Cougar Bait Read online

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  Chapter 1

  “You’re going where?” Liam Keller looked in disbelief at the curvy blond surgeon who had saved his life.

  Well, he tried to look at her, anyway. After his fight with Mathis Blackwell the night before, he was in piss-poor shape, one eye swollen completely shut and the other barely a slit. The rest of him ached like holy hell too—that damn Buck had really done a number on him. Still, he tried to focus because what Samantha Becker was telling him was more than a little troubling.

  “I’m going to Vegas to a trauma convention, which was where I was supposed to be all week, until I got sucked into going to your weird little town instead. How are you even awake?” She frowned at him. “There’s no way the anesthesia should have worn off this soon.”

  “Shifters heal quickly.” Keller made a dismissive gesture and winced—his right arm was in a cast and felt wrong somehow . . . probably broken.

  “Don’t do that! You shouldn’t be moving at all right now.” Samantha’s lovely voice took on a stern, no-nonsense note. “You nearly died last night—I was in the OR eight hours trying to save you. Don’t go screwing up all my hard work.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He sketched a salute with the other hand and wound up wincing again—this one had all kinds of wires and tubes attached to it. What the hell had Samantha done to him in the OR while he was out cold—turned him into the Bionic Man? At the moment he felt like he had more hardware coming out of him than the exit of a Home Depot.

  “I told you, don’t move.” She put out a hand—presumably to hold him still—and her fingers touched his bare arm.

  An electrical shock ran between them—but not the kind you get from static electricity. This was more of a sexual charge—a sensual lightning bolt that crackled between the two of them, electrocuting both with pleasure. Keller bit back a growl and felt his shaft go instantly hard under the thin hospital gown some bastard had put on him while he was unconscious.

  Samantha gasped and jumped back, looking at him as if he’d just groped her. Her scent—lovely and feminine, though not the scent of a Rejuvenating female—suddenly intensified and took on a hot note Keller’s sensitive Cougar nose couldn’t miss.

  “Hey!” she exclaimed. “What did you . . . how did you . . . ?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Keller growled. “That, my dear Samantha, is what is known as a ‘telling sign’ among Shifters.”

  “A telling sign? What the hell is that?” She looked angry and uncertain.

  Keller sighed. “It means you have the Gene,” he said simply. “The Shifter Gene.”

  “No, I don’t,” she denied quickly. “That weird pharmacist, Fiona, told my sister Sadie that if I hadn’t started the, uh, Rejuvenation process by now, I probably don’t have the Gene.”

  The Shifter Gene was carried by both male and female Shifters. In males it became activated around age eighteen or twenty—the age of sexual maturity. But in females, the Gene didn’t activate until they were somewhere in their late thirties to early fifties. And it would only become active at that time if the woman was single or hadn’t been sexually active with a man who claimed her as his own for six months. Once it activated, though, it didn’t stop—it rolled back the clock by twenty or more years, restoring the Rejuvenating female—or “Juvie” as Shifters called them—to her early twenties. Not only that, it induced a state of hyperfertility, forcing the female Juvie to get bred by a willing Alpha male or die during the full moon.

  Samantha knew all this—Keller knew she did because she’d been in his bar, The Cougar’s Den—where her sister, Sadie, had explained it to her. She hadn’t believed any of it, however, until both Keller and Mathis Blackwell had Shifted into their animal forms and fought nearly to the death.

  My death, Keller thought with another wince.

  But more even than his defeat at the hands—or hooves to be more accurate—of his rival, Keller was worried about the look of denial on Samantha’s lovely face.

  “I don’t have the Gene,” she insisted again.

  “Just because it hasn’t been activated doesn’t mean you don’t have it,” Keller said patiently. “In fact, that little ‘jolt’ that just passed between us when you touched my skin is proof positive you do have it. I’m an Alpha and your body recognized me as a potential mate—the telling sign is a wake-up call, letting you know a male who can meet your needs is in the vicinity.”

  “A potential mate?” Samantha gave him an incredulous look. “Dream on, buddy. You’re what—twenty-eight?”

  “Twenty-six.” Keller spoke with as much dignity as he could muster.

  “Okay, well I’m forty. As in the big four-oh. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not Rejuvenating like my sister Sadie did. Besides, I thought it was her you were interested in, not me.”

  “I was interested in her reproductive potential,” Keller said stiffly. “And I didn’t want her to become an Unformed—a female Shifter who has no animal shape to shift to during the full moon.”

  “I know what an ‘Unformed’ supposedly is.” Samantha frowned. “But you don’t have to worry about Sadie. She’s life-bonded to Mathis—whatever that means—and already talking about having his babies.” She made a face.

  Keller raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Do you object to her being with Blackwell or ‘having his babies,’ as you put it?”

  “I’ve got nothing against Mathis—he seems like a really nice guy, unlike some people I could mention.”

  She gave him a look he supposed he deserved—he had locked her and her sister up in his bar to try and force Sadie to mate with him. But that was only because she was the first Juvie that had been seen in his hometown of Cougarville in almost a decade. Juvies—Rejuvenated Shifter females—were incredibly rare and valuable since they were the only females able to reliably pass on the Shifter Gene and bear the next generation of Shifters.

  “So it’s the ‘babies’ part of the equation you don’t like?” he asked blandly, being careful not to let his face show any emotion.

  “I’m not a baby kind of girl.” Samantha shrugged. “Never wanted any of my own, and I guess I can’t figure out why Sadie would want to start all over again when she just got her twins off to college.”

  “I see.” Again, Keller kept his face blank, but in the back of his mind he heard another voice saying, I don’t want this baby! I can’t have it—not now! With an effort, he pushed the memory away.

  “We seem to have gotten off topic,” he said to Samantha. “The point I was trying to make earlier is that you do have the Shifter Gene, and it could still potentially become active. Which means you should stay near an Alpha male who could help you if you started feeling the breeding fever.”

  “An Alpha male like you, you mean?” She raised an eyebrow at him. “Didn’t we just establish that you are way too young for me?”

  “I’m not quite so young and inexperienced as you seem to think,” Keller growled. “I gained early admission into MIT at age fourteen. Following that, I got