The Cougar's Bargain (29 page)

Resignation.

He'd compartmentalized all of those powerful feelings and shoved them all back behind a curtain of cheerfulness and enthusiasm when he returned home and settled back into the new Foye routine. He went through the motions, behaving as though nothing bothered him, but in truth, everything did. He didn't even know who he was anymore, besides some indistinct Foye who'd always been the extra
son, the extra brother.

And now, he was second fiddle to his own mate.

A woman like Hannah didn't need him. She'd been fierce and awesome long before she'd encountered him, and being turned into a Cougar only made her more perfect.

He was tired of going through the motions of being respectable, of being trustworthy by other people's standards when they didn't really need him in the first place. He was just an extra body, and Hannah would have certainly known that.

They'd have to hash it out after they got back to the ranch. He had to find some way to support her without dragging her down. After all, Amazons didn't need sidekicks. They needed armies, and she had the perfect lieutenant right there with her.

Hannah and Steven conferred in hushed tones in the front seat of his rental car. Sean slumped low in the backseat, half-listening to Steven's debriefing of what he'd seen inside the house.

Sean had been able to get in touch with the guy with the LinkedIn profile. He'd been understandably wary when Sean asked for the reference, but when Sean explained honestly and tersely why he needed to know, the man wouldn't
stop
talking. Apparently,
Los Impostores
had done the job he'd hired them for, and as part of the contract the client had signed, he could only speak of them in positive terms on public forums, if he had to discuss them at all. So, he couldn't say anything about the mess that came
after
the job. It'd been such a small thing he'd wanted—to have his old wolf pack cut him from the rolls so he could be an independent—and
Los Impostores
were supposed to facilitate that.

They'd gotten the client separated, all right, using a surprising cocktail of blackmail and brutality. The client was still waiting for the other shoe to fall and for the pack to lash back against him and his family, even though he'd originally engaged
Los Impostores
over a year ago.

He was scared, so he'd told Sean what he needed to know.

If they wanted to infiltrate and neutralize
Los Impostores
, they needed to tempt them with a job they couldn't refuse.

Hannah was ready to do just that.

She turned and peered through the seats at Sean, and gave her wig a pat. “Does it smell weird to you? I wonder if it won't be a dead giveaway that I'm not who I say I am.”

“Hannah, they've got to know that people meeting with them aren't going to show up with their real faces on, so to speak.”

“Still, does it?”

Sean let out a long sigh and shrugged. “Yeah, but I know your smell.”
Smells
, rather. Every nuance, every emotion. He wished he could forget them so he didn't immediately think of
her
whenever he walked into a room where she had been. “The better question would be whether or not you smell like
me
through cross-contamination, and if you do, would those who work here be familiar enough with the Foye scent or that of the Cougars in our glaring to recognize it?”

“I keep thinking about that, but I don't think they would. Unless there are more of them infiltrating the Coyote pack than we've been able to make out.”

“I imagine those Coyotes aren't being very forthcoming with information,” Steven said.

Hannah shook her head. “Nope.”

“They've been trying to edge the Cougars out of their territory for at least a hundred years to my knowledge.” Sean put his back to the door and wedged his feet behind Hannah's seat. People over six feet tall just didn't fit well in the backseat of small sedans. It'd be a wonder if he could contort his body the right ways to get out of it. “When my mother's family started the ranch, they had no idea that shapeshifters existed. I imagine that if they did, they might have tried to claim some other spot to raise their cattle on. Cougars were already there then, as were the Coyotes, though Cougars got there first.”

“It's a use it or lose it argument,” Hannah said to Steven. “Cougars don't really clump. They live more or less independently or in family units, not in tight communities like the canines. The families dot the desert, here and there, so there's a lot of sprawl and that naturally increases the area of their territory.”

“Whereas the dogs would construct a bunch more homes closer together in the same square mileage.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, damn. I can see why it'd be a fight, but I'm also a huge believer in the principle of
finder's keepers
.”

“Let's do this. I'm ready to get out of Tucson and get my life in order. Can't do that until we get all these hydras' heads chopped off.” She hitched her thrift store purse up to her shoulder, put on the costume cat-eyed glasses she'd found, and gave her fake auburn hair one more fluff.

He'd been right. Red hair didn't suit her at all.

“Can you see the coffee shop window from here? I'm going to take that table right by the door.”

Steven grunted.

She turned and looked at Sean. “Can you see it?”

Why does she need me if she has Steven?

She snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Don't zone out on me again. You're freaking me out. I need you right now.”

“Do you?”

“
Yes
. Shit. What's gotten into you?”

“Nothing.”

She narrowed her eyes and yanked on her door handle. “Do I need to give you an order? I think I outrank you in the glaring.”

“Of course you do.” The answer seemed to address both parts of what she'd said.

“Get into the front seat.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said glibly.

She exited, and Sean settled down low in her vacated seat with his hood pulled up to cover his hair. They were parked beneath a shady tree probably a hundred feet from the coffee shop door, but turned toward it. They were across the street and down the block from it. There was a bit of a glare on the coffee shop's window from where they sat, but between Sean and Steven, they theoretically should have been able to see any trouble.

Steven drummed on the windowsill and fiddled with the radio knob for a while, keeping his dark gaze locked on Hannah waiting by the shop door. “I can't believe she's gotten herself into this.”

Sean's hands squeezed involuntarily into tight fists he had to shake out. It seemed to be an automatic defense mechanism, but he didn't need to defend Hannah's honor. She did a fine job of handling that herself. “She'll be okay.”

“Yeah, I think she will. If you had asked me last week if she'd been capable of it, I would have said no. Not because she doesn't have the stuff it takes, but because I never thought she'd ever be in a situation where she'd have to prove it.”

“Because when you weren't busy cutting her down, you were keeping her sheltered.” It wasn't a question. It was a calling-out. If Steven took offense to it, Sean knew it'd be because Sean had hit a nerve.

“You can't put the blame on me for that first part, bud, but maybe you're right about the sheltering. Wouldn't you have done the same?”

“I have a sister. Right now, we're kind of on the outs. She doesn't want my kind of help, and I'm going to give her what she wants.”

He was going to give everyone what they wanted, except perhaps himself, but that didn't matter anyway. He couldn't have anything for himself. If he did, they'd all say he was just another selfish cat.

A swarthy man in a black baseball cap and leather jacket—suspicious in the sweltering late-summer heat—joined Hannah in front of the coffee shop. She shook his hand and gestured to the door.

He followed her in, and as she'd said, she took the seat at the window.

“What can you see?” Steven asked.

“I see the yellow of her purse atop the table and I think her wig. The rest is glare.”

“Okay. The smudge of black I see must be his jacket. If they make any large movements, we should be able to catch them. What story did she end up going with? Do you know?”

“No. I assumed she'd told
you
.”

“She didn't tell me a damn thing.” Steven thumped the steering wheel and made the dinky car's horn chirp quietly. “I hope she's not gonna go off the rails with some crazy shit.”

Sean scoffed. “In our world, crazy is normal.”

“I'm starting to see that. And it's crazy, but I think … crazy just might suit her.”

“Meaning?”

Steven shrugged. “It's weird. I think we've talked more in the past couple of days than we have in the last two years. It's nice being able to talk to her.”

“You had plenty of opportunities to in the past.”

“I'm not saying I didn't, but … things were different. She was defensive, and I guess she had the right to be, and that made her hard to talk to.”

“Talk
at
. You were talking
at
her.”

Steven put up his hands in a gesture of conciliation. “Yeah. We were. I'm not gonna argue that. It's what we were used to, I guess.”

“You can't keep letting your parents treat her like that, or they're going to lose their daughter.”

“I don't know what I can do about that, man. You know that saying about teaching old dogs new tricks? I think it was created for people like my parents. There might be some hope for our brothers, but I think with them, things would get worse before they got better. They wouldn't understand why they would have to change. It'd be so much easier for them to just say we need to stop being so fuckin' sensitive about everything.”

“And because of that, you've instilled in her that it's not okay to have a wide range of emotions, and especially not any soft ones.”

“If that's true, I'm sorry.”

“It's true. I've—I
had
been—trying to break down her defenses for weeks. She didn't want to let me in, and I know now it wasn't just because of how we met. She didn't want to let herself think that anything good would come of it. She
assumed
I was using her and that I was going to treat her badly.”

“But you like her.”

Sean did a little more than
like
her. He'd never wanted anyone more in his life, but he was just going to drag her down. He didn't want to be a footnote in Cougar history because he'd been mated to an avenger. He was tired of being a footnote, and tired of feeling so damned resentful about it. “I'm pleased to have been chosen to be her mate.”

“Why do you make it sound like that's a past-tense thing?”

The coffee shop door opened, so Sean didn't have to answer.

Hannah stepped out holding her purse in the crook of her arm and a coffee cup in the other. The man she'd met with shook her hand, relayed some words to her, and started up the sidewalk in the opposite direction from Hannah. She walked slowly down the block, glanced over her shoulder at the retreating man who'd already rounded the corner, and then she crossed the street.

They said nothing until she was in the backseat, bent low, and Steven got the car moving. As planned, he drove to no particular place—just in case she was being watched—and got the car on the highway so he could shake off a tail, if they had one.

After about fifteen minutes of random turns and aggressive driving, Steven pulled off the highway and parked somewhere in the middle of a superstore's crowded lot.

“Well?” he asked.

Hannah sat up, peeling off the wig and freeing her hair from the cap beneath. “He said the company was interested in taking the job and would start putting things together as soon as the deposit was paid. In
cash
.” She laughed. “I'm not sure, but I think he overcharged me.”

“How much did he ask for?”

“Ten thousand dollars to start.”

“Are you kidding me? What did you tell him you wanted them to do?”

She grinned.

Fuck.
Sean didn't like that grin. It was a grin that made his inner cat press against his seams so he could break out and snarl at her. It was a grin that said she invited trouble, because as avenger, she had to sometimes make things worse before she could make them better.

“I gave him a half-truth. I told him that I married into a Cougar group in New Mexico and that we have a little property dispute with some Coyotes.”

“They're going to know which Coyotes.”

She kept on smiling. “And which Cougars, too, and who their alpha is. Hard not to put two and two together.”

Steven let out a strained laugh. “They're gonna get in touch with whichever Coyote hired them, if he isn't one of the ones your Cougar goddess incinerated.”

She smiled some more.

“Gods.” Sean put his head against the rest and closed his eyes. His mate … she was absolutely crazy, and that wiring was what made her a good avenger. He rubbed his eyes. “Oh
shit
.”

Steven said, “What, exactly, just happened? Tell me in dumb-dumb terms what you did, keeping the supernatural mumbo jumbo to a bare minimum.”

Hannah shrugged and crossed her arms over her chest. “Fine. You said you didn't think there were very many of these guys.”

“Right. When I was poking around the basement inside their house-slash-office, I got the distinct impression that there aren't very many of them. It seemed like everything they owned in excess was stored downstairs, and none of it was new. No kid stuff, nothing from the past thirty or forty years. Plus, I had one of my new local friends trace the property record and those associated with it. They were able to pull a few new names from those, but with everything else they found, it was the same names coming up again and again. They're pretty firmly rooted in Tucson and their group doesn't seem to be growing very much.”