The Cougar's Trade (7 page)

She didn’t say anything, and that
why, why, why
part of his brain made him look down at her. She was chewing the inside of her cheek and staring at the uneven sidewalk they’d navigated. Maybe she just didn’t have anything to add, which was fine. He didn’t really expect her to, but he didn’t like feeling ignored. It made his animal side mouthy and reckless, and he couldn’t afford to lose control with so many Cougars watching his every move.

He stopped her in front of Mike Sheehan’s veterinary practice and turned her to face him. “I’m just going to check in and see how much of a runaround the staff will give me.”

She nodded, yet again, not bothering to meet his gaze. The needy cat in his head that wanted to be stroked and coddled was angry at the snubbing. He wanted to be paid attention to, and the man Hank was ruining it for him. Hank rolled his eyes. The cat would just have to deal.

The receptionist let out a long, chesty sigh the moment he opened the door. Of course she knew him, and not just from his repeated visits. Katrine was in the glaring, and the Delacroixs were another old family in the area. Fortunately, they’d never made any outright overtures that they wanted someone other than a Foye in the alpha role. They were more passive in their disrespect.

“He’s not here and I don’t know where any of them are,” Katrine said preemptively. Her gaze tracked past him to the doorway Miles remained in. Katrine scented the air and furrowed her forehead. “Who’s that?”

Hank ignored the question. “You can’t really have me believe you’re still carrying on business as usual after a month with the good doctor being gone.”

“I never said we were. I told you we haven’t heard from him, but we still have to come in.”

“You can’t blame me for finding that hard to believe.”

“Believe it or not, Hank, I can’t change your mind.”

“You board pets?” Miles asked softly.

“Yeah, some long-term. For deployed military personnel and those sorts of folks. Also have some horses boarded just outside the town limits. If it weren’t for the fact the office manager has access to the payroll system, we’d all be in deep shit right now. Bills are piling up and we don’t even have the right credentials to log in to Dr. Sheehan’s computer to cut checks. We’re kind of running in gray mode here. Turning away new customers and sending anyone who needs immediate care to the competition. I don’t know how much longer I can stay here myself. Too risky.”

“Have you worked here long?” Miles asked Katrine.

“Five years,” Katrine said.

Miles approached the counter and rested her forearms on top, twining her fingers. It wasn’t all that high, but even that looked like a strain for her.

She couldn’t intimidate so much as a toddler away from a pile of fresh leaves, so of course he wanted to pull her over, wrap her into his shirt, and hide her from the world. That was his inner cougar’s idea. Hank suppressed a groan. The cat was just fine with their convenient arrangement and insisted he reap the perks of having a mate, starting with the bedroom ones. His inner cougar wanted to know if she was a whisperer or a screamer. Hank had no intention of finding out. His cougar also didn’t seem concerned that Hank was going to have to pay up somehow for the favor. Animals rarely concerned themselves with the future. They were too busy getting the needs of the moment met. Obviously, his cougar thought he needed
her
, or at least very specific parts of her.

Involuntarily, Hank let his gaze track down the back of her body and settled on her hips, her ass.

I bet she’s a whisperer.

Hank discreetly adjusted his crotch. With much more of the salacious imagery the animal half of his brain was streaming to his man half, Hank would be sporting a painful erection in under a minute. Just because a quarter of the town, probably, had seen him naked before or after shifting didn’t mean he wanted them to see him primed and ready to go. They’d be able to guess the cause.

“Do you know where Dr. Sheehan and his family might go on vacation?” Miles asked. Apparently, while he and his inner cougar were having a battle of propriety, she was concerning herself with the glaring issues
he
should have been investigating.

Already, she’s got me screwing up.

Katrine leaned back in her seat and fidgeted with the collar of her puppy-print scrub shirt. She rolled her gaze to the ceiling. “I know what you’re getting at, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. They don’t have any time-shares or vacation property that I know of, but they do have an RV. I forgot about that old, ugly-ass thing. It’d be a miracle if they made it as far as the state line in it, though. Looks like a roving meth lab.”

Shit
. Hank dragged his hand through his hair and gave it a little tug at the end. If the Sheehans were constantly on the move, they might be impossible to nail down. They could have been making circuits around Mexico. Wouldn’t take them a lot of money to get by there, assuming they had access to any.

“Are there other groups—um,
glarings
—that would take them in?” Miles asked her.

Pointless, because he’d already asked her and every woman in the clinic that question.

“None nearby,” Katrine said. “Any glarings in the Four Corners states would call Mason and try to get a reference about them. Nobody wants to pull troublemakers into their group.”

“You believe they’re troublemakers?” Miles asked.

And damn her, Katrine answered. It was just a shrug, but it was telling enough. She wouldn’t have given Hank even that much, just out of orneriness.

His inner cat thought that was a damn hoot.

“Sorry. I’m talking you to death and I didn’t even say hello.” Miles extended her hand across the counter. “Miles Bennett.”

“Look how cute you are.” Katrine shook it. “Katrine Delacroix. You’re new around here, I guess. You’ll probably hear my last name a lot around here. We Delacroixs are a fertile bunch. Not too many boneheaded boys in our lot, either.” She rolled her eyes at Hank.

He just shook his head. There was too little respect all around in the glaring. Made Mason’s job harder, and Hank always felt like he needed to go behind the guy cracking the whip to make sure everyone carried out their promises. It was a concern for later, though. Katrine was apparently in a chatty mood for once, so as much as the lack of respect for the glaring hierarchy perturbed him, he’d have to let it slide.

“Yep. New,” Miles said. “First day out.”

“Well, I’ll give you a little word of advice. Don’t tell anyone you’re associated with
this
knucklehead just yet. You smell like him a little, so there won’t be much way around it soon, but if you want to make friends before they figure out you got saddled with Fabio for a mate, you might want to keep a few paces between the two of you.”

Eyes wide, Miles looked back at him.

Oh, so
now
she looks at me.
“You make me sound like a psychopath,” he said.

“You’ve got a reputation, and you know it,” Katrine said. “Be less of an asshole going forward and maybe the rumor will disperse.”

“How does being practical translate into assholery?”

Katrine leaned forward and grabbed the ringing phone off the hook. “Sheehan Veterinary, please hold.” She pressed the red button and set the handset into the receiver. “Oh, you’ve always been
practical
, Hank, even in high school. When everyone else was worried about what they’d be wearing to Homecoming, you were—”

“Don’t go there,” he interrupted. It was the past. No use bringing that shit up—about what decisions he had to make long before he was ready to make them. It’d been passion versus reality, and in the end, cold, hard reality had won. When deciding between hobbies and helping his family earn money, the latter won out. He’d made his choices, and he couldn’t take them back.

She shrugged. “Fine, but like I was saying, practicality is adult and expected, but it’s okay to be kind at the same time. Customer Service 101. First lesson’s free. Next time, I’ll charge you.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

Miles turned one of her pearls and stared at his face. Not at his eyes, but someplace lower. She didn’t say anything, just looked. Then her gaze tracked up to his eyes, and she turned to Katrine. “Thank you for your time. I’ll let you get back to your phone call.” She backed toward the door, and cringed, snapping her fingers. “Uh, just one more thing. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, sweetie. What do you need?”

The woman would probably track down the grave digger and apologize to him for the inconvenience before drawing her last breath.
That had to get wearying for the people around her.

“Do you know how Edgar got his hands on the tranquilizer he injected Ellery with? Did he steal it from the clinic himself, or did Dr. Sheehan give it to him?”

Now it was Hank’s turn to stare.
Who does she think she is?
He’d already asked all those questions, only to have them responded to with hostility.

Katrine pursed her lips and shook her head. “I wish I could tell you one way or the other.”

Hank threw up his hands. “Obviously, the goddess hasn’t finished punishing me.”

“You all right, Hank? You sound like you’ve been hanging around Darnell too much. I think Exam Room Two is empty if you need to lie down, but there might be some sheltie hair on the table.”

He rolled his eyes.

She rolled hers right back.

Miles gave them both a mildly chastising look that Hank hadn’t seen the likes of since tenth grade. Cougar girls were always getting him into trouble in English class. The rookie teacher had no idea that all the fuss came down to shapeshifter hormones. Cougar teens bickered, even over the pettiest shit. It had something to do with territorialism, supposedly. The teacher had found out later there wasn’t a damn thing different she could have done, though. She’d unknowingly married into the glaring and had a crash course about supernatural shenanigans.

Apparently, Miles needed to have one, too.

“Answer the question, will you?” he said.

Katrine glared at him. “I really don’t know,
Miles
. Does it matter, though? What’s that phrase?” She narrowed her eyes as she thought. “Perception of guilt, I think. Whether Doc gave it to him or not doesn’t matter. We’re all going to assume his hands are unclean because he’s gone. They’re all gone.”

Miles nodded. “Thank you.”

“Any time.”

Any time
. No one had ever said that to Hank, not even his own mother.

“’Bye, Fabio.” Katrine snapped her wrist in his general direction as if he were a dead fly she wanted off her desk.

“A little respect wouldn’t kill you, Katrine.”

“Probably wouldn’t, but you know how we women are. You walk in here throwing around all that testosterone, and our brains go
douche alert! Douche alert!
If you want to blame anyone, blame the goddess. She’s the one who wired us women to give you fools a hard time.” She waggled her eyebrows and picked up the phone’s receiver.

He ground his back molars, and followed Miles outside. Katrine might have been right about the female Cougar’s propensity to continuously punish the male of the race, but Miles wasn’t a Cougar. That didn’t make her disregard of protocols any more forgivable. There was an order and structure to the glaring for a reason, and if his own mate was going to subvert it, how could he expect anyone else to get in line?

He moved her a bit past the veterinary office’s glass door so Katrine couldn’t read their lips. “We need to have a discussion about the glaring hierarchy.”

“The chain of command, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“What about it?”

“Specifically your place in it.”

She turned her earring, and her guileless gaze moved to the street at her right, and then back to him. She swallowed. “I didn’t think I was in it at all.”

“Everyone’s in it.”

Her gaze tracked to the right again, and this time he followed it.

She looked across the street to where a woman tried to wrest a flailing child into the backseat of a county car. Had to be a caseworker, given they were right in front of the social services building.

“Poor little thing.” Miles started across the street, whether to assist the woman or the child, he couldn’t tell. It seemed to Hank the lady was worthy of more pity at the moment. She’d sweated out her suit jacket, and one of the attached ties at the neck of her blouse hung down in tatters.

Shit. Kid’s one of ours.

Of course a Cougar child would fight harder, and that’s what Jamie Fitz was. Miles wouldn’t have known that, though. She wouldn’t recognize many Cougars on sight or be able to feel their auras the way Ellery did. She was just a tenderhearted stranger who saw a struggle and wanted to help.

Where the hell is Jamie’s mother?

Hank didn’t bother stopping Miles because he suspected she was going to intercede anyway. They could argue about it later—when they
weren’t
in front of someone who didn’t know what he and Jamie were, and when he was certain Jamie was in the best possible care. He and Mason likely would have intervened anyway as soon as they’d gotten word about the child’s whereabouts, but apparently, because of Miles, he’d have to be more proactive.

She quickened her pace to a sprint as Jamie’s shrieks became louder, her wrenching more violent. Miles got as close as she dared, keeping her hands in her pockets and moving as the child did so she could see her.

“You’re going to get so tired,” she said sweetly to Jamie, who stopped flailing long enough to look at Miles. Had it been Hank, she probably wouldn’t have stopped. Curse of the male Cougar.

The social worker used that moment of calm to try to get her into the backseat again, but once more, she started to thrash.

“I’ve been wrestling with her all morning,” the social worker said, and set the child on the ground next to the back tire as if to rethink her strategy.

“I’m a hospital nurse,” Miles whispered, “so I know the system pretty well, and I know you can’t tell me anything specific. I just…understand.”