by Holley Trent
“You driving her all the way out to the ranch? What’s wrong with her car? Isn’t it parked a few blocks from here?”
“I’m driving her home, meaning my home.”
“Why?” Kenny’s voice was flat and eyes narrow.
“Don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to, Ken. You’re the smarter of the two of us.”
“I’m pretty good at jumping to conclusions when I have to, but I want to hear the words from your own mouth. What are you doing? Blue told us to stop poking at the Foyes and their associates.”
“I’m not poking at her.” Lance turned his head and added in a mumble, “At least not in that way.” Or actually, in any way. They were being very, very chaste. Of all the things he’d thought marriage would be, chaste wasn’t one of them.
“Then what?”
Just spit it out. They’d be standing there all night otherwise. Lance may have been ruthless, but Kenny was a patient sort of sadist. He would make Lance suffer and spit out the exact words he wanted to hear, even if he didn’t know what those were yet.
Kenny’s eyes narrowed even more and nostrils flared in an unsettling way.
Oh hell.
“You keeping secrets from me again?” Kenny asked.
“Maybe some things should be kept between a man and his wife.”
“I thought you said you were getting a divorce.”
Lance shrugged. “Maybe not.”
Kenny’s forehead creased with a kind of concern that could only be described as matronly. Lance would have laughed if he didn’t know how hard the guy could punch. People didn’t expect much of Clark Kent when he had his glasses on, either.
“Listen,” Lance said, “maybe the situation isn’t such a bad one, you know? Obviously, I would have preferred to marry a shifter, and if I’d had the luxury of picking which family she came from, it wouldn’t have been that one. But look at her.”
They both turned.
Lily had her elbow propped in the windowsill and was performing the sort of “I’m listening” nod that he’d recently learned meant she was doing the exact opposite. The lady kept talking. And talking. And talking.
Still, Lily smiled. To him, it was obviously fake. His wife wasn’t the smiley, bubbly fairy princess everyone thought she was. Even if it was fake, it was pretty.
“I’m looking,” Kenny said.
“Okay, that’s enough. Stop looking.”
Kenny rolled his eyes but turned to face Lance. “You can’t just keep a lady because she’s attractive.”
“She has other qualities.”
“Yeah, I’m aware of some of them. But I’m asking you if she’s your mate. Because if she’s not and you run across the person who really is, are you going to be prepared to leave her?”
“I’m not going to leave her.”
“Because she’s your mate?”
Lance shrugged.
“Either she is or she isn’t.”
“I don’t know if she is.”
“We’re close so I can tell you’re lying. I can also tell you’re super uncomfortable.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me, Ken. You’re not qualified.”
“I wouldn’t dare to. Maybe this isn’t the best place to have this chat, but if you’re going to get in that truck with her and take her back to your den, you should have all the information.”
“And what information would that be? Put it in language for a guy whose best subject in school was PE.”
Kenny cleared his throat and moved Lance even farther away from the truck. “You’ve seen how Coyotes’ instincts change when they’re with natural mates. Don’t tell me you haven’t. You see it in Blue. His priorities are different now.”
“Yeah. He has Willa to take care of, so he’s even more dangerous.”
“With Willa to take care of and two kids on the way, he also has a big fucking Achille’s heel, wouldn’t you say?”
Lance couldn’t argue with that. He didn’t want to think of Blue’s family as liabilities, though. Blue wouldn’t be a stable alpha without them. He needed Willa’s moderating influences as much as she needed his protection.
Kenny grimaced again and dragged a hand through his perfectly coifed hair. It stuck up. That was going to drive him apeshit when he walked past a window and saw himself. “What does the coyote part of you have to say about her, Lance? And I mean the stuff beyond the fact she has a tiny waist and childbearing hips.”
“Do yourself a favor and keep your eyes above her neck.”
Kenny rolled them. “Or else what? You’ll kick my ass?”
“Hey. Sure. You know how it is, Ken. I’ve always tried to give you everything you needed. That’ll be no exception.”
“Interesting. Remember when I went out with Lauren Sheedy six months after you did? Your reaction when I told you about the date was a resounding yawn, and I thought you’d liked her.”
“About as much as you did, apparently.”
“You told her you’re not the marrying type.”
“I’m not.”
“So, you see where I’m going with this.”
“No, Kenny, actually I don’t. Seems to me that you’re just trying to piss me off.”
“No. I’m trying to get you to really think through this. Coyotes throw away what they don’t want. You know what kind of bullshit the Foyes are going to start with you if you cross her?”
“You really think I haven’t thought of that? You really think that—” Realizing that Lily and her companion had stopped talking and were peering over at the heated exchange, Lance stopped talking and took a breath. And then another.
When his pulse had stopped pounding in his ears, he put his back to the ladies and said in the most modulated voice he could, “Listen. Right now, I’m just trying to give myself options, okay? She’s open to that for some reason that I promise I do not grasp. Why shouldn’t I see what could happen?”
Why not see if I’m the marrying type?
And what was a marrying type, really, but a person who had decided that they were more afraid of being without someone than they were of all the inevitable hard times.
There’d be plenty. He just didn’t mind so much.
“And the coyote in you?” Kenny asked. “What’s he think?”
Lance chose his words carefully. He wasn’t used to so much self-examination. “The coyote in me thinks that if some other dog gets near her, he’s going to need to use a feeding tube for the foreseeable future. Basically.”
For a long white, the cousins stood on the sidewalk, glowering at each other. Lance didn’t know what to say, and although Kenny was usually pretty good about filling dead air when he needed to, he seemed out of words as well.
“Lance?” Lily called out. Her visitor had finally gone away. She waved at Kenny. He waved back.
“I’ll tell Blue to slot the meeting for late tonight so you can do what you need to,” Kenny said.
“Yeah. Just text me.”
Kenny took off back in the direction he’d come from.
Lance got in the truck. He got the engine started and heat on. Lily was looking a little pale. He could only guess that she was cold again.
“The Maria grapevine’s working fast,” she said. “That lady is a teacher’s aide at the middle school. I don’t think I’ve had a conversation with her in fifteen years. She was just telling me how old she’s feeling now that all of us kids have gotten married off.”
And so it begins.
Blue was going to be on Lance’s ass soon. Surprisingly, Lance didn’t care. He actually felt an unmistakable wash of relief about the fact that things would soon be out in the open.
He had nothing to be ashamed of, except having needed an assist from mescal to get near enough to Lily to incite her.
“I’m surprised your old man would be so eager to share the news,” he said.
“That’s because you don’t know him. That’s his style. He thinks if everyone knows, I’ll be ashamed enough to do the right
thing. Like when I was fourteen. I’d tossed out the idea of going to live with my mother for a couple of years, just brainstorming, you know? What fourteen-year-old girl doesn’t need her mother?”
“What happened?” He turned the corner toward Lily’s car, but more importantly, his house.
“By the next day, every other person I encountered in town was telling me how much I had going for me here and that it’d be a shame if I lost everything I’d been working toward for a short-term move.”
“So you stayed.”
“Yeah. I regret that sometimes. Hey, you just passed my car.”
He grunted.
“You don’t have to drive me home. I can drive myself.”
“Not taking you home. At least, not to your home. Mine.”
“Why?”
“Figured we should talk this thing out.”
“Why now? We’ve had days to do that.”
“Yeah. Maybe this time we’ll actually get something done.”
“And what is it you want to get done, Lance?”
He didn’t respond. Maybe they’d both find out soon enough.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Lance had no furniture.
That was the first thing Lily noticed when he nudged her across his threshold and into the dim front room.
The second thing she noticed was that his place was freezing cold.
He eased around her, hit the lights, and fidgeted with the thermostat. Seconds later, there was a pleasing whir of warm air coming out of the floorboard vents. “Sorry. I’m not home a hell of a lot.”
“I’m sure you don’t get cold enough even when you are here to turn the heater on.”
“Haven’t yet, but winter may change that trend.” He hooked his keys onto the rack near the door and gestured toward the rear of the house. “If you want a bottle of water or something, you can check the fridge. I’m going to go unhitch the trailer before it gets dark.”
“Okay.”
He slipped back through the door and closed it softly.
Lily stuffed her hands into her pockets and ambled toward the kitchen. The house itself wasn’t all that interesting. It was a typical kit house. Dozens of the mill-cut homes sprang up in Maria after World War II to accommodate returning soldiers eager to play their part in the imminent baby boom. The house she and Belle had once rented downtown was similar, though a bit larger.
Heeding his suggestion, she went into the kitchen. He did actually have a table and chairs and the requisite piles of paper clutter everyone seemed to have. She stifled the compulsion to riffle through his mail and instead opened the fridge, right as her phone rang.
She bumped the door closed, read Belle’s number on the caller ID, and sighed. She wasn’t going to be able to avoid her cousin for long. Belle would track her down like a repo lady who had a quota to meet.
“Uh. Hey,” Lily answered weakly.
Lily could hear labored breathing on the other end, and definitely not the exertion kind.
“Belle?”
A scoff. “You know,” Belle started in her usual husky drawl, “I never forgot how when I was like thirteen and you were like sixteen, you told me that you’d always be straight-up with me because you never wanted me to think you didn’t trust me.”
“I meant that.”
“So why didn’t you tell me you got married?”
Lily let out a breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. The question was a valid one, and one she’d known she’d be confronted with. That didn’t make the words come any easier, though. “Belle, I didn’t tell anyone. We were still living separately and barely even talking to each other. We weren’t going to tell anyone until we had to, but it didn’t matter because we were going to get a divorce. We knew getting married so fast was reckless.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“The reason you probably think.”
Silence. They didn’t say anything for maybe a minute. Unusual for them, but sometimes the quiet was necessary for perspective. “That’s…not a good reason,” Belle finally said.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. That reason no longer applies.”
More silence. Awkward. Tense. Heartbreaking, because Belle always knew what to say, and for this, she had nothing except a whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Lily shrugged but realized Belle couldn’t see her. “Who’d you find out from?”
“One of the Delacroix sisters. She found out from some lady at the coffee shop.”
“Yeah, Dad was there earlier.”
“Is he mad?”
“Of course he is. He only knows about the elopement, though.”
“Why’d you tell him?”
“Hadn’t planned to.” Lily reopened the fridge and got the water she’d forgotten about just that quickly. “You know how Dad is. He was needling me, and I guess I looked flustered. Lance must have thought he was being overbearing and said what he did to get him to back off. He says I…smell bad when I’m stressed. I didn’t even know he was nearby.”
Silence again.
“Belle?”
“Where are you right now?”
“At Lance’s. Got back into town a couple of hours ago. We’re going to talk this thing out, I guess. Figure out what we want.”
“Forget about ‘we.’ What do you want?”
It was Lily’s turn to be silent. She was afraid to want anything—to wish for anything.
“Come on, Lily,” Belle said with a voice dripping with exasperation. “Tell me so I can get behind you on this. Tell me so I can back you up on whatever it is you want to do, even if it’s ridiculous. I’m trusting that you know what you’re doing.”
She didn’t know what she was doing. “You don’t have to do that,” Lily said. “I’ll figure things out.”
“Yeah, you’ve always been good at figuring things out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use a little help. Come on. My brothers and I always showed up for you when you needed us to. Just tell me where to be, and I’ll be there. No one stood up for Mom before it was too late, but it doesn’t have to be like that for you. So tell me what you want.”
What I want?
Lily had no flipping clue what she wanted. She was so rarely asked, and she had no idea how to even begin the list.
Or maybe she did. There was one small thing.
“All I know is that…I don’t want to cut and run,” Lily said with a strained laugh. She couldn’t believe she was admitting any of it—what a fool she was and how, for a change, she was the one who was shamefully disorganized and as reckless as a shifter. “That doesn’t feel right, and not because I don’t want to be a quitter.”
“Of course it doesn’t feel right,” Belle mused, voice soft. “You’re probably his mate.”
“Pardon me?” Lily nearly dropped her water onto the floor. She managed to slap her free hand down just in time and pin the bottle against her thighs. She hadn’t seen that speculation coming.
“I don’t know everything about Coyotes, but I can tell you how it is with Cougars. If a man’s so put off by your scent that he’d tell you he’s bothered, you’ve really gotten through his defenses. Shifters aren’t generally so candid about what they sense. He trusts you.”
And perhaps that was the same reason she carried his scent. She certainly didn’t mind. It meant she’d have fewer conversations with hot-blooded shifters who sucked at reading body language and couldn’t tell when a lady wasn’t looking for a hookup.
“So, it’s like that with you and Steven?” Lily wanted to feel like the situation was normal and that it was fine for her to be hopeful even if the way they’d gotten together had been messy.
She didn’t want to feel like she was desperate, just understood.
“Sort of,” Belle said. “Every now and then, I’ll catch a whiff of his distress before anyone else does, but we’ve got a symbiotic relationship that’s typical only of certain types of Cougars. I don’t know what it is lately. I’m apparently the harbinger of mate news to humans wh
o’ve fallen into shapeshifter snares. I’ve been around enough true mate pairs to know the signs. Most people don’t know what to look for, but I do because I got to watch my parents.”
“Is that why you didn’t…” Lily grimaced, remembering what Lance had recalled. “You didn’t interrupt.”
“Yeah. Hey. I thought the pairing was…unlikely initially, because I’ve known you forever. You’ve got preppy inclinations and he’s a—”
“Rough-dried Coyote,” Lily murmured. She moved to the side window and caught a glimpse of Lance nudging the trailer a few feet back onto its parking pad. He apparently had some kind of truck-reversing magic. She didn’t think she’d be able to do it. She could barely even parallel park. “But I like that,” she found herself admitting. “With him, there are no pretenses. I never have to guess if he’s being forthright.”
“Breath of fresh air, huh?”
“Yeah.” Lily smiled. “And there’s this crackle between us. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“You don’t have to. I get it. You poke at each other because you can’t stand silence when you’re together, and you don’t know how to show you’re desperate to gobble up more of those little morsels about them that they haven’t shared with anyone else.”
“Yes,” Lily whispered. “He fascinates me.”
“He should. If you’re his mate, he always will. Hey. Listen. My brothers will probably find out soon,” Belle said. “I know they don’t tend to be especially tuned in to what’s happening in town, but I wouldn’t put it past some dipshit to be tactless enough to call them about it. They’re always fielding calls about you.”
Lily’s body went rigid with mortification. “What…kind of calls?”
“Oh, you know. The usual ‘Who’s Lily dating now?’ kind of stuff. I guess guys are less afraid of my brothers than they are of your father lecturing them.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Be that as it may, I’ll do what I can to soften the blow for them. Better that they hear it from me.”
“You gonna be able to manage them?”
“No, I’ll let their wives do that. I’m sure their first compulsion would be to drive into town and chase Lance up a tree, but I don’t think that’ll do anyone any good. It’ll just drum up more tension between the Cougars and Coyotes, and personally, I’ve been liking the relative quiet we’ve had since Blue rolled into town.”