The Cougar's Pawn (13 page)

“Speaking of women who hate you, I want to see my friends.”

“Later.”

“Do you promise?”

“You have my word.”

“You’ll have to prove to me that means something.”

“Tell me how to and I will.” He started around the shop to turn on lights and machinery. A lot of the machines were due to be replaced. Some were older than him. They’d served his dad well for a lot of years, but Mason couldn’t help but to wonder how much faster work would be if they had newer tools. Yet another thing on the to-buy list, right below a new truck.

The shop’s side door creaked open and one after the other, his knucklehead brothers tracked in the desert dirt. Sean went immediately to the front, pulled open the partition door, and strode to the schedule clipboard hanging on the wall near the playpen. He gave it a quick glance, then bent to ruffle what little hair Nick had.

He looked back into the workshop and winked. “How’d you sleep?”

Mason gave him the finger under pretense of scratching his nose. Nick was watching. It wouldn’t do for him to pick up any of his father’s bad habits.

Hank, now standing at the desk in front of Ellery and shuffling through the paperwork on top, called back, “It’s a valid question.”

“And inquiring minds want to know, right?”

“For good reason.” He pulled out a wrinkled sheet of paper and squinted at it, then at his watch. Shrugging, he picked up the phone’s handset and dialed a number. “You’re leading by example. We just want to know what that example is.”

Even from the back, Mason could hear Ellery’s sigh.

“Ignore them,” he said, and set down the length of oak he’d been eying. He was already two days behind on a custom cabinet job, and he still needed to fix that molding problem from the last one. Doing damage control in the front office took priority at the moment. His brothers weren’t what he’d call loquacious, but they had a knack for packing a lot of punch in a few syllables.

“We’re impossible to ignore, big brother.” Hank perched on the desk edge and tucked the phone between his ear and shoulder, still shuffling through papers. “Yeah, this is Hank Foye at Foye Woodworks. I’m calling about your overdue invoice. We’ve got about half the parts of your bookcases lined up here and ready for drop-shipping. They’re taking up a lot of space. When should we expect payment of the remaining balance due?” He set down the papers. “Sure, I’ll hold. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Who are you calling at six in the morning?” Ellery asked.

“It’s eight on the east coast,” Hank said with a shrug. “I’m ruthless when it comes to collections, but I limit my cruelty to regular business hours.”

“How much money are you talking?”

Hank crooked a thumb in her direction and grinned at Mason. “She doesn’t beat around the bush, does she?”

Mason shrugged. “I’ve never known an alpha’s mate who did. Answer her.”

“I’m not your mate,” she said.

“You are for the moment.”

“Ten thousand dollars, babe,” Hank said.

“Don’t call my mate
babe
.”

Now Hank gave
him
the finger.

“It’s a big custom unit,” Hank told her. “Full-wall bookcase for some politician in D.C. who can’t tell his head from his asshole but has deep enough pockets to purchase Foye products.”

“Wouldn’t it be less expensive for them to hire a local carpenter?”

“It would be,” Sean said, “but people recognize our style. They’ll pay a premium for it.”

“How long has your family been at this?”

“Third generation.” Mason leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms over his chest. “Nick will be the fourth.”

“Assuming he doesn’t go Coyote and won’t want to stay in one place for more than three days,” Sean said.

Hank tossed a wadded ball of paper at him. “Shut up, man.”

Sean shrugged. “What? She was going to find out, anyway.”

Ellery said nothing, just swiveled in the seat and stared at Nick, who was watching them all with keen interest.

Sean sauntered over and extended his hand to Ellery. “You’ve seen me in my birthday suit, but we haven’t yet been properly introduced. Sean Foye.”

Ellery hesitated, but after a few seconds, put her hand in his and let him shake it. “Ellery Colvard.”

“Pretty name for a pretty lady.”

“Sean,” Mason warned.

“What?”

“You need something to do?”

“Nope. I need to go supervise that installation in an hour. Just waiting on the crew, assuming they’re on time. Cougars have a hard damn time getting up in mornings. I really want to start having a human backup crew on hand.”

“You can glue and clamp a lot of cabinet trim in an hour.”

“Fine.” Keeping his gaze locked on his brother, he bowed and kissed Ellery’s hand.

She had the temerity to blush.

Mason was going to kill him. Or let his cougar kill him the next time they shifted. Either way was fine. Either would be messy. The cougar wouldn’t worry so much about the fratricide guilt, though. Might even be a good thing—it’d put Sean out of his probably mate rejection misery. Maybe someone would do the same for Mason.

“Don’t get your hackles up.” Sean strode to the storage bin and grabbed a bundle of clamps. “I’m just helping you out a little.”

“In what way?”

“She only smells a
little
like you. If you call yourself staking a claim, you’re not doing a very good job. Some other cat might think she’s a free agent.”

“And you think contaminating my scent with yours will help?”

Sean shrugged. “They’re close enough. To anyone who isn’t a Foye, they’d be indistinguishable.”

“You’re such a goddamned saint.”

“I keep telling you that. You never want to believe me.”

Hank hung up the phone and dropped his papers into the already-full inbox on the desk. “The senator’s bookkeeper is cutting us a check and we should expect it by Thursday. Need to get the rest of that job back in the work queue. It’s high priority now.”

“Why, just because the client is a senator?” Ellery asked. She bent over the side of the Pack-n-Play and pressed a tissue to Nick’s snotty nose.

Mason only looked at her ass a little. Couldn’t help it. It was silly to think he’d resist such a sight, especially given how he’d been
so
good so far.

“As if that weren’t reason enough, no.” Mason watched her patiently wrangle infant snot for what seemed like five minutes. When she’d tossed the tissue, he added, “He’s a shifter. We try to sow goodwill where we can. You never know when you’ll need a favor.”

“Such as greasing the wheels so certain broken laws go unpunished?”

“Hey—”

She waved her hand dismissively. “Yeah, yeah. It’s the Cougar way. Laws are just strongly-worded suggestions for you all.”

“Have you been around many shifters, Ellery?” Hank asked. He stood at the glass customer entrance with his back to the room. There might have been some ranch staff or even their installers on the dirt road.

“Mostly Wolves,” she said. “I’d say the group I’m in is allied pretty closely with them.”

“Your coven?”

“No, not my coven. My coven is a joke.
Was
a joke, rather. My sister and I got booted from it last year.”

“Why?” Mason set down his pencil and joined her at the desk. “I’ve never heard of a coven outing members unless they’d done someone harm.”

She rolled her eyes. “They’re technical witches.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they do everything by the book. Measuring ingredients for potions and chanting very precise spells. They’re not magic users.”

“And you and your sister are?”

She didn’t answer. She just leaned forward and made a little circle in the air with index finger in Nick’s direction.

His hair fluttered as if someone had opened the door and allowed in the breeze.

Nick let out a delighted shriek and rubbed the top of his head. “Gah!”

“Again? Okay.”

She did it again, and Nick’s response was no less enthusiastic.

She smiled—a genuine smile for Nick that made his daddy’s black heart fill to bursting—and looked up at Mason. “It’s wild magic,” she said. “Technical witches tend to be of the opinion that we shouldn’t try to harness wild magic and that it’s inherently dark.”

“You think otherwise?”

“I don’t have a choice but to think otherwise. Recent events persuaded me that in spite of being shunned by a lot of people in my life who didn’t agree with my choices, I … ” Her shoulders dropped and her smile fell away. “I guess I couldn’t keep ignoring what I was born to be.”

“What kind of events?” Sean asked.

She didn’t answer. Her forehead furrowed, and her stare went unfocused as if she’d gotten lost in her own head.

Mason squatted in front of her and rested a tentative hand on her knee.

She didn’t swat it away, surprisingly, but did focus on it, then him.

She didn’t want to say. That was okay. Probably didn’t trust him, and he didn’t really expect her to. He wasn’t gullible enough to think that drama and conflict within a group of supernaturals was unique to his glaring. In spite of everything, he didn’t have it the worst. He would never claim to. He did want to know what had disconcerted her, though. He had to be interested—to be kind. If he didn’t, he may as well give up on meeting
La Bella Dama
’s challenge.

“Suppressing nature is rarely a good idea,” he said. “You can only roll with it and keep getting up when it knocks you on your ass.”

“You would know?”

“Yeah. I would. I battle with my animal half every waking minute. I may seem pretty stable, but sometimes I’m not myself … at least not who people know me as. Some days, I don’t know whether it’s me or my cougar calling the shots. I’d like to be able to pin all my bad decisions on him and his impulses, but that’s something young Cougars do. Grown men take responsibility.”

Her gaze tracked over to Nick in the playpen.

Most women would see him as baggage. A reason to say no to Mason. That was the least of his concerns at the moment.

“You being a witch makes my life somewhat more difficult, but if that’s what you are, don’t repress it for my sake.”

She let out the tiniest scoff and stared down at his hands. “As if.”

Better than
fuck off
, at least. That was progress.

He stood and backed to the shop door. “I’ll try to finish up by eleven so I can take you to the store.”

She nodded and looked up right as Hank stepped away from the front door. A ranch hand stepped in, holding his arm tight to his chest.

It took barely a second for Mason to scent the blood.

“What the fuck did you do to yourself?” Hank pulled back the front of Darnell’s jacket and took a look. “Shit, man.”

Darnell, pale as a winter sunrise, sat on the hard plastic chair near the door. “Got into a little brawl last night at the bar.”

“Last night? Why didn’t you go to the hospital?” Mason sniffed. Fetid. Infection.

Idiot
.

Hank extended his claws and ripped Darnell’s jacket off.

Mason sniffed again.
Shifter attacker
. He could smell the taint. The
otherness
. “What were you fighting with? Doesn’t smell local.”

Darnell brought his oozing forearm up and extended his tongue to lick it, but Mason pushed his arm away.

“Tell me, so I know if I need to go flush some shifters out of the area.”
Again
. Third time in a year. The last group of Bears that had rolled through tore up half the damn fair and beyond his brothers and a couple of ranch hands, not one of the Cougars Mason had called for assistance in escorting them out showed up. He hadn’t made a big deal about it at the time, but maybe he should have. His father might have, and the next time he needed help, fucking Cougars would have shown up.

Alpha up
, Mason could hear his mom saying.

“I don’t know, man. It wasn’t nothing serious. I was drunk and so he was he. Fighting over some chick that probably wasn’t going to put out for either of us, but you know, alcohol doesn’t make for a fountain of logic. He only half shifted and I think I only managed to get one paw out before he swiped me.”

Ellery walked around the desk and peered at Darnell’s arm. “What’d you put on it?”

“Hello, pretty stranger lady. Who are you? You smell half like a Foye, but the other half’s open for servicing. I’m guessing it’s just a little contamination by virtue of you sitting in that chair.” He wriggled his eyebrows. “I’ll ignore it.”

Mason twisted his arm.

“Ow! That hurt.”

“Good.” That was exactly the shit he wanted to avoid, but he couldn’t keep her holed up for two weeks unsupervised or toss her into the mate dungeon with Hannah and Miles. He had to get work done and woo her with his freaking effervescence. “Darnell, answer the woman’s question.”

“Shit, man.” He sniffled. “The usual. Ivory soap and spit.”

Ellery pushed up an eyebrow. “That usually do the trick for you?”

Darnell shrugged. “Most of the time.”

“Did you try shifting?” Hank asked. “You’d heal faster that way.”

“Up until an hour ago, I had my head over my toilet giving back the tequila I borrowed from the agave gods last night. My cougar doesn’t want shit to do with me right now. Can’t shift, can’t hardly
see
. Fuck. Can you fix it?”

Mason dropped Darnell’s arm and raked his fingers through his hair. He could fix it. As Alpha, he could spare a little energy to help Darnell’s healing along, but he kind of wanted the man to suffer. What the fuck had he been thinking getting sloshed on a work night?

“Hold still, you foolish furball.” Ellery pressed her thumbs on either side of Darnell’s gash.

“Fuck! Did you just shock me?” He stuck out his bottom lip as if she’d just stolen his favorite toy and broken it. “That’s not nice. Pretty lady like you should be nice.”

“Just call me ‘Nurse Ratched.’” She clasped her hands behind her back and peered at his forearm again. “I figured that would work in theory. I burned off the infection.”

“And half my skin! What kinda freak of nature are you?”

Ellery shoved her hands into her pockets, totally unmoved by Darnell’s whimpering. She must have been hell on wheels in the emergency room. Vicious in her efficiency, probably. Mason’s cock gave an insistent twitch at the imagery. Who would have thought competency could be so arousing?