Initially, I thought I would really like Coyote’s Mate. I suppose that I did, in one sense. It’s certainly a roller coaster of a story.

Anya Kobrin meets Del-Ray Delgado at a bar in Russia when she’s sixteen. She works in a lab with Coyote Breeds but is secretly working to free them. She works with Del-Ray, as long as he promises not to harm her friends and family when he goes to break out the coyotes. He promises her, but fully intends to break that promise. And he does. He doesn’t kill anyone, but he does shoot her family up and wounding them. He has his reasons, some valid, some not so much but even at this point in the story, I was okay with Del-Ray. He seemed smart. I was wrong.

After the rescue, Del-Ray kidnaps Anya and ends up mating with her unintentionally, not knowing what he has done. Anya is in love with Del-Ray and has been for years, but the fact that he betrayed her hurts her deeply and it takes her quite a while to forgive him. The mating heat only complicates matters, as it makes her body long for his touch but her heart is another matter. The angst that permeates 90% of this story, consequently made the sexy stuff come across as somewhat disturbing to me. At times I felt like I was reading some kind of psycho-sexual horror novel or something. It was hot but at the same time, almost kind of gross. LL tends to be over the top in that regard though.

Once Del-Ray learns that Anya is his mate, he quickly develops into an irrational, over-bearing, arrogant a-hole. Anya wants none of it, and requests a separation from him from the Breed Council, who have never issued such a separation before. They grant it, and Anya is given a year of reprieve from her Alpha, but works as his coya (alpha female) running his military base while he is away on a mission. She excels at this and is given the respect of all the other coyote’s who respect her as their alpha’s mate. Then Del-Ray returns 4 months early and proceeds to sh*t all over everything that Anya has done, and even takes away her title as his coya, thinking he is protecting her and keeping her from being a target. Essentially, Anya has to ask his permission to do anything, which is humiliating and upsetting to her, because she realizes that he doesn’t see her as his equal.

As a character, Anya was alright. She wasn’t exactly consistent in her behavior at all times but who is? For some reason her martyrdom act after Del-Ray returned and took over, didn’t bother me so much, when I could see it doing so in other books. I think its because Del-Ray was so stupid and stubborn that the only way she could get through to him was by accepting everything that he wanted, so that he could see how tortured and unhappy she was.

Del-Ray was probably one of the most irrational and arrogant “alpha” males LL has created so far. We get his perspective which is nice, because if we didn’t, I highly doubt that anyone would like his character. Getting to see where he was coming from was a definite plus, and kept me from totally outright hating him, because he was trying to do everything to protect his coya. BUT at the same time, I don’t think that’s love. And honestly, his paranoia and the constant rehashing of the same issues over and over got annoying and repetitive after a while. He just didn’t come across as alpha to me, but more as a teenage boy abusing his power and making everyone on the base feel miserable. And while he comes around in the end after nearly losing her because of his bad choices and decisions, it wasn’t quite enough for me. I wanted to see him suffer more and maybe even step down from his position as alpha.

Overall, this book isn’t terrible, I just get sick of the same kinds of conflict over and over with this series, with the same kinds of tiresome characters that grate on my nerves after a while. I think LL needs to step it up and actually make things happen…bad and good.