The Cougar's Trade Read online

  “All set? We’re going to go with who we decided on earlier, right?” Sean asked Hank.

  Hank rolled his eyes and muttered, “I don’t see any reason not to. Logic makes more sense than your idea of flipping a coin.”

  “A coin?” Miles looked to Glenda, aghast.

  She whispered, “I’m going to have to trust they know what they’re doing. I’m not a Cougar.”

  Sean skirted around the coffee table and gave Miles’s shoulder, which Glenda’s arm had vacated, a squeeze.

  “Hey, short stuff. Look. I’m touchin’ ya.”

  “You sure are.” And she felt nothing for him besides pity. She put on a smile for him, but it was as phony as she knew his was. She’d seen his happy grins, and the one he wore at the moment didn’t match by a long shot.

  “Yeah. I think so.” Hank looked at Hannah and canted his head toward the door. “Do we want to be civil, or do I need to endure the kicking-and-screaming deal?”

  Hannah cracked each and every one of her knuckles and glowered at him.

  Miles sighed and stood. She took Sean’s elbow when he offered it.

  “Gotta run some errands in town. If you’d like to have lunch, I could show you around.”

  She nodded, probably too fast and too much. “Sure. That’ll…that’ll be fine.”

  Maybe his goddess will take pity on him and let him out of this mess. She wanted to go ahead and apologize to Glenda and tell her, “I’m sorry, I can’t. It’s not him, it’s me,” but she couldn’t get her voice to work. She could hardly move her feet.

  Sean led her outside, past Glenda on the porch, and they started across the yard toward his own small house where he’d left his pickup truck. He made some unobtrusive small talk that Miles answered without thought. She couldn’t manage much more than a simple yes or no because she was giving herself a mental talking-down from the ordeal. There was nothing wrong with Sean Foye. Not a thing. He was a great guy. Maybe she’d even connect with him a bit as time went on. Who knew what two weeks would bring?

  “Sean!” Hank shouted across the yard.

  They stopped, and Miles’s heart seemed to stop right along with it.

  What now?

  “Come back.”

  Sean turned. “’Sup?”

  “Does this feel right to you?”

  Sean cringed and locked his fingers behind his head, tipping his cowboy hat back. He looked down at Miles and pushed up one red eyebrow. “Should be,” he said softly.

  “Based on what?” she asked. Maybe he knows it’s not right deep down, too.

  “Sorry to be so impersonal about it, but we had to guess based on the position you’d have in the glaring. Mason knew Ellery was his because the goddess told him in a dream, but she was vague about the two of you. Her missions sometimes come with mysteries that need to be unraveled first.”

  “Sean?” Hank called, and the impatience in his voice was hard to miss.

  Miles leaned sideways to look around Sean’s body. Hank stood with hands crossed over his chest, and Hannah mirrored him, giving him a scowl in exchange for his.

  Sean looked down at Miles, and his eyebrows disappeared into the shadow cast by his hat. “Please don’t take offense. We have no idea what we’re doing. You know we wouldn’t have done this at all if we’d had the chance to opt out. The last folks we knew of who did this were from my mom and dad’s generation. And since Dad’s dead, we don’t know how this is supposed to play out. There’s no rule book. I’m sorry if you feel jerked around.”

  “It’s really hard for me to be upset knowing you did what you did to survive. I’m not happy about it, but I forgive you.”

  “Yep. Figured you would. That’s why we assumed you’d be mine.”

  What does that mean?

  He grabbed her arm and hurried her back toward Glenda’s. They all met in the middle between Sean’s house and his mother’s. Sean gave her a little nudge toward Hank. Hannah stood firm, arms crossed, grinding her teeth.

  “Gonna be like that, huh?” Sean asked her, smirking.

  “You’ll get exactly what you deserve.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  Miles started when Hank pressed his hand between her shoulder blades.

  “Sorry,” he said. “We need to put a little distance between us and them so I can see if it feels different.”

  She didn’t know what he meant, but she didn’t ask him to explain, either. She knew it’d just be more preternatural mumbo jumbo that’d fly right over her head.

  He walked her about twenty yards away from smirking Sean and sniping Hannah, and muttered, “Yeah, that’s her pick. Odd.”

  “Whose pick? Your goddess’s?”

  No response beyond a grunt. He waved to his mother on the porch, who nodded and turned her attention to the arguing couple near her dry birdbath.

  “Come with me?” Hank crooked his thumb toward Woodworks, where he and his brothers spent their days cranking out high-end custom furniture and cabinetry. “I need to make a call, and then I need to do a couple of Cougar things. Gonna bore you to tears, but I can’t let you out of my sight. Sorry. It’s got to be better than being locked up at Mom’s, though.”

  Gonna be like that, huh? Just like Sean had said. Miles didn’t see a point in wasting her energy on soothing her ego, but there was a bitter aftertaste to having been the one he wouldn’t have picked if it weren’t for his goddess. He hadn’t wanted her, and apparent masochist that she was, she’d entertained more than a few thoughts about having him. She wanted to know what it was about him that made his mother sigh so wistfully whenever she said his name. And how he managed to make people on the ranch laugh so hard while keeping such a straight face.

  She hadn’t really expected to be swept off her feet, but at the very least, she’d hoped for a little spark. Ellery and Mason had insulted each other at every turn for days, but they’d had a spark. Ellery admitted it. Maybe Miles shouldn’t have expected a single occurrence to be the start of a pattern. Hank still hadn’t really looked at her.

  He headed toward Woodworks, and she followed at his side, just a step behind him.

  The picture of the ideal man she’d carried in her brain from the time she was twelve didn’t resemble the Cougar ahead of her in the slightest bit. She’d always assumed she’d end up with some man who thought creased khakis and boat shoes were the height of fashion. Some man with newscaster hair and a closet full of seersucker. Not a man with coppery hair that hung halfway down his back and whose uniform of choice consisted of jeans, steel-toed boots, and flannel shirts in every color of the rainbow—including puce.

  Just inside the woodshop, he paused at the bulletin board hung near the side door, studied it, reached into his shirt pocket, quickly rearranged some components on the board, and strode toward the reception area.

  Miles started to follow, but stared at what he’d done, a laugh caught in her throat. The board was full of candid pictures of the Foye brothers; their sister, Belle; Mason’s infant son, Nick; and a few other people close to the family. Along with them were pinnable accessories someone had crafted out of construction paper. Someone had put a leprechaun hat on Hank. Apparently in retribution, he’d put a comical red handlebar mustache on every single Foye, excluding himself. He’d been carrying paper moustaches around in his shirt pocket for exactly that purpose.

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hank shifted the phone to his other ear and watched Mil
es 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

  Tip of your nose slopes upward like your sister’s. Easy to discern who’s who in profile.

  “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.