been sporadic up until she was attacked—and had been that way since she was a child—but something about being a Cougar and Lola’s so-called “avenger” made them worse.

Some avenger.

Hannah hadn’t asked for the job. It had apparently become hers the moment Sean kidnapped her. She was supposedly the Cougar group’s—the
glaring’s
—righter of wrongs.

She thought
that
was wrong and that Lola got the wrong lady.

“Is the door still unlocked on your side?” Miles asked.

“Yeah. Sean doesn’t have thumbs at the moment, so I didn’t see the point of bothering with the locks.”

“Okay, we’re coming down.”

“You and who?”

“Both Hank and Mason. They don’t want a repeat of last night.”

Hannah pinched the bridge of her nose. During the previous night’s meal delivery, cat-Sean had knocked Ellery on her ass trying to bolt up the stairs. There were few things more terrifying than having a pissed-off witch in an enclosed space. Ellery had sent Sean flying across the room with a gust of wind that would have knocked the furniture over if it hadn’t been that heavy, high-quality Foye Woodworks stuff.

“Coming down.”

Hannah disconnected as the basement door creaked inward.

Cat-Sean got to his feet and started toward the exit as heavy footsteps sounded down the stairs.

“Nope. Back, dude,” Mason barked.

The hairs on the back of Hannah’s neck stood on end as his alpha energy flooded the room. She pressed a hand over the prickling hairs and concentrated on breathing normally, in spite of Mason’s disruptive presence.

He didn’t affect the stronger Cougars so much. She knew that for a fact. It was a wonder lesser Cougars didn’t fall to their knees when he entered a room.

He and Hank formed a wall of flesh to keep their brother in his corner.

Miles hurried down next with the cooler and made a beeline for the secondhand fridge in the kitchenette. “Help me unload this.”

Hannah got to her numb feet and shuffled over to the kitchenette. The cooler was loaded with enough food to feed a couple of people for two or three days. She’d gotten pretty good at discerning that after she and her friends had embarked on their nationwide camping adventures the previous year.

“It’s a lot of food.” She cast a glance over her shoulder and saw Mason kneeling next to Sean with his arm slung over the cat’s shoulders. Whatever he was whispering to him had stopped the snarling that had become the soundtrack of the past day.

“If Sean comes around, he’s going to be hungry. We can’t let you out until he’s got his faculties in order.”

“How long will that take after … well, you know. After I say yes, or whatever.”

“We have no idea. Lola says it’ll take as long as it takes. She’s not feeling particularly sympathetic toward either of you right now. She thinks you both made it harder than it needed to be.”

“She was the one who set the two-week deadline for him to court me and for me to say yes. What did she expect would happen? People don’t fall in love in two weeks.” Hannah stacked the majority of the meat packets into the freezer and put the rest on the fridge shelf.

“You didn’t have to fall in love. Nobody expects that. You just had to
accept
him, and you didn’t even try.”

“Why do you make this sound like my fault?”

“That’s not my intention. I just wish you would have given compromise some thought before now, and that your compromise wouldn’t have been—” She glanced around to the men, then finished in a whisper, “Pawning him off on someone else.”