The Coyote's Bride Read online

  SUMMARY

  Related to one of the oldest shapeshifter legacies in Maria, Lily Baxter grew up knowing there was a chance she’d find romance among the supernatural. But certainly, her idea of romance wasn’t a drunken one-night stand with a Coyote she loves to hate, a Vegas wedding, and soon after, a heartrending miscarriage. She and Lance Aitkenson obviously aren’t meant to be.

  But while secretly coordinating their divorce far from the snoops back in town, her new husband gets jumped by man-hating jaguar shifters, and it’s up to her to smooth things over. There’s something stranger than usual about these Jaguars. Not only do they seem to have abilities no other shapeshifters have, but they claim a centuries-old connection to Maria’s resident goddess. They see strong-minded Lily as a kindred spirit, but Lance fears they harbor sinister motives.

  Together, he and Lily might be able to unravel the secrets of the mysterious cult and prevent them from disturbing the peace back in Maria, but can they really work cooperatively when they’re so close to calling it quits? Or will they realize that they don’t need an accident as their excuse for sticking together?

  A SPECIAL MESSAGE

  The Coyote’s Bride is a story that contains discussions of past pregnancy losses. Although the events are not described in explicit detail, some readers may find aspects of the story difficult to read.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lily Baxter had once read a book in which the plucky protagonist had the uncanny ability to stare at a person with such intensity that the hapless victim’s head exploded. At the time, Lily couldn’t imagine what circumstances could drive a person to use such a talent without a shred of remorse.

  She was starting to figure that out.

  As she caught a glimpse of the side of her hopefully soon-to-be ex-husband’s face just before he tossed her blanket over her head, she didn’t wish irreparable bodily harm on him. Not really. She wasn’t averse to the idea of him enduring a bit of pain and suffering, though, particularly if that infliction centered around his fertile region.

  “Get down,” Lance grumbled as he nudged her for the fifth time back down toward the floorboard. “One more coming. Jimmy Lewis in a pickup truck. Tall enough that he can see in here. He keeps going fast and then slow. I wish he’d fucking pass and stop playing around.”

  “Super,” she muttered from the floor. She was tired of playing, too, and her frustration had little to do with Jimmy. Lily couldn’t be spotted with Lance so far from home. People would want to know why they’d been together—people like her high-handed father.

  In small-town Maria, New Mexico, where they lived, news of scandals spread like wildfire. That was why they’d left town in the wee hours of the morning before the busybodies were out on their porches with their coffee. The trip was necessary, in part, so they could figure out in a distraction-free environment how to extinguish those flames of rumor before they could get started burning. But apparently, Maria Middle School’s eighth-grade class was heading south on a field trip and their caravan had been swarming Lance’s truck for the better part of twenty minutes.

  She heard the wind’s whistle through the open window and the thunderous bass of the truck in the passing lane beside them. Jimmy was probably trying to get Lance’s attention. They were hours away from home and that was what people who recognized each other on the highway did. But if Jimmy saw Lily in that truck, the gossip mill would be cranking at full speed before the reluctant couple had a chance to even tell their family and friends they’d gotten married.

  They didn’t want to have to tell. In fact, there was no good reason to tell them anymore. After three months of living apart as though they hadn’t gotten married at all, Lily and Lance had decided to end the farce. The nuptials had been a rushed, impulsive mistake triggered by her missed period, three positive pregnancy tests, Lily’s terror of becoming the town’s newest objet de scandale, and some aggressive shapeshifter problem-solving reflexes on Lance’s end. Disreputable as they tended to be, coyote shifters apparently favored two-parent households. Given her own single-parent upbringing, that hadn’t sounded like such a bad thing to Lily, but it didn’t matter. They’d never get a chance to test the arrangement. Her pregnancy had ended at ten weeks, right as they’d started to try to make serious plans to cohabitate.

  They had yet to actually spend a night under one roof. It seemed ironic that they hadn’t done so on their wedding night but would be for the purpose of ending their joining.

  “Is he gone?” The noise had ebbed. Lily’s feet and neck were starting to cramp, and she wanted off that freaking floor.

  Lance grunted.

  “Thanks a lot for telling me, Grumplestiltskin.” She climbed onto her seat and buckled in.

  They’d hardly conversed at all in three months, so she really shouldn’t have expected tenderness from him. But just once, she wished he’d be kind so she wouldn’t feel like such a fool for trying to be civil.

  She pinched her thick blanket closed around her neck and turned her focus to beyond the windshield. The scenery had become somewhat less monotonous in the past twenty minutes, and she was grateful for that. There was only so long a landscape could hold a lady’s attention, especially in November. Dry grass. Yellow leaves on what few trees there were. From a distance, they looked like gold with the sun behind them, but the marvel of that had worn off quickly.

  She might be disenchanted of sun-colored things for a while, thanks to her recent exploits with premium mescal. The golden-hued spirit had looked so innocent and beckoning in its bottle, but it was the reason she and Lance had gotten into the mess they were in. Her memories of Blue and Willa Shapely’s housewarming party were fragmented. She and Lance had shared the remnants of a bottle and then squabbled unceasingly like children—just like the day they’d met back in spring. They’d hated each other from first sight, or perhaps, from first bark. He was an unyielding lieutenant of Blue Shapely’s pack of coyote shifters and Lily was…Lily. She was the human cousin and sidekick to Maria’s most prominent cougar shifter family. The groups were natural rivals.

  And Lance was a natural dick.

  She’d been driving the getaway van the day her friend Willa had sprung Lance’s best friend from a rushed arranged marriage. Lance had yanked open the door and demanded to drive.

  No “Hello,” no “Thank you,” not even a “Please.” They’d sniped at each other all the way from Nevada back to New Mexico.

  Their tipsy squabbling at the party had evidently turned into teasing and flirting…and more.

  She’d put two and two together when she missed her period and had texted him as soon as she was sure.

  There hadn’t been any emotion in his voice or even a strain when he’d called her back and told her, “I guess we’ll have to get married.”

  They didn’t even like each other, but they’d flown to Vegas for a terse quickie wedding the next night. They figured that by the time she started showing, they’d have their shit together and that people would have believed she’d been staying at his place all that time.

  Three months was far too long to be legally attached to someone she despised, especially since it’d been six weeks since her miscarriage. They’d never gotten around to ending the thing. He’d been out of town, and she’d been too busy feeling sorry for herself to broach the subject, anyway.

  Their marriage might have helped support the nascent truce between the Coyotes and Cougars, had it lasted. News of the dissolution could very well reignite old tensions.

  Secrecy was the way to go.

  She caught the road sign marking the distance to Truth or Consequences. They weren’t going quite that far—just to the state park. Elephant Butte.

  Lance had been heading there anyway to pick up a young coy
ote shifter named Gus and his grandmother, Regina, at the request of his best friend and pack’s alpha, Blue Shapely. Lance had texted her the night before with an invitation:

  LEAVING TOMORROW TO COLLECT A COYOTE KID AND HIS GRANDMA FOR BLUE. CAN GO EARLIER IF YOU WANT. NEED TO SORT OUT THE DIVORCE. NO MORE DISTRACTIONS OR EXCUSES.

  “May as well get on with it,” she’d muttered before responding in the affirmative.

  While she thought back on that since-deleted text, her phone buzzed, punctuating the glare she’d just fixed on the side of her husband’s face. She rooted the device out of the folds of her blanket cocoon and killed the noise without looking at the screen. She already knew who was texting her. She loved her little brother to death, but he was six, and sometimes his text messages told stories that actually didn’t lead anywhere. She’d read them all at once later and tap out a suitably enthusiastic response with lots of heart emojis. Antonio loved those pink hearts.

  Lance thought emojis zapped brain cells—one for every pixel. He’d muttered as much somewhere on the Vegas Strip before their wedding when a tourist wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a heart-eyes smiley screenprint had walked past.

  Her gaze tracked over to Señor Silent Treatment once more.

  He wouldn’t even spare her a glance.

  They’d been in that truck cab for the better part of three hours and neither had said anything of consequence. Their first exchange had come an hour in when he’d groused, “Do you have to have the heat on?” which she responded to with “It’s forty degrees outside. Do the math.”

  He’d opened his window after that. She’d turned the heat up more.

  On and on.

  He just wouldn’t let her win.

  Stubborn Coyote. As much as she tried to downplay her male cousins’ deep-seated revulsion of their rivals, at moments like that, she couldn’t help but to ponder if they were justified in their hostility.

  *

  Ten minutes after exiting the highway, Lance pulled the truck over at the self-pay station outside of Elephant Butte State Park. He hopped out of the cab, leaving the door open.

  Cold air poured into the truck, making Lily shiver even beneath the blanket layers and in spite of the blasting heat from three out of four dashboard vents.

  She just hadn’t been able to get warm since her miscarriage at ten weeks. The anemia from the blood she’d lost from the complications would eventually correct, but she didn’t know if the chill accompanying it ever would. That wasn’t entirely medical. Some of that iciness in her body was marital.

  “Threat of tarnished reputation or not, I shouldn’t have married him,” she muttered and glowered at him through the windshield.

  He wasn’t looking. He was stuffing cash into a registration envelope and scribbling information about his truck and camper onto the paperwork.

  Lance climbed back into the truck and slammed the door without a word.

  “Might as well leave it open,” she muttered. “Not like I can tell the difference.”

  He didn’t say anything. Just stared at her with cold blue eyes and put the truck into gear. She thought she saw his chin twitch a little, but she couldn’t really tell for sure because of that ridiculous lumberjack beard. He wasn’t a lumberjack. He was a pilot and Coyote pack lieutenant. She didn’t even know what his face looked like under that thing. That seemed to be something she should have known before she had sex with him, but no, for once in her well-ordered life she’d done something impulsive and irresponsible.

  She suddenly understood a little about why her father had wanted her to live at home until she was twenty-five. She was twenty-six and had been living apart from him since eighteen, but maybe she still needed adult supervision.

  Lance got the truck moving up the winding road that overlooked the man-made reservoir and the dam, and she chafed her freezing arms through her sleeves.

  Possibly, if she told him why she was so cold, he’d have some mercy on her, but as far as she was concerned, she didn’t owe him any details. He should have been kind without knowing all the harrowing details about the miscarriage. About her staggering through the hospital’s automatic doors and swooning before she could get a word out. And her zipped lips when the nurses made noises like “Didn’t know you were seeing anyone, Lily.” And of her shame when her cousin-in-law Ellery showed up for her usual shift.

  Maria was a small town. Three of her cousins’ spouses were nurses, and two of those women worked at the hospital. The odds hadn’t been in her favor that one wouldn’t be at the hospital that night.

  Ellery had stood at the side of her gurney, hanging a bag of donated blood, and had whispered, “Did you know?”

  Of course Lily had known. In ten years, her period had never been more than five minutes late.

  “Who?” she’d asked next.

  Instead of answering, Lily had chosen to close her eyes and let her head loll to the side. She’d been so tired and sad. Ellery had accepted that. In the weeks since, she hadn’t followed up, not even when they were alone in the kitchen after a big dinner at the ranch. Or when they walked the long dirt road to get their mail at the same time.

  Lily didn’t know what Ellery had done to keep people in that hospital from blabbing her business all over Maria, but she was going to be eternally grateful for it…and she wouldn’t even feel so guilty if the usually-neutral witch had resorted to some black magic to get it done. Ellery sometimes broke her witch’s code for the good of the family. If Lily’s father had found out about the situation, he would have been raising all kinds of useless hell for weeks.

  Maybe months.

  Lance angled the truck into an RV slot that had a pretty decent view of the beach down below and was a fifteen-second walk from the toilets. He pulled up the parking brake and killed the engine—the heater along with it.

  She sighed.

  The forecast called for a warm November day, and temperatures were supposed to peak in the mid-seventies. Soon enough, she’d shake the chill, but in the meantime, she needed to utilize some advanced-level mind-over-matter skills. That was what she used to do back when she was a dancer and ballet had turned her toenails into mangled, bloody flakes. She could survive cool temperatures for a while. She was stronger than her name let on.

  Lance rapped on her window and crooked his thumb toward somewhere or other before he disappeared.

  She scoffed.

  That kind of coldness? That, she wasn’t so sure she could endure.

  She was glad that soon enough, she would no longer have to try.

  *

  Lance walked to the mouth of the nearby hiking trail. He put his phone to his ear as he looked back at the truck and camper. Lily still hadn’t gotten out, but if she wanted to be difficult and petulant, he wasn’t going to sweat it. He wasn’t going to force her out into the open, and he figured she’d eventually figure that out. According to their soon-to-be-worthless marriage license, he had a good ten years on her, but she wasn’t unintelligent. At least, not unintelligent for a human, anyway. There were certain instincts she would simply never have.

  “Ah, Mr. Aitkenson,” Blue muttered into his phone. “I do so enjoy you calling me before I’ve waked enough to rub the damn crust out of my eyes.”

  Lance snorted and leaned against the trail post. Although he was trying to affect a casual stance, in truth, he was always on alert. That was a hazard of being a dominant Coyote’s longtime bruiser, and Lance had no qualms about what he was. He was only good at four things, in his estimation—neutralizing threats with his fists, flying planes, fucking, and running his mouth.

  He watched a lady emerge from the cargo van parked at the camping slot to right of his. She cut her gaze his way for a hot second then started shaking out what looked like some kind of rug.

  Ugly-ass rug, at that. The wildly patterned thing looked like it’d been salvaged from a carnival funhouse. He shuddered.

  “Why are you still asleep?” he asked Blue. “Not like you to be in bed now.” H
is alpha never slept the day away. Too much shit to do keeping the Coyote pack in order and keeping tabs on his multitude of investments. His family was going to double in size in a few months, so he had extra incentive to get his proverbial ducks in a row.

  “Willa and I had a surprise visit from the Goddess of the Hunt last night,” Blue grumbled. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m always gracious about Artemis popping in to visit her niece, but I think she’s getting vicariously broody and her visits aren’t the short chats they were a few months ago.”

  “She doesn’t have kids of her own, right?”

  “Not a single one in her thousands of years.”

  Lance whistled low. “Then you’ll probably be getting even more of those unsanctioned visits after Willa has the babies.”

  Lance didn’t necessarily think that was a bad thing. Having Artemis around meant that Willa, Blue’s wife and a demigoddess with no significant magical abilities of her own, would be easier to protect. Nothing got past Artemis.

  “You’re probably right, but I don’t have to like it, you know?” Blue said through a yawn. “Anyway, I’ve gotten so I can’t sleep unless I’ve got a leg slung over Willa. Didn’t get to bed until around two. Getting too old for that shit.”

  Knowing Blue’s precise age, Lance chose to hold his tongue on that one because he wasn’t that far behind him. He didn’t like the term “middle-aged.” That implied a certain expiration date, and as far as he was concerned, it was fake math.

  “Anyway, I made it down to Elephant Butte,” Lance said. “Ready to rendezvous with Regina and Gus and escort them into Pack territory.”

  “Good. Hopefully, we won’t have any problems getting them in, but who knows? Territory renderings in this state are so out of date that even now, you could be trespassing on some false alpha’s lands.”

  Lance had known that was a risk, but he was willing to take it. As far as they knew, there was only one legitimate, registered Coyote pack in New Mexico, but that didn’t mean there weren’t false alphas out there with their dogs looking for threats to their sovereignty. The Maria pack would get the boundaries sorted out eventually, but for the time being, it paid to be cautious.