Chapter Two

The insistent rapping against Willa’s front door was likely one of three things, and none made her want to pull her head out from under her pillow. The Maria Heights neighborhood raccoons might have been out again and using her front stoop as their social club. They were annoying, but they’d go away eventually. Or possibly, the desert wind was rattling her loose screen door. Like every other night, the sound would eventually become white noise if she did her best to ignore it. The worst possibility was that a Coyote was outside wanting to chat.

With her luck being as poor as it was, she suspected the latter.

“Pushy jerk,” she muttered into the mattress. “Probably why the phone’s been vibrating for the past hour.”

That had to be Blue outside, with one of his lectures queued up. No one else would dare visit so late. After all, she was a boring, matronly square. Clint Eastman reminded her of such at The Watering Hole when he’d staggered up to the bar for another beer. None of the other Coyotes had come to her defense when he’d made the accusation, and she didn’t think he was entirely wrong. There was safety in predictability. Some people didn’t understand that. Lucky for them, they didn’t need to.

The screen door rattled again, with what sounded like persistent yanks.

“Go away,” she murmured. “Just go.” Sleeping was already too difficult without the added nervousness.

After getting home from the bar, Willa had spent the better part of an hour pacing the well-worn floorboards in her guest bedroom and rearranging in her head the string quartet composition she’d been toying with for thirty years. Fruitless. She couldn’t find a single note to change, but that was still more but more productive than flagellating herself for her moments of shame and pondering what she could have done differently. Once she got on the merry-go-round of obsession, the only thing that could knock her off were puzzles requiring engagement of several parts of her brain. The previous night’s conundrum had been about where she’d gone wrong with the seventh grade band’s musical arrangement of “Hotline Bling.” There was too much alto in the mix, which was strange, given the usual timidity of that cross-section of the ensemble. The night before, she’d distracted herself with brainstorming the promotion plan for the eighth-graders she needed to have coordinated enough to simultaneously walk and play within the next two months. If those kids couldn’t march, the DCHS band director would spend yet another year heckling Willa about how he had to bench a bunch of her kids.

There just wasn’t enough time to get everything done. Between preparing the kids for the spring concert, fundraising with the boosters, transitioning kids to marching instruments, trying to get the Coyotes on the straight and narrow . . . 

She blew a raspberry. “How do I even have time to worry about the past? The future is consuming enough.”

There came another violent rap on the door that made her bolt upright, clawing at her racing heart and shouting a wordless rebuke.

“I can’t do everything!” she yelled when she could breathe again. “I can’t.”

Raccoon. Wind. Coyote. Didn’t matter. At that point, her frustration level wouldn’t have changed with the irritant. She just wanted to sleep. The world could wait eight hours for her to refill her social well.

Her phone vibrated on the nightstand and dashed any faith she had in her ignore-it-and-it’ll-go-away strategy.

She writhed with annoyance for a few beats, tossed her pillow onto the floor, and then snatched the cell from the nightstand. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” she snarled after hitting the speaker button.

“Yeah, pudding, I actually do,” came Blue’s growly baritone. “It’s eleven fifteen, so do me a favor and open the door before your neighbors start pushing their curtains aside for a peek of the action. Gods forbid anyone think this is a booty call.”

“As if you would be so discreet.” In the six or so months Willa had been in Blue’s acquaintance, she’d learned that there were two things Blue didn’t do: discretion and tact. Having rubbed elbows with far too many supernatural beings who wouldn’t tell the truth even if their pants were set on fire, Willa appreciated straight shooters. Blue, however, went above and beyond. He weaponized truth and never forgot a trespass.

“Typical alpha who likes to hear the sound of his own voice,” she muttered.

“Typical or not, you brought me here to do this job, and someone needs to be doing some talking. You sure weren’t doing much of anything before I rolled into town, and look where that got you with the pack. Open. The. Damn. Door.”

“D-don’t swear at me,” she stammered.

“I’m not swearing at you,” he said levelly. “I simply swore.”

“But—” No. She fidgeted a loose button on her pajama top and took a deep breath.

Sometimes, she needed to take a mental step back from a debate and decide if she really needed to waste the energy. The drive to argue was strong simply because he was Blue, and she was so sick of him being right about everything.

And he was right, of course. Coyotes swore as naturally as they breathed. They were unfiltered, emotional creatures. Not even alpha-level shifters were completely exempted from natural urges.

“Fine.” She forced down the flood of saliva in her mouth and propped herself against the headboard. “What do you want?” she asked wearily. “Anything you need to say to me, you can say it over the phone. I don’t want you in my house.”

He growled quietly and said, through what sounded like clenched teeth, “Do we need to get an intermediary to sit between us again, just to have a conversation about the pack?”

Thinking of Maria’s resident real estate elf, Noelle, Willa expelled a reflexive scoff. She’d begged Noelle to shake an alpha out of her network for her because Willa hadn’t known who else to ask. She certainly wasn’t going to ask for help from her father. The thought of that manipulative monster being anywhere near her made bile rise in her throat. She hadn’t seen him in the flesh in 300 years and didn’t think 300 more years would prepare her for a reunion. Especially given that in their last encounter, he’d so dispassionately queried if her life was worth anything. He always insulted her as if she weren’t standing right in front of him.

As if half of what she was hadn’t come from him.

Letting out a breath, she massaged her sternum and closed her eyes.

You don’t deserve my thoughts. Get out of my head.

“Woman up and look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you so I can see you’re not brushing me off,” Blue said.

“Woman up?” she said, shaking with rage. “And brushing you off? Really? Unbelievable.” Willa let her hand fall from her shirt button and opened her eyes to the infomercial playing on the television across the room. “How cocky are you? You just can’t stand not feeling like you’re completely in charge, can you?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, but I do. I’ll show you. Stay right there.” The combination of insult and chronic exhaustion spurred her to action. Willa stabbed the End button on the phone screen, tossed the device onto the bed, and slunk to the kitchen. From the cookie jar on the counter, she grabbed a handful of dog treats. Her Boxer, King, bolted to attention from his usual nighttime spot beneath a kitchen chair and carried the furniture halfway across the room with him before figuring out how to duck.

“Sorry for waking you, cutie.” Willa gave him a dog biscuit and flung the rest through the mail slot with a shout of, “Shoo, puppy.”

Having finished his treat in a single swallow, King bounded to the door and barked at it, sending treat crumbs and spittle flying. Blue knelt to the slot, brown eyes narrowed in a dare that sent King retreating with a whimper to his sanctuary beneath the table.

“Real funny,” Blue said after several seconds away from the door. “I just tossed them under your Jeep. The raccoons underneath were looking a little peaked.”

“Go home.” Willa closed the mail slot, retreated to her room, grabbed her pillow from the floor, and collapsed onto the bed.

Her phone rang again.

She didn’t bother checking the display when she answered. “For heaven’s sake, what do you want?” she asked with a weary groan.

“Not going anywhere until I say my piece,” Blue said. “The way I see things, you’ve got two choices.”

“I imagine you’re going to tell me what they are whether I want to hear them or not, so go ahead and spit ’em out.”

“Bingo. So, one, open the door so we can discuss the pack without distractions and interruptions for a change, or two, I’ll assume that from here on out, I run the pack unilaterally and you’ll keep your trap shut.”

After replaying his “options” twice in her head, she retraced her steps to the front, leaned against the doorframe, and breathed out a tired, “No.”

“No to which?”

“Both.”

“That’s not how negotiation works, pudding.”

“If the options aren’t good ones, it’s not negotiation. It’s more like blackmail.”

“Don’t you dare accuse me of that,” he snapped.

She hadn’t known any Coyote was capable of indignation. She filed that factoid away in the back of her mind. “So be reasonable,” she told him. The last thing she wanted was him in her house, but he was going to wake the whole neighborhood if he didn’t go away. She was going to do what he said and woman up if only to get rid of him.

“Why don’t you try the same, huh?” Laughter tumbled from his chest, full and sonorous like notes plucked from a perfectly tuned cello.

His voice had been the first thing she’d paid attention to when they’d initially met at the Coyote club house. Not his height or the handsomeness that somehow managed to be both feral and refined, because she hadn’t been looking at him. She’d been looking anywhere but at him because he was a stranger, and strangers were unpredictable. The seductive timbre of his voice had arrested her. The words he spoke had been of secondary importance.

“The pack is mine,” she reminded him, because he always needed reminding.

“Where’s the rest of it?” he asked.

“The rest of what?”

“The rest of the statement? You always tell Noelle that it’s yours whether you like it or not. That’s the part I’m waiting for.”

He overheard that?

Groaning, Willa gave the doorframe a frustrated pound of her fist.

Yes, she’d said it, but Noelle understood having responsibilities she hadn’t asked for and being committed to them long after everyone else would have abandoned them.

If not Willa, then who?

Magic bound Willa to the pack. She could relinquish her attachment at any time, and sometimes she wanted the freedom. But other times, she recognized that the pack was the only thing keeping her from completely withdrawing . . . and that if not for her, the Coyotes would be even more depraved.

She had to give Blue credit for one thing—he got her mad. When she was mad, she didn’t think too much, and when she didn’t overthink, she could argue. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t be up all night replaying her performance in her head, though.

May as well let him in.

She pulled the chain from the lock, turned the deadbolt, and rotated the knob lock. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door a crack.

“Call me pudding one time,” she murmured, “and I’ll see to it that you’ll be wearing some before the night’s over.”

“Do you promise?” he asked with a chuckle.

Grinding her teeth, she pulled open the door, in spite of her reservations.

Blue stepped up to the threshold, and without meeting his gaze, she put a hand to halt him.

“Take off your shoes,” she demanded.

“You serious?”

“As a heart attack. I know where you spend your time. Do me a favor and keep some of your filth on the doormat.”

“Unbelievable. Someone should call the ASPCA on you,” he said as he bent to grasp the backs of his shoes. “There’s gotta be some policy about alpha cruelty.”

“So, you’re admitting you’re an animal?”

“Most ladies like that.”

“Your fiancée being one of them?”

Blue stilled. For a few seconds, he stared down at his shoes, saying nothing. Then he started the tugging movements back up with more aggression than was necessary. “I guess the whole stinking town knows about her, huh?”

“I can’t speak for the whole town.” Willa reached behind him to lock the screen door. “I only know about your relationship because I overheard your lieutenants talking about your father being a bit miffed about your cold feet.”

All Willa knew, really, was that Blue was supposed to be in an arranged marriage with a Coyote associated with his home pack back in Sparks. He’d made himself “unavailable” for the wedding, and had used taking the alpha job in Maria as his excuse to delay. Supposedly, they’d rescheduled, but she didn’t know for sure. She minded her own business and hoped he’d do her the same courtesy.

It didn’t pay for Willa to get close to people. They’d learn too much, like where she was from and who had sired her. They’d draw his attention for corrective action, because he hated nothing more than for Willa to be happy. He’d told her as much, when she’d barely been eighteen. He’d said it wouldn’t be fair for so many Olympians to be cursed in matters of love and friendship and for her not to be.

Blue nudged his brogues against the wall and then brushed past her. Touching was unavoidable, so she didn’t bother scolding him. The architecture of her little house had been devised with hunched-over retirees in mind, not broad-shouldered alpha shifters. As a species, Coyote shifters weren’t generally so large—their builds tended to be tall and lanky—but the usual rules didn’t apply for dominants. Probably had something to do with all the extra testosterone, though Willa was certainly no expert. Her half brothers probably were, and her father, definitely.

She hadn’t wanted the responsibility of an animal group, but Apollo had given them to all of his other children. With Willa, however, the gift was little better than an afterthought. She’d been making her way through the Wild West on a stagecoach, heading toward California. They’d stopped for sleep and food, and the next thing she knew, she got swarmed by the local dogs. It’d taken her hours to figure out what was happening.

Typical Apollo—tossing her to the proverbial wolves knowing damned well she couldn’t defend herself. After all, he’d stripped away whatever magic she’d been born with—long-livedness aside. He’d hated her mother that much, and what was Willa but an extension of the woman who’d scorned him?

“Yeah, miffed,” Blue muttered after a minute of quiet. “I guess that’s a kind way of saying it.”

She followed him into the kitchen where he paused in front of King who was, apparently, attempting to block Blue from the table. The dog was calm enough with his tongue lolling out of his mouth and breaths coming out in relaxed pants, but Willa knew better than to assume he was completely at peace. She’d had King for nearly forty years. He may not have looked very smart, but looks generally tended to be deceiving with immortal pets. He could go from perfectly calm to manic terror beast with one whispered word.

Willa patted his head. “Shoo.”

King made a whiny, groaning sound and retreated to the corner by the refrigerator. He laid his body down, put his chin atop his forelegs, and stared pointedly at Blue.

Ignoring the dog, Blue yanked a chair out from the table and sat.

“I’d offer you a drink, but I don’t want you to stay.” Willa turned the flame on beneath the kettle. If she drank enough chamomile tea while enduring whatever lecture Blue had in store for her, she might actually fall asleep without suffering too long from her thinking affliction after he left.

“You know, my grandma offered hospitality to everyone, even if she hated them,” he said.

“So go home to your grandma.”

“I would, but my grandma’s been dead and buried for twenty years.”

She groaned softly with regret and thunked her palm against her forehead. “Sorry. That was mean of me.”

He shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. She lived a long life and went down cussing and kicking, even though she was hauling around an oxygen tank for the last couple of years.”

“How old was she?”

“Ninety-three.”

Willa whistled low and grabbed a mug from the drying rack. “Ninety-three twenty years ago, huh?”

She was no prodigy at math, but she had a pretty good head for figures. Balancing her checkbook gave her fits, but she was comfortable with and proficient at musical arrangement, which was simply math applied as art. Her math said that if his grandmother had been that old, Blue had long since fallen off the spring chicken bandwagon.

Even with being the sort of creature who never divulged her own age, she harbored a rather disproportionate curiosity about other people’s ages.

Especially people who tended to treat her like a child.

He leaned his chair onto the back legs and raised an eyebrow, probably curious if she had a guess.

She’d never been good at guessing ages, especially with shapeshifters. Some aged badly due to hard living. Others, like many of the female Cougar shifters, barely seemed to age at all during their middle years.

There was some gray in Blue’s scruff and enough in the fur at the top of his head when he shifted into his canine form that she was pretty sure that he was hiding a couple of streaks in his thick hair. He wore his hair long at the top, so she couldn’t be sure of the color throughout without running her fingers through it, which she had no intention of doing.

Their relationship had been contentious from the start, and she didn’t, for one minute, want to let him think that she was dropping her guard around him. She’d consented for him and his lieutenants to come into the pack to enforce law and order—not for Blue to completely take over. She cared about those delinquent dogs most of the time and wanted the best for them, even if they were messy.

Or maybe because they were messy.

Clearing her throat, she put her back to him and concentrated on measuring leaves into her tea strainer. “So, what’d you want to tell me?”

“Well, first things first. Not that you asked, but there are no major injuries to report from the bar fight.”

“Oh. That’s good.” She grimaced. She’d been beating herself up over her bar performance earlier, and just that quickly, she’d forgotten all about it. She couldn’t be sure if it was a good thing.

“Matty didn’t have to discharge his shotgun?” she asked.

“Nope. The boys mostly simmered down right after I showed up. Lance had to drag a couple of drunk holdouts outside, though.”

Willa wrung her hands. “Some Coyotes just can’t hold their liquor, I guess.” And Willa could guess who. Try as she might to get them to dry out, she couldn’t help people who didn’t want to be helped.

Blue could help them, though. Dominants could force their wills on others, which in human context wasn’t a desirable thing. In shapeshifter packs, the ability was a necessary evil. Not every shifter was in complete control of his or her faculties, and packs had evolved fail-safes for that problem—people like Blue, Lance, and Kenny—but they were outsiders from Nevada. They didn’t understand the Maria culture, so of course, the Coyotes didn’t trust them. They were all angry with Willa for inviting them in the first place. She’d been trying to make it up to them and to get them to trust her again.

Trust was hard to earn back once it’d been lost.

“That sure was a lot of Coyotes in one room,” Blue said. “Too many to be coincidence.”

She nodded and made a noncommittal mmm sound. She didn’t see the need to self-incriminate.

“It didn’t happen to be a planned outing, did it?” He drummed his fingertips atop the table. Long and blunt-tipped. Forceful, not graceful.

Being a musician, she’d made a study of hands over the centuries, and could tell a lot about people by their hands. Their mouths may have lied, but their hands never did.

Blue’s knuckles were bruised, nails ragged, cuticles rough. He may have been sitting at her table looking like a stockbroker in his crisp shirt and fitted pants, but he had a brawler’s hands.

An alpha’s hands.

He was a man who worked. She should have been able to respect that, but he was Blue. Too intense. Too untamable, despite that white collar.

“Well, was it?” he asked by way of nudging.

Shaking herself free of her reverie, she tended to the whistling teakettle. She turned off the burner and poured water into her mug.

Blue growled softly. The floorboards groaned beneath his chair as he set down the legs. “We talked about this, Willa. When that many Coyotes gather, you need to have a dominant in the group or you’re going to have problems.”

She dunked the tea ball a few times and chose her words carefully. Knowing he was right, there was very little she could say in her own defense. She opted for the truth. Or at least, part of it. “They don’t trust you.”

“And do you think they’re ever going to learn to if you keep undermining my authority?”

“I’m the pack patron. With patrons, our magical binds force us to care about our groups. I’m magically bound to the Coyotes. Your authority is granted at my pleasure and can be revoked at any time.”

“Actually, no, it can’t be.” He pushed back from the table and stood. She didn’t have to turn. He loomed in her periphery like an eclipsing moon. Fortunately, he kept his distance. “Maybe we don’t know each other all that well, but I don’t think you’re the kind of lady who’d back out of a signed contract. We agreed that if I came here, you wouldn’t waste my time. You’d let me do what I needed to do to get the pack in order so the locals never find out that creatures like us exist.”

“Yes. I remember.” She also seemed to remember that the start of his tenure coincided with his aborted wedding, but that was none of her business. Giving her hot tea a cautious sip, she turned to him, keeping her gaze locked on the square centimeter of gray in his neat beard. She struggled to swallow. Again, she pored over words in her mind and tried to mold her thoughts into a sensible order before speaking. She’d always been a failure at arguing. Her mind was sound, but her thoughts always got garbled somewhere between her brain and mouth.

She sounded stupid at times, but she wasn’t.

“What . . . I’ve never been able to understand is why you’d invite this kind of frustration when you were already so busy with your work in Vegas and with your father’s pack in Sparks.” She took another sip and then, slowly, set the mug onto the counter so she could twist her pajama buttons. Little movements excused her from having to make eye contact with the alpha. Making her thoughts cohesive was harder when he bore down on her with that heated, executive gaze that would have been just as effective in a corporate boardroom as in a bar. He was a man used to getting his way, and the Coyotes were one of the few things she wouldn’t back down on.

“You’re not here out of the goodness of your heart,” she said. “Let’s not pretend otherwise.”

“I could be any place but here right now. You know how many business deals I’ve had to turn down in the past six months? How much money I’ve left on the table because I’m here cleaning up your mess?” He stalked closer, edging the counter at the adjacent side. His usual smirk was nowhere to be found, and he’d narrowed his dark brown eyes to slits. Anger poured off him like condensation from a cold beer glass, and if she—with her utter lack of magic—could sense that, she could imagine how cowed the Coyotes must have felt in his presence.

Small. They must feel so very small.

Turning to him, she lifted her chin defiantly and met his gaze.

Five hundred years old and she still couldn’t make eye contact with a man who was supposed to be a lesser being without her belly feeling like it was being wrung inside out. The Inquisitors had ruined her already-deficient ability to look at most people’s faces.

She took a deep breath through her nose and balled her hands into fists. She wasn’t going to let him plow over her. She didn’t need any more self-failures to stay up late dissecting and regretting. “I did . . . the best I could with what I had,” she said in a volume barely louder than a whisper.

“You watched as one useless alpha after another took the reins.” He took a step closer.

She reclaimed her personal space and took one back.

“For more than a hundred years, you let them drive this ship into the ground, and I think if it weren’t for the fact that so many of your Coyotes were running around town in their animal forms scaring the hell out of the humans, you still wouldn’t have done shit.”

“You don’t know that. And”—she snapped off a button and balled it in her fist—“st-st-stop swearing at me.”

She was going to have to sew that button back on. More to keep her busy. Work that required precision. She could shut her thoughts off for a little while as she fixed it.

Another quiet growl from Blue snapped her back to the here and now. “I think I do,” he said, taking one more step.

She edged backward and her heels hit King’s broad side. He nosed the backs of her knees in a “get back in that fight” sort of way, but Willa was getting damned tired of fighting. She didn’t even know why she was pushing back so hard against Blue in the first place, only that someone had to advocate for the Coyotes. No one knew them better than she did.

“Why can’t you just step back?” he asked her. “Why can’t you let me do what needs to be done? I think you’ll rest easier at night if you—”

“You have no idea how I rest,” she snapped, shaking her head frantically, “so don’t even finish that sentence. You don’t know anything about me.”

“So, tell me.” He raised his shoulders jerkily. “You accuse me of not knowing anything like that’s my fault, but it’s not me who’s being so tightlipped about everything.”

One more step. She could feel the heat of his breath on her cheeks. Tears of frustration stung at the corners of her eyes. The last time a man had managed to invade her space in such a forthright way, he’d been checking to see if she’d swallowed her gag or suffocated.

She wasn’t ready. She knew how Blue was, and she shouldn’t have let him into her house, or into Maria.

“You’re too close!” she shouted and immediately covered her face in shame at the outburst. She was a grown woman. Grown women didn’t shriek, and most didn’t go paralyzed just from the proximity of people who overwhelmed them.

The tickle of breath on her face withdrew, as did Blue’s energy.

She peeked through her fingers. He was halfway across the room. Hands in pockets. Brow creased.

More fodder for him. One more reason to deem me unfit.

“Willa.” His voice was quiet, the tone oddly submissive for a change.

The least she could do was listen.

She let her hands fall slowly from her face and grabbed at more buttons, twisting, straining the already weakened threads.

Waiting.

“To make this mess work, I need to understand,” he said. “No blackmail. Just sharing. I’m willing to do the same. Understand?”

She did, so after a few seconds of ensuring no trap would spring, she nodded.

“Yes.”

“Good.” He pressed his hands flat onto the cluttered tabletop and stared at the backs.

Her gaze fell to them, too, and the very many scars on them.

She had scars, too, but she kept them hidden. The physical ones, anyway.

 The emotional ones couldn’t be disappeared so easily.

“Tell me how you ended up with a pack of Coyotes, and maybe from there, we can figure out what to do with them.”