Mated to the Cougar Read online

  “What else are you good at?” Still backwards, I bumped into another cart. I muttered an apology as Dylan tried to stifle his laugh. “It was pretty funny. I’d be more upset if you didn’t laugh.”

  “Walking, I’m pretty good at that.” He put more veggies in the cart. “But the rest, you’re going to have to wait to find out.”

  I turned around, not because I cared about bumping into the other customers, but because I didn’t want him to see my red cheeks. Sometimes I actually thought he was flirting with me. I was at least ten years older than this guy. But then I remembered he was getting paid to do this, and it was in his best interest to get me invested in him.

  Since Dylan had a plan, I let him do his work. He added meat to the cart, and a couple other staples. I was also aware of every other woman in the supermarket staring at him as he asked the butcher for house made sausage. I wasn’t the only one walking into things in this place.

  BELINDA WAS BLOWING up my phone. I ignored it. After all, I was still on assignment. It was close to noon when we returned to my apartment. Dylan set the cloth bags full of food on my empty counters. At least it wouldn’t be hard to find places for everything we’d bought.

  “When’s your next client?” I asked as I pulled the vegetables out of the bag and put them in the crisper.

  “Monday.” He handed me the ground hamburger and the chicken. “And I think it might be you. Put the hamburger in the freezer.”

  “Okay.” I had no idea what I was going to do with half of this stuff, besides make salads. I wasn’t kidding when I said I didn’t cook. But I was an absolute boss with the microwave. “Am I your only client or something?”

  “For now.” Dylan’s cheeks pinked. “I started last week. All my clients were back in LA.”

  “What made you come back to Woodland Park, of all places?” It was a quiet, conservative town, filled mostly with families. I wasn’t sure how Dylan fit in yet.

  “Family stuff,” he grumbled. “Time for a change.”

  I leaned against the counter. The air practically vibrated with his discomfort. “Anything you want to talk about?”

  “Not yet.” His eyes were the darkest I’d seen. They were usually a light hazel, now they were stormy.

  “If you need to talk, I’m here.” I hired him, so we weren’t exactly friends, but I didn’t feel like I was overstepping my bounds.

  “Thanks.” Dylan held himself up by his hands on the counter. The muscles in his arms tensed in a long line and his hair fell in front of his eyes. He took a deep breath. “I will, but not yet.”

  “What are you doing after this?” I asked, not ready to say goodbye yet, but I had no idea how to get him to stay. He’d already stayed with me way longer than he was scheduled to be.

  “I thought I’d show you how to make cauliflower pizza.” Dylan looked up at me, and the light was back in his eyes. “You said you couldn’t cook, and it would be a shame for you to starve to death with a kitchen full of food.”

  “That sounds amazing.” My stomach was rumbling. If I’d been in the office, I would’ve had lunch already. Shit. I took a quick look at my phone. Belinda’s messages had gone from how did it go? to where the hell are you? I sent her a text letting her know I was still alive, and still with Dylan.

  That sexy trainer? she answered. I’d told her all about him as soon as I got back to the office on Wednesday. You go girl. Rawr.

  “Don’t make fun of me,” I said as Dylan put the cauliflower into the blender. “But I agreed to document my training for work. My boss is having a fit because she wants to have the segment up, like, now. So I have to do it.”

  Dylan smirked. “Go for it. You have ten minutes before our next step.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he watched me fiddle with the phone, trying to hold it at the correct angle so I didn’t look ridiculous, adjusting my hair back and forth over my shoulder and tugging on my shirt. I’d left the Go Pro at the office on purpose.

  “Do you want me to do that?” Dylan finally asked, taking the phone from me.

  Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. I’d been self-conscious enough without having to do my spiel in front of him. “Sure.” One last tug on my shirt. “Do I look okay?”

  “You look gorgeous.” My mouth fell open at his words. Dylan’s eyes widened and I knew it wasn’t lip service. Neither of us expected him to say that, but he didn’t back down from his statement, our eyes locked and that sexy smile was back.

  Oh, hell. There was no way I was going to be able to do this video now.

  Chapter Five

  BRING A CHANGE OF CLOTHES with you. That’s all Dylan said when he’d surprised me by asking what I was doing on Saturday. I didn’t know if he was counting this as one of my sessions. He’d left soon after lunch, but the air remained charged after he said those words, like little electric shocks every time I looked at him. I purred for the rest of the day.

  It had been a long time since anyone made me feel this way. Too long. I stopped dating when my mom got sick. So much had changed while I was out of the game, and I didn’t know the rules anymore. I mean, shiftersingles.com? Phone apps? It seemed so forced. And I always thought I’d have Louis, my best guy friend in the pride. We’d promised each other if we still hadn’t found our mates by the time we turned thirty five...but he’d claimed Laurie before that.

  I finished off the rest of the cauliflower pizza for breakfast. I wasn’t sure how that was going to look on the food diary, but Dylan made it, so he had to approve. And it was all meat and vegetables, so it couldn’t be that bad. I was surprised that I actually liked it better than regular pizza. Especially left over.

  Dylan had given me directions to his cabin. It was on one of the mountain roads outside of town, and he was lucky we hadn’t had that much snow this year, or else he’d never get to work. Almost everyone who lived out here stayed on the mountain in the winter out of necessity. A lot of the pride worked on Soldier Mountain for the season, but I couldn’t remember the last time I came out this way. I decided snowboarding wasn’t my thing after a patch of ice on the bunny hill left me seeing stars. Even with the directions, I needed to plug the address into the GPS on my phone.

  “Hey, stranger,” I answered the phone when Kat called. I hadn’t talked to her since Sunday. We never went that long without talking unless she was out of the country for work. “I can’t talk long, I’m on an adventure and I need directions.”

  “This sounds exciting,” she purred. Her breathing had that grumbly undertone that meant she had something to tell me, too. “Where to?”

  She had no idea about Dylan yet. “I’m meeting with my trainer.”

  “You called?” Her voice went up two octaves. “I’m so proud of you!”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” My breath caught in my throat when I thought about what to tell her about Dylan. It might have been my imagination, but things seemed to be...magnetic. Or maybe it had been too long since I’d spent time around a man who peaked my interest. But I couldn’t talk about it with her now, I needed the GPS, and she had news for me. “What’s up?”

  Kat was still practically humming. I smiled, knowing this was good news. “I won’t keep you. But when I got home on Sunday night, Nolan claimed me.”

  “Oh my Gods!” I squealed along with her, then swerved when I came dangerously close to the guardrail. “But you can’t tell me this stuff when I’m driving in the mountains. I know we’re supposed to get nine lives, but I don’t want to test the theory today.”

  “Sorry!” She really wasn’t, but that was okay. Claimed. My little sister! “I’ll be down in a couple weeks. Work’s nuts, but I had to tell you.”

  “I’ll call you tonight when I get home.” I couldn’t believe I had to wait for details. “And I want to know everything.”

  MY HEART WAS STILL pounding from almost hitting the guardrail as I climbed out of my car and approached the door to Dylan’s cabin. After my conversation with Kat, I almost forgot to be nervous about being out he
re, alone, with this guy I barely knew. Kat had been too excited about her news to ask what I was doing, and I hadn’t dared tell Belinda my plans. She would have had an entire crew follow me out here, hoping to get something recorded.

  Maybe today I’d get a video for her. But probably not.

  “Good morning.” Dylan’s hair was still wet, dampening his T-shirt. “Glad to see my cooking didn’t kill you.”

  “No, it was really good.” I stood over the threshold of the doorway in his living room, surveying my surroundings. A typical cozy cabin, it only had a brown leather couch with a red plaid throw blanket and a giant TV in the living room. Leave it to a man to take care of the necessities. The whole place smelled intoxicatingly like Dylan. I was going to get high on the fumes if we stayed in here too long. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

  Dylan raked his fingers through his hair. “I thought we’d go for a run.”

  He lived on the side of the mountain. A hike I could probably handle, even with the change in altitude, but a run was pushing it. “Here?”

  He swallowed hard. “I thought we’d shift first.”

  My knees buckled. Shifting was a raw, emotional, intimate experience. That’s why we had such tight bonds in the pride. Or I’d had them, anyway. It was something we did alone, or with people we knew well and trusted implicitly. “Dylan.” It was barely more than a whisper. “I’m not sure if I’m ready for that.”

  Dylan sat on the couch and motioned for me to join him. I didn’t relax, my muscles had gone rigid with fear. If he shifted all the time, it would be no big deal for him to go back and forth between forms. Even then, it still took a lot of energy. But like any other muscles, the ones I needed to shift had deteriorated with from lack of use. My transitions wouldn’t be smooth or easy.

  “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what you told me on the track,” he said. “All of it. I think this is really going to help you figure out what you want to change about your life, Ari. I know it’s not going to be easy for you, but if I didn’t think it was so important, I wouldn’t ask you to do this. You need to get back in touch with who you really are.”

  Before Kat had given me that gift certificate, I didn’t want to change a thing. That’s why I didn’t have any answers for him.

  Dylan was right. If I was going to start anything new, I needed to know why I was doing it. I hadn’t expected to do it on such a primal level right off the bat. I pictured it more like an epiphany on the elliptical machine a few weeks in to the program.

  “Trust me, Ari.” Dylan’s smile was so hopeful. “That’s all I ask.”

  I considered saying no. But he was expecting that. He’d know that it wasn’t because I couldn’t do it. If I said no, it was because I didn’t want to do it. I’d be walking away from the entire thing. That would have been my choice.

  “Okay.” I let out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. “I’ll do it.”

  His shoulders relaxed, and I hadn’t realized he’d been nervous about his request. I’d met this guy four days ago, and I was paying him quite well for his services. Or Kat was. It shouldn’t have been any skin off his nose if I backed out. Some other snowbunny lion would take my spot on the schedule in a heartbeat, if they could afford it. But Dylan really seemed to care about me. And it meant more to me than I could possibly explain.

  “Great.” Dylan stood up and held out his hand to me. His body hummed with excitement. “How do you want to do this? Do you want me to go first, and then you join me?”

  I held on to his hand as I thought about it, trying to resist leaning closer and inhaling his scent. Still wet from the shower, it was like freshly fallen snow. Shifting was something we couldn’t wear clothes for, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. If he went first, he’d be a lion when I joined him in my cougar form. It was different as an animal than as a human. Or maybe I’d been more carefree the last time Louis and I had done this. “Yeah. That’s perfect.”

  Dylan brought me out to the porch and motioned to the slope of land beside the house. Most of it would be a rolling meadow in a few weeks once the snow melted, with more trees sprouting up as the valley deepened. “I’m going to head down there, and I’ll call to you when I’m ready,” he explained. I nodded nervously. He squeezed my hand before letting go, peeling off his shirt, and bounding down the stairs. “It’s going to be great, Ari.”

  I concentrated on the muscles straining against his shoulders as Dylan ran through the snow. He stopped to unbutton his jeans, and my breath caught in the back of my throat. Before he pushed them down, I turned back into the house. Not that I didn’t want to see more of him. I wanted to respect his privacy.

  And I couldn’t be distracted by Dylan’s body when I needed to be concentrating on my own. My heart fluttered with excitement in my chest. I surprised myself by realizing I was excited about this more than I was scared. But I wasn’t going to be able to shift unless I calmed down. Closing my eyes, I leaned against the open door and slid my feet out of my sneakers. I pretended Dylan was still here, holding my hand. I could still feel the heat of his body close to mine. Funny how that’s what calmed me. My eyes flew open, realizing what that could mean.

  No way. This guy was probably fifteen years younger than me. He couldn’t be my mate.

  But it would be really nice if he was.

  And it was that thought that helped slow my heart rate, my breaths deepening when I heard Dylan call out to me. “Ari! Can you hear me?”

  “Yes!” I leaned over the railing, scanning the valley to find him. We could communicate in human or animal form, so talking was no indication of if he’d shifted. Something started to rise inside me when I saw sandy blonde fur whipping around in the breeze near the trees. “I’ll be right there.”

  Seeing Dylan in his lion form made my animal stir to life. And it wasn’t the groggy, sick feeling I got any time I’d tried to do this on my own. I had tried recently. I didn’t like to talk about it. This time, it felt right. Pulling my sweatshirt up over my head, and shedding the rest of my clothes before I ruined them with the long nails that ripped through my fingers, I was on all fours before I even cleared the last stair.

  There was no way to avoid the pain. My roar ripped through the valley as my muscles tore away from my bones, giving my body a chance to remold itself in animal form. A fire ignited deep in my belly, and I had to outrun it as my fur rippled in the wind, filling in the places the torn skin used to be.

  Snow crunched under my paws as I trotted down the hill, the same cool air tickling my fur that burned my lungs. I’d forgotten how much more attuned I was to nature in cougar form. I’d missed this. The textures of the winter bare trees, the birds chattering above me, welcoming me home. The fresh snow smell that I associated with Dylan threatened to intoxicate me.

  Dylan sat on his haunches, his tail twitching in the snow as I approached. He looked absolutely magnificent in his animal form. Tall and proud, all those muscles rippling under his fur, refined majestic power. And his lion eyes were even bigger than his human ones, glittering like topaz in the sunshine.

  I circled him, bumping him a couple times, all this wild energy was coursing through my veins that I didn’t know what to do with. Dylan nudged me with his snout as I rounded back to the front of him. “Ready to play?” he asked.

  Gods, was I ever.

  Chapter Six

  “I’VE BEEN DYING TO check out some of these trails,” Dylan said as he began to ramble along the path.

  “Why haven’t you?” The trees and brush thickened, and we had to walk close to stay side by side. Our fur brushed against each other as we maneuvered by the fallen trees and jutting rocks. Dylan stopped to let me go through the narrower passes in front of him.

  “Didn’t want to do it alone.” His voice sounded different in his lion form, it had a rumbly undercurrent that sent shivers down to my core. This was overwhelming after so long. The sights, the smells. And Dylan. I didn’t bother to hide my purring.

 
; “How did you shift in LA?” Here, people didn’t get too upset about seeing animals even as close as their backyards. But a lion loose in Los Angeles would make the six o’clock news.

  “There are mountains up near Malibu,” Dylan explained as the trail widened and we instinctively picked up the pace. “It was a pain to get up there, but the mountain range ran right down to the ocean. If I timed it right, I could run on the beach.”

  “That sounds amazing.” I wondered why he’d ever leave. “Why are you here again?”

  “There are things I have to take care of.” I could swear he growled. Pausing, he nodded at the open expanse of snow in front of us. “Want to sprint over to that bank of trees?”

  “Sure.” I bumped him with my snout, then took off running. At first my legs felt heavy, but once my blood got pumping, that feeling melted away and I moved faster than I thought I could. I was actually staying a couple paces in front of Dylan.

  But he gained fast on me. I quickened my pace, our paws pounding against the earth in unison as we raced to the finish line. Even though I pulled a slight lead on him, Dylan leapt forward in the end, rolling over on to his back. I couldn’t stop in time, and I crashed into him, flipping on to my back. Instinctively, I batted at him, and he responded playfully. We rolled around in the snow, nipping and playing until we exhausted ourselves. When we were done, we lay there purring, with my head on his shoulder.

  “How are you doing?” he asked, his mane tickled my face when the breeze caught it.

  I picked my head up. It probably wasn’t good form to be snuggling with my trainer. “Amazing.” I sat up and shook out my coat. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.” Dylan raised himself up on his front paws. “I can’t believe you haven’t done this for so long. You’re...” his words trailed off, and he tipped his head so his mane hid his eyes. “You’re so natural in your own skin like this.”