Big Bad Wolf

by Christine Warren

  Still, at least she’d had the decency to have him clear out. One could never precisely count on Ava for decency. Witty company and the burning hell-fire of vengeance, yes, but not decency.

  Dropping her torn clothes in the small mending basket she kept beside the sofa, Missy toed her shoes off and placed them beside the front door so she would remember to bring them back to Graham so he could return them to Samantha.

  Provided she saw Graham again.

  Which was, of course, the crux of her problem two days after it had first come to her attention.

  When would she see Graham again? And why? He had seemed just as eager to spend time with her when he’d woken her up just before dawn, but had that been a sign of his affection or a by-product of his morning erection? When he’d kissed her good-bye before dashing off to handle his club’s crisis du jour, he’d whispered that he wanted to take her out to dinner tonight, somewhere special. Had he meant that, or had it been just one of the things he said to his women to leave them with a positive memory?

  Could she possibly be overanalyzing this?

  Missy sighed and padded into the kitchen for a tall glass of water. All the physical exercise she’d participated in over the weekend had made it difficult to stay hydrated. When she glanced at the phone on the wall opposite the refrigerator, the display window of her phone told her she had five messages in her voice mail. Statistics predicted that 4.7 of them would be from Ava.

  Despite the screaming protests in her head, Missy activated the speakerphone and dialed the number to access her messages. After she plugged in her secret code, the machine repeated her number of messages and began to play them back.

  “Answer your cell phone or die, Melissa Jane,” Ava ordered. “Just because you managed to evade us doesn’t mean you’re off the hook for your fix. I expect a call within the hour.”

  “Did someone just tell me the greatest lie ever spoken, or did you leave this party over the shoulder of Graham Winters?! Since you won’t answer your cell, you get to hear this same message in two voice mails. Call me.”

  Ava again. “All right, Regina has managed to convince me Graham is not a threat to your life, so I know you’re not dead, but if you’re actually spending the weekend with that . . . wolf in man’s clothing, I will be sorely tempted to make you wish you were. I sent your fix home, but that does not mean you won’t be made to pay for this, Melissa Jane.”

  Missy rolled her eyes. Ava still hadn’t quite come to grips with the idea that not only were vampires and werewolves and other assorted shape-shifters real, but also one of them had married her best friend, Regina. Against her wishes. And Ava tended to hold a grudge.

  The fourth message was from Corinne. At least, it was spoken with Corinne’s husky alto voice, but Missy didn’t need to see the cue cards to know with certainty that the words were all Ava’s.

  The fifth message wasn’t a message at all. Missy heard the brief pause that indicated her recorded greeting where she announced her name and number and invited people to leave a message for her had finished playing. After that, she heard only a few seconds of silence, followed by the click of a line disconnecting. Weird.

  Idly she glanced at the caller ID display. The number read “UNAVAILABLE,” but the call had come yesterday afternoon. On a Sunday, the only people likely to call her from unlisted numbers were telemarketers. And maybe Ava in disguise, but the day Ava declined to leave a threat on a convenient voice mail, Missy would sell all her possessions and join the French Foreign Legion.

  A touch of a button erased all the messages and another disconnected the call and turned the speakerphone off. A moment later, Missy closed the door of her dishwasher after placing her glass neatly inside and looked around her with an odd sort of panic.

  She had absolutely nothing to do.

  It was spring break for her students, so there were no classes to teach, no assignments to evaluate, no reports to write. She didn’t even have lesson plans to prepare, because the private school where she taught required all teachers to complete them at least one month in advance. Missy was caught up for another three weeks.

  Wandering back into the living room, she glanced at the television and grimaced. The idea of vegging in front of the tube held little appeal. There was no way daytime television would ever occupy her mind enough to keep it from wandering back to Graham and speculating on what might happen after they had been apart for a few hours. It would take a diligent effort at decoding secret international communiqués to do that.

  Missy pursed her lips and began to weigh the benefits of a nap or a long soak in a hot bath against the humiliation inherent in calling another cab and heading back toward Vircolac and the uncertain welcome of its sexy owner. Before her willpower could crumble at her feet like poorly made plaster, the intercom from the front desk buzzed.

  She hurried over to the door and pressed the button to answer. “Yes?”

  “Good morning, Ms. Roper,” Clancy, the daytime security guard, greeted her with his customary mellow affability. “You’ve got a delivery down here. I checked the paperwork and it looks okay, so I’m going to send it up.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  Frowning, Missy unlocked the door with a puzzled frown. She couldn’t think of anything she’d ordered in the past couple of weeks, so she wasn’t sure what she might be receiving, but security in her building was very good. If Clancy said the messenger was legitimate, you could bet he had some kind of package with Missy’s correct name and address on it and a signed and dated order slip to go with it.

  Curiosity had her opening the door in time to hear the elevator ding before the doors whooshed softly open. The man who stepped out was of average height and average weight and wore an instantly recognizable cap and uniform that proclaimed him an employee of one of the neighborhood’s most popular florists. In one arm he carried an enormous bouquet of roses in every shade from white to deep red to yellow and deep violet. There must have been three dozen of the glorious flowers, and Missy could smell their fragrance from three doors away.

  “Oh, my God, are those for me?” Mouth hanging wide, Missy stepped away from her open door and held out her hands greedily. “I can’t imagine who would be sending me flowers. Especially flowers like this.”

  Graham! shouted an impertinent and imprudent voice in the back of her head. She shushed it ruthlessly. It’s just as likely to be from Ava’s surgeon friend. She probably sent him detailed instructions. Heck, knowing Ava, she could have ordered them herself and had the florist make out the card. She must really want to see me date this guy.

  The messenger halted in front of her and consulted the clipboard he held in his free hand. “Are you . . . Melissa Roper? Apartment Seven F?”

  Missy smiled. “That’s me. Do you know if there’s a card in here? I can’t think—”

  She couldn’t finish her sentence, either. In fact, she couldn’t do much of anything, not even scream when the clipboard and bouquet went crashing to the hallway carpet, sending sheets of paper and shards of wet glass in every direction. And the reason she couldn’t make a sound was that the messenger had his hands wrapped around her throat and was dragging her toward the stair at the end of the hall with inhuman strength.

  Strength that matched the glow in his distinctively Lupine-yellow eyes.

  Terror and confusion warred briefly for supremacy in her mind before her adrenal gland cast the deciding vote and waved a victory flag over the field of battle. It didn’t matter why a Lupine had attacked her, the hormone said. What mattered was that she get away alive. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in, and she decided in an instant that just because she couldn’t scream did not mean that she couldn’t express her feelings for the situation in other ways.

  For instance, by abruptly ceasing to struggle and using her attacker’s momentary surprise as an opportunity to slam her forehead into the bridge of his nose with all the considerable force she could muster. Which turned out to be a lot more than she would otherwise
have predicted.

  The Lupine moved fast, but the unexpected attack had given Missy an advantage. It wasn’t much, but it meant that instead of missing her mark entirely, she managed to impact his cheekbone hard enough to result in an audible crack. Not as satisfying or as debilitating as a bloody broken nose, but it did send a fleeting warmth through the vicinity of her heart.

  Her attacker roared something indistinct and used his grip around Missy’s throat to swing her around and slam her head into the wall on the other side of what happened to be her favorite neighbor’s favorite room.

  Lincoln Kennedy Jones threw open his door and stormed out of his apartment with fury in his heart and a wooden spoon in his hand. He hated to be interrupted while he was cooking, but when he saw what was happening in the hallway, it became clear that the only thing he hated more was to see a man physically attack a smaller, weaker, softer individual. A woman, for example. A woman he considered a friend, like Missy, merely added insult to his injury.

  “What in the name of all that’s holy do you think you’re doing, fool!” Lincoln roared in the voice that had served him well during his decade of bouncing for some of the roughest bars in the city. “You take your hands off that little girl before I rip your fingers off and use them to clean out your ears! ’Cause I know your mama must have taught you better than to hurt a woman, but you must not have heard her right. Maybe after I’m done with you, you’ll listen a little better.”

  Any normal man would have taken one look at Lincoln’s shining, ebony head; his fierce, tattooed face; his six feet, seven inches, and 375 pounds of muscle, and executed a strategic retreat. The Lupine, however, obviously thought of himself as far superior to a normal man, because he took one hand from Missy’s throat—which was enough for her to draw a deep, grateful breath—and used it to take a swing at the side of Lincoln’s jaw.

  Unfortunately, the werewolf hadn’t taken into account that Lincoln might be the son of an African savannah giant. Missy herself hadn’t known until after Regina had become a vampire. That was when Missy had started to look at the world in a new light and to ask questions she’d never before thought to consider. Instead of sending the black man sprawling, all the punch succeeded in doing was knocking his head around and making him very cranky.

  With his spoon-free hand, Lincoln grabbed the wrist of the hand the Lupine still had wrapped around Missy’s neck and squeezed. It happened close enough to her ears that she could hear the distinct sound of each bone snapping under the pressure of her neighbor’s huge, dark fingers. By the time she had counted the fourth snap, the Lupine’s grip loosened and she was able to wrench herself free and stumble against the wall well out of reach of her attacker.

  From the look of things, though, the werewolf had more pressing concerns than making another grab for Missy. From the sound of them, too. The man howled loud enough to raise the dead, but the rest of the doors in the hall remained firmly closed. Either everyone else in the building was at work at this hour or they had all lived in Manhattan long enough to know better than to stick their noses into the kind of business that sounded like this, even if it was happening right outside their doors.

  Missy watched Lincoln raise his wooden spoon and bring it down over the Lupine’s head so hard that the handle cracked with the force of an explosion. Shards of wood went flying around the hall, except for the ones she felt sure had embedded themselves in her attacker’s skull.

  The Lupine howled again, but the sound of Lincoln’s rumbling voice nearly drowned him out.

  “Look what you made me do,” the half giant said, his fierce expression turning down in a scowl. “That was my favorite spoon and now all it’s good for is being driven straight through your worthless heart. Just like this.”

  Lincoln raised his arm as if he intended to stab the Lupine exactly as he’d described, but the other man didn’t give him a chance. With a twist and a growl and a blurring of space, the Lupine shifted his form, his broken wrist sliding free of Lincoln’s grip as his body changed and morphed into that of a blondish brown wolf with yellow eyes and a red and black baseball cap perched incongruously atop his furry head.

  Before Missy could do more than blink, the wolf spun around and threw himself at the door for the stairs, forcing the latch from its anchor and disappearing into the dim stairwell.

  His wrist didn’t appear to be quite so badly injured now that it was a paw, Missy noticed. He had barely limped as he raced away.

  “Now, let me get a look at you, sugar,” Lincoln said, drawing Missy’s attention from her fleeing attacker to refocus it on Lincoln’s expression of concern.

  He hunkered down on the floor beside her and carefully tilted her head to the side so he could examine her throat.

  “Son of a bitch left marks on you, sugar girl. I should have turned him into a winter coat.”

  Missy laughed, the sound rough and painful as it emerged from her bruised throat. “He was completely the wrong color for you, Linc. You need to set your sights on something in an arctic silver. Or maybe fox red.”

  The enormous man chuckled and lifted her gently to her feet. “I guess you’re probably right, sugar. I’ll make a note. Now come on into my kitchen and sit down for a while. You’ve had a shock and you could use a nice cup of my chamomile and rose-hip tea. With extra honey and lemon. And while you drink that up, I’ll call one of those girlfriends of yours. You’ll need someone to sit with for a while after a thing like that. You want Reggie or Corinne?”

  Missy sighed. Lincoln was probably right. The attack hadn’t really hurt her, but she could feel the shakes coming on as a result of the shock. She probably should have one of her friends come hang out with her for a while. Just until her nerves settled down.

  Desperately she tried to stuff down the thought that the only person she wanted to call right now was Graham.

  Forget it, she told herself. You’ve known the man two days. That is not the kind of relationship you call on in case of an emergency. It’s way too soon. This is why God created girlfriends.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Little bit before noon.”

  Missy shook her head. “Not Reggie, then. She’s sound asleep at this hour. Call Corinne. If she’s not out after a story, she can be here in twenty minutes.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Missy sat at Lincoln’s kitchen table with a mug of tea in her hand, a plate of warm ginger-molasses cookies in front of her, and her cell phone against her ear. When her mind had blanked on Corinne’s number, Lincoln had fetched it from her apartment for her to look it up in her contact list. Unfortunately, Corinne had been on a story and Lincoln had been forced to settle for leaving the reporter a voice-mail message. Half an hour later, the woman had finally called back.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not important,” Missy lied, ignoring the glower Lincoln had aimed in her direction. “I’m already feeling better. My neighbor has been taking great care of me.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll be there as soon as I can catch a cab.” Corinne paused. “Well, actually, I’m in Weehawken at the moment, so first I have to take the ferry back to the city. But as soon as we dock, I’ll hop in a cab and be right there.”

  “I said don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.”

  “But you’ll never be a good liar.”

  “Corinne—”

  “Missy,” the other woman echoed. “You need one of us with you. I thought about calling Ava, but I figured that even if you survived a mugging, seeing her right now might finish you off. But I did get ahold of Danice and I left a message on the machine for Reggie.”

  Missy winced at hearing her own lie repeated. Explaining that the attack had been more than a random mugging had seemed too complicated to go into over the phone. It would be so much easier to spell it out in person.

  Wouldn’t it?

  “There’s no need to cause all this trouble. You guys have jobs and lives and stuff. You don’t need to come rushing over here to wrap me in blanki
es. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

  “Yes, but that’s my job now,” a voice said from somewhere above her, just before a large, familiar hand plucked the cell phone from her ear and folded it closed with a snap.

  Startled, Missy spun around in her chair to see a much more welcome Lupine aiming a thunderous glare squarely at her head.

  “Graham! What are you doing here?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “What am I doing here? What am I doing here?” Besides stifling the urge to throttle her, Graham fumed.

  “That’s a very good question,” an unfamiliar voice added, drawing Graham’s attention to an enormous, muscular black man who stood at the kitchen counter, a huge knife in his hand and a furious expression on his face. He stepped forward until he hovered over Missy like a guardian angel. “What are you doing here and who the hell do you think you are? You think you can just walk into a man’s apartment without an invitation? And how do you know Melissa?”

  Graham blinked, unsure which question to answer first. He was also having a little trouble deciding whether to applaud the stranger’s concern for Missy or to rip his throat out for presuming to stand between an alpha and his mate.

  “When I hear that my mate has just been attacked outside her own home, where else do you suppose I would be?”

  “Mate?”

  Missy raised a hand and touched the man’s arm. “It’s okay, Lincoln. Graham is a-a . . . friend.”

  To Graham, the man appeared less than satisfied with her explanation, but at least he lowered the knife.

  “From where I stand, man wants to be more than a friend, sugar girl.”

  “I already am.” Graham bared his teeth in a possessive snarl. “And you’d better watch that sweet tooth, or I may have to knock it out.”

  A distressed sound from Missy yanked both men’s attention back to her and averted an armed conflict. Graham had to wonder whether she’d made it deliberately.