Authors: Lora Leigh
“For now.” Anya nodded. “I’ve tried to discuss this with my alpha, but he refuses to agree that the Coyotes need their own specialists.” Or blankets and pillows, or a sense of belonging.
Nikki rose from the stool as she drew her jacket around her, crossing her arms under her breasts and turning from Anya for long seconds.
“I have limited time before my alpha jumps in here demanding answers,” Anya sighed. “I need a decision soon, Nikki.”
“You could get in a lot of trouble, Anya,” Nikki whispered. “If these are Council plants, it could backlash on you.”
Anya nodded. “I know this. Just as Hope knew the trouble that could arise when she contacted you, Nikki, and the Wolves gave you asylum.”
Dr. Armani grimaced at that. “And you want Hope to consider giving these two asylum as well?”
“I can’t discuss this with the lupina.” Anya slid off the exam table. “But if you were to tell her that a confidential contact informed you of the possibility, then there would be no backlash to her, or to you, if it were discovered who your contact was. Your medical designation separates you from many of the laws that hinder me here.”
One of those laws? Going against direct orders from a person’s alpha leader. A mate could face serious charges if her alpha decided to go that far.
Would Del-Rey do that? She had to say at times, she simply didn’t know. Trust was an issue between them. She couldn’t be certain which way he would go in this. She hoped he would accept it, see the value of it and eventually trust that she was doing what was best for them, and any child they conceived.
“Why are you risking this?” Nikki asked her then.
Anya placed her hand against her stomach, feeling the twinges she knew to expect. “I’m still ovulating,” she whispered. “If I conceive now, or in the future, then I want my child safe, Nikki.
I don’t want to risk losing Del-Rey’s child on the off chance that the genetics decide to go haywire or something unforeseen comes up. He’s an adult, an alpha. He can risk his life if that’s his choice. I’m not nearly as accepting of that risk to any children we’ll have together.”
“I can understand that.” Nikki nodded as a hard, sharp knock came to the examination room door.
Their heads jerked to it.
“Your alpha,” Nikki said. “I’ll talk to the lupina and contact you within the next twenty-four hours.”
Anya lowered her head, closing her eyes briefly as Nikki strode to the door and unlocked it before pulling it open.
He was standing there, wild, irritated, alpha. It was like a slam of lust surging inside her without the physical pain. Or was the emotional wound just too deep right now to allow her to feel the physical?
She stared back at him, seeing the disarray in his long hair. He must have raked his fingers through it more than once. He did that when he was frustrated or becoming angry. His dark eyes were narrowed, thick blond lashes framing the wicked black.
“What’s wrong?” He strode into the room. “Why have you decided you need the additional hormone shots?”
“I changed my mind.” She gave him a bright smile as she jumped off the examination table. “I guess I just needed someone to talk to.”
He stopped in the middle of the room, his gaze focused, intense on her now. “You have me and your bodyguards to talk to,” he growled. “Why do you need someone else?”
“The restrictions placed on me don’t bar me from talking, Alpha. Just from acting.”
He frowned. “I have a name, Anya.”
She paused and stared back at him silently for long moments. “And I have a brain, Alpha Delgado, regardless of what you think. Are you ready to go?”
She swept past him, moving from the examination room and rejoining the security detail waiting in the hall outside.
He turned to Nikki, staring back at her as though he could will her to give him the truth.
She shook her head, her somber expression giving him more to worry about than to find comfort in.
“You’re making a mistake,” she sighed. “But, with Breed males, I’ve learned, all you can do is let them beat their head against a wall. When it hurts enough or the blood gets thick enough, they stop.” She shrugged.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you’re just as hardheaded as the rest of them.” She glanced to the door then. “She’s not as easy to manipulate as you think she is. And manipulating her is only going to hurt you worse.
There.” She threw him a bright smile. “The advice was free. Do you need anything while you’re here? A shot of common sense perhaps?”
He clenched his teeth before turning on his heel, stalking from the examination room and moving to catch up with his coya.
She strode, shoulders straight, head high, pride draping her like an exquisite cloak as she moved through the underground steel-and-reinforced-concrete corridors to the ground level.
There was no dust here as there was at Base. It was brightly lit, functional, yet still there were areas of greenery built into the walls with growth lights. A small, miniature orange tree grew in one hallway; the controlled atmospheric settings around it kept it healthy and in its natural growth cycle.
Vines grew along one wall. There were glassed-in sunrooms with a complicated system of mirrors that opened along a wide tunnel to allow the sun’s rays inside. Unlike the mountain facility that housed the communications that the labs were networked into, Dr. Armani’s medical facility was warm, friendly. He could understand why Anya would want to visit. There were many things here that Base lacked.
But this wasn’t a military facility, he told himself. Coyotes didn’t care about a little dust and dirt, a few inconveniences. They had the bar, the kitchen, the television. Del-Rey had his mate.
His mate was human.
He nearly paused. When other Coyotes mated, their mates would in all probability be human as well. He pushed through the exit doors just behind Anya and her security detail, his frown darkening.
Dammit, he didn’t trust humans. He trusted Anya and Armani and that was pretty much the extent of it. He was wary even with the lupina, Hope, and the Felines’ prima, Merinus.
He didn’t like humans and he didn’t want them in his base. Except his coya.
Yeah, that was going to go over well.
Fuck!
He could feel it working through him now, the way that woman messed with his mind, made him think, made him want to give her anything and everything she desired.
He’d cross the bridge of the human mate problem when he had to, he decided. Until then, he was faced with another, very intriguing problem: figuring out exactly what his mate was up to.
Because he had no doubt she was up to something.
Anya moved into the bedroom ahead of Del-Rey as he opened the door and stood back for her to enter. Sharone, Emma and Ashley had been completely silent during the heli-jet ride back to Base. They had sat across from Anya and Del-Rey, and stared over his shoulder like good little military-trained Coyote soldiers.
Del-Rey hadn’t been happy about it; she could tell. If she hadn’t been so upset, she would have been amused.
She heard the door close behind her as she pulled the jacket he had forced on her off her shoulders and laid it over the chair at the side of the room, before turning to face him. She rubbed at the chill in her arms and fought to ignore the need for his touch.
She didn’t want the chaos that came from his touch right now; she needed to think, to plan. So much was happening, and so many things she had envisioned happening weren’t going to happen. And it hurt.
“What was so important that you had to talk to Armani as a snowstorm was brewing?” he finally growled as he pulled the comm link in his ear free and tossed it to the table at the side of the large bed.
“Evidently, something important.” She shrugged. “Girl stuff.”
She forced her arms down, forced herself to stop trying to rub the warmth into them once again.
She’d been cold before; she was certain she would be again before it was all said and done.
“Would you like to tell me what you were doing in Armani’s office?” he asked her. “Or should I begin questioning your bodyguards?”
Her brows lifted as she forced a smile to her lips. “I asked them to schedule an appointment for me, Del-Rey. I’m certain they’ll be more than happy to tell you this themselves.”
There was no lie there. A careful manipulation of the facts, nothing more.
He crossed his arms over his wrinkled shirt. He looked good scruffy, she had to admit. And he did look fine in that tux the night of the party. Del-Rey was a man that could pull off any look he wanted to, even the harried, irritated male.
He finally breathed out roughly as he stared at her, his gaze caressing her from head to toe. “I can smell your hurt,” he said softly. “I can feel it. I’m sorry, Anya.”
She waited, but nothing more came.
“But not sorry enough to change your mind,” she said painfully.
His expression was heavy; his black eyes raged with emotions that she didn’t know how to interpret.
“Fine.” She shrugged. “What about our marriage ceremony? Or mating ceremony? We need to schedule that.”
She was going to crawl into a hole and strangle on the pain. She watched his expression shift, become closed. She believed it was the worst rejection she had ever faced.
“You’re not officially making me your coya,” she stated hoarsely.
Sofia’s words haunted her now. That it wasn’t official. That Anya was living in a dreamworld, and somehow the other woman had known it.
“Anya, the ceremony doesn’t matter.” He pushed his fingers through his hair as he glared at her.
“You’re my mate. That makes you my coya. Period. It can’t get any more official than the mating.”
She stared back at him, forcing herself not to cry, not to scream in rage and agony.
Finally she nodded slowly. “Thank you for sparing me the preparations for the celebration that comes later. I’ll answer Lupina Gunnar and Prima Lyons’s inquiries into that in the morning and let them know that they needn’t prepare for it.”
Humiliation sang through her bloodstream. She wasn’t going to cry, she promised herself. She was too tired to cry, too hurt to want to do anything but curl into a miserable ball of shame.
Hope and Merinus were already making plans. A spring ceremony, the white gown Anya had always dreamed of. A real wedding, just as their mates had given them. A ring. Every woman’s dream, but in the world she now lived within, it would have been even more. It would have been an affirmation, and it came with a certain security where other mates, where the hierarchy of the Breed society, was concerned.
“Anya, dammit,” he growled, his eyes flashing with an edge of anger. “What’s happened to you?
You’re more logical than the pain I can sense coming from you. You’re killing me with it.”
She lifted her chin slowly and swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Sorry. Hormones probably,” she finally whispered. “If you’ll excuse me, Del-Rey, I think I’m not feeling very well. I’m going to go to my office for a while. Good night.”
“The hell you are.” His fingers looped around her arm—not hard, his grip wasn’t tight, yet still, she flinched. It was almost painful, that touch, even through her clothing.
He released her just as quickly, staring at her as though confused.
“I hurt you.” He frowned, perplexed, watching her carefully. “What’s wrong? Is this why you went to Dr. Armani? Is my touch suddenly painful to you?”
Anya shook her head. It hadn’t been pain. It hadn’t hurt, not physically. Emotionally. The warmth she needed, the feel of him that she ached for physically, couldn’t overshadow the pain she felt inside.
“I’m fine,” she said again. “Please excuse me, Del-Rey. I just need to shower. Maybe eat.” She gave him a false smile and edged to the door of her office. “Good night.”
She opened the door, slipped inside the little room and nearly sank to the floor as her upper body spasmed with the need to sob. She was his mate, not his coya. Without the ceremony, she would never truly be his coya, his other half. She was just the woman he fucked and nothing more.
Exhaustion filled her, and for the first time since Del-Rey had returned, the mating heat didn’t torment her. She lay down on the couch, pillowed her head on her arm and stared into the darkness until she slept.
She wasn’t aware of Del-Rey stepping into the room or of him crouching beside her. She didn’t know he reached out, touched the tear on her cheek and felt like sobbing himself.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered. “This way is best. For both of us.”
He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers, feeling the silky, cool flesh as he felt a shiver work through her. She was cold, but she wasn’t aroused. He could smell the hurt radiating off her in waves, even in sleep.
Sighing at the brutality of what he’d done to her, aching with it to a depth of his being that he didn’t know existed, Del-Rey picked his fragile mate up in his arms and carried her to their bed.
Undressing her took a while. He moved slowly, carefully, unwilling to wake her from the exhausted slumber she seemed to have slipped into.
When he had left her that morning, she had been laughing, happy, teasing him. She had been making plans and he had known it. He had known it and hadn’t wanted to lose the warmth of her laughter until he had no other choice.
Now he had lost it, and it felt as though he had lost a part of himself.
He stripped and eased into the bed beside her, curled around her cold body and fought to bring back the warmth in her. He was cold himself. Cold to the marrow of his bones, and he couldn’t explain why. The chill had begun when she had walked from his office earlier. It had grown after she had left their bedroom for her office.
He had to protect her. Hope and Merinus lived with the threat of greater danger than Faith or the other Breed mates. More attempts were made on their lives than on the others’. Without the ceremony, the world would never know for certain if she was lover or true coya. Coyotes weren’t Wolves, he told himself again. They didn’t need a ceremony to make something like this official.
And she would see in time that it would give her a greater security, and that was what mattered.