The Cougar's Bargain (35 page)

“Patience.” He tugged her earlobe between his teeth and let it snap inward.

She dug her fingers against his back, and ground against his thigh as he leaned over and pulled open his nightstand drawer. From within, he pulled out a bottle of lubricant and a condom.

“Just one?”

He sat back onto his heels, smirking as he unrolled the rubber onto himself. “Don't bite off more than you can chew.”

Looking at his hard, thick length, she thought that maybe he had a point.

He slipped lubed fingers between her legs and inside her, and then squeezed more of the jelly onto himself. “You could always back out. I won't think badly of you.”

“Why wait? I want you
now
.”

“Maybe you'll change your mind tomorrow.”

“I'm not going to change my mind.”

“How do you know?” He settled between her legs and she wrapped them around his thighs.

She arched up to draw his full bottom lip into her mouth, and lingered there to kiss him more. She wanted to put everything she had into that kiss so he knew she wasn't going to change her mind and that he was so welcome there.

His lower head probed against her thigh, then higher.

She stopped kissing then, because she couldn't kiss and hold her breath at the same time.

“Relax,” he whispered against her lips. “I'm gonna go slow until you tell me you like it.”

“Maybe I'll like it too much.”

“From where I'm lying, that's a good problem.”

“I could use more good problems.”

He pushed against her, and it was all pressure she thought would leave bruises, and then the fiery stretch that had her gasping into his open mouth—the one that made her want to stop, because obviously nothing that started so badly would ever feel good.

But that wasn't true. Shifting felt bad, but once she landed on her four feet or stood back up onto two, she felt like magic embodied. Some people said sex was like that. Maybe it was just a matter of letting it be.

“More?” he whispered.

“Yes,” she said while shaking her head.

He chuckled and pressed farther into her, increasing the pressure, the pain, the insanity. “More?”

“God, is there more?”

“Yep.”

“I shouldn't complain, right?”

“The way it'll work is you'll tell me what feels good, and I'll do more of it. And what you don't like, we won't do.” He slipped in a little bit farther—perhaps to the end of her, though she couldn't say for sure. She was having a hard time making sense of what she was feeling. The pressure was too intense and the whole area was just big thrum of energy.

“What about what you want?” she asked.

“It all feels good to me.”

She didn't believe that, really, but couldn't refute it because his lips and tongue were so sinfully tantalizing against hers, she couldn't remember to breathe, much less object.

She didn't want to object to anything at the moment. As he pulled at her lips, and set his teeth against her jaw between kisses, he moved slowly in and out of her. Less burn, still plenty of pressure, but something in her mind latched onto the idea that pressure wasn't bad. Pressure led to explosions—small and large—and that was natural and expected, not just with physical things, but emotional ones, too.

The old god whose name she didn't know had said her heart needed to be guarded, and she couldn't refute that. Had Sean heard him? “You know … I'm a mess … right?”

“Mm-hmm,” he hummed against her lips, and settled his body lower, crushing her breasts. “Messy weirdo. Sounds like someone else I know.”

She hooked her feet together around his knees and gasped at the delicious friction against her tender clit.

“I'm … not going to make this … easy for you.”

“You're making it
so
easy, baby.” He swiveled his hips and somehow made more room for himself.

Less friction, more glide, and the bright, tingling starburst he kept sparking each time the head of his cock massaged some spot just beneath her belly button …

“Oh,
God
.”

“More of that?”

“Yes. I like that.”

As promised, he increased his speed incrementally, pausing every so often as if to await her consent, which she gave readily.

“I'm not so easy, either,” he said. “I'm going to follow you around like a hungry cat that you were kind to one time long ago and now keeps coming back.”

“So you can keep people from making me cry?” She wanted to cry. For no good reason, she just needed to. But if she cried, he was going to stop, and she didn't want him to stop. She though she could get high from his touches, drunk off his kisses, and she'd never before wanted so badly to be under the influence.

“Because you deserve to be happy and I want to make sure that you are.”

“But are—
mmm
…” She didn't know to expect that wave that rippled over her and stole her breath, because it just wasn't the same as the other times. It felt complete, like it was gripping her heart and everything else that mattered inside of her and stealing it away, only for it all to fall back into place better than it was before.

She opened her eyes to see Sean hovering over her, who resumed his thrusts as her body came to rest again. “Are
you
happy?”

“Are you kidding? I'm the luckiest Cougar in the glaring.”

“Why's that?”

“Hannah …” He gripped her hips and put his head back as his cock convulsed inside her. “We fit.”

Though her brain was foggy and reflexes slow from the magic her orgasm had cast, she knew his words were truth. “Yeah, we do.”

He rolled off of her, and her eyelids fell closed.

She counted his footsteps as he padded to the bathroom, then back, and reflexively rolled onto her side to let him spoon her.

I'm being spooned!

He tucked her hair behind her ear and kissed just below it. “In spite of you trying to stab me once or twice, I'm gonna love you. You know that, right?”

“Is that a promise?”

Silly question.

He'd never told her a lie. She'd certainly told him plenty, but she didn't need to anymore. But it was still easier for her to whisper than to shout. Maybe some day she wouldn't feel so shy about it.

“I hope you will,” she said. “It'll make it easier for me to love you, too.”

 

 

Holley Trent is the author of more than forty works of diverse contemporary, paranormal, and erotic romance. Although raised in rural North Carolina, she currently resides on the Colorado Front Range. A Southern girl at heart, she occasionally wears flip-flops in winter and still sometimes forgets which time zone she's in.

Learn more about her Desert Guards series at her website, www.holleytrent.com. While you're there, sign up for her paranormal romance newsletter so you don't miss the next installment in the saga that started with
A Demon in Waiting
—where the fallen angel Gulielmus makes his first appearance.

 

Miles Bennett eyed the sewing table in her sort-of jailer Glenda Foye's living room corner and wondered if there was anything inside its drawers that could make her bleed. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and Miles was nearing the despairing precipice where she'd throw herself in front of a ravening vampire just to stave off the symptoms of her disorder. Ever since her diagnosis as a preteen, she never liked playing it so close with her hemochromatosis—she hated being unproductive due to her body not being at peak efficiency—but lately, her life had gone a bit off-kilter. Because of her busy nursing job and a summer camping trip gone sideways, it'd been nearly four months since she'd sidled up to her favorite phlebotomist to give up a pint of precious O positive.

The joint aches from the excess of iron in her blood were dull warnings at the moment, but the abdominal pains would probably come soon. The fatigue had already set in, but she'd explained the warning signs away and said they were simply due to her circumstances. After all, anyone would have been tired if they'd been abducted and held in captivity for a month within walking distance to an open portal to hell.

While vampires didn't exist—as far as she knew—and couldn't relieve her of some blood, Were-cougars did. They didn't want to bite her, though. One wanted her for a mate. Her friends, too. One—Ellery—was already paired off, and happily. Miles and Hannah were kept in limbo, held captive by their abductors' mother with no access to a phone or computer for nearly a month. It seemed the men couldn't tell whose mate, precisely, was whose, and they wouldn't let them leave. They
couldn't
, actually. Their goddess would curse them if Miles and Hannah didn't stay.

I could go on a hunger strike. If I pass out, someone would have to take me to the hospital
.

She pondered the implementation of such of plan, then laughed quietly. Glenda would have been so annoyed. Not because Miles had tried to get away, but because Miles didn't tell her she needed medical care. She could say a lot of things about the woman, but Miles could never say Glenda was cruel. In fact, Miles admired the woman, and pitied her for being thrust into her Cougar sons' numerous messes. “A weaker woman would have broken a long time ago.”

Miles slumped lower on the sofa as Hannah cut her a sideways speculative look.

“Ignore me,” Miles said, and closed her eyes.

“Stop giving me reasons to worry, then.”

Miles ground her palms against her eyes, and caught from her skin a lingering whiff of Glenda's excessively decadent cinnamon rolls. The woman behaved as if feeding Miles to death would make her forget her circumstances. The men had been sent on a hunt for mates by their goddess,
La Bella Dama
, and apparently she saw something in Miles, Hannah, and Ellery that had made them worth abducting. The Foye brothers had snatched them out of their tent in Utah and driven them to their mother's ranch in New Mexico.

It was obvious to Miles why Ellery would have had a celestial target on her head. Her best friend of ten years had been hiding the fact she was an air witch, and evidently, a pretty powerful one. She made the perfect mate to the Cougar group—or
glaring
—leader. Mason was alpha as all get-out, and Ellery was the epitome of Type A. They suited each other, and had quickly realized it.

Miles could even think of a few reasons why the angry blonde sitting opposite to her on the sofa would catch a goddess's attention. Hannah wasn't afraid of a fight. In fact, she'd been doing nothing but fighting—mostly with words—since they'd arrived on the Foyes' New Mexican ranch. She could probably handle anything, provided she worked up enough indignation. She wasn't even afraid of the demons that popped up anymore. They just annoyed her.

As for Miles, she couldn't guess why she'd been included in the haul, except that, perhaps, she was convenient. It had been a long month in comfortable captivity with her angry, agitated friend, but Miles didn't have any anger. Fear of the uncertain? Yes. But it was hard for her to be angry when she wasn't so certain who deserved the blame. Anger needed to have somewhere to go.

“We've got to stand firm,” Hannah leaned across the sofa to whisper. Again. She'd already said it six times that morning by Miles's count, the first having been right after they'd rolled off the twin beds in Glenda's guest bedroom.

“You don't need to keep saying it,” Miles told Hannah softly. Probably
too
softly. She never wanted to hurt anyone's feelings, even if they deserved it. The second time Hannah had whispered that reminder had been as they'd descended the staircase for breakfast, and the third time had been right after that, as they sat at Glenda's kitchen table.

Hannah had been hissing and whispering so much in the two hours since then that Miles had started tuning her out in the same way she'd tuned out all the people in the last house she'd lived in before aging out of foster care. They talked and talked and talked, and having nothing of her own to contribute, she'd learned how to confine their ramblings into their own frequency. And, as if the inside of her head were a radio she could turn off, she just…
did
.

Of course, that didn't work so well when the noise she tuned out came from a person who could get close and yank her sleeve.

“Stand. Firm,” Hannah said, enunciating each word for emphasis. “Just because Ellery fell for it doesn't mean you have to. Two weeks, right? That's when their curse kicks in, doesn't it? All we have to do is refuse them until then.”

And doom them to short lives as cats.

Ellery had clued them in to the curse's terms after she'd accepted Mason, hoping it'd make them less fearful about why they were there. Cougar men bore their goddess's curse. Once
La Bella Dama
chose a man to embark on a mate hunt, they had two weeks from the moment their inner beast latched on to their would-be mate to convince her to accept him. If they failed, they'd spend the rest of their lives on four furry legs; hence the reason the women weren't allowed to leave—not until Hank and Sean had their two weeks' chance at their mates. According to Ellery, the only reason they'd delayed their hunt for so long was because neither of them had spent enough time around Miles or Hannah for their inner cats to wake up and tell them
that's the one
. They were stalling, for sure, but of course they would have. None of the men had been ready for mates in the first place.

Miles turned her head slowly and took in her patriot of a friend. It'd been a rough month for both of them, full of revelations about supernatural things they hadn't known existed, and learning about Ellery's true nature. If it weren't for that camping trip, Ellery probably would have never told them. Well, she still hadn't told them so much as
showed
them. It was funny the things you could learn about a person when they were being attacked by demons.