by Danica Avet
Ram blamed her jiggling ass as she ran away for his slow response to her words. He was so mesmerized it took her disappearing from sight for him to recall her taunt. His roar of outrage shook the woods, followed by the throaty laughter of the female bear who drove him insane.
*
She painted her toenails. Daisy stared at the fire-engine-red polish and bitched at herself. She never painted her toenails because it was something Kyle used to like, yet here she was primping herself for a lying, stinking lion. A lion who was out right now with someone he didn’t want her to know about.
God, she was so pathetic. She’d very nearly begged him to come home with her and he was busy going out with someone else, had made plans to be with someone else. After he gave her another intense orgasm and let her suck him off.
The bottle of polish made a cracking sound when it made contact with the wall across the room. Damn, she’d have to paint that spot. And her little fit hadn’t relieved her anger any.
She should’ve gone to her mama’s house and gorged herself on food. That wouldn’t have made her feel better but if she was in a food-induced coma she couldn’t think about how betrayed she felt by a male she only wanted to fuck.
The strident ring of her phone broke into her furious thoughts. Hoping it was a telemarketer because she really needed to roar at someone, she grabbed the cordless and hit talk.
“What?”
There was a moment of silence and then, “I can’t believe you didn’t call to tell me Ramsey Reinhardt bought Red House!”
Daisy flopped back on her sofa. “Hey, Kitty.”
Kitty, her first cousin and best friend, didn’t even bother greeting her back. No, once Kitty got going, nothing stopped her until she left you bleeding and broken in her wake.
“You know how much I love their music and you couldn’t tell me they played the festival? Or that you’re on friendly terms with Ramsey? God! Or how about the fact that it looks like you’re mated to him? Sometimes I swear you’re a man with the lack of communication we have going on between us. I’m supposed to be your best-fucking-friend, not to mention I’m your only cousin on our mamas’ side of the family. How could you do this to me?”
“Wait, hold on and back up. Where did you get the idea that I’m mated to him?” Daisy demanded in a near roar.
A long, frustrated sigh filtered through the receiver. “Hello? Mama told me because Aunt Claudette told her. That’s why Ramsey’s over at your parents’ house right now, to formally ask your daddy for permission to mate you.” She sighed again, but this time it was dreamy. “That’s so sweet, by the way. Why can’t I meet a male like that? Someone old-fashioned, rich and sexy? I’ve run into some of all three, but never any who were all those things. Lucky bitch. Why, when I think…”
Daisy tuned her cousin out, her brain processing the information. Surely her mama hadn’t actually told Aunt Francine that. The only person who might suspect Ram had marked her was Monk. Her heart thundered. The bastard. So this was how he got back at her for scratching his car, huh? Calling her cousin? The same sweet cousin who’d sobbed her heart out over him?
“I’m going to kill him,” she growled into the phone.
Kitty paused in her long-winded monologue. “What? But I thought you liked Father Bryan.”
Daisy frowned. “What? No, not Father Bryan. I’m going to kill Monk. I can’t believe he called and told you about that.”
“Oh please,” Kitty snorted, “I wouldn’t have answered the phone if Monk Badeaux had called me. No, it was Mama who told me, no lie. As if I’d even share a phone line with Monk,” Kitty continued in a grouchy rumble. “That pussy has avoided even looking at Mama since I left home. I know because she said…”
An uneasy feeling washed over Daisy. She climbed off her couch and walked to the windows facing the pasture and her parents’ house. When she peeked out, she almost crumpled to her knees. The house she’d grown up in was lit up like a Christmas tree. Her daddy’s cruiser was out front next to her mama’s truck, but next to both of those vehicles was a fancy truck she knew didn’t belong to any locals. Oh fuck. Dark dots danced in front of her eyes and she thought she’d faint.
“So? Why didn’t you tell me, Daisy?” Kitty finally asked, a note of hurt in her voice. “I mean, this is exciting, not just because of whom you’re mating, but that you’re mating a lion.”
“I’m not,” she croaked as she stumbled back to her sofa and fell on it. “I don’t know why Mama told Aunt Francine that, but we’re not getting mated, Kitty.”
“I can’t see her making that kind of assumption without some solid evidence.”
Sometimes Kitty sounded more like a cop than a fashion designer, but then she’d spent a lot of time at the Pointe-Aux-Chat Sheriff’s Department when she was a kid too. Daisy gnawed on a claw, not sure how to answer her cousin without sounding like a complete idiot. Unfortunately everything she thought of made her sound like a melodramatic shifter who might need psychiatric evaluation.
“Daisy,” Kitty said in a warning tone.
“Okay, so I had sex with him!” Kitty sucked in a sharp breath and Daisy spilled. “Twice. Or…maybe three times? I—I—Yeah, three times and he bit me. Without asking! Can you believe that? And he’s been following me around. Okay, no, he hasn’t been following me around. He bought Red House and I was pissed off when I found out, so I went over there and he kissed me right in front of Monk.” She leapt off the sofa to pace around her living room, the entire story flying out of her mouth with the force of a geyser.
When she finished, Daisy was out of breath and tears trickled down her cheeks. Horrified at her loss of control, she sucked in a deep, steadying breath and wiped at her wet face with the sleeve of her nightshirt. Kitty hadn’t said a single word through the whole confession and Daisy waited for her to say something.
Finally, she couldn’t take the silence anymore. “Well? Am I crazy?”
“Daisy, I had no idea you were that hurt after the thing with Kyle,” Kitty said, her voice soft and hesitant.
“This isn’t about Kyle, Kitty. This is about Ram. I mean…he’s a rock star, you know? What if this is just his way of alleviating the boredom? I’ll get attached and when he leaves, I’ll be devastated,” Daisy confessed.
“He isn’t Kyle though,” Kitty pointed out. “He’s not some young, barely mature lion who wants to prove his manhood by collecting females. Ram doesn’t need to have a pride for that.”
“Exactly.”
“Seriously, where’s the real Daisy Lynn Picou and what have you done with her? You’re not a coward. You’re the same bear who took out the whole McCabe pack when they threatened to break our tree house.”
Daisy found a smile at that reminder. “I was eleven.”
“You were fearless. Can’t wasn’t in your vocabulary. And then you met Kyle and you, I don’t know, you changed to suit him.”
“I did not!”
Kitty snorted loudly. “Please, don’t make me pull out the incriminating e-mails and love letters, or the ticket stubs you saved when you first started seeing each other, because I still have them, sucker. You became a sap.”
Her cheeks burned at the memory of how stupid she’d been.
“If it hadn’t been for the fact that you seemed so happy with him, I would’ve had you checked out by a psychiatrist, but you were happy. You changed for Kyle, tried to make yourself out to be what he wanted. And when he pulled that shit with the pride you almost joined, didn’t you?”
Daisy closed her eyes because yeah, she’d almost caved. She’d conveniently forgotten that part of the incident but there was no denying her stupid, nineteen-year-old heart had broken at the thought of not having Kyle in her life. “God, I was so stupid,” she muttered.
“Well yeah, but you were young. You’re forty-five—”
“Hey! I’m only thirty-three.”
Kitty’s snicker was very welcome and helped relieve some of the hurt in Daisy’s chest. “My point is you’re
not the same starry-eyed kid who fell for Kyle. You’re more mature and settled now. And what’s to say Ram is going to leave? I doubt he goes around marking every female he has sex with. It would’ve been plastered all over the tabloids if he did.” She let that statement settle in for a minute before continuing. “And if he does leave, nothing says you’ll never get over it. There is life after heartbreak. I know that for a fact.”
Daisy bit her lip, frowning at her brightly colored toes. “Do you…still think about Monk?” she asked hesitantly. No one had hurt as much as Kitty had after Monk destroyed her when they were teenagers. If her cousin could overcome that then Daisy could as well.
“Of course I still think about him, he was my first love. But I don’t measure every male I meet by his actions either. I can’t. Unlike you, I’m not ready to settle down yet so I just enjoy the chase and lots of good sex. But when I am ready, Monk won’t even factor into it.”
The strength in Kitty’s voice helped Daisy find her backbone again. “You’re right,” she said on a sigh. “I really do feel drawn to him, you know. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before, but this…fear I have that he’ll break my heart keeps holding me back.”
“Always being afraid isn’t the way to live, Daisy Lynn. You know that, which is why part of you is fighting to take whatever you can get from him. I say go for it. Enjoy him while you have him and if it ends, you’ll at least be able to tell your grandkids you made it with a rock star,” she said jokingly.
Daisy sighed, a smile on her face. Kitty always made her feel better, no matter what kind of mood she was in. “Okay, so what else is going on with you? We haven’t talked in a couple of weeks.”
Kitty launched into a description of her latest clothing line and the runway show coming up, then mentioned some of the people Daisy had met while in New York. After Kitty caught her up on all the gossip in the fashion industry and wrung a promise out of her to visit at some point in the near future, they said their goodbyes.
“Oh,” Kitty said before Daisy could hang up. “By the way, having a guy go down on you while you’re on the phone with your mama? I never knew you were such a dirty girl.”
Daisy’s face exploded with heat but Kitty hung up laughing. “Brat,” she muttered as she tossed the phone to the side.
Still, she huffed out a laugh and stretched her muscles, surprised to realize they’d been on the phone for nearly two hours. Curious to see if Ram was still at her parents’ house, Daisy shuffled to the window to peek out.
She looked right into a very pissed-off-looking green eye. She shrieked in surprise, jumping away from the window. Angry at herself, Daisy saw red. She recognized that eye. Fury caught her by the throat and dragged her to the door. She wasn’t rational, if anything she was acting just like a rabid bear, but she couldn’t stop herself. Seeing him on her porch after getting off the phone with Kitty was enough to throw her into the same all-consuming rage she’d felt when she heard the other kids snicker about “Pretty Kitty’s kitty”.
Daisy flung open the door. “You!”
Monk got in her face. “You crazy bitch!”
Things went downhill from there.
*
Ram stood on the Picou’s porch after a delicious, informative meal. Claudette and Thomas were interesting people. Ram got the idea Thomas would’ve preferred to have the conversation in one of his interrogation rooms, but in the end, Daisy’s parents seemed pleased. Well, Claudette was ecstatic and Thomas was distrustful. Ram figured they balanced out to pleased.
Thomas had also warned him about the calls the station had been fielding from the press. They all wanted to know if it was true he was staying in Maison Rouge. So far they’d been able to keep from saying anything but Ram knew that wouldn’t last long. They’d show up and his plans of getting Daisy to commit to him would be shot once she got a load of the circus that was his life. Not that he’d have an easy time of convincing her anyway. The conversation he’d had with Claudette had eradicated that thought.
Daisy’s heart had been broken by some big-city lion. Ram rubbed the back of his neck as he strolled to his truck. He’d never been in love before so had no basis for comparison, but it seemed as if that kind of hurt couldn’t be dismissed so easily. He really did have his work cut out for him.
He slid onto the leather seat of his vehicle and started up the engine. His lion urged him to seek her out. The damn cat had purred nonstop when Claudette pulled out the family albums, showing him picture after picture of Daisy as a child, then later as a very hot metal head. Ram grinned at the memory of one picture in particular.
Daisy’s arm had been flung over the shoulders of a slightly taller female. They’d posed in the middle of a crowd of shifters and humans sporting crazy hairstyles, wearing chain wallets, spike collars and bracelets. Both females had darkened their eyes with liner, painted their fingernails black and wore collars themselves. They’d each had their fingers positioned to make devil’s horns and their tongues sticking out.
Ram laughed. Claudette had apologized for the picture, saying she wasn’t sure how it got into the album full of Daisy’s christening pictures. Ram suspected his sly bear had done it on purpose.
If he hadn’t seen her at the festival, her eyes bright with excitement as she helped protect the moshers, Ram wouldn’t have been able to reconcile the deputy with the metal head youth. He tried to put the pieces together and suspected Daisy had locked up her joy when she had her heart broken, or maybe before. Claudette hadn’t met Kyle, but she said he’d been a stockbroker type, very big on appearances and proper behavior. Had Daisy shunned her love for hard, fast music to fit in with what Kyle wanted? It made sense. She’d only been nineteen or twenty when she hooked up with the bastard. Kids were impressionable and when it came to their hormones, they did all kinds of crazy shit.
He flexed his hands on the steering wheel and stared in the direction of Daisy’s house. Her lights were still on, so she was up. Was she with another man right now? His rational mind reasoned that she’d only told him she had a date because he’d been a shitty liar. The irrational animal who’d marked Daisy as his demanded Ram go over there and make sure she was alone.
As he was trying to decide if he would give in to the lion’s possessiveness, a set of headlights bounced over the landscape as a car bumped along her driveway. It was a muscle car of some kind. The kind a male spent hours restoring and took great pride in. The son of a bitch stopped in front of Daisy’s house. A long, lean figure climbed out of the car and started for the porch.
Ram didn’t even stop to think about what he was doing. He slammed the truck in gear and tore out of the Picous’ driveway. His claws sprang out, his fangs scraped his lips, and goddammit, his mane was sprouting again despite the trim Claudette had given him after dinner. He was going to kill the bastard.
Chapter Six
Gravel flew when Ram slid to a stop next to Daisy’s house. The door was closed but grunts and groans accompanied by thumps reached his ears the minute he got out of the cab. He paused for one second, scenting a very familiar cougar. His eyes narrowed on Daisy’s door, his hands curling into hard fists.
He climbed the steps of the porch and tried to calm his breathing, but with the stink of another cat near his mate and the sounds of what could only be shifter sex thundering through the house, it proved impossible. He kicked in the door with a roar, tearing into the house like a freight train.
At first he didn’t see them. Then he heard grunts and pants on the other side of the sofa. Springing the seven feet between the door and the couch, Ram landed on the cushions prepared to tear Monk away from his female.
The cougar shifter had Daisy pinned to the ground. She’d somehow twisted her body so she could lock her legs around Monk’s head. Neither of them could move much, holding each other in place in a stalemate. If either of them had one less piece of clothing on, Ram would’ve killed the cougar immediately. As it was it took him a few minutes to realize they were both fully dressed
and there wasn’t the slightest scent of arousal in the air.
“What the hell is going on?” Ram demanded, plucking the cougar off his female and flinging him across the room.
Ram followed Monk who hit the opposite wall, sliding down to slump on the floor. He could have let it go—Monk didn’t smell lustful—but the way he’d had Daisy pinned meant he’d left his scent all over her lovely body, which as far as Ram was concerned was punishable by pain. Lots and lots of pain.
He picked the slightly smaller male off the ground by his throat and banged him against the wall a few times. His lion wanted to tear the cougar’s throat out for touching his mate, but Ram had enough wits about him to keep from shifting. He didn’t want to kill the male, just hurt him. A lot.
A firm but soft hand gripped his shoulder. “What the hell are you doing?” Daisy demanded as she pressed hard in an excruciating spot that forced him to drop his prize. “You can’t kill him!”
He spun on her, noting how utterly adorable she looked with her bright-red toenails, soft lounge pants and thin shirt. Her nipples pressed against the cotton of her top. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Snarling, he went for Monk again.
“Hey! Seriously, I will arrest your ass if you lay one more finger on him,” she warned with a slap to Ram’s shoulder.
“I thought you wanted him dead.”
She scowled. “I do, but what we want and what we get are two different things. I was just going to rough him up a little.”
Monk choked, interrupting Ram and Daisy’s discussion. “You were trying to kill me,” he accused, his dark-green eyes flashing.
“If I wanted you dead, I’d have just shot you,” she defended herself.
Ram didn’t like the continued interaction between them and wrapped his arm around Daisy, pulling her hard against his body until they fit together like a puzzle piece. She glared, no doubt ready to tear him a new asshole, but he stopped her angry words with a kiss.
The minute their lips met, she melted. Her mouth opened to allow his tongue entry and her arms slid up to encircle his neck. Her easy acquiescence lit a heat in Ram’s groin that should’ve set his pants on fire. He gripped her round ass in his hands, kneading and squeezing roughly.
