The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards) (2 page)

She needed to get the hell away from him, and was going to do that, but Mason’s scorching energy seemed to sear her flesh. It made her recoil enough to get her stiff body moving back a couple of feet from him—and closer to Steven.

“We get it,” Mason snarled, crouching low. “You don’t want to be bossed around by us. You’re an adult. We understand that, but there’s something
wrong
with you. Can’t you get that through your head?”

She waved a dismissive hand at him and scrambled to her feet. “Oh, there’s something wrong with all of us. Are we going to start slinging insults around? Who should I start with? Perhaps with you, Mason. You—”

Sean clapped a hand over her mouth and yanked her in the direction of the road. “You’re going home.”

She bit down hard on his palm, and he yanked it away, hissing.

“Well, that settles it,” Mason said.

He, Hank, and Steven got in step, pushing her toward her clothes and her car.

“Who’s gonna tell her roommates?” Hank asked.

“I’ll tell them,” Mason said. “They may not understand the intricacies of Cougar politics, but they know I’m the alpha, and if I say there’s a problem that needs sorting, they won’t question it.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Belle said, yanking her arm away from Sean’s grip. “I told you that weeks ago when you got him tailing me, and now you’re talking about moving him into my house? That’s what you’re doing, right?”

He grabbed it back and kept her moving. “You do need a babysitter, and a closer watch, at that. I’m sorry, Belle. You know we didn’t want to do this to you.”

“Oh, sure you don’t. Coming from guys who kidnapped their mates and wouldn’t even open their mouths up front to explain to them why you had to do it, your words mean diddly-squat to me. You guys are bona fide experts at holding people against their wills.”

Her brothers didn’t respond, but they had to know she was right. Although their mates had come around and accepted her brothers’ foolish selves, she still believed it would have served them right for Ellery, Miles, and Hannah to have refused them.

The Foye brothers had been under a curse from the patron goddess of Were-cougars
La Bella Dama
—known casually as Lola Perez. Having apparently grown impatient of waiting for them to get their stubborn heads out of their asses, she’d sent them on a mate quest and guided them toward three women she’d chosen in advance.

The terms were always the same, whether a Cougar had asked for guidance in finding a mate or if the goddess just decided they needed to go. The male Cougar had two weeks to convince his woman to stay with him or else he’d be cursed to spend the rest of his life in his animal form ... or at least, until the woman came around.

Ellery, Miles, and Hannah—Steven’s younger sister—had gotten drafted onto Team Foye, and while there’d been plenty of conflict, eventually they’d all gotten to points where they were doing a little better than just tolerating their men. They actually
liked
being around the Foye men. Good for the brothers, because they sure as shit weren’t going to get any love from Belle anytime soon.

“I’m sorry you’re having to spend your vacation time on this, Steven,” Mason said. “We thought we’d only need you for a week or two. If we’d thought she was going to keep running at it like this—”

“Hey, don’t worry about it, man,” Steven said.

“You’ve got to be out of vacation time now,” Hank said.

“I am.” Steven paused to scoop up Belle’s clothes and held them out to her.

Rolling her eyes, she snatched them.

“But don’t sweat it,” he said through clenched teeth. He may have been speaking to Hank, but his dark gaze was locked on Belle. “I took a leave of absence. I’ll stay in New Mexico for as long as I have to until I’m confident Hannah’s life here is stable. The way I see it, having someone on the ranch run recklessly toward a portal to hell without explaining why qualifies as a destabilizing factor. What the hell are you trying to do, woman?”

Yet again, Belle rolled her eyes. She stopped walking long enough to step into her panties and scoffed. “Well, well. Yet another overbearing big brother who thinks he knows more about how his sister should take care of herself than she does. Yeah, you deserve a pat on the back for sure.” She balled her right hand into a fist. “Turn around so I can give you one.”

Steven pushed up an eyebrow and folded his arms over his chest.

He wasn’t a Cougar male, so it was going to be harder for her to frustrate him, but she had absolutely no qualms about trying. Plus, if he were annoyed, perhaps her inner cat would stop eyeing him as the next thing she needed to lick clean.

“Hannah can take care of herself,” Belle said. “She had to for a long time without any help from you, didn’t she?”

“That’s a low blow.”

She shrugged. She hadn’t lied. He and the other members of the Welch family were the reasons Hannah—a newly turned Were-cougar and the glaring’s avenger—was a neurotic ball of emotions. They’d made her feel like it wasn’t okay for her to be herself, even before she was a Cougar, and they’d been absolutely wrong. Belle never wanted to feel like she wasn’t the captain of her own ship. That was part of the reason she was skipping town as soon as she could. She just needed to take care of business first—squelching that voice coming from the portal being one item on the list.

Her brothers got her moving again.

Sean tossed her stolen keys at Mason, who snatched them out of the air with ease.

“I’ll drive her home, get her settled in, and talk to her roommates,” Mason said.

“I’ll follow you on my bike, assuming it’s still running,” Steven said.

“It’s running, but I wouldn’t drive it,” Sean said. “You’ve got some damage to the body, and I wouldn’t trust putting it on the road until we can check it out. We’ll store it in the barn until we can get it fixed. Ride into town with Mason tonight.”

“Shit. Perfect end to the night, right?” Steven said. “Licking my wounds in the backseat of a purple punch buggy.”

“Nah, Belle will sit in the back,” Mason said. “Harder for her to get out.”

“Screw you,” Belle muttered. She wrenched away from his grip yet again and shoved her feet into her shoes. She was sick of them talking about her and making plans pertaining to her as if she weren’t standing right there with them.

Story of her life, really. She really wished it weren’t the case, but it had been since their father had died five years ago. Their age gap was possibly to blame. There was a gap of a little over ten years between her and Sean. Her brothers would probably always see her as a child. In spite of her mother’s urging, she couldn’t just ignore it. She deserved respect but, if not that, some autonomy. It really wasn’t that much to ask for.

“
Belle!
” came that voice from the portal.

Damn it, not again.
Belle clapped her hands over her ears and ran. Not toward the hellmouth, but toward her car. If she couldn’t investigate that voice, the best thing she could do was get away from it and bide her time. If she were lucky, it wouldn’t follow her into her sleep and plead with her until she tried again to get inside.

And she
would
get inside to put an end to the mystery. Good or evil, she’d deal with whatever the entity was in her own way ... even if she had to resort to creative means to get Steven Welch off her back. If he planned on making himself so damned convenient, perhaps she’d just get him onto
his
back.

She snorted and slumped in the backseat of her car, cutting him a glare as he folded his long body into the shotgun seat.

That’ll put him off for sure.

Steven felt like he was the Incredible Hulk and had showed up late for fairy princess ballet class instead of a meeting with the Avengers.

He stood in the doorway of Belle’s small rental house with his duffel bag at his feet and her roommates giving him the sort of wary stares little kids gave to their parents when they threatened to cancel trick-or-treating.

He gave them a little wave, hoping to disarm them. “Hi, ladies.”

They blinked at him.

Mason emerged from the back of the house, and the ladies stood from the sofa.

“She’s got to be at work by seven,” he said.

“So do I,” the roommate with the messy dark brown ponytail said. “We usually walk there together.”

Mason shrugged. “Steven’s been watching her for weeks. You’ve probably seen him walking the block and wondered who he was. Now you know he’s here because my addle-brained little sister has mistaken the portal on the ranch as being the entrance to the beauty parlor or something, and she needs to constantly be pulled back from it. You should be relieved there’s a good reason you kept seeing him walk past.”

“I would have been okay never knowing that my cousin’s been trying to fling herself into hell,” the roommate with curly blond hair said. “My father is going to kill me if he finds out there’s a guy here, by the way.”

“Tell him I’m a cop,” Steven muttered. “That usually goes over well.”

“You don’t look like a cop.”

“You want me to flash my badge at you? Unfortunately, I left it back in Raleigh. You’ll have to take my word for it.”

She blinked at him again.

Ponytail roomie said, “You don’t have a gun in that bag, do you?”

“Of course I do. A few knives, too, but don’t worry—I’m perfectly proficient in the safe use and storage of all of them.”

“Not worried. Just wondering.” She shrugged. Giving curly a nudge, she added, “He might eat us out of house and home, but he’ll probably be cheaper than installing an alarm.”

“Why were you thinking about installing an alarm?” Mason asked. “If you’ve been having problems, Belle certainly hasn’t said anything about them.”

Curly shrugged. Seemed to be the gesture of the night. “I guess Belle doesn’t tell you much of anything. Truth is, there’s a couple of vacant rentals nearby. One right next door and one across the street. We suspect that there are some ...” She cringed. “Unsavory characters squatting in them at night. Belle sometimes goes out to confront them when they’re being disruptive, and they’ll go away for a couple of days.”

“Are you kidding me?” Mason gave his hair a yank and growled. “Just call the police next time.”

Steven cleared his throat.

“Never mind,” Mason said. “Just tell him.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Steven said.

“How?” Curly asked.

“You let me worry about that, and don’t question it, so you’ll have plausible deniability if shit goes cattywampus later.”

Curly’s cheek twitched. Obviously, those weren’t the comforting words she’d been hoping for.

Mason glanced at his watch and then headed toward the door. “Sorry to skip out, but I’ve got to get some sleep. My girl goes to work early, and my kid wakes up before the sun. Call me in the morning.”

“Yep.”

Ponytail roomie gave Mason a little wave. “Bye, Mason,” she whispered.

“Bye, ladies.”

Ponytail sighed.

She had to have known her
obvious
crush on Mason would go unrequited. For one thing, at thirty-three, he was too damned old for her. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty, which was how old Belle happened to be, too. For another, Mason loved his fiancée and everyone in town knew it. The alpha wasn’t exactly shy about it.

Ponytail would probably get over it soon enough.

The door slammed shut behind Mason, and the gazes of both ladies slipped to Steven.

He bobbed his eyebrows at them.

He would have never imagined in a thousand years that flying to New Mexico to check on his semidisappeared little sister would turn into a weeks-long foray into supernatural subterfuge. Hannah could probably take care of herself, and over the past few weeks of watching her adjust to life in the Cougar glaring, he became increasingly convinced that if shit went down, the Foyes would take care of her. Sean, especially. He liked her and wanted to keep her, bless his heart.

She didn’t need Steven to babysit her, but apparently the youngest Foye sibling did. He was keeping an eye on Belle as a favor to Mason. The quick-and-dirty debriefing he’d gotten from the Family Foye was that female Cougars became agitated by male Cougars—relatives or not—and sometimes behaved recklessly to spite them. Since Steven
wasn’t
a Cougar and because he had certain qualifications, it made sense that he keep an eye on the brat for as long as he could.

He just hadn’t thought it would be
that
long. The folks back in Raleigh were hounding him by phone every day to see when he’d come back to work, and he didn’t know what to tell them except more lies. He’d taken time off to “care for a sick loved one”—Hannah, who’d been mauled by a wayward Cougar and turned into one herself. The problem with that lie was that he happened to work at the same police department as his father, and his father didn’t know shit about Hannah anymore. Steven could tell he was frothing at the mouth all the way from New Mexico.

Good times.

Ponytail roommate extended a hand to shake. “I’m Alex.”

Steven shook it. “Steven Welch.”

“Welch.” She narrowed her eyes. “So you’re ...”

“Right. Hannah’s brother.”

“Ah.” She raised her chin and grunted.

“What’s with the
ah
? I haven’t been around long enough for my reputation to catch up to me.”

Alex folded her hands atop her lap and nodded in an
okay, sure
fashion.

The curly blonde extended her hand next. “Lily. I’m Belle’s cousin. My dad is her mother’s brother.”

He shook her hand. “I figured there’d have to be some relatives somewhere who weren’t Foyes.”

“Plenty of us. Hey, do me a favor and don’t answer the phone if it rings, okay? My dad is paranoid with a Fox Mulder sort of ferocity.”

“Hey, now. You’re too young to have watched
The
X-Files
when it aired. And I don’t blame him.” Steven leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms over his chest. “I would be, too.”

Which probably made Steven a lot different from his own father. His pop had pretty much tossed Hannah to the sharks and said, “Swim, baby, swim.” Hannah had, but she’d sure as hell gotten chewed up a bit as a result.