The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards)

by Holley Trent

  “Maybe I’ll leave when you do.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Anywhere there isn’t a Foye shadow over every damn thing.”

  And that’s a problem.

  He caught Hannah’s gaze in the rearview mirror, and the slight shake of her head told him she’d caught the exchange.

  There was no reason Belle couldn’t leave the nest, but setting off for some other place where she’d never been and had no connections wasn’t the safest thing for a woman, even if she was half animal and the daughter of an alpha.

  The Foyes were fixtures in the area and invested in it, which is why they had their goddess’s favor. Who knew what would happen if Belle stepped out of the reach of it?

  Maybe he was no better than her brothers, but if it were up to him, he wouldn’t let her go. Someone needed to look out for her if she wasn’t going to. For the moment, he was as good for the job as anyone, and he was going to figure her out, too.

  He couldn’t call himself a good detective if he didn’t.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The moment Steven parked the SUV in front of the jail, Belle hopped out of the truck and took long strides toward the diner. She had to get back to work before the lunch rush.

  A firm arm wrapped around her shoulders, pulled her back, and walked her in the opposite direction. She didn’t have to look to know who it was. The cat knew. The cat liked.

  “Ugh! Let go of me, Steven.”

  “What are you gonna do? Shift in public? I don’t think so.” He pinned her against the side of the SUV, bracing one hand on either side of her face, and let out a long, ragged breath of what seemed to be one half frustration and one half curiosity, judging by his cocked-brow expression.

  Boo hoo for you. I’m frustrated, too.

  He smelled like pancake syrup, coffee, sandalwood, and some other thing her supernatural nose couldn’t quite make out. She hadn’t caught a whiff of that note earlier at the diner, and she had to identify it now that she’d noticed it. She pressed her nose against the pulse point at the side of his neck and took a deep breath.

  “What is that?” She tried the other side of his neck, yanking down the collar of his T-shirt with frustration.

  He slipped his palms down the side of her body, letting his hands rest at her waist. “Tell me what you’re looking for, and I’ll tell you what it might be.”

  “Stop touching me.” She leaned in once more and inhaled the unusual musk of ... licorice? As if her tongue had instincts of its own, it lashed out against the bend of his neck for the tiniest taste.

  “Princess, you put off more mixed signals than a wartime message designed for interception.”

  “What do you taste like?”

  “The hell if I know. I don’t exactly go around licking myself. I usually leave that job to other folks.”

  She groaned again and tried to duck under one of his arms, but that only brought her closer to the center of his chest, where the scent seemed to be even more intense.

  She grabbed the bottom of his shirt and pulled it up over his navel.

  “Now now,” came Sean’s scolding tone. “We’re in public.”

  For gods’ sake ...

  This time Belle did manage to duck out from under the little cage Steven had made for her with his body. It wasn’t like she could go far with so many damn Foyes around, anyway. Mason had shown up to talk to the sheriff, and Hank had been right behind him.

  Sean rocked back on his heels and adjusted the tilt of his cowboy hat. “I mean, no one would dare accuse a Cougar of being decent, but we do try to act like we have some home training sometimes.”

  “Shut up. I was just sniffing him. He has a scent I can’t identify, and that drives the cat in me nuts. I need to be able to catalog the scent. Sniff him.”

  Steven pushed up an eyebrow.

  Sean shrugged and leaned a little closer to Steven. He pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “Oh, that? That sweetly spicy thing?”

  “Yeah. That.” She leaned in and took one more sniff. That smell was addictive. She could normally ignore or compartmentalize scents as she went throughout her day, because all that information could be overwhelming if she didn’t try to shove it to the back of her mind. Steven’s scent was hard to ignore. It was a standout scent, just like her favorite perfume. She’d smelled it once in a department store, and every time she walked past someone wearing it, she’d stop and watch them.

  She must have gotten too close again, because Steven pressed his palm to the small of her back and kept her from toppling over when she pushed up on her tiptoes.

  Gonna move. Just need to sniff him first.

  Sean cleared his throat.

  Belle pulled away. “Damn it. What is it?”

  Sean laughed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Well, I guess the only way to say it is that it’s the essence of Welch. Hannah smells like that. You know, beneath the Foye funk that’s rubbed off from me.”

  Belle shook her head. “That can’t be right. Humans don’t have notable scents like that.”

  “Not quite true. I encountered a few memorable ones while traveling during my twentysomethings. They were definitely human.”

  “But worth paying attention to, maybe,” Jill said through the window.

  Belle started, hand pressed to her chest. She’d forgotten the lady was still in there. Jill was waiting for her ride to the bus station, and Mason had brought Nick to her for a quick good-bye.

  “What do you mean?” Belle asked her.

  Jill shrugged and unwound Nick’s fist from her shaggy hair. “I think Coyote noses are little better than yours on average. We just don’t always know what to do with the info. My mother always said if someone smelled weird, you’d better pay attention to them.”

  “Huh.”

  Jill went back to cuddling Nick, and Steven leaned against the side of the vehicle, arms crossed, staring at Belle.

  “What?” Belle asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t shrug. You’re not staring at me for entertainment purposes. If you’ve got something to say, spit it out.”

  “Even if I were staring at you for entertainment purposes—which I’d never confess with your brother standing five feet from me—what’s so wrong with that?”

  “You drive me nuts.”

  “From what I hear, that puts me in excellent company. Who with a certain kind of equipment doesn’t drive you nuts?”

  “Nick.”

  “He’s a toddler.”

  “Yup. The rest of you just act like toddlers sometimes.”

  “Low blow, sunshine.” Steven clucked his tongue, lifted his baseball cap, and tucked some escaping hair beneath it. “Maybe you ought—”

  Belle came back to reality with Hannah in front of her giving her shoulders a shake.

  “Belle.”

  “What?”

  “Are you Belle?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you Belle Foye?”

  Damn. What did I do? Belle swallowed hard and tried to get her expression under control. She couldn’t see it, but it felt wild, and she didn’t want to give them any more reasons to believe she didn’t have a grip on her faculties ... even if she didn’t. “Of course I’m Belle Foye. Who the hell else would I be?” She looked around and found herself pinned inside a circle of cats. Mason, Hank, Sean, Hannah, Tito. Steven paced behind them.

  “Do you know what you just did?” Hannah asked.

  “I ... was talking to Steven, wasn’t I?” She managed to sound a hell of a lot more confident than she felt.

  “You were doing a little more than talking to him, which I’d usually say is none of my business, but you don’t generally pull 180s like that.”

  Belle cocked up one eyebrow. “Did I pull a 180, though?”

  “I’d say so. I mean, you don’t ... uh ...” Hannah’s cheeks went red, and looking at Sean, she cringed. “Somebody want to field this for me?”

 
; Seriously, what did I do? Belle looked to Steven for a clue, but his expression was completely neutral. Artificially so. She could tell by the twitching of one his cheeks. In the weeks she’d been in his acquaintance, he hadn’t once tried to hide his feelings. He didn’t want to tell on her.

  Why not?

  She figured her only course of action was to make something up. Vague seemed the way to go. She shrugged and waved a dismissive hand. “I mean, it’s like Sean said, right?” Belle asked. “Can’t accuse a Cougar of being decent, so ... let me out. I need to, um ... go to work.”

  “Not until we know you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You sure? If we send Steven back to the diner with you, are we guaranteed to not have any issues?”

  “Y’all, she’s fine.” Steven shouldered his way into the cluster and slung an arm around her shoulders. “She’s fuckin’ with you, and you all fell for it.” He gave the side of her arm a discreet pinch.

  Suppressing a yelp, she bobbed her eyebrows at the cluster of cats. “That’s what you get for nagging me. But, um ... maybe you shouldn’t send him back with me. I’m in heat.”

  Steven stiffened at her side, but she didn’t dare look up. If he was covering for whatever she’d done, she wasn’t going to be so ungrateful as to give alert the others something was amiss.

  “Half the town is going to find out soon enough, anyway,” she said. “It’s all fun and games right now, but it’s probably not a good idea for him to be around me indefinitely. Who knows, I might ...” Well, she couldn’t very well say what she was going to do when she still didn’t know what it was that she’d done. “I might ...”

  “Whatever you’re going to do,” Steven said low, “I don’t think you’ll be so sensational as to stick your hands in my pants again.”

  Shit. Her pulse pounded in her ears, and her face burned hot with shame. She wanted the ground to open up and swallow her whole. Or maybe a hellmouth. That’d kill two birds with one stone.

  That wasn’t me. I didn’t do that. There is something in me ...

  But all the Cougars staring at her seemed to think it had been Belle, and for whatever reason, Steven was covering for her.

  Mason opened his mouth to say something, but before he could get it out, Steven turned Belle in the general direction of the diner.

  “Your hands are colder than Queen Elsa’s, by the way. If that inner cat of yours wants to grope me, maybe y’all can discuss chafing those suckers until they’re warm first.”

  “Steven,” Hannah scolded.

  Steven kept Belle moving. “She’s all right. Going back to work now. I’ll call you if she’s being stupid. Go do avenger stuff. Bye.”

  He kept her moving at a rapid clip until the cats were out of earshot, and then Belle pulled her arm away. “I’m fine.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  She tried to walk away from him, but he grabbed the back pocket of her jeans and pulled her right on back. “There is something wrong with you.”

  “Okay! Ugh.” She swatted his hand away and laughed until she couldn’t breathe. There was nothing funny about her situation, but so often lately, her body’s reflexes didn’t match her brain’s sentiments. “There’s something in me, okay? Simple as that. And whatever it is seems to be capitalizing on my blackouts to compel me. I’ll deal with it. There’s no use belaboring it.”

  “We ain’t started belaboring yet, honey. All I’m doing is trying to find out a little something about it so I know why I’m lying for you.”

  “I’d like to know why you’re lying for me, too. I didn’t ask you to.”

  “Are you kidding me? I just did you a favor, and you’re going to show me how grateful you are by telling me that you didn’t ask me to do it?”

  She drew in a breath through clenched teeth and pounded her fists against her thighs. “Thank you, but you don’t have to do me any favors. You can go home, Steven. You don’t need to be here, and you know that. Hannah’s fine.”

  “But you’re not.”

  The truth had a way of wounding worse than almost any lie. Fortunately, being behind her, he couldn’t see her flinch—couldn’t read in her expression how uneasy she was about it. She had no idea how to fix it, but she would somehow. Had to, along with everything else she had to do.

  “What do you intend to do about it, Belle? Do you have a plan, or are you going to act like what’s happening to you is normal?”

  That had always worked in the past. She could just pretend everything was fine. But she wouldn’t be able to pretend the next time she shoved her hands into his pants that it was only because of the ghost. Next time, it would be the cat, and the cat was just the part of Belle that had fewer restraints and less concern of social niceties.

  She walked briskly the rest of the way to the diner with him on her heels, saying nothing, but he didn’t have to say anything. His proximity made her spine tingle and stomach upset. It tangled her tongue and muddled her brain. That didn’t seem like the side effect of Cougar heat to her. That seemed like ... a crush, and she didn’t do crushes.

  Crushes were for women who didn’t have fangs.

  Gods.

  She pushed through the diner’s side door, and at the sound of the bells jingling, Alex perked up at the counter. “Hi, Steven!” she called out brightly.

  Belle was evidently going to have little to no success at ignoring the man with Alex around.

  Maybe we should have a little chat.

  “Got lunch for me?” Steven asked Alex.

  “Not yet, but I saved you a stool.” Alex pointed to the one unoccupied stool as if Steven couldn’t discern on his own which spot she’d referred to.

  He climbed onto it, and Alex pushed a glass of iced tea across the counter at him.

  Belle walked around the back of the counter, grabbing her apron from under the shelf as she went, and fisted the ties of Alex’s apron when she passed her.

  She pulled Alex back into the kitchen and propped her fists onto her hips.

  “What are you doing?” Belle asked.

  “Being nice. As always.”

  Belle narrowed her eyes at her friend. “Yeah?”

  Alex stuffed her hands into her apron pockets and canted her head demurely. “If you won’t, I will.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s a nice guy, and he’s single. I confirmed it.”

  “Who cares and with whom?”

  Alex giggled. “You care, and wouldn’t you like to know.”

  Actually, Belle did want to know, but she wasn’t going to ask. Alex had always had a knack for drawing information out of people who wouldn’t have otherwise talked.

  “Why would I care?”

  “He’d be good for you.”

  See, chided Belle’s inner cat. If the beast could have knocked her lady half on the side of the head, she would have. “Not that I’m entertaining that ridiculous idea at all, but what makes you think that?”

  “Order’s up,” the cook shouted at them. Since he was standing five feet away, the volume was unnecessary, but Belle got the point—they needed to quit yammering and get back to work.

  Alex gave her brother the finger.

  He squinted at her and mumbled something about wishing he’d had the good sense to not work in the same place as his sister.

  Alex tucked some escaped locks back into her lopsided ponytail and wrapped her arm around Belle’s shoulders. She slowly moved Belle toward the door and whispered, “Listen, he makes sense.”

  See? the cat repeated. Intrigued, the lady part of Belle asked, “How so?”

  “He knows what you are, for one thing.”

  “In general terms, maybe. And you say that as if it were a positive point.”

  “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But look—you’re not going to do any better.”

  “Oh, that’s not insulting at all.”

  “I’m serious. I’m not trying to be offensive. I’m just telling you the truth
as I see it. I’ve known you forever, and I think sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees.”

  “Yeah? How’s that forest looking?”

  “You tell me. I mean, have you ever had a conversation with the guy? And have you ever looked at him?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “Which?”

  “Both.”

  “Order’s up,” Chet said.

  “Keep your panties on, Chet. We’re moving,” Alex said.

  “Move faster, or we’re gonna get slammed, and there’s only so many hamburgers I can fit on the griddle at once. The heating element on the right side blew out.”

  “Maybe you should call the repair tech.”

  “Thank you, Einstein. I wouldn’t have thought of that on my own.”

  Alex rolled her eyes and gave Belle a nudge with her elbow. “Which?”

  “Both. Like I said. Of course I’ve looked at him.”

  “Through the sides of your squinted eyes.”

  “Not only that way,” Belle said low. He wore baggy athletic shorts sexier than any man she’d ever seen, and he had a penchant for pickup games with Tito and Darnell at the court down the street from her house. She knew there were cartoon wolves on his underwear because he had a habit of pulling up his T-shirt to wipe his sweaty face and his shorts sagged on his hips. On the day she’d made that discovery, she’d stormed down to the court to tell him that she was sick of seeing him on her street. The cat in her must have been hypnotized by the pretty muscles of his back or the nice pop of his ass or something, because she’d forgotten what it was she was going to tell him and ran off before he could turn around.

  Alex picked up a water bottle from the counter and splashed some of the contents into Belle’s face.

  “Hey!” Belle flailed and reached blindly for a kitchen towel. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “I’m talking to you.”

  “And I’m listening.”

  “So answer me. What kind of stuff did you talk about?”

  “Gods, I don’t know. One lecture sounds pretty much like another after a while. When certain people around me open their mouths, everything sounds like womp-womp-womp. I’ll be adding you to that number soon.”