Cougar's First Christmas (3 page)

She searched his eyes. “Are you asking me to move in with your clan? Do they know about this?”

He moved his hand from her cheek to the back of her neck and squeezed. “I haven’t asked. I wanted to ask you first.”

~~~

Her heart thumping in her ears, Lauren couldn’t believe Sean had asked her to be his mate. The thought of never having this shifter male tease her, touch her, or hold her close made her heart squeeze. She hadn’t known where their relationship was going, as the law forbade human-shifter marriages, but now all she could think about was spending the rest of her life with Sean Fisher.

Yet Lauren was far too logical to say yes without thinking things through. After all, it wasn’t just her life that would be turned upside down if she said yes; her family, and his, would have to accept them as well.

He squeezed the back of her neck again and Lauren realized she hadn’t responded. Laying a hand on his jaw, she said, “Maybe.”

He blinked. “Maybe?”

“Yes, maybe. First, I want you to meet my parents and charm them like no tomorrow. Then, we can go to your clan. I want to meet them before I even start thinking about living amongst a pack of cougar-shifters.”

One corner of his mouth ticked up. “At least we’re not wolves.”

“Sean.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll be serious.”

She raised an eyebrow. “So when am I meeting your clan?”

He chuckled. “Funny you should ask as I spoke to my sister earlier today about that. She’s determined to scare you off.”

“Oh, is she? Well, maybe I should buy her a scratching post for Christmas and throw down my challenge.”

Caressing the back of her neck, he leaned up and placed a kiss on her lips. “Have I mentioned recently that I love you?”

“Maybe.” She kissed his jaw and then his ear before she whispered, “But I think you should show me how much, just to try to sway my decision into the yes column.”

He slapped her ass. “You know you’d miss my ‘surprises’ if you left me.”

Sean had a tendency of showing up in random places and convincing her to have sex in bathrooms, parks, hell, he’d even made her come with his fingers one night while they’d been out to dinner at a shifter-run restaurant. “Yes, but who would miss having a woman around who allows those kinds of surprises?”

“Allows? Baby, one touch and you melt in my hands.”

“Then make me melt again, Sean Fisher, and my Christmas Eve will be complete.”

As he kissed her and hugged her tightly against him, she pushed any worry she had about their families to the back burner. If worse came to worst, and neither his clan nor her family could accept the mating, this might be the last night she had with her cougar and she would make it count.

Chapter Three

The next morning, they were driving in silence when
that
song came on the radio. Sean groaned just as Lauren squealed and jacked up the volume to the rock version of Carol of the Bells.

As she waved her hands in the air in time to the beat, his inner cougar growled. Not that Sean could blame him; the first time he’d heard the song, it’d been cool. But after two hundred times in the span of a week, he was ready to rip the stereo out of the car and forgo any music at all if it meant he wouldn’t have to hear the song ever again.

Glancing over, some of his irritation eased as Lauren swayed to the music. Maybe this song wouldn’t be so bad if his female swayed to it while she was naked.

Yes, if she were naked and swaying, she could listen to the same song a thousand times, and he wouldn’t care.

Tearing his eyes away, he focused back on the road. Despite being the busiest freeway in the state, I-5 was dead this early in the morning on Christmas Day. Lauren had wanted to spend the entire day with her family, so they could get to know him, and right now, he needed as many bonus points as he could until she agreed to be his mate.

Especially since meeting his clan would be ten times worse for his human than him meeting her family. DarkStalker was cautious, and while they’d recently accepted one of their own mating a wolf-shifter, mating a human was a whole different ballgame since it was illegal.

But it wasn’t as if he would put his clan at any serious risk. DarkStalker’s clan leader, Kian Murray, was one of the smartest men he’d ever met, and if there was ever a shifter to find a legal loophole allowing Sean to mate a human, it would be Kian. Provided the Spencer family accepted him, first thing tomorrow he’d call his leader and ask for his advice.

As the song ended, Lauren turned down the music, but before he could tease her about her weird obsession, something smacked into his bumper. The car spun and his reflexes kicked in. He tried to keep his steering wheel straight, but something slammed into him again, knocking his grip loose. The wheel spun out of control, and his last thought was of Lauren before the car crashed headfirst into the roadside barrier and the world went black.

~~~

Lauren opened her eyes to find a white, inflated airbag in front of her face. Blinking a few times, the fog lifted from her brain at the same time pain radiated up her left leg. She groaned, and then remembered Sean. “Sean? Babe? Are you okay?”

When there was nothing but silence, a bad feeling gathered in the pit of her stomach. He’d better be alive, damn it. He couldn’t leave her like this.

She pushed against the airbag until it deflated. Turning to the side, she found the driver’s seat empty. The door was open, so she yelled, “Sean!”

The answering silence made her heart skip a beat. Her shifter would never abandon her. Lauren needed to get out of the car and see if he’d been thrown to the side.

Oh, god.
What if he’d been thrown and broken his neck? Shifters healed fast, but not even her cougar-shifter could survive that.

Breathing in and out, she forced her panic down. Freaking out about “what ifs” would accomplish nothing, so she fell back on her usual logical self and determined the first step was getting free of the car.

A quick check told her that apart from her leg, the rest of her injuries appeared to be superficial. They’d been lucky to hit whatever it was head on rather than on her side or she might be dead.

Moving the deflated airbag out of the way, it took a few tries until she could undo her seatbelt and open the door. She leaned her head out and peeked, but she didn’t spot any people or other cars, except for the occasional person driving past. Rather than wonder why no one would stop to check on them, Lauren eased out of the car and noticed the long gash on her left leg. It wasn’t gushing out blood, which was good, but it hurt like hell so she still kept most of her weight on her good leg as she pushed herself up.

Once upright, her head spun for a second, but she gritted her teeth and remained standing. She needed to see if Sean was okay.

Favoring her right leg, she limped around the back of the car until she could see the driver’s side, but her shifter was nowhere to be found. The small pool of blood right outside his car door made her stomach churn as she realized this might not have been an accident after all.

“Shit.” She should have told Sean about that car following her last night. Some small part of her brain screamed that the two were related.

If this were a normal situation, she’d wait for the state patrol to show up, report what had happened, and ask for their help. But Lauren was a human and Sean was a shifter, which meant talking to the state troopers or the police might land her in jail.

Think, Lauren, think.
She wasn’t about to abandon the love of her life, but who would help her?

Then it hit her—his clan. If she could find a way to contact them, they should listen to her long enough to gather the facts. They might toss her aside after that, but none of that mattered as long as she secured the help Sean needed.

There was only a matter of minutes before a passerby stopped or the state troopers showed up, so Lauren limped to the driver’s seat and confronted more blood. Normally, she wasn’t squeamish at the sight of blood; she saw it often enough when working on her dental patients. But this wasn’t just any blood; it was her boyfriend’s blood.

Stop it. Focus, or who will help him?
With a deep inhalation, she leaned down and looked for Sean’s phone. He always tossed it into one of the drink holder slots under the stereo console, but both of them were empty. Clenching her jaw, she sat down on the blood-covered seat and fished around his seat, and still came up with nothing. She turned, and after feeling around the floor of the backseat, her hand came into contact with a hard, rectangular object.
Bingo.

After checking that the phone still worked, she grabbed her purse from under the passenger side seat, maneuvered herself upright again, and limped for the grass on the side of the road. There were some trees not too far away, but with the pain in her leg, it took three times as long to reach them. Just in time too, as the sirens blared in the distance.

Once she was far enough inside the trees to be hidden from view, Lauren took another fortifying breath. She hoped Sean had told his clan leader about their relationship because she was about to call him.

She looked through Sean’s phone until she found the name Kian Murray. She may never have visited Clan DarkStalker, but Sean had told her a little about their clan leader. While DarkStalker’s leader didn’t hate humans outright, he could still blame her for Sean’s disappearance and leave her to the human police.

No, she needed to stop with all the guilt about not telling Sean about the tail last night. She and Sean had been careful, but whenever people had discovered her boyfriend was a shifter, they’d suffered their fair share of jeering and threats. The person who had hit them could be any one of those people. After all, she had no proof it was Human Purity or any of the extremist “humans only” groups.

With her guilt pushed back for now, she hit the call button and the phone rang once before a male voice answered, “Hello?”

Her heart was pounding as she answered, “Is this Kian Murray?”

“You’re not Sean. Who is this?”

He was trying to intimidate her with his tone, but she wasn’t having it. “This is Lauren Spencer, Sean’s fiancée. He’s been taken, and I need your help.”

~~~

Pain throbbing at the back of his head was the first thing Sean noticed when he regained consciousness. The pounding made it hard to concentrate, but then he remembered the accident; he needed to wake the hell up and get Lauren to safety. Whoever had hit his car had done it on purpose and who knew what they’d do to his female.

He grit his teeth against the pain, and with incredible effort, Sean opened his eyes to find himself in a dim-lit room.

Fuck.
This wasn’t a hospital, or even the makeshift clinic on DarkStalker’s lands. His cougar eyesight was keen even in the dark, and the room was no more than fifteen feet by twenty feet. No tables, beds, sofas, or anything else apart from the chair under his ass and one tall, metal cabinet across the room.

And most important of all, there was no Lauren.

Where the hell is she?
He needed to find his female. If whoever hit his car had hurt her, they would pay.

His cougar snarled in agreement.
Yes. She is ours. We must find her.

In order to do that, he needed to find a way out. He tried to move his hands, but pain shot up his arms at the same time his wrists and hands came up against some kind of bindings.

Drawing in a hiss, Sean realized he was trapped. His fingers were folded into his palm with his thumb on top, and wrapped with some kind of super strong bindings, which had been placed to prevent him from not only using his claws, but also from shifting. If he shifted in this position, his arms would break in cougar-form. His chances of getting away would be nearly zero after that. He’d have to come up with another strategy.

The lock on the door clicked. With every bit of stubbornness he possessed, Sean pushed his pain to the back of his mind so he could focus. He might be one of his clan’s engineers, but all of DarkStalker’s clan members received training as teenagers on how to defend and escape. There were always humans who wanted to harm them, and one of the few things all shifter clans agreed upon was that their members needed to be ready in case of an attack.

The door opened to reveal a man and woman wearing jeans and sweaters, but also with cloth bandit-style black masks over their faces. That signaled the pair were with Human Purity. Despite how loud the fuckers were with their protests and outrage, they hid behind scraps of material to avoid being targeted and hunted down.

Shifters might be civil ninety-five percent of the time, but Human Purity feared that remaining five percent, and with good reason. If this pair had killed his female, he would make the bastards pay.

The human male approached him, his head high and shoulders back. The bindings around his hands must be pretty fucking special to instill this kind of confidence in the human.

The male stopped two feet away from Sean. When he spoke, his voice was loud and his tone rushed, as if the man came from the east coast. “A trial was held with the board, and you’ve been found guilty of intent to dilute the human gene pool. Once we confirm the woman you’ve corrupted is clean and free of any shifter hybrid offspring, she will be rehabilitated. Then you will receive your sentence.”