COUGAR'S MATE is Book 1 in Terry Spear's Heart of the
Cougar series. As a longtime fan of Terry Spear, I was
very excited to hear about this new series about cougar
shifters. Happily for me, I really enjoyed this book. There
is a lot of action in COUGAR'S MATE, but it doesn't obscure
the romance.
At the beginning of the story, Shannon Rafferty is a woman
in crisis. She witnessed her boyfriend's murder and is on
the run from the bad guys. Luckily for her, she is also a
cougar shifter. She is able to survive without a lot of the
same things a human woman would need, like clothing. One of
the things I like about Shannon is her resiliency. She is
able to survive while staying in her cougar form longer
than most cougar shifters, and she's able to defend herself
well.
Chase Buchanan is the sexy, incredibly sweet lawman
she runs into. Chase is a dream. Although he is in law
enforcement just as her former boyfriend was, the
similarity ends there. Her ex was controlling and into
illegal activity, while Chase is such a good guy. From the
first moment the two meet, he tries to protect and care for
her. He takes her into his home and provides her with
sanctuary but never forces her to stay. He seduces her by
showing how much he genuinely cares about her. Her safety
and happiness is his main concern. Both have known violence
and tragedy involving family and loved ones. There is a
real sense, in COUGAR'S MATE, that it was fate that they
met at this particular time, and as the people they are
now.
Chase's buddies -- Hal, Dan, and Stryker -- are all great
guys and I look forward to reading stories about them in
future books. They are all tough, former military types,
but they all have a wonderful caring side. I love the way
the entire town took Shannon in and supported her like one
of their own. The town and the feeling of community and
family it provides Shannon are almost equally as seductive
as Chase's charms. COUGAR'S MATE is an exciting paranormal
romance with a strong heroine and a sweet, sexy hero!
Cougar’s Mate: Instinct told her to run… Shannon Rafferty
learns that hanging out with the bad boys could be a
dangerous business, but hooking up with a cop is even worse.
Now she’s on the run, trying to avoid being murdered by his
cougar shifter brothers and uncle. If that isn’t bad enough,
a deputy sheriff hunts her down while she’s running as a
cougar and trying to survive in the Colorado wilderness. He
vows to protect her no matter what she’s done. With three
dead boyfriends to her name, she’s sure she will be the
death of Chase Buchanan before either of them can prevent
it. No matter how much she knows she has to run again, he
soon holds her heart hostage. But will that be enough to
keep them both alive? Chase Buchanan—as wilderness cabin
resort owner, former US Army Special Forces, and part time
deputy of the small town of Yuma, Colorado that boasts a
love of cougars—is tasked to track down a cougar reported to
be hunting human prey. Chase soon learns she’s a shifter,
not a full-time cougar, and she’s on the run. When he takes
her in, he vows to protect her. After losing his wife and
baby to the human kind of predator years earlier, he’s not
letting Shannon’s hunters kill her, too. But how is he going
to hold onto the wild-cat woman, who is unpredictable at
every turn, without losing his heart to her, and then losing
her as well?
Excerpt
Shannon rose, listened, her ears perked, trying to hear
anything other than the sound of the breeze rustling the
leaves down below. She heard no sign of humans and leapt
down to the next ledge. Thankfully, her kind could leap
eighteen feet in one bound, up or down. And horizontally? As
much as forty to forty-five feet. At a sprint, she could run
full out for short distances at forty to fifty miles per
hour, which was what she had planned—to race back to the
lake, despite discounting the idea earlier, and then take
however long it took to catch her meal.
She'd made it to the second rock ledge when she saw
something move in her peripheral vision. A man standing on a
lower ledge off to her right, his hands reaching for his
rifle, slung over his shoulder. How could he see her at
dusk?
He moved quickly as if he was a military man and not just a
hunter. Before she could leap at him, he fired a shot, the
sound ringing in her ears, echoing across the rocks. The
last thought she had as she collapsed on the rock ledge
above him was that she had lived a month longer than she
thought she would have ever managed.
***
As soon as the she-cat landed on the stone, asleep,
hopefully, Chase struggled to reach the ledge she was lying
on. If he’d been in his cougar form, no problem. But to
reach her as a human, he could have used climbing gear.
He hated having to shoot her as much as it felt as if he
were shooting one of his own people. But he wasn't. He had
just knocked out a wild cat protecting herself that might
have killed him, based on survival instinct alone.
He grasped the top of the ledge, got a couple of toe holds
with his boots, and pulled himself halfway up the rock face
when he saw a naked woman lying on the granite, her back to
him, and his tranquilizer dart in her shoulder. Shocking him
to the core, he gaped at her. Holy shit.
Silky, dark brown, nearly black hair draped around her neck,
the rest of her tan skin covered in chill bumps from the
cold. Before he could climb on top of the ledge to reach
her, and while he was still processing that the cougar was a
shifter, and not a full she-cat, his cell phone rang.
His nerves, normally made of steel, shattered into a million
fragments. He climbed up onto the ledge and hurried to pull
the dart out of the woman's shoulder, then jerked off his
parka. After rushing to lay it on the ledge and then lifting
her onto it, he pulled her arms into the sleeves and then
buttoned it up to her throat. The parka only came to high
thigh, but he couldn't do anything about that for now. He
glanced up at the cave above them, assuming she must have
been staying there.
His breath coming out in a misty fog and his heart pounding
hard, he made the rest of the arduous climb to reach the
cave to grab her clothes and ID. He stalked inside, used his
cell phone to provide some extra light as pitch black as it
was in there, and found—nothing. Not a backpack, not a
stitch of clothes. Certainly no ID. And she wasn't anyone he
remembered ever having seen before.
He hadn’t thought he could be shocked any further.
"God, what a nightmare." He had to get the nearly naked,
sleeping woman down the cliffs somehow. And he had to keep
her warm until then.
He called Dan to give him an update. "Dan.”
“Yeah, I tried calling you to let you know the cougar headed
in this direction at some point, but I haven’t found any
sign of him. Have you discovered anything your way?”
“Yeah. I sure as hell did. I'm in one hell of a mess. I need
your help… pronto."
***
Dan immediately headed back south. In all the years he'd
known Chase, he'd only heard him sound this frantic about
anything twice in his life. The first time was when three of
their team members had died in a mine blast during a combat
mission and neither could save any of them. The second time
was when Chase's family had been murdered.
"Okay, slow down and say everything after: you have a naked
woman in your custody."
The last Dan had recalled, he'd sent Chase to track a cougar
and… Ah, hell.
Sounding startled, Chase said, "Just a minute."
But Dan couldn't wait to hear what was going on. "Don't tell
me she's the cougar we were trying to track down. The one
who saved the boy."
No answer.
"Chase?"
No answer.
"Chase!" He had to get coordinates from him if nothing else.
And he damn well wanted to know what he was up against, so
he knew how to get Chase out of the mess he was in, whatever
it was.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Chase said, sounding totally rattled. He
quickly spouted off coordinates. "I'm in a cave above where
the woman is. No ID, no clothes, nothing, but she's been
sleeping here. I need to get back down to her."
"She's sleeping, naked, in this cold weather on a rock ledge
below a cave," Dan said, still not believing it as he strode
through the woods, figuring it would take him an hour to
reach the location.
"I tranquilized her before she leapt at me. I didn’t know
she was a shifter."
“One of our kind.” Dan didn't say anything for a moment. He
couldn't imagine shooting one of their own people like that.
But at least some of it made sense now. "No one we know, I
take it."
"No. We've got to get her down from here. I'm afraid if we
allow her to come to, she'll shift and run off. We’re going
to have a hell of a time getting her down from here safely."
"Run off… because she wouldn't come into town initially."
"I didn't find any sign of hiking gear or anything else. So
it looks like she arrived here as a cougar from somewhere
else. She might have a tent somewhere and just went for a
run as a cougar. This is one hell of a mess."
"All right. All right. We’re fine. We’ll take care of her
and then we’ll find her stuff and marry them up. If you’ve
knocked her out, it might be awhile before we can locate
anything for her."
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