The Cougar's Trade (19 page)

Nixon owned a little moving company and had agreed to haul her things west. Miles wondered if perhaps she should be there in person to oversee the cleanup, but she didn’t really see what difference it made. She’d lived alone, didn’t have much stuff—because why bother if no one was ever going to see it?—and her car was light enough to tow behind the truck. She did miss that little car. Glenda’s pickup had a hell of a lot of blind spots for people below a certain height. Driving it made Miles feel like a kid steering an amusement park ride that had no tracks to guide her.

She perched precariously on the edge of the bit of Hank’s dusty sofa she’d peeled the drop cloth off and stared unseeing at the laptop screen.
Is that it?
Nothing left to do?

No one else to notify, no one else to care. Her closest friends were right there on the ranch. Well, at least for the moment. Hannah would probably cut and run as soon as she was able, and
La Bella Dama
had no guidance for Miles about that. Maybe she wasn’t paying attention at the moment. “Ellery and I will have to do an intervention on her tomorrow,” she thought aloud and closed the laptop.

Since Hank was out in his truck watching the desert, she could indulge in a moment of brazen nosiness and poke around, although there really wasn’t much to see. Except for the kitchen, the entire downstairs was a cluttered, spackle dust–covered mess. A cavern of horrors.

She sneezed just looking at it. There really was nowhere to hide anything. All the shelves were exposed and the chests were empty. His life was an open book—everything visible. Everything…
uninteresting
. Weeks ago, she might have thought that was just Hank—that his appeal was wrapped up in his looks and in his dominant, masculine bearing and that woodworking and Cougar harassment were his entire life.

Perhaps that’s what he wanted people to think. She found it hard to believe that a man who carved whimsical vignettes into furniture wouldn’t have a less structured side to his personality. Maybe he’d never show it to her on purpose, but she wanted to believe it was there. She wanted to make sure he never lost it.

“Practicality in excess. Happens far too often with Cougars,”
Lola said wistfully.

There
she is.
Miles let out a relieved sigh. As much as the goddess’s voice had frightened her initially, having her pop in on occasion to chat made her feel less anxious. She didn’t like feeling alone, and she didn’t want to bother Ellery. Glenda would probably try to feed her until she felt better, and Miles wasn’t in the mood for chewing her way through mountains of carbohydrates. “I imagine it does. It’s a pity.”

Miles scanned Hank’s cluttered pantry in search of snacks, and on a whim, pulled out a storage tote beneath the bottom shelf thinking it contained nonperishables. In the dim light, it took a moment for her brain to process what her eyes were seeing. Not boxes or cans of food, but books. She sat back on her heels and, smiling, lifted the stack of yearbooks. She loved leafing through yearbooks, not just for the photos, but for the clues about who a person was. A person’s participation in sports or membership—or lack of membership—in clubs were a hint to adult personalities.

She opened the book from what would have been Hank’s junior year of high school and turned to the index. “So many pages with Foyes.” Mason was on seven pages, Sean on four, and Hank on
eight
. Apparently, he wasn’t as antisocial as he made out. Holding down the index page with her thumb, she leafed through each entry. His portrait—she’d already seen that in Glenda’s albums. There was a picture of all three Foye brothers covered in mud and wearing cross-country running attire. On page 47 was a candid of Hank in woodshop class.

“Ha. Easy A.”

And on page 63 was Hank…

She squinted at the caption.
Center snare Foye tightens his drumhead prior to drum line competition.

Band?
She checked the index again. No, not marching band. “That would have conflicted with…” Page 72, varsity soccer with Mason.

She hadn’t had the cash for extracurricular activities when she was in high school, but she had a general idea of how the scheduling worked. Still, if he’d been pulled into drum line, then he had to belong to an orchestra or some smaller ensemble group.

“Found it.” She grinned.

Page 65 held a picture of Hank with what must have been an instructor. Hank gripped the handle of a guitar case in one hand, a leather portfolio in the other, and gave the cameraperson a neutral expression while his teacher beamed.

Foye wins funds for the DCHS Music Department at national contest.

“Why does he look so glum?” She swiped her thumb over his sullen face and peered into the crate. It was filled with loose sheet music and classical guitar method books. She shoved her hand to the bottom, patted around, and found a couple of drumsticks, what felt like guitar picks, and various other odds and ends she couldn’t identify just from touch.

Things he’d not only put away, but
hidden
away. She would have never guessed he was a musician. She hadn’t even gleaned a clue of it while thumbing through Glenda’s old albums. He’d stripped that part of his past out of those books, just like he’d apparently stripped it out of his life at the moment. He said he didn’t have passions anymore, and now she had a sneaking suspicion as to what they once were.

“
He was good
,” Lola said. “
Better than good. You don’t get that good if you don’t care
.”

“That makes him not caring anymore even worse.”

“
Who said he didn’t care?
”

The goddess had a point. Miles was doing what she’d accused Hank of doing—making assumptions. That wasn’t fair.

“It’s hard to tell what he cares about. He’s so dispassionate.”

“
He certainly behaves as if he were, but is he really?
”

“You would know better than I would.”

“
I stay out of my Cougars’ heads as much as I can. I simply observe, and usually from afar. Gods do well to meddle as little as possible, and in fact, we have no choice. Step on the wrong toes, and you create chaos in three realms, probably. Agatha could tell you all about it
.”

“I’ve been doing a whole lot of observing. I still don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. I just know I’m his mate and I’m physically attracted to him and some part of me wants to take care of him.”

“
That’s the Cougar bond
.”

“But that’s not enough. That’s not a relationship.”

“
You want one?
”

“I
think
so. Ask me again when I know more about him. Right now, he’s a cardboard cutout and I only know what’s on the surface. What else is there? He doesn’t seem so eager to share.”

“
It is your job to learn, and his to show you. That is all I can say
.”

“It’ll have to be enough, I guess.”

Just as well.

She put everything back in the storage tote, resumed her rummaging for snacks, and carried what amounted to half a convenience store out to the truck.

Hank had—for some reason she couldn’t discern—parked with the tailgate toward the fence instead of the other way around.

She peered through the driver’s side window, and seeing no one, called out, “Hank?”

“Back here. In the truck bed.”

“What are you doing back there?” She hitched her canvas bag full of goodies to her other shoulder and walked to the back. There was Hank, lounging atop a long floral print cushion she was 80 percent certain had come from one of Glenda’s patio chairs. And it seemed he’d taken them all, as the bed’s floor was covered from end to end with cushions, creating a sort of redneck futon. Relaxing there on top of the cushions with his shirt unbuttoned and his phone dangling from his fingers, he looked like some kind of redheaded maharaja awaiting his bevy of concubines.

Tough
.
One woman is going to have to be enough for him.

He patted the cushion beside him. “Come on up, if you can reach the tailgate.”

“And if I can’t?” Perhaps she sounded a bit tart, but she
was
concerned she wouldn’t be able to climb up with any degree of grace. She was no stranger to climbing onto high surfaces to grab items otherwise out of her reach, but she usually did that without witnesses.

“I’ll pick you up, if you let me.”

She took one more look at the gate, and seeing no reachable footholds, set the bag onto the truck bed and nodded.

He crawled over with all the sinuous gracefulness of a stalking cat and reached down to grab her under the arms. He pulled her up and against him for a moment, looking into her eyes with that curious yellowish gaze before settling her onto her knees. She knelt there in front of him, staring between the open plackets of his shirt, and resisted the urge to touch him. To marvel at his enduring warmth regardless of the fact that the temperature had dropped so quickly.

He’d never said she
couldn’t
touch him, so why hold back? As she started raising her right hand, Hank moved back to his throne of cushions.

She let her hand fall back to its side.

“What’d you bring me? Besides yourself, I mean. And come sit.” He patted the neighboring cushion again.

“Snacks. I think I cleared out your pantry. I figured you’d be hungry by now. Cougars seem to have faster-than-average metabolism, and dinner was hours ago.” She sat and nestled the bag between them.

“If you’re looking for good snacks, you have to go to Sean’s. He never buys actual food, but neither do I, for that matter.”

“I was going to say…” she whispered. None of the guys seemed to be particularly adept at cooking, but given Glenda’s considerable skill at it and her proclivity toward whipping up large batches of everything, they probably didn’t see the point of trying.

He pulled out a bag of jerky and set the tote on his other side. “You know, putting obstacles between yourself and a cat doesn’t do much to deter them from wanting to be in a particular spot.” He pulled her closer so they were hip to hip and slung his arm around her shoulders. “They’ll either find a way to remove the obstacle, dig under it, or lie on top of it.”

“It wasn’t meant to be an obstacle.”

“Are you sure? I figured you’d want to put a little distance between us.”

“Why would I want that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Are you feeling a bit scandalized? There weren’t even any witnesses.”

She rolled her eyes. “Are we going back to that again? Why is the fact that I happen to enjoy sex so hard for you to believe? Do I have to be a bitch for it to be okay for me to get a thrill out of certain things?”

“Honey, I’d say the vast majority of people enjoy sex. It’s just hard for me to reconcile that sweet demeanor of yours with anything beyond quiet servitude of the
just lie there
fashion.”

That was what most of them thought. Some, she didn’t bother educating otherwise. If they didn’t ask what she liked, she didn’t keep them.

“I’d much rather be on top. I don’t get suffocated that way.” She fixed her gaze on the toes of her shoes, folded her arms, and drummed her nervous fingers against her ribs.

“What did I say that got you so agitated?” He skimmed his thumb across the hairline just over her ear, igniting tiny frissons of awareness in her burning cheeks.

“What makes you think I’m agitated?”

“Your scent.”

“What do I smell like?”

“When you get upset, there’s a sort of…sharp, metallic spike, I guess is the only way I can describe it. It’s a little different for everyone, but Cougars can usually connect physiological responses to emotions pretty easily.”

“I wish you were so easy for me to read.”

“I didn’t say you were easy to read. Only that I can sometimes judge your moods based on what your body’s doing. When you’re feeling a bunch of things at once, I can’t always discern how you feel. And it seems like more often than not, you’re feeling a lot of things at once.”

She couldn’t contest that. Lately, her usually tidy thoughts had been a mess of uncertainty—of…
inadequacy
. It had taken her two decades to convince herself that she was
enough
the way she was, and it was funny how the opinion of one man could set back her confidence. And he hadn’t even had to talk to her to do that—just ignore her for a month, and then continuously disregard her value when he did pay her some attention. She might not have had much strength in the physical sense, but that didn’t make what she had any less useful.

He turned her face gently toward his. “What’s wrong? Your mood’s bottoming out. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her lips. “I’m okay. Just overthinking some things that don’t matter.”

The expression he returned was as neutral as always, but somehow, his incredulity was clear. He set down the jerky bag and stared out at the desert. “About a year ago, when demons first started coming out of that hole, we were just getting to a place in our lives when we were considering settling down a little. You know, getting some stability around here.”

And perhaps renew a passion for old hobbies?
She wanted to ask him about the artifacts in his pantry, but she didn’t want to divert him from telling his history. Who knew when he would volunteer it again?

“Mason had gotten the Cougars organized well enough that most of them weren’t outwardly hostile over him having taken over Dad’s role, though there were still a few challengers here and there. Mom had finally hired enough staff for the ranch that she could spend some time at home. This was right after Belle had moved out.” He cut her a look as if to ensure she’d gotten the math on her own.

“Right.”

“Business at Foye Woodworks was going pretty well, and there was finally some extra money to go around. Then that first demon came out, and then another and another. They sort of upended everything we’d worked on in the few years prior, and made us unsure of ourselves. Mason didn’t want to drag any other Cougars into the mess because it was on our property, and thus our problem, and lots of folks in the glaring started getting pissed about it.”