Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (33 page)

She clawed at him and was rewarded by a sharp intake of breath, a tighter grip, his nails raking her flesh in the most delicious way. When she scratched again, he collected both wrists in one big hand and pinned her hands over her head. She could have broken away with only a little more effort than she put into her mock-struggles—but why would she want to? The illusion of force, the pretense of being trapped, set a fire in her belly that pulsed down to her sex, pulsed up to her heart.

She bit and nipped, and he growled that dark, sexy growl and sank his teeth into her shoulder. She thought for a second that he’d partly changed, that the cougar, not the man, was biting her, but quickly realized it wasn’t the case. The swift pain, and the swift pleasure that followed while the pain still throbbed, was just that intense.

She wrestled and squirmed, using just the strength of her legs, and managed to flip Jack over, forced him to release her hands. She knew he’d let her do it but she felt a nanosecond of chortling glee as she straddled his hips and looked down at his ruddy, handsome face, the snarled silk of his hair, his sculpted body.

Carefully, teasingly, she grazed his hardness with her dripping pussy. Once, twice, three times, each jolting her with pleasure. Some day in the very near future, she’d tease Jack that way for a good long time, hours, maybe. But that was for another time, a time when there hadn’t been violent death and dark magic and anger and reconciliation and reconnection and meeting an actual deity all within the past few hours.

She poised herself over his cock, ready to sink down and ride him to glory.

Jack grabbed her hips, entwined his legs with her. Flipped her onto her back and impaled her before she was fully onto the bed.

He thrust deep and hard, without mercy. His steely hands imprisoned her wrists again. She dug her heels into the thin old mattress and pushed up, meeting each fierce stroke with the force of her body. She nipped at his shoulder, the only place she could reach, and tasted salt that might be sweat or blood.

“Stop running away from me, Cara,” he muttered, the words in rhythm with his strokes.

“Stop being an asshole, and I’ll stop running.”

“Can’t stop being an asshole. Goes with the shaman job sometimes.” Jack paused at the top of the stroke, supporting his weight on his arms. All his muscles quivered with tension. It wasn’t that warm in the cabin, but sweat slicked his skin. His eyes were black with need. “But I can tone it down, and you can smack me upside the head when it gets too bad. That’s part of a shaman’s job too—calling people when they’re being dense.”

“I can do that. I’d like to stop running, Jack. But there’s so much scary shit in my life now that sometimes I’m going to balk and think you’re the problem when I’m just overwhelmed. We’re going to fight sometimes, and it won’t always be for a good reason.”

“That’s one of the things that mates do,”
the cougar opined. “
Along with watching each other’s backs, making the beast with two backs, etc., etc.”

She blinked. “Your cougar knows Shakespeare?”

“The part that’s cougar-me remembers the stories from college, but not the words. The part that’s an avatar of Trickster probably knew Shakespeare personally. A lot of writers are Trickster-touched, especially the really good ones.”

Cara shivered involuntarily. She loved Jack, or at least was well on the way to love, but the whole aspect of Jack being Jack’s cougar being Cougar the spirit-guide was going to weird her out for some time to come.

“Ain’t it cool?” Jack said, picking up on her thoughts. “Our lives may be strange, Cara, but they’ll never be boring.”

“Where did you go to university?” she asked suddenly, the fact that Jack had attended college just filtering through her distracted brain.

“Later,” Jack said and kissed her, probably as much to silence her as to enjoy it.

Maybe he was getting to the point where duals found it hard to talk, or maybe he was just trying to change the subject because it wasn’t nearly as interesting as sex.

She couldn’t agree more.

Cara gripped at his cock with her inner muscles. Jack made a strangled noise and moved his hips in a particularly delicious way, and Cara understood why Jack had no desire or possibly no ability to think about anything outside this moment, outside this bed. She relaxed into the moment in a way she could rarely recall doing.

She’d never had a lover with such total, fierce focus. His silent intensity contracted the world for her as well so she could focus entirely on him and on the sensations breaking in waves over her body.

Jack thrust hard, almost punishingly. His dark eyes hazed toward the cougar’s greenish amber.

Her back arched as she shattered. She cried out a sound that might have been Jack’s name in some primal language.

Then he was coming too, shaking as he exploded inside her.

He collapsed on top of her, trembling with lust and exertion.

Maybe from more than that. He kissed her, a kiss that was both tender and fierce, letting go of her hands so she could pull him into an even closer embrace. “Mine,” Jack whispered, but she wasn’t sure how he did it because she wasn’t letting him move his lips away from hers long enough to speak. “Yours. Each other’s. That’s the part I wasn’t clear about before.”

There was so much Cara could say, but she left it at, “Yeah, that,” and continued kissing him.

They were drifting from kissing and cuddling toward much-needed sleep when Jack muttered, “I went to Queen’s University. Didn’t finish. I liked the classes, but I didn’t like how normies live. All in little separate boxes, cut off from nature and from their own nature, paying more attention to some electronic thing or another than to the world around them. It doesn’t make sense.”

Cara blinked and realized, in that moment, how thoroughly she had changed from the woman she’d been in the city. “No,” she agreed, “it doesn’t.”

Chapter Forty

“How do we open this gate?” Rafe stretched as he spoke, deceptively casual, but Cara could see the wariness of one trained to watch and observe, and the skepticism of someone who’d gone through an operation or two planned by a desk jockey who’d forgotten that in police work, no plan survives contact with reality.

She recognized the look because she was pretty sure she was sporting it herself.

“We have to move a ton of energy,” Gramps said. “Different ways to do it. Certain drugs help, but for something this big, you can’t rely on just drugs. You’d need to take so much you’d just open a door in your own head and get lost inside. Dancing and drumming help, but again, it won’t be enough. Not sleeping helps—it makes you a little nutty and gives Trickster more room to work. Prayer helps. Your guides can help. But adding sex to prayer and dancing and your guides is probably the best way.” He flashed a grin that was more like a spasm. “Which is weird for me to be saying to my grandkid, thank you very much for asking, so I’m going to leave it up to the people involved to figure out the combination that’ll work best for them.”

“For this gate to work, we need Chenier around when we’re opening it. How are we going to lure him out?” Elissa asked, which Cara thought was a terribly vital question of the nitty-gritty sort that shamans tended to forget.

“We have trackers,” Jude said. “Big cats, wolves. I know what he smells like. A couple of us duals could sneak up on him.” His usually lazy, affable voice was menacing. Cara could imagine it turning to a leonine roar at any time.

“And then what? You can’t kill him; he’s protected by fae magic. But he can kill you.” Grand-mère shook her head. “If I thought he’d believe me, I would say I wanted to try to patch things up, but even his ego is not so monumental as to believe that, after so many years and so many deaths.”

The answer hit Cara so hard it physically hurt, as if Trickster had torn off the top of her skull and forced enlightenment directly into her brain, along with a good measure of cold, bracing air. It left her queasy and wishing she could pretend it hadn’t happened. But the pain, the giddiness, the sheer weirdness of it—and the way the scar on her shoulder throbbed damply—let her know it was true inspiration.

Voice shaking in a way it hadn’t since her mother’s funeral, Cara spoke up. “He’ll buy that he got his hooks into me. Trickster says he underestimates me. I’ll lure him here. And then—say good night, Gracie.”

“Good night, Gracie,” Jack obediently responded, making everyone laugh.

Which gave him time to give her a hug.

Just a quick one, but it was enough to stop the shaking.

“I don’t like it,” Gramps said.

“I don’t either,” said Jack. Before Cara could elbow him—she figured that her grandfather had a right to be overprotective, having changed her diapers, but Jack didn’t—Jack stood up and took her hands. His words were meant for the whole room, but his focus was on her. “I don’t like it because sending in either one of us alone would be going about it all wrong. Chenier knows my weakness. That weakness is Cara, and Chenier got me to stand still long enough for the fae to slip its hooks in by offering me an ugly, cheater’s way to win her. Cara gave me another chance despite my idiocy, not because of it. Only Chenier doesn’t know that.” He grinned, first at Cara, then at everyone else. Cara saw the cougar’s fangs in his human-seeming face, knew it was a smile that could rend flesh.

“I see where you’re going with this,” Elissa said out of the blue. “It just might work—at least long enough for us to do what we need to do.”

Grand-mère gestured royally. “So go to it, children. We move at sunrise.”

They were on the way back to Cara’s house when Elissa caught up with them. “I wasn’t about to say in front of your grandfather, Cara, but there’s one small problem with your plan. To eyes that know how to see it, you guys look all happy and shiny and newly in love. You need to do something to rough up the energy a little.”

“We could always have a fight. We’re
great
at having fights.” Jack was still grinning and holding her hand as he said it, though, so Cara didn’t mind.

“It may take more than that to throw the fae off the scent,” Elissa said. “Something that, at a quick glance, will read like darkness and violence to something from another world, something that doesn’t really understand how complicated mortals are.” She dropped her voice. “Do you think you guys could get…a little kinky?”

The laugh started near Cara’s pussy and spread from there, filling her whole body. “I think we could manage that.” She thought for a second, then squeezed Jack’s hand. “That is…I can manage that if Jack’s okay with kinky.”

“Okay with kinky?” His response was so loud Cara figured small children all over the village would be asking their parents embarrassing questions. “I was afraid you’d never ask.”

“Well then, that’s settled.” She said it calmly enough, but the lust coursing through her body was almost enough—almost—to squelch the sheer, abject terror at the thought of dealing with Chenier on his own turf.

The problem, they discovered, was that it was bloody hard to get started. Bloody hard to initiate sex, let alone kinky sex, under these circumstances.

They’d talked, even through a rising sense of embarrassment that almost drowned both desire and fear.

But they’d talked so much, they’d talked the lust out of the air. Talked around their limits and fears and what they simply wouldn’t do, not even to open a gate and save Couguar-Caché and Jocelyn from crazy fae-possessed sorcerers.

All the talk left Jack with a distinctly limp dick and a sinking sense that this would never work, that Chenier would see right through them, possess him again and force him to hurt Cara for real. He knew that wallowing in that feeling could be dangerous, but at the same time, he knew that facing that dark place was important, part of the journey to the place they needed to reach to create the gate.

But he couldn’t help wallowing.

Until Cara kissed him and said, “All right. We’ve covered the negatives, the fears, the things we’re scared of. But we haven’t talked about dreams and fantasies, and I don’t think this will work until it’s fun. So you know what I’ve always fantasized about? Wrestling with a guy, really getting down and dirty and putting up a good fight, and him not holding back because I’m a girl. Getting rough-and-tumble, biting and scratching and hitting and fighting dirty. He wins—and maybe I let him win for the fun of it. Because he wins, I end up getting spanked and then tied up and taken.”

“That,” Jack said, his cock stirring for the first time since they’d started the ever-so-serious conversation, “hardly sounds like losing.”

“My point exactly,” Cara purred. “We both win in the end. But if we really go for it, there should be enough bruises, bites and scratches to confuse Chenier. Sorcerers are surface, according to Elissa. They can’t read too deeply. And fae are so used to being the tricky ones, they can’t imagine being tricked themselves.”

The bright stripes of her aura, now leaning toward passionate reds and oranges, wavered a bit, as if she wasn’t entirely convinced of her own words.

But Jack was.

At least the part where she said they’d both win in the end.

Chapter Forty-One

Cara’s hair was wild. Her body ached from being flung around, and her butt was distinctly tender. The handprint on Jack’s face had faded to normal vision, but Cara could see it if she squinted with her shamanic sight. Through those eyes, it was deep red like a Valentine heart.