The Cougar's Trade (3 page)

She stood transfixed and confused.

“Miles, up here,” Hank called out in his usual flat tone.

That stoic creature was capable of whimsy and softness?

“Please don’t make me have to escort you every little step of the way. I’m on a really tight schedule today.”

She sighed. Maybe he was capable. He just wouldn’t be using any of it on her, and she wasn’t going to set herself up for disappointment by expecting it. She wasn’t there for a fairy-tale romance. If anything, she was just biding her time until she could leave.

Hank shifted the phone to his other ear and watched Miles bend to adjust the fastener of her hiking sandal. Pink shoes.
Pink
, of all fucking colors
.
He imagined that if
La Bella Dama
watched, she laughed at him. She’d sent him a mate in pearl earrings and pink shoes. What did the goddess expect him to do with such a woman, play bunco?

Hank considered himself a practical man when it came to most things, whether work-related or personal. He was the kind of man who’d think twice before acting because he considered probabilities and outcomes to every scenario and tried to minimize not only his risk, but the amount of inconvenience the people around him might endure. Apparently, he’d forgotten his mother’s oft-repeated lesson about assumptions.

As the Cougar glaring’s second-in-command, he had a responsibility to his brother—the alpha—and their brethren. He counseled Mason, watched his back, talked him out of doing stupid shit, and basically acted as the guy’s stunt double. Alpha couldn’t be everywhere at once, and Mason was learning to trust Hank to do what needed to be done. There was a lot to be done. They were in a perpetual state of catch-up. No one could remember when the last time an alpha had had
La Bella Dama
’s blessing, and now that Mason did, many women in the glaring pleaded for more order and structure. Cougar women were naturally distrusting of men. For the past sixty years—as long as a Foye had been alpha—they’d merely tolerated their leaders. Though difficult, they had to trust their enigmatic goddess. She’d said Mason was okay, so the women cut him some slack.
Finally
.

If “Second” had been merely an honorific, Hank wouldn’t have been so careful about which woman he picked. Any woman would have done, as long as she looked nice and smelled good, too, but the Cougars would expect more from the second’s lady, just like they did of the alpha’s lady. They weren’t decision-makers, not being cats themselves, but they had status. Folks looked to them as examples and knew they had their mates’ ears. He’d assumed the goddess would steer him toward a gutsy broad who could not only put up with
his
shit, but tolerate the Cougar drama with aplomb, as well. That was why he’d thought Hannah had been it.

Hannah, who’d sooner scratch his eyes out than consent to a courtship, and not the delicate slip of a woman in front of him. But Hannah hadn’t felt right. His inner cat had recoiled when he’d stood near her. It’d taken all he had not to bare his fangs at her.
Nope
, the cat seemed to be saying, and,
Wrong
. Standing near Miles, though, Hank got mental images of him in his cat form, rolling over to present his belly.

He didn’t know what to make of it, but he knew for damn sure she was the goddess’s choice, and he guessed Sean was equally perplexed with his lot in life at the moment, as well.

In the doorway, Miles grinned and gave a little wave to someone outside. It was probably a ranch hand. Being cooped up as she’d been during the past month, she wouldn’t recognize any except the few Cougars who worked on Mom’s ranch. Maybe, though, she was one of those women who waved at people she didn’t know because she thought it was nice. Sounded like something a Southerner would do.

He shook his head.
She’s gonna get chewed up like a necktie dangling into a meat grinder.

She scrunched her nose and slapped a hand over her mouth right after the giggle escaped.

Pete Dell darkened the doorway, holding one of the ranch’s pathetic free-roaming barn cats that had somehow managed to acquire a coat of mud. He spotted Hank through the glass door, quickly turned on his heel, and vanished.

Coward.

“Aw,” Miles said.

Hank suppressed a groan and tried to concentrate on the on-hold music piping into the phone. A month ago, he’d taken one look at Miles and thought she was beautiful and fragile, like one of his mother’s untouchable ceramic figurines.
Dainty
. Miles was a pocket-sized woman who needed handling with kid gloves. Apparently, the goddess saw something in her that he didn’t. He was going to have to find some basis for them to connect, and soon, or he was screwed. Two weeks. That was all he had to get her to stick. As it was, they were already off on the wrong foot. He imagined that was generally the case when men kidnapped women and explained they were sent by their goddess to claim mates and that they were it. A month hadn’t tempered Hannah’s anger any. He wasn’t so sure how Miles felt about the situation. She so rarely complained about anything. That couldn’t be normal.

The music on the other end finally stopped, and the man Hank had been trying to connect with for five days said, “You gotta send someone out here to fix these cabinets.”

“Yeah, Cory, I got your message. What precisely is the problem?”

Miles passed by the desk, idly fidgeting the pearl earring in her left ear as she stepped toward a large portrait hung in the reception area. Twirling his pencil between his fingers, he just watched her for a moment, only half-listening to his client. Hank knew what Cory wanted and didn’t plan on giving it, so there was no real reason to pay attention to the tirade.

He tapped the pencil eraser against the desktop and eyed Miles from the top of her dark cropped hair, down to the soles of her hiking sandals. She’d probably stopped growing at fourteen. Wasn’t shaped like a kid, though. Even with the relatively unflattering clothes she was wearing at the moment, it’d be evident to Stevie Wonder that there was a nice little shape inside. He hadn’t really noticed before because he’d been trying so damn hard not to look.
Might as well now.

“So, what are you going to do about it?” Cory asked.

“What am I going to do about it? Oh, I dunno.”

Miles brought her thumb to the corner of her mouth and nibbled. He’d never paid any attention to her lips before, either. Rosy and ripe, and when she wrapped them around her thumb before chewing on her cuticle, his cock gave a volunteering twitch.

As if.

“You there, Foye?”

Hank rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I heard you. Listen, you had your assistant order the cabinets to be delivered in pieces. We offered to send Sean and one of our crews to D.C. to install them, but your assistant told us no.”

“He didn’t know you were Cougars. He was just being cautious.”

“That’s
your
problem. You directed him to us, so you should have filled him in. You can’t really complain now that they were incorrectly installed. We include installation in the cost for a reason. He negotiated the price down because he didn’t want us there.”

Miles leaned forward, squinting at the detail in the framed portrait. Everyone did that. Tried to make out which Foye was which, and given Hank and his brothers had been pretty indistinguishable as little boys beyond their subtle differences in hair and eye color, he knew she’d never guess correctly. The portrait was in black and white.

She tapped the picture of the hardheaded preteen on the far right and mouthed, “Is that you?”

Well, shit.
He wrote
LUCKY GUESS
on a piece of scrap paper and nudged it toward the desk edge.

“I’ll pay you whatever you need, but someone needs to come out here and fix this,” Cory said.

Hank winced. “Our schedule is a mess right now. There’s a lot going on with the glaring, and you know the Sheehans are still on the lam.”

The wanna-be alpha Edgar Sheehan had kidnapped Ellery a month ago, hoping to prevent Mason from completing his mate bond in time. Mason had found her—as well as Edgar’s complicit younger brother, Ralphie—in plenty of time, but the elder Sheehans were on the run. The Foyes had cut Ralphie loose, hoping he’d lead them to his family, but so far, he’d been holed up at a cousin’s house in Albuquerque. He hadn’t left, and no one had come to see him, according Hank’s informants.

“What if I could help with that? You know I’ve got connections,” Cory said.

“Sure thing, Senator. Look, you don’t want us installing your cabinets, and we don’t want Bears sniffing around in Cougar business.”

Miles, who was scribbling a return note to him, pushed up an eyebrow.

Yep. Were-bears were a thing. He leaned in and squinted at her small, neat print.

WENT THROUGH THE ALBUMS AT YOUR MOTHER’S. I NOTICED CERTAIN TRAITS.

Shit.
He didn’t want to guess what kind of traits. He’d taken out the most embarrassing of the photos when Mom wasn’t looking, but some of those little bitches were stuck and stuck good.

“You’re a cold man, Hank Foye,” Cory said.

“No colder than my father.”

“Your father was much easier to pull one over on.”

Hank pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Hey, that’s a compliment. Seriously. Help me out here. I’ll make it worth your while. The referrals alone—”

“We don’t need the referrals. We’ve got more business than we know what to do with at the moment.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“Dammit.”

Hank could hear Cory drumming his fingertips on the other end. He pulled Miles’s paper a little closer and read

“Observant,” he said quietly.

She shrugged and fiddled with one of her pearl studs. “I’m a nurse. Observation is part of the job description. You can’t help people if you’re not paying attention to them.”

Is that an accusation?
It sounded like something Mary Poppins would say. It was painfully clear the woman had no edge whatsoever. He half-expected her to break out in song at any minute and sing to him some aphorisms about wholesome living.

“Okay, how about this,” Cory said. “Find me a hole in your schedule and I’ll give you ten thousand bucks and pay you and your crew’s airfare.”

Hank whistled low and watched Miles glide back to the door. Elegant. He was so fucking screwed. “Ten K, huh?”

“Come on. It’ll take you a weekend, and my wife’s going to kill me if it isn’t fixed. She’s been waiting six months to get that room organized.”

“I’ll talk to Mason and see what we can work out.”

“Great. And I’ll put out some feelers about the Sheehans. I know you said not to, but you’d be an idiot not to let me. ’Bye.” Cory hung up.

“Jeez.” Hank dropped the phone into the cradle and leaned back in the desk chair. He had no idea how they were going to squeeze a trip to D.C. into their schedule with everything that was going on. As it was, they were stretched thin having to take night shifts monitoring the hellmouth. They couldn’t risk letting any sort of malevolent entity get off the ranch, so the spirits and demons needed to be suppressed immediately after they emerged. In fact, because of the hellmouth, none of the Foyes had gone more than a few hours from home since the portal had mysteriously opened up a year ago. They didn’t have the manpower to spare the trip to Cory’s, but he was a good ally to have and Hank didn’t want to ruin that.

Miles stepped back from the door, and Hank rolled his eyes before he even locked his sight on whom she’d moved for. He could always smell Darnell coming from a mile away. He was one of Mom’s ranch hands, and he occasionally popped in at Woodworks when he’d gotten himself into the sort of deep shit he needed second-party assistance in digging out of. Apparently, he’d rather get chewed out by his alpha than his boss. Why Mom was scary to so many grown-ass men in the glaring, Hank could never figure out.

Darnell took off his cowboy hat, swiped his shirtsleeve across his sweaty brow, and rocked back on his heels. He tipped his chin at Miles. “Well, hello.”

She gave him a little wave.

He stuck out his hand. “We haven’t formally met, what with you being locked up in—”

Hank pointed to the chairs near the door.

Darnell dropped his hand as if a heavy lead weight had fallen into it, then plopped into one of the hard plastic chairs.

Miles took the one next to him, cheeks flushed and looking chastised.

Shit.
He hadn’t meant for
her
to follow the instruction, too. He groaned inwardly and scratched out a note for Mason about Cory. He looked up to find Miles staring at her hands. Then she wrung them. He knew they were capable hands. She wasn’t afraid of work, and she’d proven that time and time again. If given a chance to help someone, she would, whether it was with Mom’s dirty work or tending the occasional minor wound for Cougars who couldn’t get to urgent care, or even keeping an eye on Mason’s son, Nick. She did everything with enthusiasm. A pushover. If he somehow did manage to win her, he’d probably spend more time babysitting her than meeting the needs of the glaring. That couldn’t have been what
La Bella Dama
had in mind.

“All right, Darnell. What’d you fuck up this time?”

The other man cringed. “Mason ain’t around, is he?”

“Nope.”

“Thank the gods. Listen, I know Mason said not to antagonize the Coyotes, but I overheard them at the bar—”

“The same bar Mason told you to keep your ass out of?”

Darnell’s dark gaze flitted shiftily.

Hank just stared. Darnell usually did a pretty good job of digging his own hole.

“Look, it was two-for-one draft night. A guy in my tax bracket takes his savings wherever he can get them.”

Miles chuckled.

Darnell nudged her arm. “Right?”

“Are you trying to get me in trouble, too?”

“With that guy?
Pssssh
.” He flicked a hand in Hank’s general direction. “At least he gives me warning before he roughs me up. Mason prefers taking me by surprise. Calls it
negative reinforcement
.”