CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lance found Lily half an hour later coming out of the pharmacy clutching a paper bag.
“I thought you were bullshitting him,” he told her.
“Well, I was,” she said, shrugging. “But then I remembered I had some vitamins to pick up. Figured I’d get them while I was in town.” She shifted her weight and tilted her head toward his truck. “Think you could drive me to my car? I don’t want to do the walk of shame past my father’s office.”
“I could see why you wouldn’t.”
She cringed and averted her gaze demurely. “Um. There wasn’t any screaming after I left, was there?”
“No.” Lance grunted and shoved a hand into his messy hair. “Guy like him doesn’t need to scream. He can make a guy feel like he’s three inches tall just by adjusting his glasses a certain way.”
Lily nodded slowly. “Yeah. Sounds about right. When I was in high school, all the kids called him Mother Gothel because I was basically on lockdown. Weird that he’s so uptight. Once upon a time, he was a black sheep in the family.”
“I don’t buy that.”
“It’s true. Of course, Aunt Glenda sits atop the ultimate grand pedestal when it comes to Baxter aberrations, but they’ve all pretty much written her off, anyway. My father had a special place on the bad Catholic’s list for a while for…” She put a hand over her heart, gasped, then whispered, “Fathering a child out of wedlock.”
Lance snorted and got her moving toward his truck. He needed to get home and get that damned trailer unhitched. His truck was using up gas like it was oxygen. “I take it he didn’t like his status on the family shit list.”
“Nope. That’s why he’s been toeing the line for the most part ever since. He gets some bullshit from my grandparents and from his other siblings about not reining me in better, and I can always tell when he’s been talking to them.” She shrugged. “It is what it is.”
“I guess the ‘I’m a grown woman and you can’t tell me what to do’ speech never has any effect on him?”
“Never. Maybe one day in the next decade, he’ll take a good long look at me and notice the crow’s feet forming and the gray hair in my eyebrows and realize I’m not a teenager anymore.”
“Pretty sure that’s what did it for my parents.” He opened the passenger door for her and gave her a boost into the truck cab.
“What? Gray hair in your eyebrows?”
“My gray hair is actually white, shortcake, but no. Crow’s feet. My mom went out and bought me a pair of Aviators the very next day.”
Lily giggled. “I can’t imagine your mother trying to tell you what to do.”
“She doesn’t. She tells my father and he does the nagging.”
“Your father is in Sparks.”
“So?”
Lily grimaced. “I see your point. My father will utilize any and all technology if it’ll assist him in parenting me from afar.”
“May as well get used to it, huh?” He shut the door right as a familiar gingham bowtie-wearing figure cut across the street in front of a slow-moving tractor. “’Sup, Ken.”
Kenny bumped his fist against Lance’s proffered one and then slid his glasses off. He rubbed his eyes before replacing the specs. He looked like he’d been burning the midnight oil. “Blue wants to do a debriefing in a bit. Where are you headed?”
“Taking Lily home.”
“Yeah?” One of Kenny’s eyebrows launched upward. “Pretty sure I just saw her father in the coffee shop. He had one of those sour milk looks on his face.”
“I’m the one who put it on him.”
“How so?”
Lance made a get-on-with-it gesture. “What time’s the meeting?”
Kenny gave Lance the long, unblinking stare treatment.
Lance let out a breath and shifted his weight.
Some lady had crossed the street and approached the truck. Lily seemed to know her. They struck up a conversation.
Lance appreciated her momentary distraction. He didn’t think Kenny was going to go away any time soon, and his questions probably weren’t going to be fit for her ears.
“What are you doing?” Kenny asked low.
“I just told you. I’m taking Lily home.”
“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?”