Switching Gears: Coyote Bluff Series Book 3 Read online

  Walking into an empty clinic was awesome. Finding her way immediately to the waiting room and listening to Zeke’s pissed off ranting? Priceless. For her sake she was glad the chair she occupied was down the hall from her victim, but close enough she could enjoy every whimper or groan. She didn’t want him to detect her because, no matter how funny she’d thought this latest stunt would be, even she was second guessing her behavior with the juicy vulgarities streaming from his mouth.

  The plan had worked too well. Zeke had been in the exam room for close to half an hour, leaving her to sit in her own thoughts. Now she had to battle her nerves and boredom. Staring at months-old magazines and a barely-working television hadn’t stilled her thoughts. Her cat sulked in the back of their mind, giving Amie the cold shoulder and refusing to rouse unless Zeke was making noise. And then, well, the feline creep would yowl pitifully, shooting guilt and anger at her.

  As long as she could remember, there had never been a time when her kitty didn’t enjoy pranking others. Her bobcat would strut around, flicking its ears and stubby tail while preening over their victory. Even when Amie had changed all the locks in Zeke’s house her kitty had been on board. But not this time. Maybe it had to do with the pain-laced air streaming down the hall. She’d assumed he would be itching, of course, but pain hadn’t been on her list of things to accomplish. Between her cat and her own thoughts the waiting was slowly burying her in guilt.

  It had all started perfectly. How had it gone so wrong? She sighed and thumped her head against the wall, making her teeth rattle.

  The single beep from her phone over two hours before had caused her to drop her gardening tools with a squeal of excitement. The quick text from the teen she’d bribed was the highlight of her day. Scrubbing dirt from her hands had never seemed to take so long. After that, though, time flew by as she drove quickly and snuck into the clinic. She’d giggled and waited for Zeke to come out covered in pink goop, frowning and swearing. Slowly the smile had slid from her face and the fun she thought she’d have at his expense died at the increasing discomfort she could sense he was in.

  Which brought her to her current predicament. White walls mocked her with their perfect blandness. Sure, she could enjoy Zeke’s cursing from a distance, but how long could it really take the doctor to figure out what had caused the quick rash and intense itch now plaguing her mate?

  Mate. She huffed in irritation. The man deserved to be plagued by an itch he couldn’t reach. Amie had suffered for months from the same thing, but hers was mental and hormonal. The first moment she’d come in contact with Zekeil Brian Marrow, the town’s mechanic and all around jokester, she’d known he was their mate.

  The knowledge had surprised and, irritatingly, made her warm in her lady bits.

  It had also terrified her.

  Being tied to someone, no escape, no possibility of running. Sure, she wanted to eventually be mated to someone, but was Zeke the right one? Would he dampen her freedoms? Require her to report her comings and goings like her father had done to her mother? Would he turn from the mild-mannered goof to a controlling asshole?

  She shuddered, as memories from her childhood rolled through her mind. Her mother had put up with so much before she passed, guarding Amie from her father, brothers and the rest of the group. A tyrannical leader who hated women? Her father was everything terrifying and nightmare-inducing all rolled into one heavy-handed man. He’d loved her mother with every cell of his being, but that same affection didn’t trickle down to his daughter. No, instead, Amie had been the focal point of his obsessive behaviors. She’d never been fast enough, smart enough, quiet enough. And where he would have hit her for her faults, her mother had stepped in. Every single time. Instead of being smacked around for breaking a dish by accident, she was scooted out of the kitchen by soft hands and a quiet voice. When her father would order her into the basement or dark closet for speaking without being spoken to, her mother would redirect his attentions, motioning to a terrified Amie to run to her room. Amie’s mother had been her guardian angel.

  Once her mother passed away, not only had Amie had to learn to grieve in silence, but she had to deal with the neglect and abuses she’d been protected from. Her father took out his frustrations on her with fists and words. He made her into the woman he thought she should be. Silent as the grave, meek as a mouse and able to take anything he wanted to dish out. Her comfortable life vanished, replaced by anger and hatred. It was more than the loss of her mother and the abuse of her father that caused her nightmares though. It was the complete lack of contact with others that stole her will. After Amie’s mother died, she’d been forced to maintain the house, do the ‘womanly chores’ that her father listed daily, and to remain trapped inside the house away from everyone else in their small pack.

  The sequestering included being locked away from her brothers as well, unless she was required to assist them in something. On the rare occasion she was allowed to play with them, her behavior and communications were monitored closely by the ever watchful eyes of her father or older brother. Those eyes still burned her when she slept. They peered at her through the darkness, stealing her sanity.

  Those weren’t the worst memories. No, the ones that held no light or sound, the ones that were full of pitch black lengths of time without food or water, those were the ones that tore her awake with a scream on her lips. Flashes of darkened closets tore a whimper from her.

  No. I’m not going to go there. Not again.

  With a violent shake she forced her mind onto other things. Like the fact that the doctor was still in the room with Zeke and hadn’t come out laughing about it just being a case of poison ivy, shaking his head at the incredible information that a shifter existed who was allergic to the plant.

  Paying the group of teens to run through the patch might not have been her best moment as an adult, but it had definitely made her feel better. He’d completely deserved to break out in hives and any other torture he was currently enduring at the hands of the town doctor. Or that had been her thought process the day before. Now, after sitting for so long listening to his suffering, she’d started to think perhaps this prank hadn’t been the best one to pull on him. Perhaps punishing him for listening to her demands to leave her alone instead of to his heart wasn’t a proper reason to give him a head-to-toe allergic reaction.

  Her thoughts stuttered to an end when another loud thud from down the hall was followed by the smell of antibiotic medicine and calamine lotion. She winced slightly. Perhaps she needed to cover her tracks before someone, mainly the hollering man down the hall, found out about her little wager with the pack’s teens. She’d made sure not to be seen when she slipped them the money and bag full of candy, their price for running Zeke, their tracking teacher, through the specific patch of plant life, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t talked. Or wouldn’t, once their actions made it to the Alpha’s ears.

  She gulped when a string of profanities, so ripe even her ears burned, burst from the patient room. The lilting voice of one of the nurses talking animatedly to Skip on a phone somewhere in the bowels of the clinic had her scrambling. Skip was the pack’s Alpha and not someone she wanted to cross. Ever. She could take Zeke, and maybe even his brother in a fight for retribution but there was no way she’d ever take her Alpha. And if he found out she’d been the one behind this little stunt—

  I better make sure Tommy and the boys didn’t snitch.

  A quickly typed message of ‘if you tell I’ll hunt you down and chop off your balls’ to the leader of the teen boys would ensure they’d at least think twice about turning belly up if anyone asked them for information. She tried to smile and chuckle when another round of cursing made it to her ears, but it wasn’t any fun anymore. Any other day she’d be happier than a pig in mud, but she couldn’t dodge the feelings of guilt when the pain-laced sounds reached her.

  “You know he’s going to find out, right? And then you’ll have to explain why you’ve been tormenting him for the last
four months.” Margie’s whisper made Amie jump.

  “Fuck. You’re starting to move like your mate.” Amie gulped some air before turning to her friend. “He should know why. I’m just paying him back.”

  The arched red eyebrow and smirk aimed at her didn’t bode well for Amie and her silent revenge. “You are paying him back for ignoring you after you specifically told him to do just that? Christ, Amie, I thought I was insane, but you take the cake. You drove that poor man away and nearly attacked him in animal form. And now you’re making him suffer again, and he doesn’t even know why.”

  “When you put it that way you make me sound like the bad guy here. He should have known that I wasn’t really trying to make him leave me alone. His coyote should have forced him to come back to me by now. We’re mates and he’s avoiding me like I’ve got the plague.” To punctuate her words Amie pouted a little, even as each word sounded worse and more insane than the next. Her animal whined in the back of her head.

  She’d been a little messed up inside after Zeke walked away. But she knew he deserved the tormenting and irritations she’d aimed at him. No one could turn their back on a mate-pull as strong as theirs without really working at it. He should have known she was a mess and needed to be pursued. Right?

  Sighing she glanced at Margie. The red-head’s face was scrunched up, her lips thin, and her hands were tapping a fast beat on her lap. All the pent up energy meant someone was about to get an earful. Waving off her friend’s tirade, Amie started talking again. “You’re right. I’m being stupid. I don’t know what got into me. I wanted him so badly that I started losing control of myself and my animal. You don’t know what it’s like to be standing around a group of people and suddenly start to sprout fur, or fangs, or claws just because the person you crave walked into the room. I was terrified. And the emotions?” A shiver raced down her spine. “So freaking strong. I wanted to purr and rub against him or yank him to the ground and ride him like a buckin’ bronco.”

  Margie chuckled and motioned Amie to continue.

  “I got scared. Okay? I’ll admit it. I am terrified enough to get the cold sweats when I think about us being together. So, I chased him away. But he wasn’t supposed to stay away. He was supposed to make me come to my senses. Show up and sweep me off my feet and make me agree to mate him. Win me over with overtures of love and patience. But instead he’s fought the pull and now won’t even look at me.”

  “And the way to fix that was to make him miserable? Because, trust me when I tell you, trying to make someone want to try at a relationship while they’re covered in poison ivy blisters might not be the way to do that.”

  Amie paused. “I let it go too far didn’t I?”

  “Yep. I think you did.”

  Shit. It’d seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Knowing he was one of the only shifters allergic to the plant had been a bonus piece of information she’d gleaned about him. And, really, she hadn’t hurt him too badly. Sure, he’d be itchy and taking antihistamines every few hours for a week, but she hadn’t stabbed him or anything. Or shot him with a tranquilizer gun like Margie had done to her mate Connor. Although painting penises on his car windows from the inside and then locking the keys in the vehicle while it sat outside the only store in town might not have been a good idea either.

  Her cat growled at the memory, swiping a meaty paw at the image. Yeah, her two halves weren’t really working well together when it came to her mate. With a sigh she looked up at her friend, opening and closing her mouth a few times, probably looking like a koi fish, without finding a word to say. The look of amusement and warring disapproval on her friend’s freckled face told her all she needed to know. She’d gone too far, and if Margie was shaking her fluffy hair about Amie’s actions she’d really gone too far. A sense of unease had her bobcat mewling pitifully.

  “The Alpha is going to kill me. Or worse. He’ll make me apologize.” A shiver of dread shook her hard enough to make the plastic chair squeal in protest as it scraped the floor. Between the disappointment she’d surely reap from her Alpha and the hatred her mate would finally feel, she’d be a shunned cat. Unwelcomed within the pack? Probably. “He’s going to be furious, isn’t he?”

  Margie nodded without asking which he she’d been referring to. Probably because the answer was a resounding YES no matter which male they were speaking about. Panic welled inside, quickly extinguishing any joy and smug satisfaction she’d gotten from listening to her mate’s discomfort.

  Slumping deeper into the chair she sighed. “I’m in so much trouble.”

  “Yes you are, Amie Dorner, and if you don’t tell me right now what the hell you did to get Zeke in here making that racket I’ll have Ian chase you from here to the next town, nipping at your furry feet the whole way.”

  The new female voice crawled right up her back and wedged itself between the nerves of Amie’s neck and shoulder as she spun slowly to face the newest arrival. Cammie, Ian’s mate and Zeke’s biggest champion, stomped into the waiting area. Her flushed cheeks and her blonde hair whipping behind her made her look like a living, breathing sister of Medusa.

  Even being a human, she scared the shit out of Amie. Sure they were friends, had been social and even had gone out together when all of the females did a girls’ night out, but it seemed that getting Zeke covered in a rash and stuck in the clinic for hours stepped over whatever womanly bond they’d formed.

  “What? I didn’t do anything. Well, okay I did something, but it wasn’t that bad.” Amie backpedaled quickly when Margie cleared her throat and shook her head.

  To make a mockery of her words a moan and inhuman howl punctuated her sentence. Damn. Her chest constricted and her cat growled again, pushing hard at Amie’s control. A few deep breaths gave her the strength to push her animal away enough to retain her human form, but it was getting harder.

  What did she know about poison ivy anyway? She’d assumed he’d get some pink shit, slather it on, itch a little and that’d be it. She hadn’t expected him to have to come to the clinic, nor the amount of pain he obviously was experiencing. Her intention hadn’t been to really hurt him. Not really. A wave of guilt swept through her. Even her inner monologue pointed the finger at her, because she’d never been one to lie to herself.

  A whimper caught in her throat when another pained growl echoed down the hallway. What the hell was she going to do? Now that her mate, even if she couldn’t seem to handle that term, was sitting in a room, growling and causing a ruckus, was she supposed to confess? What good would that do?

  Nervously she stroked her phone. Hopefully the boys wouldn’t rat her out, but if Cammie was at the clinic someone had said something. Those little fuckers.

  “What do you mean it wasn’t that bad?” Cammie’s accusing, angry words ripped Amie from her thoughts.

  “Well, I…umm… I—”

  Margie came to the rescue and would be owed some seriously enormous favors. “She was making fun of him for being such a baby.” Okay, so maybe she didn’t so much as save Amie, but turn the tide from an ass whooping to a yellin’ at.

  Cammie stared for far too long, scowling and slowly squinting her eyes like she could actually see inside Amie’s mind. It made the bobcat inside shiver and try to hide. Yeah, for a human Cam was a scary chick. Amie took a deep breath. “Fine. I had the kids run through poison ivy today.”

  Confession was good for the soul, right? Right? At least that’s what everyone seemed to tell her, but all it did was piss everyone off. To prove that thought as correct everything seemed to stop. And then everyone within the clinic was in motion at once. Cammie gasped, Margie shook her head and a roar tore down the hall from Zeke.

  “You did what?” The confusion and hurt tones were carried on his yell. She listened to Zeke struggling in his room, arguing quietly with the doctor and then finally grumbling loud enough for her to hear. “Amie, get your ass in here. The good doctor here won’t let me come down there and wring your crazy-ass neck.”


  “Ooh, you’re gonna get it now.” Margie’s sing-song words didn’t help the flutter of anticipation and fear tickling Amie’s belly.

  This wasn’t how she wanted to have him find out. She wanted it to be weeks after he’d stopped scratching, when he’d be laughing about it and she could spring it on him that it’d been her. Not when he was neck deep in calamine lotion and in enough pain to make the man shout. They were supposed to clink their beer bottles together after she told him, and he’d shake his head about how crazy she was.

  But Amie was brave enough to deal with Zeke. Maybe this would be the final straw and he’d run completely away from her, like everyone else did, and finally break the connection they had. The thin link that even now tugged at her heart, making her crave him with frustrating intensity. She sucked in a deep breath, smoothed her hands down her jeans and faced the hallway. She would have laughed had she not been dealing with the rolling belly of anxiety.

  “Amie. Don’t make me piss off the doc. Get your ass down here.” Zeke’s words were difficult to understand around the animal-fed rumble.

  Even knowing the trouble she was going to be in, knowing how much she’d already put him through, her heart rate sped up with the growl of his voice. Her desire for him flared to life, mocking her with the warmth pooling in her belly. She had it so bad. One final look at the now silent women, who wore matching looks of amusement and concern, gave Amie the boost she needed. She could do this.

  “Yes dear.” She sang, striding toward her mate’s room. It didn’t take her long to reach the door. One last deep breath and internal slap on the back had her turning the metal knob and pushing into his room. Her eyes rested on him for a single moment in time, and her world was rocked on its foundations. A gasp ripped from her throat.