The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards) (12 page)

She stood very still, her body tensed and ready to pounce, eyes wide and pulse loud in her ears.

His hands tracked up her arms, and he laced his fingers in front of her chest, his weight heavy against her back. “I asked you a question.”

He smelled so good. Felt so good. That cat inside of her—that untrustworthy ditz—didn’t want to put up a fight. “A ... a question?”

“Mm-hmm. Has any lady ever asked Lola?”

“N-not to my knowledge.” Belle dragged her tongue over dry lips and sucked in some air.
Need to move. Just move. Left foot, right foot, go go go.

She found her cheek pressed to his forearm, rubbing it. Marking it.

Fuck you, Fates.

“Do you have a horse here?” he asked.

“Huh?” She stopped rubbing and tried to turn around in his arms, but he tightened his grip and pulled her closer. If she concentrated, she could probably itemize every single bump on him. That rigid thing against her shoulder was probably a pec. A belt buckle against the small of her back, and the fastener of his jeans a little lower.

And she didn’t want to think beyond that, because if she did, she was going to get herself into the kind of trouble that came with nudity and regrets, and she had no use for regrets. She couldn’t spend them, couldn’t trade them in, and there wasn’t a damned thing she could learn from them.

“A horse,” he repeated. “Do you ride?”

“Um. Haven’t in a while, but yes. I still have a horse here.”

“Easy to get to?”

“Should be.”

“Why don’t you show me? Maybe it’ll distract me from how freakin’ hungry I am since you didn’t let me eat.”

“You could have eaten.”

“I didn’t want to eat that.”

“What did you want?”

“Nothing on the menu, probably. Where’s the horse?”

Belle cleared her throat and lifted an arm to point. “Down the path toward the bunkhouses.”

“Walkable?”

“Faster if we drive.”

“Let’s go. Maybe you can find some creature willing to let me mount.”

Well, if that was what he wanted, he didn’t have to look so far. There was one right in front of him.

Gods.

She cleared her throat yet again and nodded. “They’re trained well. I’m pretty sure we can find something that’ll suit you. Have you ...
ridden
before?”

“Of course. I like riding.”

And being ridden, too, I bet.

“I’ve ridden plenty,” he added. “Just not recently.”

“How long has it been?”

“A while. Not for lack of opportunity.” He loosened his grip on her and dropped his arms.

She turned and faced him. “You didn’t want to ... go riding?”

She had no damn business asking. His sex life was none of her concern. If he gave her the wrong answer, she’d get angry, and she had no right to be. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was just the guy who’d stood too close too often and who’d made the mistake of being too nice to her.

He shook his head. “No. Didn’t want to.”

“Why not?”
Shut. Up.

“Lots of reasons, sunshine. Suffice it to say that although I wasn’t driven before, I’m certainly interested now.”

Belle bit her lip to still her tongue. She wasn’t usually the kind of woman who’d hold back her words, but she wasn’t going to ask outright if he was offering to put her out of her misery. If he did, she wouldn’t say no. She’d just pounce, and then they would have a world of problems.

He would go away, and she’d be angry for a few weeks. Maybe longer. She’d get over it eventually, but the next time she went into heat—then what?

Would she go back to avoiding men altogether or relent and call up Steven for a pity fuck?

She’d probably call him.

Lather, rinse, and repeat until he’d had enough.

Cougar history said that wouldn’t take long at all. Lola’s lover hadn’t even stuck around, and she was a goddess. Belle had no hopes that she’d do any better.

No one had ever accused Steven of being subtle, but unlike some old dogs, he could learn new tricks. He could adapt. And maybe it was self-serving, but the way he saw it, he was chewing on a win-win situation.

Belle gave him an inscrutable look as she led a red-brown horse out of its stall. The horse was giving him a look, too, but it was less of the shrewish Were-cougar thing and more so the “You look heavy, dude,” kind of glare.

She groaned as he took the reins. “What exactly are you proposing?”

“We’ll get to that eventually. There’s no hurry. Why don’t you tell me the horse’s name first, and we’ll go from there.”

“Idiot.”

“The horse’s name is Idiot?”

She hissed.

Cute.

“The horse is Mousse, and you need to be sweet to her, or she’ll try to bite your shoes.”

“I’m always sweet.”

Belle made some sound that was neither hiss nor growl but some garbled mixed of the two. Didn’t seem to bother Mousse, but it certainly made Steven sigh.

“Hold on to that horse.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He held the reins and rubbed Mousse’s shoulder, returning the same narrow-eyed look she was giving him. “How ’bout we have a little agreement? You don’t throw me off, and I won’t keep heeling you if you stop to piss one too many times.”

Mousse made a chuffing sound and knocked off Steven’s cap.

“Everyone’s a critic.”

Belle led a somewhat darker horse out of the stables and climbed onto the saddle without a word.

She was good at that—no hesitation, no flinching as her ass hit the seat. Just confident, knowledgeable, and sexy as hell.

“This is Roast,” she said, giving the horse’s long neck a pat. “Roast can usually tell if something’s wrong with me, so if I start handling him oddly, he’ll ignore me and bring me home.”

“What happened the last time you were behaving oddly?”

“I stopped pulling the reins. Like I said. Sometimes my blood pressure drops when I’m ...”

“In heat.”

“Yeah.”

He put his foot into the stirrup and heaved himself on, discreetly adjusting his junk as he sat. He’d learned that lesson the hard way the first time he got on a horse. “Are you going to trot me off to my doom?” he asked as he got his feet settled and adjusted where his stirrups fell. The last person who’d used that saddle had obviously been a little shorter.

“No,” Belle said. “It’s a thirty-minute trail. It’s been here since my grandparents’ day. They originally put it here for fall hayrides back when we still grew pumpkins, but Mom repurposed it for trail riding. It’s pretty flat, so no worries about any extra bruising to your boy bits.”

“Thanks for worrying about them.”

“I’m not worried. I just didn’t want
you
to be.” She got Roast moving.

Roast kept looking back at Steven, either to see what Mousse was up to or to watch the horse’s rider.

“Eyes forward, Roast. Nothing to see back there,” Belle said, digging her heels into the horse’s sides.

“’Scuse the hell out of me.”

“I can’t help it,” Belle called back. “If you leave a gap for me to say something nasty, I’m going to say something nasty.”

Steven got Mousse moving and caught up to Belle’s side. The trail was wide enough for them to ride abreast, and he wasn’t particularly eager to watch Roast’s tail swish for half an hour.

“Why is that?” he asked.

“What? Why am I going to say something nasty?”

“Yep.”

“Dunno. It’s just the way Cougar women are wired. Trust me when I say I’d be even meaner to a male Cougar than I am to you.” She scrunched her nose. “I think. I think you’re the only non-Cougar guy who incites me so often.”

“I’ll try to take it as a compliment, but I don’t understand the logic of it. You’d think Lola would want to make it easier for you guys to proliferate.”

“I’ve pondered that myself a time or two, but Mom was curious enough about it the first time I went into heat that she did some asking around.”

“What’d she find out?”

“That it’s not supposed to be easy. Some female animals play hard to get and fight back against the males who are trying to mate with them, because if those males can’t suppress them—”

“Right. They’re not strong enough to sire and protect her offspring.”

“Exactly. And I guess because we gestate long like humans and tend to only have one baby at a time, we don’t want to take risks that our offspring aren’t going to be viable.”

“Is inviability a huge issue with shifters?”

Belle winced. “We don’t talk about it a lot, but yeah. It probably won’t be a problem with Ellery and Miles because their human DNA will offset some of the Cougar DNA weaknesses. Hannah may have some frustration.”

“Does she know that?”

“I don’t know. It’s not really a conversation you want to sit down and have with your brother’s mate, especially if they haven’t had a conversation about kids yet.”

“With Hannah, it’s better to give her too much information and too soon than to lob a huge blow at her during a sensitive time.”

“She’s gotten a lot of shit for that, hasn’t she?” Belle hopped off Roast and jogged to the gate blocking access to the trail. She pushed it open and mounted the horse again.

“For what?”

“For not being so great at regulating her emotions.”

Steven let out a ragged breath. He’d probably always feel like he was dancing on eggshells when it came to Hannah, but that was better than the alternative—him being completely insensitive to her feelings. He never wanted her to think he didn’t care. “She has,” he admitted, “but in my opinion, she’s not actually that bad at it. She has normal enough reactions to stressful situations, but I guess growing up, we made her feel that any reaction at all was bad.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“I’d blame my parents and say we were just taking their lead, but I knew it was wrong. I was just too chickenshit to opt out of the pile on at the time. I’ll probably be making it up to Hannah for the rest of my life. The lady can really hold a grudge.”

“You deserve it.”

He nodded. “Yep. Fair enough.”

They passed by some dilapidated structures and rode quietly until they’d passed, as if the things weren’t just piles of construction detritus, but a graveyard of people’s exertion. A monument of energy gone to waste.

“What was that?” he asked, when the plot was a hundred feet behind them.

“My great-grandparents’ house. Believe it or not, they lived in that little thing with eight kids, mostly boys.”

“Jesus.”

Belle laughed. “Yeah. Things were different back then. I guess it was normal to be right on top of people all the time, even if you couldn’t stand them.”

“I imagine they all worked so hard during the day that come night, they didn’t have much energy to argue, anyway.”

“You’re probably right. My brothers and I always had plenty of energy for arguing. I was so happy when they all started moving out to their own houses, not that they went all that far.”

All the Foyes—excluding Belle—were within shouting distance of each other. Glenda lived in the main house. Mason a bit off to the east, Hank in the adjacent corner, and Sean behind them all. That made them all convenient to the woodworking business, which was situated near the road, and not so far from major ranch activity, either.

“My siblings and I didn’t scatter a whole lot,” Steven said. “We all live in the same county. Well, not Hannah anymore, obviously, but we’re a close enough drive to our parents’ house that we usually can’t come up with a good enough excuse about why we can’t show up for Mom’s little shindigs.”

“You mean the same mother who threw a birthday party for Hannah that she knew Hannah wouldn’t be at?”

Steven shrugged. “That’s Ma for ya. I mean, she’s not stupid, but I swear, some of my father’s emotional tone deafness has rubbed off on her. The tradeoffs she makes for the sake of being social sometimes make me scratch my head.”

“Mom’s been going out of her way to make Hannah feel comfortable here. She’s had the hardest time getting her to open up, and that frustrates her a lot, because who Hannah presents herself as isn’t who Sean says she is.”

“I guess he’d know better than anyone.”

“Even you?”

Steven shrugged. “I hate to say it, but Sean came in at something of an advantage because he hadn’t been around for the previous twenty-eight years. He got unfiltered Hannah, and I guess we all forgot what that looked like or simply didn’t want to see it.”

“You can’t make people be anything other than what they are.”

“Tell that to my parents. I don’t even know whose idea it was for me to go into the military, that’s how fucked up my head is. I don’t know if I did it because I wanted to or because I was
supposed
to.”

“Are you ... angry about it?” she asked softly. “You know, because of what happened there?”

Anger
...

He pulled the reins sideways to get Mousse to put a little sunlight between her and Roast. The horse might have thought she was doing Stephen a favor putting him that close to the unpredictable cat lady, but he didn’t want to be there at the expense of having his leg pinched off.

“Not anger, no,” he said finally.

“Really?”

“Anger is a hard place for me to reach, and it’s so imprecise. It’s a strong word people sometimes use to disguise feelings they think are weaker.”

“Like what?”

“Shame. Fear. Helplessness, I guess.” He’d certainly spent more than his fair share of time dwelling in those emotional stations. He didn’t talk about it much, but there hadn’t been anyone to tell.

Apparently, he’d just told Belle.

She nudged Roast over to claim back the space Mousse had made. She didn’t say anything, though, just adjusted her grip on the reins and watched the trail ahead.

“If I had to do it all over again, would I have done something else?” he asked. “Maybe. I don’t know what, though. I like being a cop. The path I took to get there was a little bumpy, but I like to think I would have ended up in the same place.”

“At least you know that about yourself. I—
shit
.”

She passed the reins to her other hand and patted her back pocket and, with some very interesting saddle-top maneuvering, dug her vibrating phone out of it. She looked at the screen, rolled her eyes, and slid her thumb across the display. “
What
, Mason?”