The Cougar's Trade (30 page)

“Oh.”

He pushed it open, and she followed him through and down the first flight of stairs. At the landing, he turned, scooped her by the waist, and pressed her against the wall. Tilting her face up for her to look at him, he furrowed his brow again and shook his head.

“Hank, what’s wrong?”

“You
should
be swept off your feet. If I did it now—if I carried you the rest of the way—would it be corny?”

She didn’t have an answer to that. She was too busy watching the color of his irises change from that neon yellow-green to their more human hue as his catlike pupils dilated and ebbed in the low light.
Who would be able to think?

“Would you even let me?”

She closed her eyes so she
could
think. “Yes.”

He positioned his hands as if to lift her, but she batted them away. “You don’t have to do that to make me feel better.”

“I’m doing it to make
me
feel better. I’m calmer when you’re close. You make it easier for me to see through all the distractions.”

“I don’t believe you. I think I stress you out more than anything.”

“Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?”

“
He gets it
,” Lola whispered.

When Miles saw the woman again, she’d have to ask her how she did that. Was she hopping in and out of her head and seeing what Miles saw, or watching them invisibly?

“Shouldn’t you be my first concern? I know we don’t have a typical relationship, but I’d like to try to give you something that resembles one at least a little.”

“I won’t have you upending your life for me. I’m just—”

“Just what?” He scooped her up, and she hardly even protested before slipping her arm around his neck. She’d be lying if she said him holding her so close didn’t feel right, or that the careful embrace didn’t confirm to her that his sex had been as much about his need to touch and connect in a way he just couldn’t with words as it was about having a primal need met.

He was domineering and aggressive and enthusiastic in bed, but he also had that Cougar curiosity. The way he watched her, awaited her responses, suggested he cared about his effects on her body and her mood.

“Just…just a Southern girl who could do with a little less optimism,” she said as he descended down the final landing.

“Someone should have some optimism. It has a far different flavor from ego, and I gotta say I like the taste of it a lot better.” He deposited her onto the front seat of his truck and reached for her seat belt. He stopped halfway through the motion and seemed to fixate on the track.

“What are you thinking about, Hank?”

“Just wondering what would have happened if me and Sean didn’t know to trade.”

“I didn’t want Sean.”

“I would hope you still don’t. You only get one Foye.”

“I like the one I have.”
Her
mate. She wasn’t just his. He belonged to her as much as she belonged to him.

“I’m glad you do. I wanted you for so long.”

She didn’t realize her jaw had fallen until Hank tamped it up and bussed her lips with his own. “That surprises you?”

“You wouldn’t even look at me.”

“I didn’t want to let myself get attached to the idea of having you if you weren’t going to be mine. I didn’t want to be resentful over the goddess’s choice.”

Lola
made a
harrumph
before exiting. Miles could tell it was just for a while—a gentle mental swish of her skirts as she departed to see to other concerns and to give Miles some much-needed privacy.

“Why are you smiling like that?” Hank whispered.

“The goddess. You and your brothers…you frustrate her to no end.”

He chuckled and grazed his lips across hers again. “Sounds about right. We do it to our own mother, so why not her? And don’t I frustrate you?”

“Oh God, yes.”

“I’ll try to make up for it.”

“You can make it up. You still owe me something in trade for putting up with you.”

“Putting up with me, huh? I thought we’d moved beyond that stage and that you liked me a little.”

“I do. Know what else I would like?”

“What?”

“To hear you play the song that won your high school all that money.”

He rolled his eyes and groaned. “The moment I pick up a guitar, everyone on the ranch with Cougar hearing is going to be standing on my porch heckling me.”

“I’ll turn the hose on them if I have to. So…fair trade?”

He cringed, then leaned in close. His kiss was tender, yet committed. He pushed his fingers through her hair and held her in place just where he wanted her, and let his tongue delve in and out of her mouth. Sometimes with more force, but mostly in gentle, caressing flicks. Tasting, not devouring.

She worked her hands into his hair, too, and twined it around her fists, feeling the silky strands beneath her thumbs as he took her breath away again and again.

When he pulled back, his lips were a winsome red and he was breathing at an erratic pace. “Yeah, fair trade, I think.”

She grinned and gave his hair a little tug. “I don’t know why everyone wants you to cut this. It has its uses.”

He kissed her again, this time just a peck on the lips before closing her door. “Spite is one of the reasons I keep it long,” he said when he climbed into the driver’s seat. He pulled on his seat belt and stabbed the key into the ignition.

As they pulled out of the garage and away from the hospital, her euphoric feeling ebbed, and sour self-doubt and fear began their assault once more.

Hank dropped a hand onto her thigh and squeezed. “Stop. It’s going to be all right, princess.”

“What is?”

“We are. You and me. That’s the only thing I can control. Being good to you is something I can control, and I’m going to do better by you, Miles, I swear. But everything else?” He shrugged as he brought the truck to a stop at a light. “Cougar politics and Coyote bullshit? Demonic hellmouths?”

“And Hannah and Sean…”

“Yeah. Especially that.”

She wrapped her fingers around his hand and gave it a squeeze. She felt unsettled still, but hopeful. She was used to hoping for things when it came to Hank. Maybe if they put his ego and her optimism together, they could be a force to be reckoned with. “We’re all right, aren’t we, Cougar?”

“Hell, yeah.” He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

He couldn’t promise her happily-ever-after, but she suspected he’d see to it that she didn’t know the difference.

Holley Trent is the author of more than thirty 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 series at her website, www.holleytrent.com. While you’re there, sign up for her paranormal romance newsletter so you don’t miss the next installment in the saga that started with
A Demon in Waiting
.

(From
The Cougar’s Pawn
by Holley Trent)

Ellery Colvard zipped her sweatshirt up to her chin and tugged her bandana down so it covered her ears from the freezing Utah air. “I hate you both,” she said to her friends.

Miles, shuddering on her little corner of the rapidly deflating air mattress, wore a broad grin. A
manic
grin. Ellery had known the woman for ten years, and thus knew the smile was as phony as that Gucci purse Ellery had bought out of some guy’s trunk last Christmas. Momma hadn’t figured out it was fake yet, and given their tumultuous relationship as of late, Ellery didn’t care if she ever did.

“Pretty sure the fifty states camping trip bucket list was your idea, precious,” Miles said sweetly.

Teeth chattering, Ellery shook her head. “No. It was Hannah’s. I was too drunk to say no.”

Hannah sighed and rapidly chafed her thin arms. “Okay, maybe it was my idea, but it was Miles’s idea to run down the states in reverse alphabetical order. We could have been in California right now.”

“Yeah, I was
definitely
drunk when I suggested that,” Miles said. “But in my own defense, what woman in her right mind—especially a woman as educated as you two are—would give a flying frick about the specific order they received their torture in? Y’all, it all sucks equally, if you ask me. Which I guess you did. Why did I say yes to this?”

Ellery turned her gaze to the tent’s sagging fabric above them and sighed. Try as they might, they couldn’t get the stakes positioned right, and this wasn’t their first camping rodeo by a long shot. “If we’d done Alaska first, it would have probably also been the last,” she groused. “I hear the bears up there could shit out a human being completely undigested.”

“For God’s sake, screw the bears,” Hannah said. “The people around us are bad enough. So damned hunky-dory. Happy smiley people in their head-to-toe Patagonia gear who’ve barely gotten their boots broken in.” She wound her long blond braid around her index finger again and again and let her knee bob. “I actually hate camping. I did it so much as a kid with my dad and brothers, and I hated it back then, too. It’s just so inconvenient.”

“But you agreed,” Ellery said. She leveled her friend with an incendiary glare, but Hannah was unmoved. Didn’t even flinch. Ellery should have expected that. Southern women couldn’t use
the stare
on each other. They were born immune to it from everyone except their own grandmothers. No one was immune to a granny stare. When Granny gave that look, a little girl would sit up straight and get the scrunch off her face immediately.

Hannah shrugged. “I just thought it was time I did something more adventurous than chasing butt-naked practical joker patients down the hospital halls. So sue me.”

“Thanks for bringing us down with you, girl.” Ellery pulled her leggings-covered knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins. Her damned coat was too snug and too short to pull over them. “Who would have thought it’d get down to forty degrees in Utah in the middle of the summer?”

“Might have something to do with that hail storm coming through,” Hannah said. “I think I caught something about that on the radio when I was at the Jeep.”

“Hail storm?” Ellery’s voice careered to that stratospheric pitch her sister Gail had been trying to coach out of her for the past year. When Ellery got agitated, she got shrieky, but who could blame her? She wouldn’t get so freakin’ frustrated all the time if crazy shit didn’t keep happening to her.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and concentrated on the sharp sting of her nails against her palms.

Deep breath.

Deep breath.

Anxiety gets in the way of clear thoughts.

She pushed her panic away on an exhalation and opened her eyes. When she spoke again, she wanted her voice to be level. Calm. “So, Hannah, you didn’t think that, perhaps, with the storm coming that we’d like to get under some cover more than a millimeter thick? Or did being in this dinky tent while hail and wind pelted it sound like a proper adventure to you?”

Ellery could handle a little wind. She was a goddamned witch, for crying out loud, and her magic was tied up in air and weather. She could buffer them a little, at least for a while, but Hannah and Miles didn’t know that. In the ten years they’d been friends, Ellery had never told them what she was. Folks like her played their cards close to their chests. No one was “out,” and knowing too much about the supernatural world wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Sympathizers sometimes became targets, and Ellery had been fighting off boogeymen of the demonic and minor-god sort frequently during the past year. It was all Gail’s fault. At least, that’s what Ellery liked to tell her. It wasn’t really, but Gail hooking up with that gorgeous half-demon witch had a little something to do with their goddess zillion-times great-grandmother coming out of the woodworks and raising Hell—somewhat literally—a year ago.

Nope. The girls didn’t need to know about that.

“Next time, warn a girl, would ya?” Ellery muttered.

“Shhh!” Miles hissed, and she put one index finger on each friend’s lips.

Ellery grunted. She loved her friend like a sister, but she was shivering so hard that she could see sounds and feel colors. Her patience was edging ever-closer to
cut-a-bitch
territory, but that dull-ass knife on the multi-purpose tool she’d bought at Camper’s Paradise before their
last
ill-fated trip couldn’t cut cheese, much less flesh. Her fingernails would have to do.

She nudged back one cuff and studied her nails.
Oh yes. Nice and jagged.

“Did you see that?” Miles’s pale eyes went wide in the dim light and her gaze flitted from the tent slit to each corner of the enclosure in search of some phantom shape only she had seen.

“See what?” Ellery whispered.

“Don’t do this to me, tramp,” Hannah hissed, and she grabbed Miles’s wrist. “So help me God, if I have to get my gun out of the Jeep to feel safe enough to sleep tonight, you’re gonna—”

Wind whipped around the trio, blowing maps and paper wrappers around them as their tent peeled back in one easy yank, exposing them to the elements.

“What the hell?” Ellery scrambled to her feet intending to chase the tent, but no sooner had she turned did a rough hand clap over her mouth and another over her eyes.

When then the hand on her mouth retreated, she tried to open her mouth to scream only to find her lips were taped together.

Memories of the last time someone had gagged her came rushing back, and her heart rate soared.

No. No! Not again.

She wrenched her body around and swung her arms, trying to make contact with her assaulter and vaguely registering her friends’ wild movements in her periphery, but he moved around her with a silken ease and pulled a hood over her head.

“
Mmmf
!” she mumbled, and the attacker grabbed her around the thighs and heaved her up to one broad shoulder.

She kicked, flailed her arms, and thrashed her fists against his back.