Free The Cougar's Mate by Holley Trent Page B

that had claws and fangs without too much effort. The problem was that Glen didn’t know he was a shifter. All she knew was that he was weird.
    Her folks knew why he was weird. The Foyes had never tried to hide what they were from the time they’d settled onto the place all those generations ago. While Glen’s folks were well aware of what their neighbors were, their children seemed to be in the dark. He understood why Mrs. Foye might have been hostile. As a much younger woman, a Cougar had scorned her. He thought he’d been in love…and then he found his true mate.
    Floyd had wanted to tell Glen what he was for years—since that day two years past when he’d been eighteen and she’d turned sixteen. She’d asked him in that sassy way of hers, “Will you kiss me now?”
    He’d sure wanted to, so he had. Hadn’t stopped kissing her since, or doing… other things with her that would probably have her momma getting her daddy to point a shotgun in Floyd’s direction if she ever found out.
    Floyd wanted to make sure that when Mrs. Baxter did find out, it’d be too late for her to do anything about it. Floyd didn’t want Glen to go home.
    He switched on his flashlight and did a quick scan of the cavern. The opening was about six feet high, but the ceiling was lower the farther back into the cave he went. Ten feet inside—at the farthest point—there was only four feet of clearance. They wouldn’t be able to stand, but he didn’t have much standing planned.
    He danced the light’s beam to the corners and checked that no animals had made out with the supplies he’d been stowing over the past couple of weeks. He’d been waiting for the perfect moment to take her away and, with things at the ranch being so quiet lately, he figured it was as good a time as any.
    Everything in the cave seemed to be as he left it, so he went to fetch Glen.
    Gently, he freed her seatbelt buckle and let the strap retract slowly. He scooped her up under the knees and around her back, and she opened her bright green eyes. “Floyd?”
    “Shh. You can go back to sleep.”
    “Where are we?”
    “Not too far from home. Promise.”
    She looked around, but she likely didn’t recognize the place. He’d never taken her there, and he’d only discovered it himself six weeks prior.
    He ducked her into the cave, set her down, and started shaking out cushions for a pallet.
    “Floyd?”
    “Let me get the stuff out of the truck. I have a lantern.”
    “What are we doing?”
    “Camping.”
    He grabbed the lantern and Glen’s things, thinking that the sleeping bag would come in handy if the temperature dropped overnight. He had a few blankets, but knew Glen had a tendency to get cold. Cougars put off a lot of body heat, but she might not want to cuddle once she put two and two together and figured out what he was up to. He wanted to keep her from going home.
    “How’d you find this place?” she asked as he lit the lantern.
    “I was out prowlin’ with my brother. You know how it goes. You get to runnin’ your mouths and don’t realize how far you’ve walked.”
    He and Jesse had actually discovered it while in their Cougar forms. They’d passed by while chasing a Coyote shifter off their land. The damned things had been getting into the cattle at the Double B, and the last thing the Foyes needed was for the Baxters blaming them for the butcher work the Coyotes were responsible for.
    “You know, I haven’t seen Jesse in a while,” Glen said. “How’s he doing?”
    “He took a—” Floyd shut his mouth at the last moment before the word “mate” could come out. “Uh. He…got a girl,” he said. “Got married last month.”
    “Really?” Glen scrunched her nose. “I didn’t hear anything about it. I usually hear things. Anyone I know?”
    “Nah. It was a girl Ma set him up with. A girl from Sonora.”
    A good girl for Jesse. She was sweet, pretty, patient, and not particularly ambitious. She was a fine girl for an