by Holley Trent
“Steven.”
“How about princess?”
She groaned and sat. “Just call me Belle if stark-raving bitch is too much of a mouthful for you.”
“Who calls you that?”
“No one. But they don’t have to.” She sat and laced her fingers atop her lap. “It’s implied.”
“But you feed into it, don’t you? You’re not as cantankerous as you make out.”
“Aren’t I?” She cut a sideways glare at him, but again, she was going to have to try harder to cow him. She hadn’t scared him off yet. His training in perseverance had been too good—he’d grown up with Hannah.
“I think you could be sweet as could be if you let yourself.” He picked up the end of her ponytail and brushed it along the edge of her jaw.
She looked at him in that way guilty-looking dogs did when they’d done something wrong and their owners hadn’t yet figured out what it was. “Quit it,” she said quietly.
Her hands didn’t move, though. She made no gesture to push him away. All the same, he dropped it. He wasn’t the kind of guy who’d try his luck after a lady had said no the first time.
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” she asked, staring forward. “You’re not getting paid for this. In fact, you’re out of vacation time and are probably losing money by being here.”
“I keep my promises. I made promises to Hannah and to Mason.”
“But you have priorities. You have a job—”
“That’s right, a job. It’ll be there when I get back, and if it’s not, so what? I’ll get another one. It won’t be the end of the world, and I tend to think everything happens for a reason.”
“Even having the air choked out of you by some unseen thing?”
Just thinking it made his lungs seize and body tense. It was almost like that thing was there squeezing him—trying to get into him.
He squeezed his hands into fists tight enough that he could feel his nails nearly break the flesh, and his lungs expanded. His heart slowed.
Fuck.
“Including that.” He opened his eyes. “If that hadn’t happened, I probably would have been a hell of a lot more terrified at what Hannah had become and of some of the other things you’ve got roaming around here.”
Belle bobbed her eyebrows but kept her gaze forward. “The sheriff doesn’t really know what to do with some of the things we’ve got roaming around here. If anything seems too weird for him, he calls Mason, and Mason’s got enough to do as it is.”
“I guess someone’s got to do it.”
“Yeah. They keep Mason hopping.” She cringed. “I guess we all do.”
“You think you’ll find a better alpha in your next glaring?”
“No. I’m just hoping to find one who’s good enough. My father was a good enough alpha. When he was alive, I thought he was great, but hindsight tends to shave a few style points off a performance.”
“And do you think you’ll find a niche in your next place?”
“I don’t even have one here.”
“I think you do.”
“Really?” Now she did look at him, and the incredulity in her expression was so clear it was almost cartoonish.
“Yeah, sunshine, you do. I may not have been around long, but even I know you’re something of an institution around here.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Folks refer to you as ‘Belle at the Diner.’”
“What folks? Why are they talking about me?”
“Lots of reasons.”
She punched his arm and turned her body toward his. “Don’t hold back! What kind of reasons?”
He couldn’t help the grin spreading across his face. She was so concerned about what folks thought of her, even if she made out that she didn’t. “Lots of reasons, large and small. I guess they can’t think of the diner without thinking of you because you’re always there.”
“Certainly feels like it,” she muttered.
“And of course, the men who aren’t afraid to look in your direction think you’re pretty.”
“No one’s afraid to look at me.”
“Maybe it just seems that way to you. Nobody wants to earn a Foye beat down.”
“My brothers probably aren’t going to beat up everyone who tries to have a polite conversation with me.”
“No, but I’m sure they would object to a few who want a little more than conversation.”
“Men will be men. Can’t expect anything more of them. Men are programmed to put their dicks in things.”
Steven nodded. “True.” That was certainly how he was coded at the moment.
“I guess I can’t really talk. The only difference between them and me is that they’re horny all the time. My affliction comes in fits and starts.”
“You know, there’s probably a pretty easy cure for it.”
“Sure. Childbirth.” She laughed. “Though not one I’m interested in pursuing right now. What am I going to do with a kid? Most forms of birth control don’t work because of nonhuman genetics. Implants get dislodged when we shapeshift. I could think of a couple of ... temporary treatments, though.”
“Oh?”
“Mm-hmm. I’d be a little less twitchy.”
“So, what’s stopping you?”
“I would have thought that was pretty obvious. The cat in me says I should pounce on you, and I think we both know that’s not a good idea.”
“Yeah, you’re too young for me, anyway.”
She punched his arm again. “I am not.”
“Temper temper.”
“Shut up.”
He knew he shouldn’t goad her, but he needed to see where her head was. Maybe it was dastardly of him, but he had to figure her out. He didn’t think her moving away would fix her problems, and he didn’t think she wanted to move, anyway. Like he’d said, she was an institution around those parts and not just at the diner. Maybe she’d see reason if she had one less thing in her head nagging for attention. He was doing a good deed, the way he saw it—giving her a little more time to think without that damned cat in her head running the show.
He slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her closer. “How do you know you’re not too young?”
She swallowed and pressed her lips to that tender place at the crook of his neck. “I’m just not. Gods.” Her tongue lashed out and traced a searing path up his neck. “A younger man couldn’t deal with me. I hear I’m a handful.”
“A little more than a handful.” He pulled her onto his lap and demonstrated such with his palms on her ass.
She kept licking and kissing up the line of his jaw, and he kept kneading. It felt sinful and taboo, and that made it all the more arousing.
“Are you ... are you offering to put me out of my misery for the moment?” she asked.
“Yep. Won’t even tell anyone.”
She grabbed him by the collar, and then her lips were on his, and she made that unholy snarling noise she usually reserved for when he was chasing her.
He wasn’t sure who was chasing whom anymore.
“Kiss me, damn it,” she said.
He kissed her. Yeah, pretty sure I’m being chased.
CHAPTER NINE
Belle was desperate, and Steven was safe. At the moment, that was all that mattered. She’d worry about the fallout later.
His tongue was forceful and dominating inside her mouth, and he didn’t give her room to do much but to chase it—or be chased by it?—and she kept eating it up, breathlessly enduring the probing. Liking it. He wasn’t giving her any room to take charge. She was used to being the one in charge, and men usually let her be.
He pressed his palms down her back and grabbed at the hem of her shirt. She might have said it was her favorite, but when she heard the tiniest ripping sound of him pulling it out and up, she couldn’t find enough give-a-damn to stop kissing him—to stop touching him. It was probably just a couple of threads popping, anyway. With Cougar hearing, sometimes situations sounded worse than they a
ctually were.
Leaning away and breaking their kiss, he tugged her shirt over her head and flipped her onto her back, her knees still pressed to his. She tried to sit up to get back to his sinful mouth, but he put one hand to her shoulder to keep her down and the other went to the fly of her jeans.
He unbuttoned, unzipped, and slipped his hand down the inside of her panties.
Just a tease. Not touching anything that mattered.
She growled at him, and but that didn’t spur him on. She shouldn’t have expected it to. She should have known Steven wasn’t the kind of man who let her set the pace of anything if it didn’t suit him or what he was supposed to be accomplishing.
He leaned down and kissed her again, whispering against her lips, “Wait ... you’re not on anything, and I don’t have a condom, so ...”
She winced. Desperate as she was, she couldn’t take the risk of not using protection. For one thing, even if her biological imperative was to spawn, she wasn’t ready. Maybe in a year or two when she was settled down somewhere. For another thing, she wasn’t about to play an entrapment game with the guy. She didn’t want a long-distance cub daddy, and she didn’t particularly cherish the idea of being bound to someone for the rest of her life who wasn’t her mate.
Idiot, the cat inside her muttered. He is.
The lady part of her brain didn’t know what to make of that.
That can’t be true, could it?
“Belle?” Steven gave her chin a little squeeze and turned her face toward his.
“Huh?”
“Are you in there?”
“Yeah. It’s me. I’m ...” She was what? Staging a comical argument between the two sides of her consciousness? She could have been wrong. Maybe he wasn’t her mate. For all she knew, those sorts of things weren’t necessarily clear. Hank and Sean had had the damnedest time figuring out which of the stolen mates were theirs, so maybe her inner cat was just projecting. She wanted sex, and Steven was convenient.
“Are you having second thoughts?” he asked.
“No. I’m just really confused.”
“About what?”
“Nothing.” She leaned up and kissed him again, knowing that would distract him. He wouldn’t just let himself be kissed; he’d want to kiss back.
And as he kissed, kneading her breast beneath one calloused palm, the thought.
Fretted.
He can’t be.
It didn’t work the same way when the lady was the aggressor. No harm was going to come to her if he rejected her and decided he didn’t want to stick around.
And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s for the best.
Mate or not, she needed him to take off her edge, or she was going to be a beast—at least until all the hormones worked their way out of her system. That would take weeks.
“No,” she said breathily, leaning away from his kiss.
He started to stand, but she grabbed his shirt. “I mean no, I ... Don’t walk away from me unless you want to get chased. She’s going to chase you.”
“Who is?”
“The cat. She’ll chase you until you change your mind.”
“I’m not gonna change my mind. I just want to be responsible.”
“You really don’t have—”
“Nope. I told you, I haven’t gone for a ride in a while. But that’s okay.” He leaned down and traced the seam of her lips with the tip of his tongue. “I’ll make do.”
He slipped his hand inside of her panties again, this time probing farther. He skimmed past her clit—the roughness of his flesh making her spine bow and toes curl—and tucked his fingers into her slit.
“Please.”
“Please, what?”
“Help me. I can’t stand it. Feeling like this all the time.” She rolled her hips and rocked her crotch against his large, still fingers. “Put them inside me.”
“Like this?” He tucked barely the tip of one inside her, and she didn’t know what else to do but growl.
He laughed and kissed along the line of her jaw. “What do you expect to happen when you let someone else have all the control?”
“You don’t have it all.”
“Sugar, the only control you have right now is being able to say no, and I don’t think you want to. You want me to stuff my fingers into you and get you off, and I’m willing to do that just to see you come apart, but I’m gonna do it at my own pace.”
“Your pace is slow.” She rocked her hips again and shuddered at the pressure of the heel of his palm against her clit.
She was so on edge, and he was a damned tease.
“Slow’s good sometimes. Sometimes slow means someone knows what he’s doing. You can fake it real good when you’re going fast. You don’t need technique when you’ve got confusion.”
He pulled his hand free of her, and before she could finish her whimper, he stood, pulled off her shoes, and yanked her pants the rest of the way down.
“I’ve got enough confusion already,” she muttered.
“So don’t go courting it.” He insinuated himself between her legs and sat back on his heels, skimming his hands up the insides of her thighs.
She was used to being nude around people who were practically strangers, or nearly nude like at that moment, but that was when she’d had to shapeshift around other Cougars. Shapeshifter nudity wasn’t an inherently sexual thing. It wasn’t that they didn’t look and appreciate each other’s bodies, but after a while, it was all just so much flesh, and for the most part, they stopped caring.
But Steven was an outsider. Nudity to him meant something completely different than it did to Cougars in the glaring.
“Take off your clothes,” she whispered.
“Nah. This is about you, not me.”
“I want to see anyway.”
“You don’t get to make the decisions right now. You’re not equipped to, so just let me take care of things, okay?”
She let her eyes close on a sigh and scooted her ass against his hand.
“I guess that means okay.” He didn’t so much breach her as tickle her, running his fingertips down her slit again and again until her shoulders shook and her belly quivered from hysteria.
She opened her mouth to say something—what, she didn’t know—but before her tongue could wag, he pressed a finger against it, teasing her down below all the while.
She closed her lips around it, and he drew out the wet digit and slipped it into her lower down.
“You’re not in charge here, Belle. Do I need to keep reminding you, or are you gonna hush?”
She zipped her lips.
She could be indignant on the inside as long as he didn’t stop touching her. The teasing she could endure. She just had to keep her mouth shut so he’d give her what she needed.
“I think you’re gonna hush, at least until you can’t help but to make some noise.” He pressed a second finger into her, barely up to the first knuckle as far as she could tell.
He was going to make her cry. She was going to be so pathetic. She was going to cry because she couldn’t deal with it, and her body was just going to explode and there’d be nothing left of her.
Oh well. Maybe that’s for the best.
“Tearing up already? Man, I’ve been told I’ve got skillful fingers, but I usually need to do a little more work.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I’ll take that as my cue to proceed, then.”
He parted her a little more and pressed his thumb over her clit as he slid his fingers more deeply inside her, and yeah, she made a little noise. Some needy mewling sound she hoped to forget if she could, because it was just that pathetic.
For a few seconds, he held his hand still—no thrusts, no scissoring. He looked down on her with that damnable smirk on his face, as if to dare her.
Well, I’m not gonna fall for it. She bit down on her bottom lip to keep her from saying anything, but she couldn’t help what her body was doing. Her sex gripped his fingers, and her knees—pressed
against his hips—shook.
“I don’t think you need all that much stroking, do you? I bet you’re one of those women who could come just like this, just from thinking about how badly you need it. You get so turned on, and your body does what it wants. Kind of like how you can get off during a dream. Have you done that before? Had a hot dream and woke yourself up when you came? Go on. You can answer.”
She just nodded. She didn’t want to run afoul of his rules—didn’t want to give him a reason to say, “I told you to hush,” later.
“What were you dreaming about?” he asked.
She shrugged. She couldn’t really remember, and it didn’t matter. The most lucid ones were when she was in heat.
“Do you dream about men?”
She shook her head.
He slipped a third finger into her.
“So what’s turning you on? Use words.”
“I don’t know. It’s nothing that makes sense. I think it’s caused by the hormones. The only thing I see in those dreams is a glow and it sort of ... envelops me. Gets into me.”
“Gets you primed for someone.”
She nodded.
“Well, ain’t nature a bitch? Gets you all wet and ready for someone and it doesn’t even matter who it is.”
“It matters to me.”
“Yeah?” He flicked his thumb over her clit again, and barely wriggled his fingers inside her, but those little frissons started up.
Drawing in a breath of surprise, she clenched around him.
“You’re beautiful, Belle. You know that?”
She kept quiet, not that she could have talked anyway. His dark gaze on her face was too cutting, too knowing. It was as if her body was under some spell of his. Her lungs seemed to have become paralyzed and her diaphragm was frozen, and she just couldn’t get out the words.
“I understand why people would want to shelter you. I’d probably do the same if you were mine, and I’m not that kind of guy. Not my style to cling.”
Clinging wasn’t Belle’s style, either. She’d been doing everything she could to avoid it.
“And you probably take care of yourself just fine most of the time, don’t you? Carnal needs aside. Hell, I’m sure if pressed, you can deal with those on your own, too, not for lack of willing partners.”
