by Holley Trent
“I’ll drive her home, get her settled in, and talk to her roommates,” Mason said.
“I’ll follow you on my bike, assuming it’s still running,” Steven said.
“It’s running, but I wouldn’t drive it,” Sean said. “You’ve got some damage to the body, and I wouldn’t trust putting it on the road until we can check it out. We’ll store it in the barn until we can get it fixed. Ride into town with Mason tonight.”
“Shit. Perfect end to the night, right?” Steven said. “Licking my wounds in the backseat of a purple punch buggy.”
“Nah, Belle will sit in the back,” Mason said. “Harder for her to get out.”
“Screw you,” Belle muttered. She wrenched away from his grip yet again and shoved her feet into her shoes. She was sick of them talking about her and making plans pertaining to her as if she weren’t standing right there with them.
Story of her life, really. She really wished it weren’t the case, but it had been since their father had died five years ago. Their age gap was possibly to blame. There was a gap of a little over ten years between her and Sean. Her brothers would probably always see her as a child. In spite of her mother’s urging, she couldn’t just ignore it. She deserved respect but, if not that, some autonomy. It really wasn’t that much to ask for.
“Belle!” came that voice from the portal.
Damn it, not again. Belle clapped her hands over her ears and ran. Not toward the hellmouth, but toward her car. If she couldn’t investigate that voice, the best thing she could do was get away from it and bide her time. If she were lucky, it wouldn’t follow her into her sleep and plead with her until she tried again to get inside.
And she would get inside to put an end to the mystery. Good or evil, she’d deal with whatever the entity was in her own way ... even if she had to resort to creative means to get Steven Welch off her back. If he planned on making himself so damned convenient, perhaps she’d just get him onto his back.
She snorted and slumped in the backseat of her car, cutting him a glare as he folded his long body into the shotgun seat.
That’ll put him off for sure.
CHAPTER TWO
Steven felt like he was the Incredible Hulk and had showed up late for fairy princess ballet class instead of a meeting with the Avengers.
He stood in the doorway of Belle’s small rental house with his duffel bag at his feet and her roommates giving him the sort of wary stares little kids gave to their parents when they threatened to cancel trick-or-treating.
He gave them a little wave, hoping to disarm them. “Hi, ladies.”
They blinked at him.
Mason emerged from the back of the house, and the ladies stood from the sofa.
“She’s got to be at work by seven,” he said.
“So do I,” the roommate with the messy dark brown ponytail said. “We usually walk there together.”
Mason shrugged. “Steven’s been watching her for weeks. You’ve probably seen him walking the block and wondered who he was. Now you know he’s here because my addle-brained little sister has mistaken the portal on the ranch as being the entrance to the beauty parlor or something, and she needs to constantly be pulled back from it. You should be relieved there’s a good reason you kept seeing him walk past.”
“I would have been okay never knowing that my cousin’s been trying to fling herself into hell,” the roommate with curly blond hair said. “My father is going to kill me if he finds out there’s a guy here, by the way.”
“Tell him I’m a cop,” Steven muttered. “That usually goes over well.”
“You don’t look like a cop.”
“You want me to flash my badge at you? Unfortunately, I left it back in Raleigh. You’ll have to take my word for it.”
She blinked at him again.
Ponytail roomie said, “You don’t have a gun in that bag, do you?”
“Of course I do. A few knives, too, but don’t worry—I’m perfectly proficient in the safe use and storage of all of them.”
“Not worried. Just wondering.” She shrugged. Giving curly a nudge, she added, “He might eat us out of house and home, but he’ll probably be cheaper than installing an alarm.”
“Why were you thinking about installing an alarm?” Mason asked. “If you’ve been having problems, Belle certainly hasn’t said anything about them.”
Curly shrugged. Seemed to be the gesture of the night. “I guess Belle doesn’t tell you much of anything. Truth is, there’s a couple of vacant rentals nearby. One right next door and one across the street. We suspect that there are some ...” She cringed. “Unsavory characters squatting in them at night. Belle sometimes goes out to confront them when they’re being disruptive, and they’ll go away for a couple of days.”
“Are you kidding me?” Mason gave his hair a yank and growled. “Just call the police next time.”
Steven cleared his throat.
“Never mind,” Mason said. “Just tell him.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Steven said.
“How?” Curly asked.
“You let me worry about that, and don’t question it, so you’ll have plausible deniability if shit goes cattywampus later.”
Curly’s cheek twitched. Obviously, those weren’t the comforting words she’d been hoping for.
Mason glanced at his watch and then headed toward the door. “Sorry to skip out, but I’ve got to get some sleep. My girl goes to work early, and my kid wakes up before the sun. Call me in the morning.”
“Yep.”
Ponytail roomie gave Mason a little wave. “Bye, Mason,” she whispered.
“Bye, ladies.”
Ponytail sighed.
She had to have known her obvious crush on Mason would go unrequited. For one thing, at thirty-three, he was too damned old for her. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty, which was how old Belle happened to be, too. For another, Mason loved his fiancée and everyone in town knew it. The alpha wasn’t exactly shy about it.
Ponytail would probably get over it soon enough.
The door slammed shut behind Mason, and the gazes of both ladies slipped to Steven.
He bobbed his eyebrows at them.
He would have never imagined in a thousand years that flying to New Mexico to check on his semidisappeared little sister would turn into a weeks-long foray into supernatural subterfuge. Hannah could probably take care of herself, and over the past few weeks of watching her adjust to life in the Cougar glaring, he became increasingly convinced that if shit went down, the Foyes would take care of her. Sean, especially. He liked her and wanted to keep her, bless his heart.
She didn’t need Steven to babysit her, but apparently the youngest Foye sibling did. He was keeping an eye on Belle as a favor to Mason. The quick-and-dirty debriefing he’d gotten from the Family Foye was that female Cougars became agitated by male Cougars—relatives or not—and sometimes behaved recklessly to spite them. Since Steven wasn’t a Cougar and because he had certain qualifications, it made sense that he keep an eye on the brat for as long as he could.
He just hadn’t thought it would be that long. The folks back in Raleigh were hounding him by phone every day to see when he’d come back to work, and he didn’t know what to tell them except more lies. He’d taken time off to “care for a sick loved one”—Hannah, who’d been mauled by a wayward Cougar and turned into one herself. The problem with that lie was that he happened to work at the same police department as his father, and his father didn’t know shit about Hannah anymore. Steven could tell he was frothing at the mouth all the way from New Mexico.
Good times.
Ponytail roommate extended a hand to shake. “I’m Alex.”
Steven shook it. “Steven Welch.”
“Welch.” She narrowed her eyes. “So you’re ...”
“Right. Hannah’s brother.”
“Ah.” She raised her chin and grunted.
“What’s with the ah? I haven’t been around long enough for my re
putation to catch up to me.”
Alex folded her hands atop her lap and nodded in an okay, sure fashion.
The curly blonde extended her hand next. “Lily. I’m Belle’s cousin. My dad is her mother’s brother.”
He shook her hand. “I figured there’d have to be some relatives somewhere who weren’t Foyes.”
“Plenty of us. Hey, do me a favor and don’t answer the phone if it rings, okay? My dad is paranoid with a Fox Mulder sort of ferocity.”
“Hey, now. You’re too young to have watched The X-Files when it aired. And I don’t blame him.” Steven leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms over his chest. “I would be, too.”
Which probably made Steven a lot different from his own father. His pop had pretty much tossed Hannah to the sharks and said, “Swim, baby, swim.” Hannah had, but she’d sure as hell gotten chewed up a bit as a result.
Lily sighed. “I’m twenty-three. I’m the old lady of the house. I’ll have you know I have Mason’s Netflix password, and so I’ve seen every X-Files episode, and all the ones with Nicholas Lea twice. He looks like my high school ex. Maybe it’s the murderous glint in his eyes. Dad hated him.” She shrugged again. “Anyway, after my legendary travails with that guy, Dad decided I couldn’t make good choices, but I think I learned how not to open the door to strangers by the time I was ten. You don’t have to be a Mensa member to figure that out.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed twenty-three. You look sixteen or seventeen. No offense, but you look like jailbait.” At least to a thirty-one-year-old who actually had some common sense, in spite of what his sister asserted on occasion.
Alex nudged Lily with her elbow. “I think that’s a compliment. Say thank you.”
“Thank you,” Lily said blandly. She stretched her arms over her head and let out a long yawn. “I’m going back to bed. If I don’t get enough sleep, I’m not going to be able to feign pleasantness at work tomorrow. I need to be able to put sunshine in my voice when I’m answering the phone and responding to the same damn questions again and again.” She shuffled down the hall, grumbling.
Alex rocked back on her heels. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. If I don’t get enough sleep, I’ll keep dropping trays at the diner, and I can’t afford to break any more dishes this month.”
“Can you show me where the bathroom is before you go?”
It was a small house. He imagined there’d only be one, and if there were a second one, it’d probably be attached to the master, which he guessed Lily would have claimed. All the same, he didn’t want to go opening doors and stumbling into things he wasn’t meant to see.
“Come this way.” She gestured toward the hall, and pointed to the first door on the left as she approached. “Right there. If you need towels or whatever, the linen closet is there.” She pointed to the narrow door across the hall.
“And where’s the secondary exit for this house? I know you’ve gotta have one.”
“We do have one. It’s in the kitchen, but if you’re worried about Belle sneaking through it, you shouldn’t be. The door is behind a little bookcase and is painted shut. None of us have been able to unstick it. Not even Belle, and she’s stronger than we are thanks to her shifter weirdness.”
“And how do you feel about her shifter weirdness?”
Alex gave a dismissive wave. “Ah, I’ve always known about it. I’d say most folks in town know about the weirdos, and I think the ones who don’t know are being purposefully oblivious. Fun fact: most of the maternal side of Belle’s family moved away after Belle’s mom and dad bought out the ranch, but Lily’s dad stayed in the area.”
“So, I take it that the folks on that side of the family aren’t shifters.”
“Nope.” Belle stuck her head out of her bedroom door and glowered at the two of them in the hallway. “Mom’s normal and so are the rest of her family. If you’re going to hash out my life story, maybe you’d like to consult me for fact-checking.”
Alex sighed and moved past her roommate. “We’re just talkin’, Belle. Thought you were asleep.”
“Who could sleep with all the noise?”
“Whether you can or not, you need to try. We’re on opening shift tomorrow, and there isn’t enough coffee in the world to keep my ass from dragging if I don’t get at least six hours. So, I bid adieu to you and you.” Alex curtsied, walked into a dark room at the end of the hall, and shut the door.
Belle shifted her cold gaze to Steven, rolled her eyes, and then retreated to her own room, closing the door with a resounding slam.
Groaning, Steven lifted his baseball cap, scraped his hair back beneath it, and turned on his heel.
In spite of what Alex said, he needed to check that kitchen door, anyway. Depending on the functionality of the windows, the ladies not having an alternate exit route in case of fire was possibly illegal for their landlord, not that Steven had any intentions of ratting the guy out. At the moment, he was doing Steven a favor. After that hellmouth had been sealed off and Belle had stopped trying to run into it, maybe he’d confront him and ask, “What the fuck, dude?” but for the moment, Belle having fewer exits made his job easier.
He pushed the dinky little bookcase aside, undid the deadbolt, and gave the knob a hard tug. As Alex had said, the door had no give.
He bent and squinted at the seams, checking the connection, and running his fingertips down the side of the doorframe. The asshat had nailed the door in place through the trim, probably to keep squatters out during a period of vacancy. “Idiot.”
Oh well.
At least Belle wouldn’t be able to get out without running past him.
Maybe not.
Halfway to the living room, he stopped.
She had a window in her bedroom, and he had to check it.
He rapped on her door, and at the sound of her frustrated, “What?” he opened it and strode immediately across the room to the window.
She pulled the blankets up over herself, and snarled at him. “Excuse you?”
“Checking your window.”
“Go ahead and waste your time, and you’ll find out the same thing Mason already has.”
All the same, Steven pulled open the curtains and raised the blinds.
Bars. She had bars in her window.
“Surprise,” she said. “I guess the guy who owns the house covered some of your bases for you.”
Steven let the curtains fall back into place and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Why are you so hostile to people who are trying to help you?”
“Because I don’t need the help.”
“Really?” He knelt beside the bed and narrowed his eyes at her. “You don’t need help? So that means either you have some plan of how to close off that hole to hell that you haven’t informed anyone else of, or you’ve got a death wish.”
“Either way, it’s none of your business.”
“Oh, I think it is. For one thing, I made a promise to Hannah and to your mother and brothers that I was going to keep you away from that portal.”
“What do you want, a medal for valor?”
“I don’t need any fucking medals. I’ve got enough medals piled into boxes and shoved under my bed at home. You keep the kudos, and I’ll keep my promises.”
“You’d best keep them from afar unless you’re equipped to deal with the consequences.”
“What consequences? And I tried staying back, honey, and you keep slipping through my fingers like the sneaky cat you are. I think your family has been too generous in letting you out to work and run around, to be honest.”
“It’s a good thing your opinion doesn’t matter.”
He sputtered his lips. “Hey, you’re right. It doesn’t matter, but I guess I take that protect and serve credo to heart and even apply it to the folks who’d prefer that I go fuck myself.”
That made her cringe.
Ha.
He was glad something could affect the unflinching Belle Foye. She was a lot like her mother, Glenda
. As far as Steven had witnessed to that point, nothing scared that lady, not even the shit that scared him. Like demons coming out of that portal on her ranch. He’d been praying nonstop during that chase through the desert that nothing came out of the damned thing. If something had, chances were very high he would have left Belle to it. Being shot at repeatedly in Afghanistan hadn’t caused his PTSD. The entity that had tried to choke him in his sleep every night managed that.
It had happened to him every night for weeks, and since no one else in his unit seemed affected, he’d kept his mouth shut. He’d wanted to finish his stint in the Marines with an honorable discharge, not being escorted into a room with padded walls and handed a cup of pills to swallow.
Fuck that.
“Get some rest, doll.” He clucked his tongue and stood. “I hear you have to get up early, and I know you’ve been burning it at both ends lately, what with your adventures into the desert and all.”
“Don’t call me doll. Do I look like a doll to you?”
With her eyes narrowed at him like they were, and her wet, red hair falling into her face, she looked more like an evil mermaid trapped on land than a doll.
She certainly had the makings of a mermaid body. Long and lean, curves where they mattered.
Not that he’d been looking.
Well, he’d maybe looked a little. It was hard not to look with her running naked all the damn time before she shifted into her cat form.
Looking was one thing. Admiring was another, and he wasn’t going to be doing any of that.
He wouldn’t mess with her even if she were ten years older. He preferred that his girlfriends be firmly entrenched on the “nope” end of the supernatural spectrum. Less drama that way, and he had a knack for pulling the most dramatic fish out of the sea of eligible bachelorettes as it was.
He closed the door on the way out of her room and let his exhalation sputter his lips. Where he went, drama followed. Seemed pointless to try to escape it.
Halfway back to the living room, he turned on his heel yet again. He had a burning question and wouldn’t be able to sleep until he got an answer, so he returned to Belle’s room and didn’t even bother knocking first.
