by Holley Trent
“Where’s Ma?” Lance asked again.
“Don’t you know that?” Lily whispered as she rolled up her sleeves. Still too many layers. Pajamas would be better. As she dangled over the edge of the loft, she told the dreaming man, “Your mother is in Maria, probably dead asleep like I wish I were.”
“Ma’s supposed to pick me up,” he said as Lily’s feet touched the floor.
“From where, Lance?”
Responding to him might have been a gentler way of waking him than shaking him. She had no particular desire to be a Coyote by the next full moon.
Her pajamas were on top of the shelf of the organizer in the bathroom. She pulled them on, listening for more of Lance’s murmurs.
“She at home?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be at work. You’re gonna get fired if you don’t go to work. You said so.”
“Who did?” Lily mused.
He wasn’t just dreaming. It seemed as though he were recalling a conversation again.
“Happened again, didn’t it?” he asked. “Tell me. Last time, she said I was old enough to know.”
“Old enough to know what?” Lily whispered.
She paused in front of the thermostat and squinted at the display. The trailer was dark, but she could just barely make out the digits. 76.
“No wonder.” She notched the heat down a few degrees. She’d rather wear a blanket than sweat to death. “Why isn’t he sweating? He should be soaked.”
Turning back to the bed, she noted that he wasn’t even under the covers. He was sprawled on top of messy sheets in his boxer shorts and nothing else. Moving closer, she could indeed see the bead of sweat on his brow and the scowl on his mouth, but she didn’t know if those were due to the greenhouse temperature they were sleeping in or the dream.
Backtracking to the kitchenette, she got a paper towel and wet it with cool water. She swiped it across his forehead.
Still, he didn’t wake.
“She at home?” he asked again. “Why don’t you just stop trying? You’re gonna kill her. Don’t I matter? Shouldn’t I have a mother?”
“Oh, Lance.” Lily had no idea what event had caused him so much turmoil, but the angst in his voice ripped her heart to shreds. He must have been a child, terrified that something awful would happen to his mother.
Lily knew that fear all too well. Not a single day passed without her wondering when she’d get to see her mother again. The longer they went without embracing, the more she feared that something bad would happen before she could see her in the flesh again. Two years was too long for a young woman to be without her mother.
She couldn’t leave him to suffer like that, no matter how much he frustrated her. Figuring out how to wake him was going to being a challenge, though.
“Throw something at him, maybe?” she murmured, eying her pillow. That would put a safe distance between them if he got all shifter ragey from being roused. She could toss it from as far back as the sofa and still have sufficient force.
She grimaced and considered the man’s long reach and supernatural speed. The bathroom was farther. She could stand in the doorway, toss, and then shut herself in hoping for the best. If all was well, she’d come out, no harm done. If he went berserk, there’d be a little metal layer between her and the beast that should stave him off until his head cleared and he remembered where he was.
Carefully, she climbed onto the side of the lower bed and reached for the pillow on the top one. It was just within the range of her grasp when Lance said, “This some kind of joke?”
That was different.
Did he wake up?
She bent her knees to get a peek. Looked like he was still asleep. She grabbed the pillow and got down.
“You’re playing with me,” he said. “Come on. You can’t be serious.”
Those words were somehow redolent. Furrowing her brow, she pressed the pillow under one arm and planted her other fist on her hip.
She couldn’t believe this was what her life had boiled down to—eavesdropping on a Coyote’s dreams to slake her curiosity about him.
“How long have you known?” he asked.
She remembered those words, too.
“We can be in Vegas by tonight,” he said. “Hate fuckin’ going there. The moment I set foot in Nevada, Randall’s gonna know, but we’ll have to risk it.”
Wait…
Lily took a step closer. She remembered all those words. He’d told her that the day she’d told him she was pregnant. He was talking to her, but…not.
“It just has to be done,” he said. “You’re not a Coyote. You’re not my mate. This’ll get people to leave you alone, probably. Has to be done if you’re gonna go through with it.”
Lily perched on the edge of his bed, heartbeat loud in her ears.
Had she become one of his dreams? Or was she a nightmare?
Just wake him.
She wanted to wake him because she was a coward and didn’t want to know what he’d really been thinking of her on that awful morning. She didn’t want to know what thoughts had crawled through his mind after they’d disconnected. At the same time, she recognized that dreams had their purposes. They helped the brain process strong emotions and traumatic events, even long after the traumas had occurred. But she didn’t want to be anyone’s trauma.
She reached for him as he asked, “You gonna go through with it?”
“I wanted to,” she found herself quietly answering.
Even alone, she would have been okay. She had lots of family around. Even if her father had completely disowned her, she would have had her cousins and all the Cougars. Cougar women rallied and pitched in. There’d been no doubt in her mind that Lily wasn’t going to succeed at being a mother if she chose to. Her friends weren’t going to let her fail.
“Give me a couple hours,” he said. “Can fly out as soon as I finish up some errands.”
And they had. A silent, nervous flight to Vegas, during which the refrain she’d been whispering in her brain was, “Am I really doing this?”
“Married a man I hardly knew, and for what?” she asked Lance’s slumbering form. “Just so that no one would criticize me? And so that no one would bother your kid? That’s what Coyotes do, right? Always looking for quick fixes.”
“I don’t understand,” he murmured. “This far? I don’t understand.” He tossed his head, expression crinkling with anguish. “When? Two days ago? But you said you were ten weeks.”
Oh no. No no no.
She wasn’t going to let him recount that. She didn’t want a replay the aftermath of one of the worst nights of her life from his perspective. Having done the hard work of living through it, she thought she’d earned the right not to have to listen to the highlight reel.
Without thinking, she gave his shoulder an insistent push. “Lance.”
His pale eyes, reflexive as mirrors in the dark, snapped open and before her body could complete its backward recoil, he’d thrown his arm around her waist. He yanked her close, teeth bared.
She was close enough to hear the beginnings of a growl starting in his chest, even through the bombastic pulse in her ears. Close enough to hear his heart’s accelerating patter. Close enough to see when his pupils began to shrink and feel when the tension in his body began to abate.
“Shit. Lily.” He dragged his tongue across his lips and took a breath. “What are you doing?”
“I…tried to wake you.” She tried to wriggle out from under his arm, but even with his lazier, wakeful grip, she couldn’t move her body enough to work herself free. “You were having a dream.”
“I don’t dream.”
“Bullshit. Either you dream, or you tell secrets in your sleep due to being in some kind of hypnotic trance. If the latter, you better call Blue and tell him he has a new rabbit hole of research to burrow into. That’s something you should really get checked out. Gods know how many trade secrets you may have leaked to your travel trailer—” She clamped her teeth and spit the word “companio
ns” through them.
“What was I saying?” He made a decent effort at trying to sound cavalier about it.
He failed. Lance may have been casual, but he was always serious.
“Are you or are you not recognizing that you were in fact dreaming? I can’t believe this is even an argument.”
He shrugged jerkily beneath her. If the idea of actually letting her go dawned on him, he certainly didn’t act on it.
“Maybe I don’t remember all my dreams,” he said. “Sometimes I wake up knowing that I was dreaming, but whatever the dream was about sort of slides away before my wakeful brain can grab onto it.”
“Maybe that’s for the best.”
“Maybe it’s not. You’re being super cagey,” he said.
“I did you a favor.”
“What favor would that be?”
She raised a triumphant eyebrow. “I woke you.”
“Loud sex dream disturbing you?” She could see the corners of his lips inching upward in her periphery.
She rolled her eyes. He should have known by then she wasn’t so easy to scandalize. Being related to who she was, if she got her panties in a bunch over every off-color statement a shifter uttered around her, she’d spend her entire life offended. Frankly, she had too much shit to do to let that happen.
“Do you feel like you were having a sex dream?” She wedged her knee between his thighs and gave it a revelatory wriggle. “Doesn’t feel like you were to me, but I may have forgotten some anatomical certainties.” She canted her head and worked her arm out from the band of his grip so she could tap her chin. “Which way did you hang? Left or right?”
“Gravity doesn’t work that way, shortcake. I’m on my back.” The corners of his mouth twitched again. “What do you think is filling the gap between your belly and mine? Sure as hell isn’t my waistband.”
She blinked at him.
“I like physics,” he said. “Almost as much as I like anatomy.”
She swallowed and tried to make sense of what her body was feeling without actually moving. If that massive bulge beneath her wasn’t gathered fabric, then mescal had erased a phenomenal memory.
And then it twitched.
Fabric didn’t tend to do that.
Shit.
“I’m just…gonna go back to bed.” She crooked her thumb toward the top bunk. “You’re awake now. Maybe just try to keep it down. Okay?”
“Keep what down? We’ve already discussed the physics, shortcake. There’s nowhere for it to go but up, and it’s too heavy for that.”
“Let go of me.”
“You really want me to? You smell pretty relaxed to me.”
Bastard.
She tried to work up some inner turmoil and get her hormones moving in a more “Eek, I’m prey,” kind of direction, but all she managed to do was get a better idea of the exact outlines of a certain physics experiment.
It was a wonder she’d been able to walk afterward.
Or could I?
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Could I walk?”
“When?”
“That night after I left Blue’s.”
“Probably about as well as I could.”
“You don’t remember.”
“Bits and pieces.”
“Okay, well, I’ll leave you to your bits and pieces.” His very prominent bits and pieces.
“What’s the hurry? You’re shivering. Might as well stay until you’re warmed up.”
“If I’m shivering, it’s not become I’m cold. It’s plenty warm in here. I had to turn down the heater.”
“Turned it up because you’re always cold.”
Oh.
So she was. Some little voice inside her head screamed out for her to tell him why, but she couldn’t. She’d sound so dramatic. “I could have died that night.”
Anger was easier than being sad.
“I’m fine right now,” she said.
“Okay.” He gave his throat one of those “Well, that’s that” clearings, closed his eyes, and let his head fall to the side.
“Uh. Lance?”
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat again and shifted his right leg so she fit more snugly between them.
And more in touch with his physics experiment.
Damn. Damn.
She pressed her palms to the mattress and pushed herself up onto them.
That small victory didn’t last long, because he’d apparently only let go of her to grab the corner of the covers.
He pulled them over her body in its plank position and looped his arm back around her trunk. “You’re making a draft.”
He tugged her back down and cleared his throat again.
“What are you doing?”
“You wanted to shut me up so you could sleep, right? Congratulations. You’re shutting me up.”
“My best idea was really more along the lines of suffocating you with my pillow.”
“Nah, I’d just chew through it before you could succeed.” He grinned. “You want me quiet, this is how you can make your wish come true.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Apparently you have much to learn about shapeshifters.”
Maybe she did, but he didn’t seem especially interested in furthering her education, in spite of the fact that she kept waiting for him to say more.
He didn’t.
Within a couple of minutes, he began to snore softly.
“Lance.”
He smacked his lips and settled her even tighter against his chest in his sleep.
“Lance.”
“Gods,” he groaned. “What?”
“My bed’s up there.”
“Just stay where you are.”
“Why?”
“I just…” Still facing the wall, he opened his eyes and let out a long, ragged breath. “I don’t want to dream. Just…stay there so I don’t. Okay?”
“But I thought—”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now. Okay?”
“So, you know? You know what’s in your dreams?”
He didn’t respond.
She didn’t push. That haunted look in his eyes told her to back off, and she would because she was smarter than he gave her credit for.
She put down her head and closed her eyes. “Okay.” In the morning, they could pick up their fight where they’d left off.
Besides, she was comfortable where she was.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
There was fur in Lance’s face. With his eyes closed tight, he racked his brain and tried to remember if the pack had been out for another run that ended in a doggy heap, but that didn’t seem right. It seemed even less right after he inhaled deeply. Coyotes didn’t tend to smell like vanilla.
And canine fur wasn’t that soft.
Oh.
He let out the breath and lifted a hand to Lily’s hair. He looped the curls through his fingers and brought them to his nose. Then he shifted a bit beneath her so his bits were less squashed.
Good girl.
She hadn’t moved an inch. He liked it when his lovers could stay where he put them, assuming he bothered with that whole spending-the-night mess.
But Lily wasn’t his lover, he remembered. She was his wife, and she was lying there because he talked in his sleep.
He knew he did. Kenny kept dogging him about it. Kenny had suggested therapy but Lance didn’t see the point. He already knew what was wrong with him. His awareness of his mother’s numerous miscarriages had started when he was thirteen. The older he got, the more he remembered about the ones she’d had before then. Every time he’d thought his parents had given up on expanding the family and Lance’s anxieties had tapered off, it’d happen again. He could never really recover, and he couldn’t see how his mother did, either. When he’d found out it’d happened to Lily, he’d wondered if he was cursed.
Maybe he was a bad luck omen or had hostile energy or something.
That was ridiculous, of course, but all the same, he wasn�
�t interested in ever seeing a woman go through what his mother had. Not Lily. Not anyone.
Nothing could fix what had screwed him up except, maybe, a time machine.
Time. Shit. What time is it?
He lifted one eyelid begrudgingly, then the other. The sun was out, but he couldn’t guess the time. All the blinds were closed.
Lily had her cheek pressed against his chest and hands shoved beneath his pillow. Looking for warmth, probably.
“Could have just put them in my shorts,” he murmured. “I wouldn’t have minded.”
Having his bits diddled while he attempted sleep was one of the most relaxing ways he could drowse off. Not everything had to be about sex.
He snorted and crushed Lily’s hair in his fist for a deeper sniff. “Yeah, that’s a lie.” He spent half his waking hours in a state of turgor when she was around. Generally, he had a little more self-control than that and could talk his body into standing down. Apparently, not so with her. She was so soft and warm and very…
He chuckled softly as he snaked his fingers just inside the elastic of her pajama pants.
She snapped up onto her hands and glowered at him.
Laughter came out of his body sounding like a cross between a bark and a chuckle. Her eyes were bleary and unfocused, plump lips turned down into an angry scowl, and her cheek was red and creased from sleep.
“Come back down here.” He patted his chest where her face had been. “Otherwise, the indention you made will plump up and you’ll have to do the hard work of getting comfortable again.”
She looked at him like she had no fucking idea who he was.
“Go back to sleep for a few minutes, shortcake. You can try that waking up thing again.”
The line between her eyes creased deeply. “You had your hands in my pants.”
“All I did was flick the elastic.”
“Still counts.”
“That was just my fingertips. I’ve had far more interesting things in your danger zone before.”
She blinked a few beats, then groaned and rolled her eyes. She let herself back down, though, and yanked the covers over her head, which put them right at the bottom of his chin.