Cherished by the Cougar_A Shifters in Love Fun & Flirty Romance Read online

  “Back up. Are you telling me that Robin picked you because you’re available, although she is aware some other cougar is Jimmy’s sperm donor?”

  He winced. “I gathered she and Sully think I’m the son of a cat who knocked you up and left you high and dry. For all the reasons I gave before. But mostly because of this.” He slapped his right thigh.

  “Your injury?”

  “I was bitten by a hooded cobra shifter. Damned bite won’t heal. Your supporters believe I’m cursed.”

  It was her turn to shake her head. Unlike his sleek hair, her curls flopped around her face. “I’m a talent detector. I couldn’t curse you if I tried.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “I guess,” she said doubtfully. “They do have a lot of talent. Dad’s a weather worker. You experienced any floods or lightning strikes?”

  He grinned. “Nope. But your mom’s a healer, isn’t she? She could hex a bite easy.”

  “She would never!”

  He held up a big hand. His big left hand. A wide gold band flashed on his ring finger. “She wouldn’t need to. Shifter venom doesn’t need any kind of boost from a witch.”

  “My. Mother. Is. Not. A. Witch.”

  “Sorry. Is it all right to call her a sorceress?”

  “That’s what she is. Witch, warlock, wizard are not polite terms. I’d think someone who’s been coming to West Haven all his life would know better.”

  “I apologize. I guess I figured it was like you guys calling us hunters, as if that could ever be an insult. We are hunters. Beasts of prey. Big cats. And proud of it, I might add. We use that word without shame.”

  “Well, it’s not the same, Ryan. To call a sorcerer or sorceress one of the W words is to suggest that they stir cauldrons and chant incantations to the moon like non-sensitives playing at make-believe. The only thing worse is to call one of us a magician. Magicians perform tricks.”

  “Got it. I apologize for insulting your mother. But even if she wouldn’t curse me, here I am with a bum leg. And she could have made sure I didn’t heal. Right?”

  “Potentially. But she didn’t.”

  “Well, of course not. I’m not the father. Why would you sic her onto me? But just for the record, did they hex the guy who did knock you up?”

  “Of course not! We don’t do stuff like that. It’s, it’s uncivilized.” Besides she had identified Jimmy’s father to no one.

  “Yeah.” He smiled that dangerous smile again. “See, that’s the thing about us cats, we’re fundamentally uncivilized.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ryan~

  Dammit. He had frightened Claudia. He didn’t need to be able to see his wife’s aura to recognize the shock his last words had given her. That was his problem – he was too danged blunt. He tried to ignore the pain in his leg while he thought up words to reassure her. Nothing came.

  “You don’t look uncivilized,” she murmured.

  “Certainly not.” She might as well know the truth. “But it’s only a skim coat of varnish. I’m a cougar. I protect what’s mine and I don’t let anyone hurt those close to me. Period.”

  “Oh. But I’m not really your wife.”

  “Sure you are. That document is duplicated everywhere it’s supposed to be in the state of Oregon.” He held up his left hand where his wedding ring gleamed. “I’m yours. And you and the boy are mine. With all that entails.”

  Those pretty brown eyes were positively glowing. “You bought yourself a wedding ring?” Her voice was incredulous.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve been married for four years. These rings are from the Rutherford collection. I just had them polished and engraved.”

  He dug out the box containing hers and staggered to his feet. She looked befuddled. Probably hadn’t counted on him being all talk and no action. But he limped across to her and knelt at her feet, flipped the lid of the little black velvet box open.

  “These are yours,” he told her. “May I put them on your hand?”

  She took the box out of his hand. Her fingers brushed his palm. A hot spark that he felt over the boiling poison in his veins traveled straight to his heart. Whatever they had going on was powerful. As powerful as she was. He had been correct that Claudia was no nonentity when it came to magic. Not a chance. Talent detector? Not so much.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Whose are these?” She flicked the marble-sized yellow diamond with her thumb. Fire blazed in its heart but she didn’t seem impressed by the famous Cat’s Eye. A 4.5 carat beauty and she was asking about provenance. He had a lot to learn about his wife.

  “They were my great-grandmother’s. Now they are yours.”

  “Just like that?”

  He remained on his knees, although this position was murder on his swollen thigh. “My great-grandparents were happily married for eighty years. I thought that was a good omen. Will you wear them, Claudia?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure marriage will solve my problems. Not in the long run.” She sighed. “Maybe we should dissolve this one?”

  Now that was a dumb idea. “Where will you go?”

  “Go?”

  “When the Council throws you off the island?”

  Her shoulders drooped. He felt as if he had kicked a kitten. But this was no time to take the pressure off her. “It’s not like you have a lot of choices here, Claudia. Once the Council banishes you, there will be no coming to visit your siblings or your parents.”

  “Oh.” Sorrow was in that single syllable. “I hadn’t thought of it as exile.”

  “Think of it now. No more Christmases. No more weddings or funerals. Not here, anyway.”

  She was white. But he didn’t relent. It was only the truth. “Let me put those rings on your finger and set the councilors’ minds at ease.”

  Her hands clenched around the open ring box. “What do you get out of this?”

  “I told you. The Rutherford woods and land. Our cottages. This lighthouse.”

  “You’re willing to stay married to a stranger for some property?” She sounded indignant.

  “My family needs Cat’s Head and West Haven. It’s where we let our cougars run free.” He creaked to his feet. “Sorry. I can’t keep the kneeling up indefinitely.” He rubbed his thigh.

  “For goodness sakes, go sit down. I have to think.”

  He obeyed her. Stretched out the damned leg. “What’s to think about? I assume you need West Haven, too. That you want to raise your son here where the paranormal is normal.”

  She nodded. “I don’t want to live in Seattle or Portland.”

  This was more like it. Now she was negotiating. He was good at that. The trick was to make sure the other person wound up as happy with the end results as you were. A win-win situation. “We can live here on West Haven. Move into town if you like.” Not like he was going to live long, anyway.

  Her brows met. “In the Rutherford mansion?”

  “If you wish. But probably you would be more comfortable in my parents’ cottage. We’d have to share the main house with a boatload of Rutherfords. Including Jimmy’s real father.”

  “I’d like to stay here,” she said. As if it was a test.

  “If you have your heart set on it, I can ask Adam if he’ll sell the lighthouse to me. But I’d prefer to build you a place in the compound, closer to my folks. Your dream house.” He dangled the bait.

  “Oh.”

  “And I plan on being a good father to your son.”

  “You haven’t even met him!”

  He only smiled.

  “Have you?”

  “You might say he’s met me. Twice now, Jimmy has found me while I was outdoors in cougar. Did you know he was coming and going from your yard?”

  He might as well have hit her. She swayed, dropped the rings and ran to the window, hands over her heart. The bubble around her aura vanished. She was gazing into the yard when he caught up to her and put his hands over her shoulders.

  “Easy,” he said. “He’s ri
ght there. Hunting.” Jimmy was on hands and knees prowling through the thick raspberry canes, pawing the red and yellow leaves and moving his blond head from side to side. His attention was focused on whatever trail he was following. The kid was cuter than a bug’s ear and as sharp as any cub could be.

  “There’s no hunting on West Haven.” She sounded appalled. “What’s he hunting?”

  “He’s only pretending,” he assured her. “It’s instinctive. You and I can teach him that hunting his neighbors isn’t right, but we can’t ever completely suppress his instincts. And why would we want to?”

  She half-turned in surprise. Her shoulder connected with his chest. Desire gripped him. His curvy little bride wasn’t just a powerful witch, she was a potent little piece of femininity. But she stiffened in his arms so he took a clumsy step backward.

  “Hunting is uncivilized,” she hissed at him. “Jimmy has already been thrown out of two daycares in Portland for biting.”

  “Bite inhibition is learned behavior. He needs other cubs to wrestle with so that he learns not to bite too hard when he’s playing. He’s what? Three? He should already know that.” Ryan peered through the windows at Jimmy. “He’s smart enough.”

  “He’s not allowed to fight,” Claudia informed him fiercely. Her arms were clutching her elbows. “Or hunt.”

  “The boy is a cougar cub. Wrestling is what he does. Hunting comes naturally. You can’t teach him not to want to. You can only teach him where it is appropriate.”

  “Fighting is never appropriate.”

  “As three-time state wrestling champion, I beg to differ. As a former Marine, I beg to differ. Context is everything.”

  “You’d teach him not to bite his friends?”

  “Yup. Or at least I’d let him play with his cousins and they would teach him.”

  “How?” Her voice was still worried.

  She still hadn’t noticed her bubble had packed up. He put his arm around her shoulder. It felt good to feel her relax against him. But he could tell she was terrified that he was about to unleash cougar mayhem on her innocent baby. As if. That kid was plenty robust. Out in the garden, Jimmy pounced and sent something small and hard flying.

  “By yelping if he hurt them. By pinning him if he was repeatedly rough. Nothing violent.”

  “What has he got out there?” she quavered. “What’s he hitting?”

  “Horse chestnut.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know, for a woman who has just had a calm half-hour conversation with a total stranger you think is a primitive thug, you are awfully frightened by normal kid behavior. What’s up with that? Surely you don’t believe that crap about ‘hybrid vigor’?” He put scare quotes around hybrid vigor.

  “Nooo.”

  “You needn’t sound so emphatic,” he teased.

  But she really was worried. Her plump features were drawn tight and the prettiness had drained out of her face. He took her hand in his. “It’s okay. Jimmy is perfectly normal. Hybrid vigor is a real thing, but it only means that two unrelated lines produce more robust offspring. Using it as a euphemism for vicious psychopathy discounts everything we know about the genetics of psychopathology.”

  “Really?” Her brown eyes were hopeful.

  “And everything we know about normal paragenetics too.” He glanced out into the garden where Jimmy was still teaching the horse chestnut who was boss.

  The glossy dark-brown chestnut was about the size of an unshelled walnut and it kept getting lost in the fallen leaves. Each time Jimmy sniffed it out, picked it up in his mouth and tossed it away before leaping on it. Ryan guessed that hitting it mid-air was a win.

  At any rate, most of the time his clever, athletic cub succeeded in knocking the small missile while it was airborne. Jimmy was delighted with his game and burning off energy. Nothing here needed fixing. Any trouble was in Claudia’s head. Ryan led her back to the couch and sat beside her.

  He took the rings out of their box and placed the wide gold band on her ring finger and followed it with the big yellow diamond. The Cat’s Eye looked good on her hand. Right on cue his possessive cougar instincts kicked in. You had to love instincts. But this was about settling Claudia’s fears, not claiming his reluctant bride. Not tonight.

  “What do you know about the Haverstocks?” he asked.

  She had her answer pat. “They were dangerous killers – hybrid killers. They conducted a reign of terror on the island of West Haven for a quarter century, back when Mystic Bay was barely incorporated.”

  “Well, yes. And, no. Mostly no. When Owen Haverstock stole Olivia Fairchild – that’s right, Ma Haverstock was a fairy, not a sorceress – she had a reputation for malevolence going back to her earliest childhood. The original evil fairy. And Owen was already feared as a bad-tempered and demented grizzly, who had kidnapped other females in the past.”

  “How do you know this?” she asked.

  “Looked it up in the Rutherford archives. In Olivia, Haverstock found his soul mate. It wasn’t especially surprising that they brought up their many children to consider their neighbors prey.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said. “Are you sure?”

  “Old Cuthbert Rutherford left tons of notes and a diary. He documented every single Haverstock – children and grandchildren – because he and his associates wanted to make sure they had gotten them all. No one should be too surprised that two antisocial sensitives produced a family of antisocial offspring.”

  “I guess not. Are you sure Olivia was a fairy?”

  “Dead sure. Her last name is a giveaway. All the Fairchilds are Fae. You know that.”

  Her brown eyes were horrified. “And your ancestor killed even the children?”

  “And the grandchildren. We’re talking profound evil here, Claudia. Owen and Olivia were killing all the normal kids. At least, Cuthbert thought so. They found gravestones for children who died of disease or in fights – they called them battles – and a pit full of children of all ages. It had a headstone that said only THE DISOBEDIENT. Those were the discards.”

  “Gosh. Their own children?”

  “We’re talking vicious evil, Claudia. The vigilantes did rescue two babies and place them with shifter families. Didn’t turn out well.”

  “Define ‘didn’t turn out well’,” she demanded.

  “There was a boy and a girl. The boy raped his foster sister when she was nine and he was six. After another ten years of worse and worse crimes, his foster family had had enough. He died of consumption that year.”

  “That’s tuberculosis, isn’t it?”

  Ryan nodded. “That’s what it says in their family bible. But we have reason to believe he was executed.”

  “And the girl?” Claudia asked.

  “Did no better. But as she was the product of the Haverstocks’ inbreeding program – Pa Haverstock considered his daughters as so many extra wives – that was probably inevitable. Butter wouldn’t melt in this girl’s mouth, but she was caught smothering her foster sister’s infant twins while she was supposedly minding them. Age twelve. She fell out of a loft and broke her neck. Or that’s what it says on her death certificate.”

  Claudia’s hand twitched in his. “Executed?” she asked.

  “Would you let a child capable of killing babies live?” he asked.

  “The courts? Psychiatrists?” she asked in horror.

  “The courts would have hanged her for murder, if she didn’t escape from prison first. Her adoptive family just made sure she couldn’t hurt anyone else. Before you go all bleeding heart on me, remember that the death of those Haverstocks ended the troubles on the island of West Haven. Pa Haverstock was killing and eating his neighbors. Raping and getting grandkids on his daughters.”

  “Really?” Her eyes were enormous. “You’re making that up.”

  “Nope. But you must realize that just because two depraved sensitives had depraved children is no reason to suppose Jimmy is going to go bad. You don’t have a history o
f doing evil. Nor does anyone in your family. Am I right?” He smiled encouragingly.

  At least he hoped he was encouraging her. She had left her hand in his after he put the rings on her finger, but it lay there limply. He gave it a squeeze and continued. “Worst thing we know about Jimmy’s sperm donor – your word, not mine – is that he’s an unfaithful husband and a liar. Which is a far cry from being a career criminal.”

  “That you know of.”

  “Believe me, I’d know if one of my family was a career criminal, or if his kids were antisocial. The Rutherford get-togethers are all about the children romping and playing.”

  “And fighting.”

  “Play fighting,” he corrected.

  “And watching kids play fight would tell you if they were antisocial? Because Jimmy’s fighting is what got him kicked out of daycare.”

  “By non-sensitives, am I right?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “How about the one he’s in now?”

  “We’ve had a few problems, but by and large he’s the teacher’s pet.”

  “Of course he is. Kid is fricking adorable.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, sure.” He placed his hand over his heart.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Claudia~

  She shouldn’t be finding his vow that he found Jimmy adorable so reassuring. But she did. She was having a hard time taking it in. She was married to this cougar. This tall, broad-shouldered, red-hot alpha male who rejoiced in being a hunter. And who had promised to teach her son to handle his inner beast.

  Ever since her father had let slip to Jimmy that he was going to grow up to be a cougar, her son had been pretending to be a cat. And for the last few days all he had talked about was his new friend, Cat. The penny dropped.

  “You played with Jimmy. In cougar.” Even to her own ears she sounded accusatory.

  His gold eyes surveyed her for a long while. They narrowed a trifle and then he smiled his devastating smile. “Yup. We played hide and seek and then I brought him home. He’s a friendly little fellow. Fearless.” He obviously thought that last was desirable.