CHAPTER FIVE
“Pretty out here.”
Sheena nearly jumped a mile out of her skin at the sound of the male voice behind her. Her brain didn’t immediately recognize the voice, and so her heart was slow to cease its fearful thrashing.
Austin.
She rubbed over her sternum and, digging her toes into the insoles of her sneakers, closed her eyes.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Blue had assured her that nothing bad would happen to her on his property, but she couldn’t shake the worry that someone from Sacramento was going to track her. She’d been careful as she could be, but she knew she was ignorant. She had no idea how many breadcrumbs she’d inadvertently left behind.
“What are you doing here?” she asked when she caught her breath.
His boots crunched the gravel as he slowly approached.
He was right that Blue’s backyard was pretty. It was a garden-in-progress, a little city of raised beds—partially planted with succulents and some leafy fall vegetables—and groomed walkways. Benches and statues. Pretty Southwest vignettes were painted on the fence slats.
It was a sanctuary, and she’d been sitting outside in it for hours, since Blue’s lieutenant had delivered her bag to her. The garden was a good place for fretting.
She’d purposefully left her phone back in Sacramento but had checked her voicemail from Blue’s landline. Her mother was already in a panic. If Sheena had ever doubted the woman’s love for her, it was evident in those tearful, pleading voicemails. “You didn’t meet me for brunch, darling. Did I mix up the days again? Call me. Please?”
She opened her eyes in time to see Austin stop about two yards from her. Dark hair combed. Clean-shaven, the sharp cut of his masculine jaw on clear display. Hat clenched in his hands in front of his belly.
It was so odd having him stand so close and not feel the familiar surge of hot energy that so many of the men in her life had. Austin wasn’t a shapeshifter, though, and it dawned on her that she didn’t know many people at all who were just…people. Like she once was.
She missed being what she’d been—missed feeling like she fit in her own skin.
Suddenly chilly, she rubbed her arms through her sleeves.
“Got caught up with work a little early,” he said. “Came into town to mail some stuff. Pick up groceries. That kind of thing. Figured I’d stop by and see what shook out with you.”
“Oh.” She tugged the ties of her velour sweatshirt, tightening them before tucking a few errant falls of hair beneath the raised hood. Her hair was a mess. She needed a deep conditioning session and an hour under a hooded dryer before she could even consider putting her weave back in. If she did. She was sick of trying to impress people who really didn’t give a damn about anything except the veneer of her.
“Such a hassle,” she muttered.
“What is?” Austin asked.
She sputtered. “I was talking to myself. Too used to that, I guess.”
“Know the feeling.” Shifting his weight, he pushed his hat onto his head. The shadow from the brim made his eyes look bluer, less gray.
He was an interesting-looking man. Not exactly handsome in the traditional sense—his nose wasn’t quite straight, and his cheekbones were a bit too sharp. There was a roughness about him, but he was pleasing to look at, somehow.
Or maybe easy to look at. She could look at him all day and probably find lots of new things to like.
“So, that’s what easy on the eyes means,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You keep talking to yourself like that, and I’m going to start to wonder if I actually exist.” He wore a teasing smile that made something inside of her chest unfurl.
There’s another nice thing to look at.
“You definitely exist,” she said. “I have the memory of a shockingly cold shower to show for it.”
He sucked in some air and bashfully stubbed the toe of his boot against a large rock nearby. “Sorry about that. Put yourself in my shoes, though.”
She laughed. “You mean Todd’s shoes. If it’d been up to you, you would have let me choke under all that mud and die in the desert.”
“Todd has a soft spot for strays.”
“So do I. Mostly cats, though. Not that I can ever keep them.”
“Why not?”
“My father thinks pets are unclean and useless.” Her cheek twitched, and she put a hand over it to hide the continuing spasms. “He’s one to talk.”
“Is he…” Austin raised a shoulder and let it fall. “You know. What you are?”
“I am what he is.”
Austin narrowed his eyes, likely sensing that there was a nuance there but unable to catch it.
She sighed and tied a loose knot into one of her sweatshirt ties only to let it right back out.
The gravel crunched again.
She could see the square toes of his boots near her feet. Brown leather, broken in well because he actually worked for a living.
She wondered what that kind of freedom felt like.
“Can I sit?” he asked.
“Sure. If you’d like.” She scooted over on the stone bench, musing that one day, she’d like to be someplace stable enough to buy permanent outdoor furniture. It dawned on her that she’d never really given her future much thought. People had always done the planning for her. College or travel had never been in the cards for her. Three days after she was born, her father had arranged with the Sparks, Nevada alpha for her to marry Blue. He was probably at that very moment trying to find some other highly placed Coyote he trusted enough to sell her off to, although he’d promised he wouldn’t.
She’d finally stopped believing his lies. It’d only taken her twenty-three years.
Austin settled onto the bench beside her and twined his fingers in front of him. “Todd wanted to come into town. I didn’t want to bring him.”
“So you left him at the ranch by himself?”
“Nah. I actually did bring him, but then I ran into some folks I knew a little at the post office. Kids were heading to the park to kick around a soccer ball, and Todd wanted to see if he could keep up.”
“Is he good at soccer?”
Austin snorted. “Good for a Kansan, maybe.”
“Is New Mexican good different?”
“It’s like the difference between peewee-league football and Division I NCAA.”
She grimaced with sincere empathy. “Ouch.”
“Yep.” Austin laughed. “Folks were more into football and basketball where I grew up.”
“In Kansas?”
“Yep.”
“On a ranch?”
Austin shook his head. “A farm, actually, but that’s mostly my grandparents’ thing. Ma is an elementary school administrator. Pop delivers for a package company part-time. Had to get outside jobs so they’d have health insurance, I guess.” He looked away and added in a mutter, “Definitely needed it.”
“How the hell did you end up here, then? I’m not seeing where the dots connect.”
He massaged what looked to be a set-in stain on the back of his hand, quiet for a while. She didn’t think he was going to answer, which was too bad because she was so curious about him. She rarely got to just sit and talk to people without being supervised, and why not talk to Austin? He’d seen her naked already. She couldn’t think of a better icebreaker.
But then he sat up straighter, stared at his tented fingers, and said, “I guess when I looked at all the options being offered to me, I didn’t see a good choice except ‘none of the above.’ I needed to go away and do my own thing. I needed to figure out what I actually knew and didn’t know without folks swooping in and telling me. Can’t learn like that.”
“Oh.” Sheena could relate a little. There were so many life lessons she’d been held back from that she doubted she’d even endured a tip of the iceberg as far as hardships went. “I’ve been put up on some kind of weird, twisted pedestal all my life,” she said. “But I was supposed to toe the line and do what I was told, go where I was commanded to go.”
“Why?”
“Because in communities like mine, where power is twined with magic, sometimes people forget about how their decisions affect individuals. Or they just don’t care anymore about anything except their own enrichment.” She shrugged and smoothed her hand over the grain of the velour. Her mother had bought the sweatshirt. She’d said that shade of royal purple was flattering on Sheena, and Sheena had been confused because it’d been such a frivolous purchase. Her father wouldn’t have let her be seen in public in a sweat suit. He had a reputation to uphold, after all, and he wasn’t going to let his daughter prance around town looking like an impoverished gym rat.
“Oh, if he could see me now,” she muttered ruefully.
“Who?” Austin asked.
She grimaced. “Keep forgetting.”
“That I’m here?”
She nodded. “It’s easier for me to just be alone where I live. Maybe it’s going to take me a while to get used to saying things and having people respond.”
If she even had a chance to get used to it. She had to get home.
“I prefer to be alone, too,” he said. “Don’t have to worry about so much that way.”
“I don’t prefer it. That’s just the way things have to be.”
“Why?”
She picked at her ragged cuticle, wondering how much she should say. Austin, no matter how easy he was to talk to and in spite of the fact that he had incontrovertible evidence of what she was, was still an outsider. Sane shifters didn’t share their secrets so easily. She had to tell someone, though, and there was no one else. Her mother already knew Sheena’s worries and couldn’t do anything about them. Willa or Blue? Too awkward, considering what had happened.
There was really no one else, and it wasn’t like she was sticking around to endure the shame of him knowing. She was going to ask his lieutenant Lance to drive her to the airport that very evening.
“My…father is what a shapeshifter group calls an alpha,” she said haltingly. “He’s the one in charge in the territory. Has the most dominance and the most magic, supposedly.”
“Why do you say supposedly?”
“Because there’s no way to quantify it. You can only assume that’s the case. If a more dominant Coyote were to challenge him and win, then we’d know otherwise, but no one’s going to challenge him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he doesn’t always fight fair, and everyone knows it. He doesn’t care if he’s respectable.”
“Oh.”
“I was supposed to marry Blue.”
“What?” The shock threaded through Austin’s voice wasn’t a surprise to Sheena. Any normal person would have questioned the match. Blue was much older. He was a powerful alpha in his own right, and Sheena was a made Coyote. Her lack of natural magic and dominance hadn’t mattered to her father, though, or to Blue’s. All that had mattered was the territories the two of them represented and how they could merge them into a sickeningly powerful unit.
And for what, anyway? What’s the point?
“It was supposed to be a political union.” She rubbed at the stinging cuticle she’d molested. “Neighboring territories. But Blue came down here and found Willa, and the rest is history.”
“You’re supposed to be married to that guy?” Austin crooked his thumb toward the house and, ostensibly, to Blue, who was supposed to be inside it. When she was last in there, he’d been in a meeting with his sister Diana and his lieutenants about the information Sheena had passed on. She’d opted out of the gaggle. She didn’t think there was anything else of use she could add, and the situation was just too awkward—sitting in a room with four dominant Coyotes who had good reason not to trust her, even if they claimed they did.
“Things worked out okay,” Sheena said.
“You wanted to marry that guy?” Austin actually sounded chagrined for some reason, and she really didn’t understand why he was dwelling on the subject.
“No,” she said. “I’ve spent maybe ten minutes alone with him in twenty-three years. I hardly know him.”
“So you didn’t come here thinking you’d have a shot at rekindling something?”
Her jaw dropped. “Are you serious? There was nothing to rekindle, and trust me, he’s not glancing in his rearview mirror worrying about leaving me behind. He’s not a man with regrets. He’s thrown his full effort into making a life in Maria as quickly as possible. His wife is pregnant with twins, and he’s buying up property he doesn’t even need in this town at a breathtaking rate just so developers can’t get it, and—”
“Okay, okay,” Austin said, standing. “It was just a question. You don’t need to get sensitive about it.”
“You’re accusing me of being triggered for something you were needling me about?” She let out a dry, humorless laugh. “Are you freaking kidding me?”
“I wasn’t needling you.”
“You acted like you didn’t believe me.”
He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes,” she insisted. “You did, and I don’t like that. I get enough of that shit back at home, where people want to insist I don’t really know what I need or want, and I’m not going to take that here.” She stood to leave and had gotten halfway to the back door when she stopped. Turned. “Actually, I’m not going anywhere. I was here first. You can go.” She held out her hand. “Give me my earring.”
He opened his mouth. No words came out. She didn’t count growls as words, not even from Coyotes.
He mashed his hat down farther and walked past her without acknowledgment.
She plopped back down on the bench, seething.
She couldn’t control how other people treated her, but she could control how she responded to them.
Never again was she going to let anyone think that she wasn’t going to react when she needed to. In spite of what her father might have thought, she was a person, not a well-trained pet.