Cougar's Conquest

by Linda O. Johnston

  But it was damned hard being this near without touching her, even knowing she had fled from him before and probably hated seeing him now.

  At her silence, he continued, “I’d never heard even fictional stories of a shapeshifting cougar before. Wolves, sure. Even birds, from that classic movie Ladyhawke. But a mountain lion? At first, I was shocked that my lover changed shape under a full moon.” He purposely refrained from saying “the woman I loved.” He had told her that before he’d realized she had kept something so vital from him—and before she ran away. “But after you were gone and I had an opportunity to think, I realized how fascinated I was by it. Too bad you didn’t hang around long enough for me to tell you.”

  He did pause then, staring at her still-averted face. Waiting for some reaction.

  She turned then to look at him. The expression in her dark eyes was skeptical. “Fascinated how? Like you’d just seen a carnival freak show? Or some crazy sci-fi thriller come to life? Or—”

  “You’re the one calling yourself a freak or unreal creature,” he reminded her. “Not me.”

  He again wanted to touch her as she winced, but refrained. What was it about this woman that brought out all his protective instincts? He’d wanted to take care of her from the first, but that was because she had always seemed so vulnerable—before he knew why.

  Even now, after she had accidentally revealed the truth about herself and fled—leaving him in bewilderment and pain that continued to haunt him in unguarded moments—her reactions still caused him to want to fix things for her.

  Well, he would do that, but not in any way she might anticipate.

  “Fair enough,” she admitted. “And, well, for whatever it’s worth, I do apologize, Brett. I never intended to get so close to any man—anyone at all—and yet with you…” Her voice trailed off, and he saw tears in her eyes before she again turned away.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I was upset when you left. But after thinking about it, I understood why you left, even if I didn’t like it. And my amazement and fascination—well, it did turn my life in a different direction. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Alpha Force, have you?”

  Her puzzled expression was his answer.

  “I didn’t think so. They work extremely hard to keep it secret. I work hard at that now, too. Believe it or not, I’ve enlisted in the military, Gwynn. And I’m going to tell you some pretty incredible stuff. First, though, you have to promise to keep it as much of a secret as your shapeshifting.”

  “You’re in the military? That’s so unlike you—well, it’s unlike how you used to be.”

  He swallowed his annoyance that she didn’t answer his question. “You weren’t who I’d thought you were, Gwynn, so why do you think you know who I am?”

  Her smile was wan. “You’re right about that.”

  “So, do you promise not to reveal to anyone what I’m about to tell you?”

  She shook her head, not necessarily in denial but in apparent puzzlement. “How can I promise to keep a secret when I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

  “It’ll be to your benefit,” he promised. “But I can’t tell you more without your commitment. I can’t walk you through getting a highest level government clearance, especially not this fast, so I’ll just have to trust you. But before I can, I’ll ask you again. Will you keep what I tell you to yourself?”

  She glared at him in apparent exasperation. “Okay, since you said it’ll be to my advantage, but—”

  “No buts. Just yes or no. Will you keep it secret?”

  “Yes,” she spit.

  “Good. Now, just listen to this. I’m sure you’ll find it hard to believe, but I’m not just in the military. I’m part of the outfit I just mentioned—Alpha Force. It’s a highly covert special ops unit. And wait till I tell you what you have in common with many of its members.”

  Her eyes widened as he paused. “You’re not about to tell me, are you, that some of the members are—”

  “That’s right,” he said with a broad grin. “Shapeshifters.”

  Gwynn couldn’t help it. She shook her head vehemently in denial. “You’re just joking, trying to get back at me for not telling you everything about myself. But it won’t work, Brett. I’m not that gullible. You’ve found me. You’ve shown what a great investigator you are. But—”

  “I figured you’d react like this. I got permission to show you a video depiction on my smartphone. And, yes, I know pictures like that can be fudged by digital animation, like in commercial movies. But what I’m about to show you is something used by Alpha Force for recruitment. It’s real, and if you get interested enough to come with me to the headquarters I’ll prove it. Watch this.”

  He’d already pulled his phone from his pocket. Brett pushed the screen for a very special app, and in moments there was a depiction of a man shifting from human form into a wolf beneath a three-quarter moon.

  “That’s one of the first and most senior officers of Alpha Force, Lieutenant Patrick Worley.”

  Gwynn watched the phone’s screen in fascination—and incredulity. When the shifting was done, she looked at Brett. “It’s real?” she whispered, knowing how unsteady her voice sounded. “There are more shifters in that unit, and, well, they work together?”

  The only shifters she knew were her family members. They hated her. They hated one another. Talk about dysfunctional, and yet, they had to work together, like it or not, to keep the world from finding out about them.

  That was why she had left home as soon as she’d been old enough, defying them. Surely, she’d believed, there were others out there. Even if she couldn’t find them, she still needed to get away from the horror that constituted her relatives.

  She had managed to go to college, get a job at the company where she had met Brett, all without being detected.

  But she’d had nowhere else to go after she had inadvertently allowed Brett to watch her shift. She couldn’t stay there, in Denver, after that.

  She had come home and regretted it sorely ever since, yet she had not yet devised a better alternative, though she was working on it. Constantly. So far, though, her research had yielded nothing that made it worth trying to flee from here again.

  But Brett had mentioned recruitment by this military group Alpha Force. A military group of shapeshifters? Was he trying to recruit her?

  What did that mean?

  She wanted to know more. She also had to fight with herself not to throw herself into Brett’s arms. She remembered only too well how much they once had meant to each other.

  She had loved his hard, irresistible body and all it had done to hers. He had been her first lover. Her only lover. She had missed that when she had fled back here.

  She had missed him.

  But she wasn’t foolish. Despite what he had said, what she had seen on his phone, he might be here to exact a particularly painful kind of revenge on her.

  To tempt her with salvation—and present her instead with even more devastation than she had experienced before, when she’d had to leave him.

  “Shifters who work together?” he asked, repeating her question with a smile that suggested she was naive for even asking. “Oh, yeah. And more. Tell me, Gwynn. Have you ever shifted when there wasn’t a full moon?”

  “No,” she retorted. She had her answer. He was just attempting to play her. Shifting outside a full moon? Despite the film clip she had just seen, it was impossible.

  “Alpha Force members can shift anytime they want,” he told her. “The commanding officer, Major Drew Connell, is a medical doctor. So is Lieutenant Worley, whom you just saw. Drew has developed a really special form of medicine, an elixir, he calls it. When a shifter drinks it and has a certain kind of light reflected on him or her, shifting can occur anytime. I’m told it’s unusual for most shifters to retain their full human awareness while in animal form, but Alpha Force members who take the elixir do.”

  “Really?” She couldn’t help her amazed a
nd incredulous tone. It sounded so wonderful.

  It sounded much too good to be true.

  “Really,” he said with a nod.

  The smile on his face was a challenge. She knew that expression, boyish yet all man. She had seen him wear it when he’d dared her to come along with him to hike up that mountain near Denver on their first outing.

  To enjoy the view that had been so similar to this.

  To kiss him when they’d reached the summit.

  And to join him in bed.

  She couldn’t help it. She took a step toward him. Ran her fingers through the dark brown hair that was now so much shorter than when she’d known him.

  A military cut?

  He closed his eyes. “Don’t do that, Gwynn.” His tone rasped, as if she was torturing him.

  She was torturing herself, too.

  But so what? Would touching him tell her whether he was lying or telling the truth about his new purported military affiliation? This Alpha Force group? The astounding elixir he had described, and its effects?

  Of course not.

  And yet she didn’t release him. Instead, she threw her arms around him. Pressed her body against his, feeling his hard, muscular frame.

  Feeling, down below, another kind of hardness, one she had never anticipated feeling again—at least not with Brett.

  “Oh, Brett,” she whispered.

  And then, suddenly yet as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if there had never been any secrets between them, any gaps of time, his mouth lowered onto hers in a kiss that made her gasp in recollection and pleasure.

  Chapter Three

  Her mouth was every bit as sweet, as tantalizing, as he remembered. She played the same games with him, too, as if they had shared their last kiss only yesterday—the way her tongue teased and toyed with his. Her lips were both firm and inquisitive, challenging him to kiss her harder, deeper. Which he did.

  As they kissed, he pressed himself against her. Wanting to touch her everywhere—and more. A lot more. And not via mere memories. Once again. Just once again.

  Carefully, not wanting to frighten her off, he let his hands roam along her soft and sensuous body, over her back and down to her tight buttocks. He wanted to caress her, stroke her, above her clothes, beneath them, the way he had done so often before. She felt so much the same, and yet different. Slighter. Her sleekness was more angular now, as if she had lost weight. Was it because of what had happened between them?

  He still found her sexy. Oh, yes. Even so, he pulled back just a little, worried about hurting her in her unexpected fragility.

  That brief movement was enough to make her stop. To back away. She seemed breathless. Her dark eyes were luminous as she looked at him. She straightened her blue blouse as if she were a schoolmarm. Hell, she was a schoolmarm now.

  Not the brilliant pharmaceutical lab technician he had known. He understood that, since she was hiding here, she’d had to change the entire focus of her career, her life, in a relatively short time. Well, he’d done so, too. The changes had been monumental for both of them. He loved what he was doing now. Did she?

  “Guess we’re letting our memories get the better of us,” she said quietly, her smile tremulous.

  But what he remembered most warmly now wasn’t just the first kiss they had shared at that similar overlook in the mountains. No, it was afterward, at the hotel, when they had been unable to resist…and the rest, then, had been history.

  That was irrelevant now.

  “Not really,” he said, attempting to sound indifferent. He had no intention of asking more about why she really hadn’t stayed around to talk to him, or what life had been like after she’d run away; what had made her lose weight; why she’d become even more defensive and delicate than she had been back then.

  And she had been both.

  But his goals now were too important to risk scaring her off. His hopes and desires had to be sublimated to needs much more critical than his—those of his new employer, Uncle Sam, and all the military stood for.

  Hell, back then he’d never have anticipated where he’d now landed, thanks to Gwynn. And how much it would mean to him. But he had become so involved in research into shapeshifters—leading to his amazing discovery of the existence of the highly covert Alpha Force—that he had delayed coming for Gwynn until he had looked deeper into the secret unit and, fascinated, joined it.

  “I admit, though, that kissing you again was fun,” he added when she said nothing. He smiled in a bland, nonconfrontational, not especially amused way. “So what do you think? Will you come with me to check out Alpha Force?”

  “I…I’m not sure. I just don’t believe—”

  “That I’m on the level? That the film I showed you is real?”

  “That you’re actually in the military, for one thing,” she shot at him, looking him up and down.

  He was wearing military camos of sorts, though far from official—a sleeveless muscle shirt and jeans, not fatigues. He’d worn his hair longer when they’d known each other, too, but those things clearly weren’t enough to convince her.

  Which wasn’t surprising.

  He had another method he’d intended to try, but if she didn’t believe him now, simply talking to his commanding officer wasn’t likely to do it for her, either; still, it might help.

  And doing that would also have another benefit. Thinking about his new job, his fellow military members, his commanding officer and all of that certainly wouldn’t keep his sex drive revved up, not the way being in Gwynn’s presence again did.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’m in the military, all right. You of all people should recognize that.” He glanced down toward his jeans zipper, then back into her face. “Didn’t you notice how much I stood at attention just now, when we were close together?”

  He’d wanted to shock her, amuse her, something. And he did get a reaction. One that really pleased him.

  She looked at him with her dark, dark eyes clouded over with what appeared to be lust. She stared first at his face, and then downward enough that the body part he’d referred to was back at full attention again immediately.

  He took a step toward her, ready to take her back into his arms, to see what happened next without exactly planning it.

  He held out his arms, and she smiled.

  Gwynn definitely wanted to hold Brett again. Tightly and immediately. That kiss—it had been so wonderful. So spectacular.

  And feeling him against her a minute earlier had been incredible. Addictive. She wanted it again.

  But before she got that close to him once more a couple of cars roared onto the blacktop paving and stopped near them. In moments, some kids darted from the cars toward the overlook railing, screaming and followed by two shouting women, probably their mothers.

  As a schoolteacher, even of students a bit older, Gwynn knew she could handle this situation and make sure the kids came out of it safely, but she didn’t want to. Instead, she decided to let the stampeding parents take charge, which they did. The kids were herded to safety almost immediately.

  When Brett shrugged then walked around to open the car door for her, she slid into the passenger seat without a word to the intruders.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Brett said as he slipped into the driver’s side. His expression suggested as much frustration as she felt, but she found herself silently thanking the families for showing up just then. The situation before their arrival had been too much like the past. She wasn’t ready to relive it, no matter how tempting that might feel.

  “Let’s go grab an early dinner,” Brett continued, shoving the key into the ignition. “Before we do, though, I want you to talk to my superior officer, Major Drew Connell. Maybe he’ll convince you to come see what Alpha Force is all about. He’s at the headquarters in Maryland so I don’t want to wait till too late to call although he’s expecting to hear from me.”

  It was now almost eight o’clock in the East, since it was nearly five o’cl
ock here in Southern California. Not too late after a day on which she’d taught school. She usually stayed for a while to grade papers or work on lesson plans. But an early dinner sounded good to Gwynn. Getting home later than anticipated always required an explanation to her family.

  And no explanation ever satisfied them.

  She shuddered at the thought of her useless attempts to apologize and explain herself when she had returned home last year after fleeing and staying away for a long time—yet not long enough…. She was still paying for that. Would be forever unless she developed a reasonable and permanent way to leave.

  Gwynn said little as Brett drove along the winding mountain roads, forcing her thoughts away from the upcoming, inevitable confrontation if she dared to return home late.

  She inhaled, enjoying Brett’s scent even more now, after their kiss. Her senses were those of a feline, not just a human, and she could tell that his sexual interest had been roused by their embrace.

  She made no comment at all when he drove into the parking lot of the ritzy Lake Arrowhead Mountain Inn.

  It did, after all, have a well-regarded restaurant.

  The fact that it again triggered those memories she was working so hard to ignore… She cast them aside as best she could.

  Brett pulled into a tight parking space, then grabbed a strange-looking phone out of the console between them. “This is a government-issue satellite phone,” he said. “It’s more secure than a regular cell.”

  Which suggested again that what he was saying was real, not just an attempt to make up nonsensical stories to get back at her for fleeing.

  He pressed a button, then spoke into the receiver. “Hi, Major. Yes, I’m with Gwynn…Macka.” She heard his hesitation over her name.

  It wasn’t the one he’d known her under, and she suspected he was trying to rub that in. Or maybe not. Maybe it was truly an effort for him to remember what her name really was.

  He talked for a few minutes, then handed the phone to her. “Here,” he said.