The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards)

by Holley Trent

  The Cougar’s Wish

  Desert Guards 4

  Holley Trent

  Avon, Massachusetts

  Copyright © 2016 by Holley Trent.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

  Published by

  Crimson Romance

  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

  Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

  www.crimsonromance.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4405-9302-7

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9302-4

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-9303-5

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9303-1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art © 123RF.com/Ljupco Smokovski.

  Thank you for purchasing a Crimson Romance novel. Please sign up for our weekly newsletter for information on new releases, contests, discounts and more.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  About the Author

  More from This Author

  Also Available

  CHAPTER ONE

  Belle Foye ran faster, harder toward the sweet, childish voice emanating from the open portal to hell on her mother’s ranch. The increasingly fervent pleas had been needling at her for weeks, and she knew without question that if she couldn’t quiet that voice, she’d lose her mind. With her being in a Cougar’s heat, her mind was already halfway shot anyway, so she really didn’t need an extra boost.

  “Belle! Help!”

  She slowed enough to kick off her sneakers and shuck her clothes. She’d move faster if she shapeshifted to her cat form. The fact she was a Were-cougar was the reason she was so damned sensitive to the beckoning coming out of that hellmouth in the first place. Shifters could see, hear, and feel more than the average person, and Cougars were the most perceptive of all. She figured she might as well deal with the problem—whatever it was—in the right body.

  She and her family had been problem solving with that portal for a year since it had opened up without warning. But in that year, they’d been exhaustingly pushing demons and spirits back through it and not purposefully trying to enter it like Belle was doing at the moment. She’d managed to make it just inside the portal about a month prior. However, the amount of energy she’d expended passing through the glowing rift between the realms had prevented her from going farther. It was a wonder she hadn’t passed out and been dragged in deeper by some vengeful entity.

  Her family had been too slow in preventing her from going in, but with some help from her brother’s witch mate, they’d freed her from the portal. They’d demanded answers, but she didn’t have any.

  Not yet, anyway. Belle usually wasn’t a woman who’d hold her tongue, but there was an old saying among Cougars: a call heard by only one was meant for that one ... until it wasn’t. It was up to her to decide who was worthy of helping her bear the burden, but she couldn’t do that until she found out what it was.

  Looking over her shoulder, she swore.

  A single headlight illuminated the car she’d parked on the roadside, and if the motorcycle rider caught up to her, he was going to get in her way. Steven Welch had been persuaded by her overbearing big brothers to keep an eye on her because she kept running toward the hellmouth. Being twenty made her stupid, apparently. They refused to trust that her movements had purpose—that she wasn’t reckless and irresponsible. Her three brothers had tried to prevent her from visiting the Double B ranch or even stepping foot onto her mother’s property. Try as they and the rest of the Were-cougar group—the glaring—might to block her attempts, they couldn’t be at her back all the time.

  No one was that good, and she’d counted on that. Perhaps she shouldn’t have. Someone was always at her damned heels. For once in her life, she wished they would all trust that she was in control of her faculties.

  She shifted into her animal form between one step and the next, ripping her bones apart and into their feline configuration quickly. Too quickly. The lady inside the cat screamed in agony as the cougar found her footing.

  She’d probably be feeling that pain for days, but she didn’t see where she had a choice. She might have been fast on two legs, but on four, she was uncatchable.

  That hellmouth called to her—that tiny voice beckoning and convincing her that she’d regret it if she didn’t listen.

  Belle didn’t want regrets. Regrets were like poison and kept people from acting when they needed to. It made them second-guess, and in a culture where shifters were constantly fighting for dominance and territory—where the smallest slights could turn into long grudges—she needed to act, not wait.

  The engine roared behind her, and Steven flicked the headlight of his bike repeatedly.

  Okay, damn it, I see you.

  She kept running.

  The iridescent glow of the hellmouth was maybe ten seconds away at her current pace, and she could get there if she only kept running.

  She put her head down lower and pushed her feline body to run faster over the scrubby desert soil.

  “Belle!” that baby-sweet voice pled, bolstering Belle’s righteousness. Dirt and gravel struck her face as Steven sped the bike beside her.

  She closed her eyes and ran blindly through the cloud of dust, keeping her route straight and sure. He wasn’t going to run her over, and she knew that. No matter how close he got, he wasn’t going to harm her, so she kept running.

  Had to.

  But then his position changed. She sensed the slight shift in his direction—more toward her—and opened her eyes a bit too slowly.

  He cut a hard left to block her, and digging her paws into the ground, she stopped hard.

  Go around.

  She ran in a zigzag, which increased her distance to the portal, but was so much harder for him to maneuver, even on a bike customized to take sharp turns. He’d towed that thing to New Mexico when he’d brought his sister—the mate of Belle’s brother Sean—her SUV.

  Belle would have grinned if she’d been wearing her human face at the moment, but it was a good thing she couldn’t. She kept forgetting that though perfectly human, Steven had the brain of a predator.

  She must have paused too long, or zagged past a cactus when she should have zigged around a rock, because he caught up to her again, getting right beside her.

  With the bike still moving at that dangerous speed, he threw a leg over the seat, and the next thing she knew, he was on top of her, and they were rolling.

  No!

  She pawed at him and growled, and he growled right back. Apparently, he didn’t have to have a cougar’s body to do that. Anger and
pain were enough.

  He pinned her to the ground, his ass atop her haunches and his rough hand against the side of her head. “Getting real sick of this shit, gingersnap.”

  She writhed beneath him and forced out a hiss when he pressed a square of silver to her neck, triggering an allergic reaction that had her convulsing and screaming.

  The scream shifted from a cat’s angry screech to a woman’s cry of pain as her body transformed on its own, and she slapped his hand away from her human throat. “Get it off me!”

  “Are you going to be still?” He kept the side of her face pressed against the desert soil and kept the silver close to her eyes as if to be sure she could see it.

  “No,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Belle,” he warned in that you’re being childish tone so many of the men in her life enjoyed employing so damned much.

  “Steven, let me go!” She writhed beneath him, and surprisingly, he got up.

  She didn’t pause to ponder it, but got up and ran.

  Didn’t matter.

  Strong hands grabbed her by the upper arms and yanked her back. Not Steven’s—the energy was wrong. It was Foye. The hot wave of it pushed her down onto her knees and made her hang her head. Her alpha—and oldest brother—Mason didn’t have to use much force. The psychic bombardment of his will was enough to make her shudder and hiss. It was almost all she could do. “Fuck,” she spat.

  Her mouth worked fine. The rest of her was like unyielding lead. She could hardly draw in a good breath and wouldn’t be able to unless he backed away.

  Mason knelt in front of her with his forehead furrowed and mouth fixed in a hard scowl.

  For a long while, he didn’t say anything, just stared at her. She knew he was struggling to hold his temper in check, because his energy pulsed hot and hard. It stifled her. Agitated her, as it likely did to most of the females in the Cougar glaring. It was the way they were built—to give their males hell. Pushing back against them was supposed to keep the dynamics healthy and balanced, although at times, it seemed like all they ever did was fight.

  Mason usually did an admirable job of keeping his alpha energy pulled in close to his body. It was the psychic equivalent of not throwing his weight around. Apparently at the moment, he was having a hard time managing the job.

  With a great deal of effort, she picked up her heavy head and watched his pupils alternately narrowing and rounding, his irises shifting back and forth from their usual hazel to a cat’s yellow green.

  If he let his cat out, she was toast. Giving her brother a hard time when he was on two legs was one thing, but on four, she’d be powerless.

  “How long did it take you to realize she was gone?” he asked Steven.

  Steven, who was studying the bleeding scrapes on his elbows through the open visor of his motorcycle helmet, said, “About five minutes. I went to take a piss after it looked like she and her roommates had gone to bed, and then I walked back and saw that her car was gone.”

  Mason forced out a ragged breath and raked a hand through this uncombed hair. “You know what this means, Belle?”

  “Why bother asking?” her middle brother, Hank, asked as he walked Steven’s abandoned motorcycle toward their little cluster. “She already knows.”

  She rolled her eyes, because she did know.

  “We told you it was going to happen,” Sean said.

  The assholes seemed to have materialized out of thin air, but Cougars were good at not being seen until it was too late to stop them from pouncing.

  “We told you that if you tried this shit again, we’d put an even closer watch on you. We tried to give you space.”

  “Well, given how often I keep seeing this guy walking past my house, you sure did a shitty job at that.” She cut a glare toward Steven, who’d taken off his helmet and glared right back with those dark, penetrating eyes.

  It was his ex-Marine/current cop stare, and thanks to her Cougar heat, it somehow managed to be both demoralizing and incendiary at the same time. She wanted to pounce on him, all right—and not to fight. When she was in heat, any man would do in a pinch. But she didn’t “do” anyone when she was in heat. She’d get attached to him, at least for a little while, and she sure as shit didn’t want to get attached to anyone who talked to her in that “silly little Belle” tone. The heat would pass in a few weeks whether she’d pounced on anyone or not, but if she were lucky, he’d be gone before it ended. It was only going to get worse before it went away.

  She needed to get the hell away from him, and was going to do that, but Mason’s scorching energy seemed to sear her flesh. It made her recoil enough to get her stiff body moving back a couple of feet from him—and closer to Steven.

  “We get it,” Mason snarled, crouching low. “You don’t want to be bossed around by us. You’re an adult. We understand that, but there’s something wrong with you. Can’t you get that through your head?”

  She waved a dismissive hand at him and scrambled to her feet. “Oh, there’s something wrong with all of us. Are we going to start slinging insults around? Who should I start with? Perhaps with you, Mason. You—”

  Sean clapped a hand over her mouth and yanked her in the direction of the road. “You’re going home.”

  She bit down hard on his palm, and he yanked it away, hissing.

  “Well, that settles it,” Mason said.

  He, Hank, and Steven got in step, pushing her toward her clothes and her car.

  “Who’s gonna tell her roommates?” Hank asked.

  “I’ll tell them,” Mason said. “They may not understand the intricacies of Cougar politics, but they know I’m the alpha, and if I say there’s a problem that needs sorting, they won’t question it.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter,” Belle said, yanking her arm away from Sean’s grip. “I told you that weeks ago when you got him tailing me, and now you’re talking about moving him into my house? That’s what you’re doing, right?”

  He grabbed it back and kept her moving. “You do need a babysitter, and a closer watch, at that. I’m sorry, Belle. You know we didn’t want to do this to you.”

  “Oh, sure you don’t. Coming from guys who kidnapped their mates and wouldn’t even open their mouths up front to explain to them why you had to do it, your words mean diddly-squat to me. You guys are bona fide experts at holding people against their wills.”

  Her brothers didn’t respond, but they had to know she was right. Although their mates had come around and accepted her brothers’ foolish selves, she still believed it would have served them right for Ellery, Miles, and Hannah to have refused them.

  The Foye brothers had been under a curse from the patron goddess of Were-cougars La Bella Dama—known casually as Lola Perez. Having apparently grown impatient of waiting for them to get their stubborn heads out of their asses, she’d sent them on a mate quest and guided them toward three women she’d chosen in advance.

  The terms were always the same, whether a Cougar had asked for guidance in finding a mate or if the goddess just decided they needed to go. The male Cougar had two weeks to convince his woman to stay with him or else he’d be cursed to spend the rest of his life in his animal form ... or at least, until the woman came around.

  Ellery, Miles, and Hannah—Steven’s younger sister—had gotten drafted onto Team Foye, and while there’d been plenty of conflict, eventually they’d all gotten to points where they were doing a little better than just tolerating their men. They actually liked being around the Foye men. Good for the brothers, because they sure as shit weren’t going to get any love from Belle anytime soon.

  “I’m sorry you’re having to spend your vacation time on this, Steven,” Mason said. “We thought we’d only need you for a week or two. If we’d thought she was going to keep running at it like this—”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it, man,” Steven said.

  “You’ve got to be out of vacation time now,” Hank said.

  “I am.” Steven paused to scoop
up Belle’s clothes and held them out to her.

  Rolling her eyes, she snatched them.

  “But don’t sweat it,” he said through clenched teeth. He may have been speaking to Hank, but his dark gaze was locked on Belle. “I took a leave of absence. I’ll stay in New Mexico for as long as I have to until I’m confident Hannah’s life here is stable. The way I see it, having someone on the ranch run recklessly toward a portal to hell without explaining why qualifies as a destabilizing factor. What the hell are you trying to do, woman?”

  Yet again, Belle rolled her eyes. She stopped walking long enough to step into her panties and scoffed. “Well, well. Yet another overbearing big brother who thinks he knows more about how his sister should take care of herself than she does. Yeah, you deserve a pat on the back for sure.” She balled her right hand into a fist. “Turn around so I can give you one.”

  Steven pushed up an eyebrow and folded his arms over his chest.

  He wasn’t a Cougar male, so it was going to be harder for her to frustrate him, but she had absolutely no qualms about trying. Plus, if he were annoyed, perhaps her inner cat would stop eyeing him as the next thing she needed to lick clean.

  “Hannah can take care of herself,” Belle said. “She had to for a long time without any help from you, didn’t she?”

  “That’s a low blow.”

  She shrugged. She hadn’t lied. He and the other members of the Welch family were the reasons Hannah—a newly turned Were-cougar and the glaring’s avenger—was a neurotic ball of emotions. They’d made her feel like it wasn’t okay for her to be herself, even before she was a Cougar, and they’d been absolutely wrong. Belle never wanted to feel like she wasn’t the captain of her own ship. That was part of the reason she was skipping town as soon as she could. She just needed to take care of business first—squelching that voice coming from the portal being one item on the list.

  Her brothers got her moving again.

  Sean tossed her stolen keys at Mason, who snatched them out of the air with ease.