Keeping Secret: Secret McQueen Book 4 Read online

  Dedication

  I made the unfortunate decision to let my friends dictate who book 4 should be dedicated to, and as such the most ridiculous list of acknowledgments follows…

  To my Keurig coffee brewer, and the makers of German Chocolate Cake coffee…you will never know how instrumental your role was in creating this book.

  To Kevin Matté…you exist. You also bought me the Keurig, so I guess you’re all right.

  To Justin Verlander of the Detroit Tigers. Because you’re a hell of a pitcher and one sexy dude. (Yes, I do realize how ridiculous it is that I’m a Tigers fan, Desmond is a Yankees fan, and Lucas owns the Red Sox.)

  To Jessica McCarthy, who can never have enough of these books dedicated to her.

  To Tegan Kenward, who took a twelve-hour train ride to be with me at my first ever paperback signing. You are a true friend, a wonderful girl and someone I am thrilled to have in my life.

  For the fur babies: Sophie, the greatest dog in history. Willow, the most useless cat ever. And Ziggy, who is twice as ridiculous as the fictional Rio.

  To the Castanedas. Angel—I love you because you were telling dad jokes before you were a dad. Bobbi—my favorite blonde friend! And Miss Liliana—Auntie might devour you whole by your chubby, adorable cheeks. Much love.

  And last, but never least…and possibly the only serious dedication here: to my father, Rob MacLennan. I lost you when I was only thirteen, so you never got to see what I became. I like to think you’d be proud of me, though, knowing I chased my dream all the way.

  Chapter One

  Vampires can’t fly, but a grown man can if you throw him hard enough.

  That was the hard truth vampire hunter Shane Hewitt learned when I chucked him off the top of the bleachers of the empty high school gym we were in. He bounced when he landed and slid with a squeal. I couldn’t tell if the sound was from him yowling in pain or from his face grinding on the polished hardwood.

  I winced. Not very fitting of a deadly former assassin, but I felt a little bad. Shane had put up a good fight, but he was outmatched. I should have gone easier on him, but the fact of the matter was I wasn’t here to coddle him, I was here to help keep him alive. He clambered to his feet with all the grace of a geriatric elephant, moaning and groaning the whole time. When he was standing tallish again, I leapt from the top of the bleachers to the bottom row, landing steadily in my knee-high black-heeled boots.

  “Do you know how I was able to do that?”

  Next to me on the bleachers my human ward, Nolan Tate, timidly raised his hand. Nolan was about six feet tall and built like a college linebacker. Seeing him ask for permission to speak as though I were really a teacher was so endearing my heart swelled. Too bad my question was meant for Shane. I touched Nolan’s shoulder, and he put his hand down.

  “Because you’re a freak of nature?” Shane growled.

  I had to laugh because he was more spot-on than he realized. Shane thought I was a freak because it was unheard of for a Tribunal leader, one of the three most powerful members of the vampire council, to be personally helping a disrespected, no-rank, human bounty hunter. In reality, my freakishness ran much deeper. I was a vampire, sure, but that was only half the story. The other half was werewolf, making me one hell of an unnatural disaster.

  Seeing as a mere handful of people knew about what I was—and Shane wasn’t one of them—I replied with, “Close, but not the answer I was looking for.”

  Once upon a time I had been in Shane’s place. Lowest on the totem pole, getting zero respect from the council while they expected me to kill their rogues and obey their every whim. Since then I had become one of them, and now my own whims were those to be obeyed. It was sort of surreal what could come from beheading one bitchy blonde vampire.

  Shane wiped a dribble of blood off his chin. If he wanted to live to see his thirty-third birthday, he was going to have to start listening to me more and sass-talking me less. I had a whole new appreciation of what a hardship it had been for my mentor, Francis Keats, to put up with me when I was a rash sixteen-year-old.

  When Shane didn’t reply right away, Nolan shifted nervously beside me. He knew I had a notoriously short fuse and was even shorter on patience. Nolan seemed to appreciate my lessons, whereas Shane often acted as if he felt they were beneath him.

  I cleared my throat and kept my voice calm like I had to in Tribunal sessions. “Shane. Tell me why I was able to throw you.”

  “Because you’re stronger than me,” he admitted, staring at his scuffed motorcycle boots.

  While it took cojones for him to say it, I had been hoping for a different response. “No, that’s not the reason. Why was I able to throw you?”

  Nolan went to raise his hand again but appeared to think better of it and scratched his head as a halfhearted cover-up. My less-obliging student tromped over and sat beside me on the bleachers, rubbing his tender jaw.

  “I didn’t see the second swing coming.”

  “That’s the first part of it, yes. What else?” I sat down between Shane and Nolan, waiting for the former’s reply while the latter watched us in rapt silence. Nolan had been an incredible find in a bar full of would-be vampire hunters. He wasn’t much with the killer edge, but he had a survival instinct that was more finely tuned than anyone I’d ever met. I also loved him like a younger brother, and it made me especially protective of him.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then you’re dead. Think, Shane. I’m not doing this to be cruel, trust me. If I wanted to be cruel, you wouldn’t have gotten up at all.”

  He stopped touching his face and took off his leather jacket. One of the studs had bitten into my hand when I punched him in the gut. I used to think the jacket was a prop to bolster his bad-boy image, but I was starting to see a defensive logic to it. Personally, I wore mine because it looked cool. Though recently it had taken an unfortunate swim with me, and the leather would never be the same.

  Shane sighed a little too dramatically and cracked his knuckles. The fighting man’s thinking posture.

  “Th—”

  “Just give me a minute,” he grumbled as I tried to goad him into answering. Then—like the proverbial light bulb going off—his eyes widened, and I knew he’d figured it out. “When I went to counter the blow, I leaned back. You took advantage of my shifted balance and used it to throw me.”

  I grinned at him. “Bang.”

  “But if he didn’t see the second swing coming, how could he have prevented the counter?” Nolan asked.

  “That’s simple.” My smile was loose and easy as I got to my feet and stood facing them. My fist darted out, and I stopped it a hairsbreadth away from Nolan’s nose. His eyes bugged, and I could feel his hot, quick breaths on my knuckles. “You have to always expect the second swing.”

  When I pulled my hand away, he let out a small sigh. The squeaky-wheeled hum of the janitor’s cleaning cart echoed down the hall outside. I offered one of my hands to each of the men, and they both accepted, allowing me to pull them to their feet. We used to panic when we heard the janitor’s cart, until we realized he wore headphones and kept the volume on his Rod Stewart cassette cranked to insane levels. Since then we took our time leaving when we heard him approaching the gymnasium.

  “Let’s call it a night,” I suggested. Sometimes when we left the gym, we’d go for practice hunts in the park, taking advantage of the warmer evenings associated with early spring. We were all glad to be rid of winter’s icy shackles, but tonight I didn’t feel like hunting with the boys. The other two members of the Tribunal were beginning to suspect something was amiss with my evening activities, and I didn’t want to push my luck. I still had my freed
om, and they hadn’t put me back under the watchful eye of the council’s lowly wardens. I wanted to keep it that way.

  You can only tempt fate so often before she turns around and bites you in the ass.

  Getting out of the gym was significantly easier than getting in. To enter, we had to scale a chain-link fence and I—being the one with supernatural dexterity—had to shimmy up a drainpipe to a high window. Afterwards I could unlock the back door and let the boys in. It was a shame they kept locking it on us every time we came because it would save me a heck of a climb if they’d leave it open.

  When we were back outside, Shane and Nolan made for the fence. They were quick and agile enough for humans, but they weren’t fighting humans in the wild. They were fighting monsters like me. I waited until they were over then drove my point home by grabbing the chain link one-handed and swinging myself up to the top beam of the fence. Then, without pausing to balance, I kicked off from the metal bar and landed deftly between them.

  “Show off,” Shane muttered.

  “Awesome,” was Nolan’s counter.

  I didn’t get a chance to put in my two cents because my phone started to vibrate in my pocket, and a moment later Billy Idol’s voice was snarling the lyrics to “White Wedding”.

  “Shit.” I bounced the phone from one palm to the other, trying to make the stupid touch screen do what I wanted. It was shiny and new and stupidly expensive, and it made me miss the hell out of my old, basic flip phone. “I’m late for my meeting with the fucking wedding planner.”

  Chapter Two

  I was in hell.

  In my twenty-three years, I had hunted vampires, chased errant fae and even decapitated a demon. But none of them could hold a candle to the horror I had to face tonight.

  Kimberly.

  Or Miss Kimberly Kaitlyn Carlyle, as she introduced herself to me the first time. Her wrist was jangly with gold Tiffany bangles, and her nails were fake gel talons that gave me a shudder when they brushed against my skin.

  “I simply adore your sweater,” she drawled, putting too much emphasis on her vowels and too much friendliness in her voice. She was lying.

  I was wearing a sweater I’d pulled out of the back of my closet that had once belonged to my ex-boyfriend Gabriel Holbrook. It had holes in the sleeves and the yarn was pulling loose across the chest, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Three months earlier I’d watched Gabriel die, and it made it difficult to discard the earthly remnants of him.

  But in this situation it helped me divine what kind of person Kimberly was, because the sweater was a piece of crap. Unless she thought I was wearing it in an ironically messy way, there was no way she would compliment for any reason other than sucking up.

  Which—considering she was one of the highest paid wedding planners in New York—was exactly what she was trying to do. She wanted to please me because she wanted to make nice with the money. Not my money, since I didn’t have any to speak of, but the money associated with the man I was engaged to marry.

  Lucas Rain. Billionaire, corporate head honcho, and the reason I had a massive, flawless diamond ring on my finger. A ring Kimberly kept sneaking glances at while she dangled her bracelets in my face.

  Kimberly was one of those New York City girls who talked a lot but never really said anything.

  “Secret,” she said, leaning close to me. We were both seated on plush divans in her too-bright, too-big, too-airy office. Her breath smelled like cinnamon chewing gum, and her nearness made me nervous and defensive. Where the hell was Lucas? He was fifteen minutes late, and I was ready to throttle him for leaving me alone with this woman. She said my name again, making the first e sound like a mosquito’s buzzing.

  She had my attention.

  “What?”

  “I said do you have a preference? Monique Lhuillier or Vera Wang?”

  The only thing I knew about wedding dresses was that they were all white, tight and probably impossible to kill someone in.

  Unless that someone was Kimberly, in which case I’d find a way.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “Well, we’ll schedule a trial at Kleinfeld. You might want something totally different.” She laughed as if this were the funniest idea in the world. “And you’ll want to have your mother there, I assume.”

  My ears felt hot, and I had my hand balled into a fist without meaning to. “My mother…” I let my fist fall open and dazzled her with the gleaming rock. She was like a kitten looking at a laser pointer. “My mother is dead.” This was a lie, but since she’d pretended to like my hideous sweater I figured my lie made us even. The truth about my mother was too ugly for Kimberly and her taffeta-drenched world.

  It was too ugly for my world, and my full-time job was to police the goings-on of the entire vampire population of the East Coast. So…that was saying something.

  “Oh…goodness.” Kimberly’s hand flew to her mouth, then her other darted out and held mine, fingers fumbling against the ring. I fought to not wince. “I’m so sorry.”

  I started to say, I’m not, but that was the moment Lucas chose to waltz through the office door in his perfect Armani suit trailing a cloud of apologies behind him. Lucas was the kind of man you wanted to forgive for anything the instant you laid eyes on him. Six foot two and well muscled, he had the blond hair and blue eyes of a corn-fed, all-American, football type. His smile showed off beautiful, even teeth and made a glimmer shine in his eyes brighter than the light off my diamond.

  My breath hitched.

  This was the man I was going to marry.

  He stooped low and planted a kiss on the crown of my head, making tingles radiate down my spine and setting off a chain reaction of tremors that ended low in my pelvis. Kimberly practically fell over me to offer him her hand. Politely, he dusted a kiss over her knuckles and gave her a puckish, panty-melting grin.

  “So sorry I’m late, ladies. Business.” He shrugged one shoulder then sat next to me on my divan.

  Lucas was larger than life. His personality overwhelmed everyone around him—myself included—and suddenly the seat felt too small.

  This was what it was like to be dwarfed by the werewolf king of the East. Even humans like Kimberly who knew nothing about our world respected the authority he threw off in waves. She probably assumed it was the power of wealth that made him so indomitable. It wasn’t. He was royalty.

  And soon I would be too.

  My mouth felt dry, like I’d swallowed a shot of sand.

  Lucas sensed my unease and took one of my hands in his, squeezing gently. Once upon a time being this close to him would have filled my mouth with a burst of cinnamon. Now, with our mate bond sealed, the connection was deeper, but the comforting flavor was gone. The only cinnamon in the room was the strong waft of it coming from Kimberly’s mouth as she caught Lucas up on what he’d missed.

  “Well, Miss McQueen,” she said, switching to an unnatural-sounding formal address, then she caught herself doing it and giggled. “Oh goodness, I guess pretty soon you won’t be hearing that anymore.”

  I wrinkled my nose and stared at her as though she were a duck who had learned to knit. “Why the hell not?”

  Her attention darted back and forth between me and Lucas, and I knew she wasn’t sure where she’d made the mistake. “I just meant…with you getting married…well, your name would be—”

  I waved a hand at her, trying to erase the 1950s logic she was trying to weave into sensible reasoning. Sure, I’d wear a white dress. I’d force my scant collection of girlfriends to dress up in matching gowns and fawn over me while eyeing Lucas’s groomsmen for prospects. But I would be damned if she thought I’d be changing my last name.

  “Kimberly,” I cut her off. “I appreciate that Lucas’s name has a lot of heft in the financial world and in…other arenas. However, my name is ridiculous enough as it is. If I changed it to Secret Rain, people would assume I was a stripper. Or a yacht.”

  I figured Lucas would chide me for
my impropriety. He was a big fan of pointing out how I always chose the most inopportune times to be snarky. However, in this case, he attempted to fight off his laughter, and it ended up bubbling out as a loud snort.

  Kimberly looked appalled, but her veneer restored quickly, and she was back in ass-kissing mode in no time. A true professional. The first rule of being a New York City wedding planner—do everything your client wants, and never ask them why they want it. Never ask. Never correct. Especially if your client is worth over a billion dollars and has insisted you “spare no expense” in planning his big day in less than a month.

  The average bride spends over a year planning her wedding.

  Well, let’s be honest, the average woman starts planning her wedding the day she learns what one is. The actual bridal planning, however, cannot begin until the ring is firmly on finger and the husband-to-be has made the big commitment.

  I was not an average bride.

  Lucas’s proposal, though it had been a grand and romantic public gesture, hadn’t been made because he was crazy in love with me. He could profess his love all he wanted, but we both knew the truth. The werewolf king had proposed because having a queen would solidify his throne. Bonus points if his new queen happened to be from royal werewolf lineage.

  That’s where I came in. Southern werewolf princess, bonded soul mate, and the on-paper perfect queen. On-paper being the operative term. Lucas had come to realize over the last year I wasn’t at all the perfect-princess type, and it had started to wear on our relationship. It didn’t help that I was also soul-bonded to another werewolf, Lucas’s lieutenant Desmond Alvarez.

  And it certainly didn’t help that I loved Desmond more than I loved Lucas.

  Yet here we were. There was a massive diamond on my finger and a wedding planner with dollar signs in her eyes waiting to yield to my every wedding whim.

  Lucas took my hand and kissed it, his lips lingering a few seconds too long as he looked up at me and winked, which sent another thrill down to my toes. Love was such a complicated bitch, more so when the supernatural got thrown into the mix. On a logical level, I knew Lucas was wrong for me. On a metaphysical level, though, a part of me needed him as much as I needed oxygen. Now that our mate bond was complete, we were connected on a level that defied explanation.