The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards) by Holley Trent Page A

enough to know that place sucks. The air was thick with misery. I don’t know how else to explain it, but it made my gut lurch and skin prickle.” Belle put her forehead against Steven’s shoulder and inhaled his comforting scent.
    He smelled nice.
Familiar
and safe. Qualities she tended to discount with Cougars, but he wasn’t a Cougar. Maybe that was good.
    “What do you propose she do?” Steven asked.
    She didn’t realize what she was doing until his voice rumbled against her chest, but it was too late to pull away. He’d looped an arm around her and was skimming his fingers in a light circle against the side of her waist. It seemed an almost affectionate gesture, and she couldn’t move. Affection was hard for her to come by, which admittedly was her own damned fault. Practicality often stood in the way of soft things.
    “It’s a weak spirit,” Claude said. “If it were a little stronger, I might have been able to communicate with it as it is. I could possibly engage with it more easily from a trance state. But as I said, Belle, if you don’t want people in your business, it’ll be harder to coordinate. I’m here at the ranch right now for a specific purpose, and if I hole myself up for an hour, people are going to want to know why.”
    “I understand.”
    “That doesn’t mean I won’t do it. It just means you’ll need to distract the others while I work, and you will have to tell Gail. If I’m in that realm too long, she’ll get pulled in, and it’ll be that much harder to rouse me. She’s my anchor.”
    “You all right with that?” Steven asked softly.
    She appreciated the sensitivity, but he didn’t need him to treat her like she was going to break. “I don’t know. I’m not used to being asked. Give me a minute to process it.”
    “Take as long as you need.” He cleared his throat and rubbed her back, and she wondered how the hell she was supposed to do any thinking when he smelled so good and felt so nice.
    Should step away.
    Instead, she tucked her hands into the back of his pants, because that made thinking
so
much easier.
    Damned inner cat ...
    But since her hands were there, she didn’t see the point of withdrawing them. Seemed like it would have been such a wasted opportunity.
    “You’re asking for trouble,” he whispered and rocked her a bit in his embrace.
    “I’m not asking for anything. You shouldn’t have been nice to me. I would have left you alone.”
    “Well, damn. It’s like that, huh? I’m not seeing a good reason not to be nice if you’re gonna be sweet.” He gently removed her hands from his waistband and pulled Belle to his side. “So ...” he said to Claude. “How do you think the Wolfpack’s gonna do this year?”
    Claude snorted. “Gods, don’t tell me you’re one of those.”
    “By default. I did my last two years of college there.”
    “Isn’t Hannah a Tar Heel?”
    “Yep. Forty percent of our fights are about NCAA athletics. I don’t think she cares as much as she makes out, but it’s one of those rivalries you can’t help but to run your mouth about at any given opportunity.”
    “We should get together and watch some games this fall.”
    “Yeah. The more the merrier, with anyone except my brothers, because goddamn, those assholes act like the stakes are life or death.”
    “If you live as long as I have, very little seems all that important.”
    Belle brazenly retook her spot against Steven’s front and, rolling a daring look up to his face, decided to steal little indulgences while she could. The warmth of Steven’s body, the comforting rhythm of his heart, and the relaxing timbre of his voice so near her ear. His proximity both soothed and titillated, and although that suited the cat part of her just fine, the part of her that was woman didn’t know what it meant.
    She couldn’t let herself cling to him. Actually, she had to do everything in her power not to. He was a short-term visitor, and she ... she had to