Falling for the Cougar Read online

  Her window had been replaced and looked just like the one before. Her apartment manager must have had it replaced right away. It wouldn’t do to have bashed-in windows marring the look of the complex with two currently available for rent.

  Whiskers poked his head through the blinds and meowed at her. Cheered with his greeting, she smiled a tad.

  Her attention shifted to the door. Whiskers hadn’t warned her that a burglar had hidden in her apartment. An insane fear the burglar still stood between her clothes in her closet gave her the willies.

  Then the worry—would the thief return, angered he hadn’t gotten anything from her place to sell for drug money? Or was the police taskforce in the area enough of a deterrent?

  Still, she couldn’t help that her skin crawled with apprehension as she unlocked the door.

  A black and white rolled to a stop in front of her place. She didn’t recognize either of the police officers who climbed out of the car.

  “Captain Welsh?” the shorter, squatter man asked.

  “Yes.” Now what?

  “Officer Callahan asked that we check on you. He wanted us to make sure you got into your place all right. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, you could tell us if anything is missing.”

  “Yes, yes, that would be fine.” Any company about now would be welcome. Except for Tom’s.

  The tall, skinny redheaded police officer said, “We’re patrolling the area heavily for the next few days. In fact, a couple of us will be in the immediate vicinity throughout the night.”

  She glanced at their hands. Both wore wedding rings. Too bad. She could use a knight. Especially if they’d been cougars.

  “Come in.” She opened the door.

  Whiskers wound around her legs. “I’ll get changed and then if you’d like, I’ll fix some coffee for you.”

  “Sure, Captain Welsh,” the shorter man said. “I’m Mike Connors and this is my partner, Kevin Blakely.”

  She shook their hands. “Thanks for coming by. I didn’t realize how shaky I’d feel coming home.”

  Once she’d changed into jeans and a T-shirt, she made the police officers some coffee. That’s when she saw her mail sitting on the counter. Freddy must have gotten it for her when he came in to feed Whiskers before he ended up in the hospital.

  She pushed the envelopes apart—telephone bill, credit card bill, card from… She turned the envelope over. No return address.

  “Is anything wrong?” Connors asked.

  She quit frowning. “No…no, nothing wrong.” She handed the coffee mugs to the men.

  Then the flashing light on her answering machine caught her eye.

  Connors asked, “Would you like some privacy to listen to your messages?”

  She shook her head. There were no secrets in her life. She punched the button for new messages.

  “It’s Jackie. Sorry, Nicole. I can’t go with you on vacation. Family emergency. Room is paid for. Enjoy the trip. We’ll get together some other time. Later.”

  No clue as to what the family emergency was all about? No number to call to get in touch with Jackie? They’d been friends for over a year. Yet Jackie had never sounded so cold, so distant. The problem at home had to be really weighing on her mind.

  Nicole would have to try to discover Jackie’s family’s phone number and give her a call to see how she was doing.

  The police officers walked into her living room with their steaming mugs of coffee, no doubt trying to give her some privacy.

  Two hang-ups followed.

  The next message said, “Hey, Nicole, it’s Tom. You said you didn’t want to have anything further to do with me, but damn it, I would have taken you home from the hospital. Hell, you had a taxi take you home? The doctor said you could take your vacation if you have someone to watch over you. Call me as soon as you get home. I want to know who you’re going with, if you decide to go. Colonel Tilton said if you can’t find someone else to join you, he’ll cancel your leave.”

  She fisted her hands. No way would Tom or the colonel dictate her vacation plans.

  Another two hang-ups on her answering machine followed. Nothing else.

  She looked at the caller ID on her handset. The hang-ups were all listed as out-of-area. So much for caller ID identifying the caller.

  She walked down the hall and into the living room.

  The redhead was examining her Japanese snowbird paintings. He glanced at her and smiled. “Beautiful work. Is Lois Welsh a relative?”

  “My mother.” She fought the tears that threaten to spill.

  He looked back at the painting. “Are the birds really blue?”

  “She painted them slightly blue against the snow backdrop. They match with my blue sofas.”

  He nodded. “Artistic license.”

  She smiled. “Yeah. I’ll check and see if anything’s missing.”

  After searching her apartment, she reported back to the police officers, shaking her head. “No.” Whiskers sat on Red’s lap as the man stroked between her cat’s ears.

  She smiled. “It looks like he found a friend.”

  “I have three of my own.”

  “Kids and animals gravitate toward him,” Connors said. “You say you didn’t find anything missing?”

  “No. It looks like Freddy spooked him and the thief didn’t get anything.”

  The redhead said, “We understand you’re going to Galveston for a week starting tomorrow.”

  She hadn’t meant to stare at him, but she couldn’t believe he knew her vacation plans.

  He added, “Colonel Tilton said you were going to Galveston for a week so wouldn’t be back in the office, should we need to get in touch with you about the attempted robbery.”

  “Oh, well, yes, if Freddy’s going to be okay.”

  “Your next-door neighbor?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll keep an eye on your place while you’re here tonight. There’ll be someone watching the apartment periodically while you’re away if you do go.” He finished his coffee and set the cup on the table. “It appears there’s a gang of ten or so men who’ve committed the break-ins. We’ve caught two. We hope to convince them to give up the names of the others. They have an alibi for the time your place was broken into, though.” Connors grimaced. “The two who were caught were tackled by an army officer at the intended victim’s home. Luckily, they were wearing army fatigues and the homeowner had enough foresight to look at their nametags before they escaped. It didn’t take long for the police to run them down.”

  She raised a brow. “They weren’t wearing fake nametags?”

  Red grunted. “Not that bright. They’d been in the Army, but out for nearly a year. Both were dishonorable discharges because of illegal drug use.”

  Connors said, “When we catch the others, we’ll need to see if you can ID any of the men.”

  “I never saw him.” Though she did smell him, courtesy of her enhanced cougar senses.

  “Yes, but we’ll still need to have you come in, just to be sure.”

  “All right.” If she could smell the person, if she had a chance to do that, she could identify him. She pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer in her coffee table, then read off the phone number for the Pelican Hotel. “That’s where I’ll be staying for the week. If Freddy’s in too serious a condition, I won’t be going anywhere.”

  Red pulled a business card from his pocket. “Call us if you change your plans or remember anything at all.”

  “Thank you. Both of you.”

  When the officers left, Nicole bolted her door. Instantly, she felt afraid. Her gun-slinging guardian angels had left her alone to face her way too vivid imagination.

  Every sound tonight would no doubt send her heart skittering. A dog barked down the street and someone slammed a car door. Yep. Everything set her on edge. She was not a scaredy cat but a cougar. Damn it.

  Whiskers rubbed her legs. She lifted him and hugged him to her breast. “At least the rotten guy didn’t hurt y
ou.”

  She inspected his paws. Clean. Either Freddy had rinsed them off, or Whiskers had licked them clean. She carried him into the kitchen and poured him a fresh bowl of food.

  Freddy had picked up her fern too and set it in the plastic container full of dirt. She swallowed the lump in her throat, hoping he was truly going to be all right.

  Whiskers meowed and she released him.

  Then she grabbed the phone. After a few minutes the operator connected her with Freddy’s hospital room.

  “Freddie, this is—”

  “Hey, Captain,” he said, his voice strong and healthy sounding.

  She smiled.

  No matter that she’d known him going on two years, he always called her by her rank. Old army habit as she outranked him, she guessed. “Hey, Freddie. What’s this business about you not telling me you had a heart condition?”

  “Heart condition? Who told you that?”

  A woman laughed in the background.

  Nicole raised a brow. “You have company?”

  “Yeah. A former sweetheart.”

  “Oh? More secrets you’ve been keeping from me?”

  He chuckled, instantly relieving Nicole. The tough old bird would be okay.

  “She’s bringing me home in a couple of days, but the doctor says I’ll live. How are you feeling?”

  “Headache, but it’s starting to fade.”

  “Glad to hear it. We make a pair. Are you still going to Galveston?”

  “Not if you’re ill.”

  “Now listen, Captain, you’ve been talking about going on this vacation for months. Lizzie’s going to take care of me. You go and have fun. I’ll get your mail.”

  Well, that decided that.

  “Thanks, Freddy, for rescuing me--”

  “What rescue? I made a mess of your window, and I didn’t catch the bad guy or anything.”

  “Yeah. You know what I mean. You take it easy. I’ll check in with you later.”

  After saying goodbye, she stared at the phone. Jackie’s parents lived in Boulder, Colorado. There couldn’t be too many Huntingtons, could there be? She finally found fifteen. After calling seven of them, she reached Jackie’s parents.

  “Family emergency?” Jackie’s mother said. “No, no family emergency that we know of. Is this a prank?”

  Nicole stared at the floor in disbelief. “Sorry, no, ma’am. There must have been some mistake with a message left by one of my office staff. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  She thanked the woman and ended the call, then sat down hard at her dining room table. What the hell was going on? Maybe Jackie was fooling around with some guy on the side and didn’t want Nicole or anyone at work to know. A married man? Or something else?

  Could things get any weirder?

  She rose from the chair and crossed the floor to the kitchen. She grabbed the mail. The card-sized envelope caught her attention.

  She ripped the envelope open.

  The plain manila card read inside: Nicole, enjoy Galveston vacation. Beware sharks, though. More abundant this year. And take good care of venison. Yours, Boris.

  Boris Nikolayevich?

  Venison. She chuckled. He could never remember the name of the stuffed toy he’d given her, Bambi, all because she abhorred the idea he’d hunt for deer and share the meat with her family. No way could she eat a deer.

  She looked at the back of the card. No address. Then she considered the Houston postmark on the envelope, dated two days earlier.

  She tapped her fingers on the counter. “Where in the world have you been, Boris?”

  She dug around in a kitchen drawer and pulled out the card she’d sent to Boris at his address in Houston to notify him of her parents’ funeral. The post office had stamped across the face of the envelope: Returned, no forwarding address. She knew he would have attended their funeral if she could have gotten in touch with him, as much of a friend as he’d been to her family.

  Why the note now? Did he know her parents had died?

  She glanced down at Whiskers, busily chowing down on his favorite salmon cat food. “You take good care of Bambi, don’t you? Boris doesn’t have to worry about that.”

  Whiskers looked up at her, burped, then poked his face back into his dish.

  She touched the words on Boris’s card, “Beware the sharks.”

  Was it because Boris had hated the water ever since his younger brother had broken through the ice-covered Baikal Lake in Siberia and drowned?

  Beware the sharks. She’d grown up in Florida and swum in the ocean since she was little. She envisioned lifeguards running up the red flag on their jeeps and shouting on megaphones to swimmers to come into shore as a shark had been sighted. She wasn’t afraid. More people died from car accidents than from shark attacks.

  But an eerie number of shark attacks had already plagued the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast that summer. She imagined that’s what had spooked Boris.

  She flipped on the television to check the weather as she pulled the cushions from her couch to make her bed.

  “Tropical Storm Alicia has switched direction and we now predict it will hit Galveston Island within the hour, but then will continue on, moving through Houston within the next few hours.”

  She stared at the weatherman, not believing her ears. “This can’t be happening.”

  The tropical storm wasn’t supposed to hit anywhere near Galveston or Houston. Previously, the weatherman had predicted only overcast skies, welcome on hot days.

  “The storm will be moving off by tomorrow morning, heading in an easterly direction.”

  Letting her breath out, she threw her cushions on the floor. “Thank God it’s moving out. Who would have ever thought taking a measly vacation would be this much trouble?”

  She broiled a steak and fried potatoes and asparagus, ate, watched a little TV, then got ready for bed. She showered and brushed her teeth, but instead of putting on her nightie, she wasn’t taking any chances. She shifted into her cougar and she headed for her bed, Whiskers already sleeping on her pillow.

  She tilted her head to the side as she glanced back at Boris’s note.

  How did he know she was going to Galveston?

  Lewis Samuel Thompson sat back in his burgundy leather chair, trimmed in silver tacks and propped his feet on a speckle-spotted cowhide footstool, good Texas look for his San Antonio estate and all brand new. The smell of leather scented the air. He lit a Cuban cigar, then dragged it in front of his nose and took a deep breath. Something about them being illegal, made them even better.

  He looked at Ralph. Tall, heavy-set, blond-haired, blue eyed—one of his most loyal men. But right now, Lewis could have eaten the man alive over the bungle. “I told you I didn’t want Nicole Welsh hurt. Not until we find the flash drive. Isn’t that what I told you?”

  “She was screaming, boss. I only meant to shut her up until I could wring the truth out of her. Then her damn neighbor broke the window, cop sirens screeched. Everything became way too hot.”

  Lewis nodded. “Search the place again. But wait until she’s gone. If you don’t find it, go after her in Galveston. No more slip-ups. We’re only lucky all the burglaries in the area have thrown the cops off our trail.”

  “Yeah, boss. I’m on it.” He hesitated. “You know, she’s checking in on the next-door neighbor at the hospital. She won’t leave if he’s doing poorly.”

  “At least the bugs are in place. Have you heard anything more that might be a clue as to where the flash drive is?”

  Ralph shook his head, then cleared his gravely voice. “The police are keeping tabs on the place now too.”

  Lewis drew himself up and narrowed his eyes. “Do whatever it takes and don’t get caught.”

  Ralph smiled. His gold tooth sparkled in the lamplight. “Yeah, boss, will do.”

  Chapter 3

  Because of the weather, Scott had thought of canceling his vacation, yet he hadn’t had one in forever, and if he hadn’t gone now, he m
ight not have been able to for months. It was hurricane season though and Tropical Storm Alicia threatened havoc in the northwestern part of the Gulf of Mexico. The storm was supposed to shift east, according to weathermen. East, not circle the area like a mixed up computer program caught in a continual loop.

  Besides, the mermaid vision he repeatedly had wouldn’t let go, and he didn’t envision being in a storm while seeing the boat and the woman, so the weather had to clear soon.

  He’d been there only a day on Galveston Island and with coconut sunscreen slathered all over his body, wearing board shorts, sandals, and sunglasses, and carrying a towel, he headed down to the sandy shore. His vision could come true any day now that he was at Galveston Island, but it wouldn’t, he assumed, if he didn’t go to the beach and check it out.

  The waves were high because of the storm, a smattering of clouds drifting across a blue sky, and brown kelp littered the sandy shore. It wasn’t very pretty, like the Caribbean Islands, but it was as close to a beach as he could easily get to from Fort Hood, Texas.

  He spread his towel out on the sun-warmed sand, the wind whipping about, but the air was warm and agreeable. Looking out at the Gulf, he didn’t see any sign of boats or mermaids and he nudged off his flipflops and sat on the towel. For an hour, he watched diligently, but saw no sign of vacationers and no boaters. He suspected everyone was staying away because of the unpredictable storm. At this very moment, rain was dumping on nearby Houston and severely flooding roads and neighborhoods.

  Feeling sleepy after the vision had woken him again last night, he lay down on the towel and closed his eyes, listening to the seagulls screeching above, the wind blowing, and the waves crashing on shore, the water rhythmically rolling back out to the Gulf again. And promptly…fell asleep.

  Nicole swam against the stiff warm summer currents of the Gulf, glad to be away from two-timing Tom, but fuming over the weatherman’s useless predictions. Still, she was bound and determined to make the most of her vacation while the weather held out.