Resisting the Cougar (Cascade Shifters #2) Read Free Page A

does it have to be pink? I hate pink.”
    She swore she saw the shifter’s lips twitch. “Just put it on.”
    “Fine.” She removed her glasses, took out the case from her jacket pocket, and slipped them inside. After sliding the pink mask over her eyes, she made a show of feeling around to get her bearings. In the process, she touched the shifter’s forearm. The feel of his hair and warm skin against her fingertips sent a small burst of heat through her body.
    What the hell? She’d never had that happen before. It must just be her excitement at being on a shifter clan’s land.
    Realizing she still had her hand on the shifter’s arm, she pulled it away. “Sorry. But with this mask, I can’t really see anything.”
    The shifter grunted before turning on the radio. As he turned up the volume, she guessed he planned to spend the rest of the ride listening to blaring music. Too bad she wasn’t about to allow him. Reaching in front of her, she touched the glove box, moved her hand over until she felt the knob of the stereo and pushed it. The alternative rock music ceased playing.
    Aidan pushed away her hand. “Don’t mess with my stereo.”
    He turned it on again. Claire was about to turn it off and tell him what she thought of the loud, grating music when Aidan captured her fingers with his own. He yelled over the music. “Touch it again, and I will tie you up and toss you into the back seat.”
    She felt silly yelling, but did it anyway. “Then at least turn it down. It’s giving me a headache.” A few seconds of blaring music ticked by until the volume became a more bearable level, allowing her to speak without shouting. “Thank you.”
    The shifter grunted. “I’ll keep the music down as long as you remain silent. If you start talking, I’ll turn it up again.”
    Rather than point out the loud music had to hurt his delicate shifter hearing, Claire merely nodded. Battling Aidan Scott over something as silly as the music wasn’t worth the chance of him turning around and dropping her back at her car.
    Tapping her fingers against her thigh, every cell in her body urged her to talk with him and find out information. But through sheer force of will, Claire kept her mouth shut.
    Even though she could recite her presentation notes and demands in her sleep, she ran through them again inside her head to ease some of her energy. Aidan’s disdain toward her chipped at her confidence. She hoped that Kian and his team would view humans differently. Otherwise, the meeting could fail and her ballot initiative would never pass in November.
    Rather than think of how the last five years of her life working toward shifter marriage equality could all be for nothing, Claire practiced facts and figures. She’d find out how the cougar-shifters viewed her soon enough.
     
    ~~~
     
    Aidan spent the next twenty minutes alternating between tapping his fingers against the steering wheel and gripping it tightly enough to turn his knuckles white. Claire was keeping her end of the bargain and hadn’t said a word. Yet despite her silence, he couldn’t think of anything but the human female at his side.
    Her delicate scent of lavender and woman filled the inside of the car, which only made his inner cougar wake up and take notice. All his cat wanted to do was pull over, cup the human’s face, and find out what she tasted like with a kiss. Even Aidan’s cock was semi-hard, and only through his learned self-control as a DarkStalker soldier did he keep it from going rock hard.
    More than being tortured with her scent, the human half of him tried to figure out why Claire affected him. He’d ridden with countless females from his clan in this very same car and had never had the urge to pull one into his lap and breathe in the scent from where her neck met her shoulder.
    He hadn’t felt this way in more than ten years. The last time a female’s scent had triggered both man and cat, it had been the first time he’d met his dead mate,