by Holley Trent
“No,” Belle said. “It’s a thirty-minute trail. It’s been here since my grandparents’ day. They originally put it here for fall hayrides back when we still grew pumpkins, but Mom repurposed it for trail riding. It’s pretty flat, so no worries about any extra bruising to your boy bits.”
“Thanks for worrying about them.”
“I’m not worried. I just didn’t want you to be.” She got Roast moving.
Roast kept looking back at Steven, either to see what Mousse was up to or to watch the horse’s rider.
“Eyes forward, Roast. Nothing to see back there,” Belle said, digging her heels into the horse’s sides.
“’Scuse the hell out of me.”
“I can’t help it,” Belle called back. “If you leave a gap for me to say something nasty, I’m going to say something nasty.”
Steven got Mousse moving and caught up to Belle’s side. The trail was wide enough for them to ride abreast, and he wasn’t particularly eager to watch Roast’s tail swish for half an hour.
“Why is that?” he asked.
“What? Why am I going to say something nasty?”
“Yep.”
“Dunno. It’s just the way Cougar women are wired. Trust me when I say I’d be even meaner to a male Cougar than I am to you.” She scrunched her nose. “I think. I think you’re the only non-Cougar guy who incites me so often.”
“I’ll try to take it as a compliment, but I don’t understand the logic of it. You’d think Lola would want to make it easier for you guys to proliferate.”
“I’ve pondered that myself a time or two, but Mom was curious enough about it the first time I went into heat that she did some asking around.”
“What’d she find out?”
“That it’s not supposed to be easy. Some female animals play hard to get and fight back against the males who are trying to mate with them, because if those males can’t suppress them—”
“Right. They’re not strong enough to sire and protect her offspring.”
“Exactly. And I guess because we gestate long like humans and tend to only have one baby at a time, we don’t want to take risks that our offspring aren’t going to be viable.”
“Is inviability a huge issue with shifters?”
Belle winced. “We don’t talk about it a lot, but yeah. It probably won’t be a problem with Ellery and Miles because their human DNA will offset some of the Cougar DNA weaknesses. Hannah may have some frustration.”
“Does she know that?”
“I don’t know. It’s not really a conversation you want to sit down and have with your brother’s mate, especially if they haven’t had a conversation about kids yet.”
“With Hannah, it’s better to give her too much information and too soon than to lob a huge blow at her during a sensitive time.”
“She’s gotten a lot of shit for that, hasn’t she?” Belle hopped off Roast and jogged to the gate blocking access to the trail. She pushed it open and mounted the horse again.
“For what?”
“For not being so great at regulating her emotions.”
Steven let out a ragged breath. He’d probably always feel like he was dancing on eggshells when it came to Hannah, but that was better than the alternative—him being completely insensitive to her feelings. He never wanted her to think he didn’t care. “She has,” he admitted, “but in my opinion, she’s not actually that bad at it. She has normal enough reactions to stressful situations, but I guess growing up, we made her feel that any reaction at all was bad.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“I’d blame my parents and say we were just taking their lead, but I knew it was wrong. I was just too chickenshit to opt out of the pile on at the time. I’ll probably be making it up to Hannah for the rest of my life. The lady can really hold a grudge.”
“You deserve it.”
He nodded. “Yep. Fair enough.”
They passed by some dilapidated structures and rode quietly until they’d passed, as if the things weren’t just piles of construction detritus, but a graveyard of people’s exertion. A monument of energy gone to waste.
“What was that?” he asked, when the plot was a hundred feet behind them.
“My great-grandparents’ house. Believe it or not, they lived in that little thing with eight kids, mostly boys.”
“Jesus.”
Belle laughed. “Yeah. Things were different back then. I guess it was normal to be right on top of people all the time, even if you couldn’t stand them.”
“I imagine they all worked so hard during the day that come night, they didn’t have much energy to argue, anyway.”
“You’re probably right. My brothers and I always had plenty of energy for arguing. I was so happy when they all started moving out to their own houses, not that they went all that far.”
All the Foyes—excluding Belle—were within shouting distance of each other. Glenda lived in the main house. Mason a bit off to the east, Hank in the adjacent corner, and Sean behind them all. That made them all convenient to the woodworking business, which was situated near the road, and not so far from major ranch activity, either.
“My siblings and I didn’t scatter a whole lot,” Steven said. “We all live in the same county. Well, not Hannah anymore, obviously, but we’re a close enough drive to our parents’ house that we usually can’t come up with a good enough excuse about why we can’t show up for Mom’s little shindigs.”
“You mean the same mother who threw a birthday party for Hannah that she knew Hannah wouldn’t be at?”
Steven shrugged. “That’s Ma for ya. I mean, she’s not stupid, but I swear, some of my father’s emotional tone deafness has rubbed off on her. The tradeoffs she makes for the sake of being social sometimes make me scratch my head.”
“Mom’s been going out of her way to make Hannah feel comfortable here. She’s had the hardest time getting her to open up, and that frustrates her a lot, because who Hannah presents herself as isn’t who Sean says she is.”
“I guess he’d know better than anyone.”
“Even you?”
Steven shrugged. “I hate to say it, but Sean came in at something of an advantage because he hadn’t been around for the previous twenty-eight years. He got unfiltered Hannah, and I guess we all forgot what that looked like or simply didn’t want to see it.”
“You can’t make people be anything other than what they are.”
“Tell that to my parents. I don’t even know whose idea it was for me to go into the military, that’s how fucked up my head is. I don’t know if I did it because I wanted to or because I was supposed to.”
“Are you ... angry about it?” she asked softly. “You know, because of what happened there?”
Anger ...
He pulled the reins sideways to get Mousse to put a little sunlight between her and Roast. The horse might have thought she was doing Stephen a favor putting him that close to the unpredictable cat lady, but he didn’t want to be there at the expense of having his leg pinched off.
“Not anger, no,” he said finally.
“Really?”
“Anger is a hard place for me to reach, and it’s so imprecise. It’s a strong word people sometimes use to disguise feelings they think are weaker.”
“Like what?”
“Shame. Fear. Helplessness, I guess.” He’d certainly spent more than his fair share of time dwelling in those emotional stations. He didn’t talk about it much, but there hadn’t been anyone to tell.
Apparently, he’d just told Belle.
She nudged Roast over to claim back the space Mousse had made. She didn’t say anything, though, just adjusted her grip on the reins and watched the trail ahead.
“If I had to do it all over again, would I have done something else?” he asked. “Maybe. I don’t know what, though. I like being a cop. The path I took to get there was a little bumpy, but I like to think I would have ended up in the same place.”
“At least you kno
w that about yourself. I—shit.”
She passed the reins to her other hand and patted her back pocket and, with some very interesting saddle-top maneuvering, dug her vibrating phone out of it. She looked at the screen, rolled her eyes, and slid her thumb across the display. “What, Mason?”
Steven chuckled at her sudden change in mood. Maybe it was like she said and she couldn’t help it. The guys were some kind of trigger for her brashness.
She smoothed her brow and muttered, “Oh.”
Steven pulled Mousse a bit leftward so he was close enough to give Belle’s shoulder a tap. He mouthed, “What?”
She covered the mic with her thumb. “He wanted to make sure we weren’t anywhere near the house. They’re all heading out to take a look at the hellmouth.”
Steven cringed. Glad I’m not there. “Claude excluded?”
“Let me ask.” She uncovered the phone and cleared her throat. “I’m on Roast back near the old homestead, so not especially close. I can’t even see the hellmouth from here. Is everyone going or just you and some of the Cougars?” She looked at Steven and mouthed, “Everyone.”
“Claude must be done, then,” he whispered.
She nodded. “We’re about a quarter way around, so it’ll be a little while before we’re back at the stables.” She put her thumb over the mic again. “He says no hurry.”
Suited Steven fine. He didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing. “You can give me the extended tour.”
She snorted. “Not much to see besides cacti and empty bunkhouses we let Boy Scouts use sometimes.”
“Show me. I’m curious. I haven’t been in a bunkhouse since I was twelve.”
“As you wish, but you’d better hope there are no snakes in there.” Into the phone, she said, “Call me when we can head back. Steven’s complaining of hunger, and I’d like to try to make up some of the hours I missed at work today.” She ended the call and tucked the phone away.
“I’m pretty sure if you’re short on rent because of your ... problem, your family would pitch in,” Steven said.
“I don’t have a problem making rent. I’ve got two roommates, and we live on the wrong side of the tracks. Rent’s cheap. I need the money to move.”
“You’re serious about that?”
“Yes. I don’t say things if I don’t mean them. Folks just don’t like what I have to say.”
“Come on, Belle—”
“It’s true. And look, I’ve been planning this move for two years. Moving is expensive, and I don’t want to end up on the other end of an adventure being destitute until I can find a job. I want a cushion.”
“So you’ve got this all worked out, huh? You’re gonna go? And where?”
“There’s a pretty big glaring in Washington State. And yep. I’d hoped to go before I went into heat again. It came out of the blue this time. I avoid intimacy when I’m like this, but ...” She cut him a nervous look. “That’s getting harder.”
“Interesting.” He ground his teeth. He didn’t want to think about her being intimate with anyone. He shouldn’t even have been entertaining the idea of her getting up close and personal with him. Alas, he was a serviceman, not a saint.
“Yeah, no one really knows the rhyme or reason to what triggers it. It’s not seasonal in Cougar shifters, and it doesn’t happen to us all at the same time or all of us in general. For those of us who do get it, it’s random as hell.”
“Perhaps you should ask your goddess about the triggers.”
“Maybe I will. I don’t imagine she intends to keep that a secret. I mean, it’s a simple matter of biology. Maybe no one else has thought to ask.”
“Not many people know she’s here.”
“You’re right. I keep forgetting that. I’m blinded by my Foyeness and forget sometimes that we’re privy to access other Cougars don’t have.”
“Yep. Nobody would believe this stuff back at home if I were to tell them. And as much as I want to pretend the unusual shit that happens here is isolated to this little part of the world, knowing what I know now, I just can’t.”
“No turning back, bub. Can’t be a skeptic anymore when proof of the weirdness you never imagined is on the horse right beside you.”
The weirdness had always been there. He’d just written off all the unexplainable occurrences as flukes. Being woken in the middle of the night by things grabbing onto his limbs, and him opening his eyes to see nothing but glimmers—dust in the air, he’d told himself. Or the occasional voices in his ears when there was no one in the room. He’d once made the mistake of Googling his symptoms, and until he’d been sent overseas, believed he was suffering from a combination of Multiple Sclerosis and early-onset dementia. The truth hadn’t eased his nerves any.
She steered Roast into a small pen and waved Stephen on. “We can park ’em here. Grass is pretty good. You said you wanted to see the bunkhouses, right?”
“Yep.” He threw his leg over the horse’s head and hopped down.
“You’re too good at that.”
“Got pretty good riding with my ex.”
“Oh, I see,” she said flatly.
He followed her out of the pen and waited on her to lock the gate. Her brow furrowed and cheeks turned pink, which was easy enough thanks to her ginger paleness.
“Not sure I like that expression,” he said. “All I did was stated a fact, darlin’.”
She stormed past him, muttering as she went.
“Nope. I definitely don’t like that expression. You usually try to harm my person in some way right after you make that expression.”
“Less talking. More walking.”
“I swear, I’ll never be able to figure you out.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe you shouldn’t try.”
“And why not?” He grabbed her around the waist and pinned her back against the bunkhouse wall. “That’s what normal people do, buttercup,” he whispered. “When they spend time with other people, they try to get to know them. That’s healthy and expected.”
She squirmed ineffectually under his grip, though he could tell she wasn’t putting her full weight behind the effort. She wasn’t doing much more than shifting her body and pawing at him.
“You shouldn’t waste your time,” she said.
“It’s mine to waste in the way I see fit. Who are you to tell me otherwise?”
She rolled her wide-eyed gaze up to him. With the hostility gone and replaced with curiosity, she almost managed to look sweet. He knew better, though. Belle wasn’t sweet. She was unpredictable and sometimes mean, and if he turned his back on her, he’d probably end up hurting somehow.
She cleared her throat and dropped her gaze to his chest, which she gave the laziest of flicks. “Where’d you learn to handle horses? With your ... ex, you said?”
He shrugged. “Here and there. They’re not really a big hobby where I grew up, but I had an ex whose daddy had a habit of buying her what she wanted. She wanted horses.”
She looked at his face again and gone was the sweetly neutral mien. The evil cat lady had returned—yellowed-eyed and sharp-fanged.
She hissed.
He sighed and ran his thumb along the line of her bottom lip. “Wrong answer, huh? Kitty cat in you doesn’t want to hear about my ex-girlfriends, I guess. Well, you asked the question. I’m just telling you what you wanted to hear.”
He got her moving toward the bunkhouse door.
She moved somewhat haltingly, stopping every so often to bare her fangs at him, but Hannah did that to him enough that he was long past the point of where the act would frighten him. For a female Were-cougar, it seemed to be just another method of conversation.
“She had a few horses,” he said. “And she didn’t like riding alone. I humored her because she was cute.”
He pressed a hand over Belle’s mouth before she could let the next hiss out. “Come on, puddin’. That was like five years ago. I rarely ever see her anymore.”
Belle pried a couple of his
fingers apart, and shouted, “You still see her?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “I mean, it wasn’t a nasty breakup. We just weren’t right for each other. I’m a recovering redneck, and she likes drinking fancy beer out of chilled glasses. We just weren’t compatible.”
“Good.”
“Oh?”
Belle swatted his hand away and yanked the door open. “You should be alone.”
He couldn’t help laughing, because the statement was just so ridiculous and out of the blue, and she couldn’t possibly have meant it, in spite of what she’d said before.
She turned on the light and gestured to the unmade bunks. “Well. Here you have it. It’s the ultimate no-frills sleeping experience.”
Steven nodded as he scanned the room. “Yep. Just you and three of your most desperate friends.”
Four beds, stacked two and two. A tiny kitchenette. A love seat and lamp in the corner. He guessed the door in the back led to a similarly no-frills bathroom.
“Actually, it’s not that bad,” he said. “Remember, I slept in desert tents for a good portion of my life. This is pretty plush in comparison. The walls are solid, the roof looks watertight, and I can’t hear the wind. Also ...” He pointed to the light on the ceiling. “Electricity with no generator, as far as I can hear. Hannah’s dorm room wasn’t much nicer than this.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
He punched a sofa cushion, and when a cloud of dust didn’t fog the room as a result, he sank onto it and put his feet up on the coffee table.
He patted the cushion beside him. “Might as well take a load off, daffodil. Not like you have anything better to do.”
“Daffodil.”
“Don’t like it?”
She scrunched her nose. “It’s ... odd.”
“I’m just trying some things on and seeing what fits. Like dewdrop better?”
She scoffed.
“Sunflower?”
