The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf nw-2

by Молли Харпер

  “That won’t be possible,” I said, my voice flat. “I’ve gotta work.”

  “Oh, you can move your schedule around,” Mo said, grinning at me. “Your hours are pretty flexible.”

  OK, that was going too far. Being an unofficial official for the pack meant settling disputes between pack members, monitoring the wildlife (i.e., food sources) available around the valley, controlling the pack when we ran together. And it’s hard to find a day job that will accept “got kicked in the ribs by an agitated moose” as a reason to call in sick. The village paid me a salary for maintaining records and appearances at the town hall. And I was the closest thing there was to law enforcement in my valley. I didn’t have time to escort the yummy doctor around by the nose.

  OK, that wasn’t true. I spent a good portion of my “work day” bored out of my ever-loving mind. But no one, particularly the yummy doctor, had to know that.

  “Mo, my hours are none of your business,” I said through a clenched, fake smile.

  Nick shrugged, and the motion brought his arm brushing across my shoulder. It felt as if a warm electric current had passed through my skin. I held my breath, willing away the tremor that skittered up my spine.

  “Well, if you find a way to fit me into your schedule, let me know. I’ll probably just wander around the eastern butte for a few days, take in the sights,” he said. “I’m a climber, and I’m eager to see what sort of trouble I can get into around here.”

  “Why would you do that?” I asked. The eastern side of the Wheeler Mountains range was where Buzz had uncovered the bones of hikers who disappeared the previous year. “That’s not exactly a beginner’s slope.”

  “I’m not exactly a beginner,” he said, smiling.

  “So says every goofball who manages to hike across the parking lot to a sporting-goods store and buy a North Face jacket,” I muttered.

  “You’re saying I need a guide.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, you’ll go with me,” he said, as if the matter were obvious and settled.

  “Ye—wait, no. Wait, what?” I spluttered.

  “I’ll give you a call to settle the details,” he said, nodding at Cooper and Mo. “It was nice to meet you all.”

  He turned and walked out of the saloon, leaving me gaping after him.

  What just happened?

  “Are you high?” I asked Mo, slapping her arm. “Why did you guys tell him that I would show him around?” Evie shot me a sharp look, and I lowered my voice. “This is the man who wants to reveal our existence to the world, and you want to set me up with him? Are you and Cooper that desperate to double date?”

  “No, I figured this was the best way to keep him out of our hair. He’s your problem now. What better way to keep an eye on him than to accompany him on his investigation? He gets nothing but goes home happy. You . . . get a little something and go home a lot less cranky,” Mo suggested, giggling unrepentantly when my brother winced. “What? After watching you talk to him, I think we should change our approach. Keep our enemies close, so to speak. Hell, maybe you could convince him that a Sasquatch did it or something.”

  “Nah, we couldn’t do that,” Cooper said. “Sasquatch is a pretty nice guy.”

  “Sasquatch is real, too?” Mo whispered. “Why do I have to find things out like this? I’m in the family, too.”

  “Look, we don’t speak to Thatcher,” I told Cooper as Mo dashed back to the kitchen to check on some pies in the oven. “We don’t take him into the woods. Nothing. As far as we’re concerned, Dr. Thatcher doesn’t exist.”

  “Is that a decree from the alpha?” Cooper asked, lowering his tone to a whisper.

  “Do I need to make it a decree, or do you have the sense to admit that we need to stay away from him?” I asked.

  “What’s the verdict?” Mo asked, coming back to refill Cooper’s coffee mug and top off my Coke.

  “Maggie said she doesn’t want us talking to him,” Cooper said, sipping his coffee. “No visits, no tours, no spilling of ancient family secrets.”

  Mo frowned. “I don’t think you’re giving us a whole lot of credit. I think I’m clever enough to maintain a friendly conversation without vomiting up forbidden information. I have just as much to lose as you two. And if he tries to interview me, I’ll just tell him I’m afraid his pocket recorder will capture my soul or something. Come on. Maggie finally has a crush on somebody. This is going to be better than one of those Japanese game shows.”

  I glared at her.

  She shrugged. “For the rest of us.”

  “One of these days, I’m going to catch you without your trusty fire extinguisher. And then your ass is mine.”

  “Bring it on, Scrappy Doo.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Chuck Norris and the Calendar of Death

  I SAT AT MY DESK in the community center/town hall, writing out the whopping four paychecks the village issued each week. One to myself; one to our village physician, Anna Moder; one to my cousin Teresa, who taught twenty-six kids in all twelve grades at the village school; and another to my gargantuan cousin-but-might-as-well-be-my-brother, Samson, who was the closest thing we had to a civil engineer. He delivered the mail, ran our modest recycling program, and maintained our handful of public buildings. He also occasionally fell asleep while driving a snowplow, but he was such a cheerful guy it was hard to stay pissed at him. Besides, every village needed an idiot.

  I didn’t live in a normal little town. Every single household in my valley was either were or descended from were. And I was related to each and every person there on one side or the other, and I’m very aware of how wrong that sounds.

  Dating as a werewolf is complicated, particularly for packs in the Great North. Every pack has to maintain close relationships with other packs and “import” mates at every opportunity, to prevent inbreeding. You practically have to review your extended genealogical history before you can agree to a movie and dinner.

  This might sound isolated and sort of claustrophobic, but wolves don’t know any other way. A pack generally lives in close quarters, filling an apartment complex, a subdivision, or a gated community in the case of more urban, affluent clans. In southern packs, it usually means parking a number of double-wide trailers on a farm. For us, it was a self-contained, nearly self-sustaining, community surrounded by some of the richest hunting lands known in the Great Northwest.

  Not that I like to brag or anything.

  I munched on a handful of red Swedish Fish I kept in a huge apothecary jar on my desk. I had to refill the damn thing about once a week, depending on how often Samson stopped by. The rest of my morning would consist of checking on a pothole in the parking lot of the village clinic and writing up a schedule for the community center that might finally settle the ongoing feud between the local quilting group and the bridge club.

  It was good to be the queen.

  OK, so I had the most boring job in the village. I considered it a trade-off because the rest of my responsibilities—running, hunting, protecting the borders of the valley, and so on—were pretty awesome. And busting my ass for a few hours that morning meant I could get a few precious moments of quiet and read the copy of the new J. D. Robb paperback I had hidden in my filing cabinet. I wasn’t a classics girl, despite Mo’s best efforts. The woman actually bought me a subscription to the English Writer of the Month Club. I was shameless in my supermarket-shelf mass-market taste. I loved King, Evanovich, Grisham, and Brown. I won’t lie; the official-looking filing cabinet in the corner is actually stuffed full of my paperbacks.

  I might have been reading at that very moment, if I could manage to concentrate long enough to write a damn check correctly. I’d slept about three hours each night since my humiliating meeting with Nick Thatcher. I kept waking up all sweaty and tangled up in the sheets, with visions of his cheeky little grin still dancing behind my eyelids.

  Jumpy and irritated, I spent hours trying to get back to sleep, only to end up stomping out of the house to run th
rough the woods on all fours. It was the only thing that could clear my head. By the time I got back to the house, everybody was bustling around town. And it hardly served as a good example for me to flop back into bed. Lazy never works for wolves. Read a few fables. So, for the last four days, I’d basically been skimming by on caffeine and luck.

  Beyond day-to-day operations, I also served as a sort of figurehead for the pack. I was “the face” for the valley and its inhabitants. And that face had some pretty serious undereye luggage. Now that I was alpha, the pressure for me to settle down and birth a litter went from good-natured rumbling at holidays to an all-out roar. I couldn’t walk from my office to my house without one of my relatives accosting me with some promise of the man of my dreams.

  While a lot of girls—particularly girls living in one of the most remote, eligible-werewolf-bachelor-starved regions in the world—would be thrilled to have such a devoted network of matchmakers, I thought about following in the shoes of Jan Brady and making up my own “George Glass” to get them off my back. Most of their recommendations were either far more interested in becoming the alpha for my pack than in me as a person. Or they were more interested in Samson than they were in me—which was disappointing. Then there were Cro-Magnon wolves who hadn’t quite grasped the whole “females are my equal” concept.

  Fun times.

  I was not counting on a love match. Not everybody had a marriage like my parents’. My mother had come from a pack in Oregon. She moved to Alaska after meeting my dad on one of his rare trips to the mainland. He came into her uncle’s garage to get a part for some motorcycle Samson’s dad wanted. My mom was doing the books in the office. She looked up and smiled at him, and he was so distracted by that smile that he walked into a wall. Dad died when I was a baby, but Cooper told me a lot of stories about what I’d missed growing up. The silly jokes, the googly eyes, Dad bringing bunches of wildflowers to her when he came home from a run. He once told Cooper that the trick to a happy life was to find the person you can’t breathe without and marry her.

  How was any guy I chose going to compete with that sort of romantic goo?

  So, given my candidate pool, marriage and kids weren’t exactly things I was looking forward to. I loved Eva. I loved cuddling her, the sweet apple and baby-shampoo smell that radiated from that crazy hair. But the best part was that I could give her back. When the cuteness was over and she had a smelly diaper or a tantrum, I could just claim ignorance and hand her over to Mo, who somehow had the patience needed to deal with stuff like that.

  I was basically a selfish creature. I liked sleeping and being able to leave the house without making sure I had a half-dozen toys and a Baggie full of Cheerios. But not having kids wasn’t an option. For one thing, I wasn’t planning on dying a virgin. And in my family, if you have sex, you’re going to have kids. And second, I sort of owed it to my bloodline to pass the werewolf magic along.

  It seemed blatantly unfair that I seemed to be suffering from some hormone surge when Nick Thatcher came into the picture. Clearly, some wire labeled “Don’t mess around with men who could ruin your life” had short-circuited in my brain. I’d known plenty of guys with big blue eyes, guys with pouty, kissable lips, guys who smelled like Sunday lunch. I’d just never met one who had all three qualities.

  That was the problem. It was all looks. It was my primal brain at work. It wasn’t that he was smart or funny or that he actually managed to thwart me in conversation, which until now, no one but Mo could do. And it definitely wasn’t because I’d developed some weird, creepy, stalker-at-first-fascination thing with him. . .

  Moving on.

  As hard as I tried to shrug off his thrall, Nick just kept popping up, like one of those damn plastic whack-a-moles. First, I found out my cousin, Evie’s husband, Buzz, unaware of his wolfy in-laws’ involvement in the debacle, had given Nick an extensive interview about his search for the killer wolf. Alan Dahling had taken Nick up the mountain to the area where Walt and Hank had shot the huge male timber wolf we were letting the public believe was responsible for the attacks. I had to hand it to Nick, he was good at his job. If you considered being a giant pain in my supernatural ass a job.

  And the final blow? Mo was delivering Tupperwared meals to his house like some cross between a Welcome Wagon and Marie Callender. He tried to pay for it, and she refused to take his money. She considered it some sort of outreach program. I think the point was reaching out to drive me crazy.

  “Let me get this straight,” I’d hissed at her over the phone. “I say don’t have anything to do with the nosy outsider, and you start delivering care packages to his door? I can’t get your meat loaf in my freezer, but you’re dropping them on Thatcher’s doorstep with reheating instructions?”

  “I saw him at the market the other day, and the poor guy had twenty Banquet dinners in his cart,” Mo said, her voice rising to a disturbing, defensive octave. “Do you have any idea how expensive those things are up here? Plus, they’re all fat and sodium, and he’s too pretty to be allowed to get all bloated.”

  “But I told you—”

  “Look, with all the questions Nick is not so subtly trying to work into conversations, it would look weird and suspicious if I went all silent religious-compound wife whenever he walked into a room. Doesn’t it make more sense that we would remain neighborly?”

  There was silence on my end of the line . . . unless you counted the sound of my teeth grinding.

  “Maggie?”

  “I’m trying to find a hole in your argument that doesn’t involve me threatening you,” I grumbled. “I got nothing.”

  She snorted.

  “What sort of questions is he asking?”

  “Oh, little things, about how Cooper and I got to know each other. He heard from a few of our neighbors that we weren’t exactly an instant love connection. Some of my better insults are fondly remembered. So he’s using ‘getting to know you’ conversations to ask what turned the tide, what couples around here do to date, that sort of thing.”

  “And what are you telling him?” I asked.

  Mo huffed. “Oh, I told him that Cooper showed up on my doorstep with a bear trap clamped around his leg, told me he was a werewolf, and we decided to go steady.”

  “Ha freaking ha.”

  My sister-in-law was not to be trusted.

  My embarrassment was replaced by annoyance, frustration, a desire to be rid of Nick that bordered on religious. It was obvious that he had been sent to torment me for some horrible wrong I’d committed in a past life.

  I failed to see how turning me into a blithering, sleep-deprived idiot was going to make me a better person. As a concept, karma was ass-backward.

  “Oh, good gravy, snap out of it, you loser!” I groaned, thunking my head against the desk.

  “Well, that seems harsh. I just walked in the door,” a voice boomed over me. I looked up to see Samson towering over my desk.

  I snickered, leaning back in my chair.

  “Now, what kind of werewolf doesn’t even notice when her office has been invaded?” Samson smirked, ruffling my hair. “What’s up, Midget?”

  My cousin Samson, ladies and gentlemen, the five-year-old trapped in a pro wrestler’s body, the man who gave me the Chuck Norris Fact of the Day calendar on my desk, which was why I tolerated abuse from him more than I would from most people. I loved him just as much as I loved Cooper. His mother had died before I was born, and his dad was a screwup of the first order, abandoning him to live with us when we were just kids. He’d been the one who helped keep me somewhat in line when Cooper left, and as my unofficial second in command, he was the first member of the pack to call me out when I was being a jerk.

  Well, the first to call me a jerk to my face and walk away without a limp . . . ok, without a permanent limp.

  He walked it off.

  I scowled up at him, but there was no real heat in it. “Everyone’s a midget compared to you.”

  “Doesn’t make the nickname any le
ss fun.”

  “You know, the ink isn’t even dry on this yet,” I retorted, pointing to his paycheck.

  “It’s not signed, either,” he noted. “You only think I don’t pick up on stuff like that.”

  “Go on, you’ve claimed your thirty pieces of silver, go do something crazy like put gas in that penis replacement you call transportation.”

  “First of all, don’t mock the truck or my junk,” he said sternly, pointing out the window toward the mammoth F-250 required to haul his ass around. “And it’s not compensating for anything if it’s to scale.”

  “Ew.” I shuddered but was grateful for something to think about that did not involve hot outsider eggheads. I was still shuddering in revulsion when a sandy-haired werewolf stuck his head in the door, toting a jam-packed postal box.

  Clay Renard was one of a handful of people in the valley not related to me by blood or marriage. In fact, that handful was pretty much limited to Clay, his widowed sister, Alicia, and her two boys. Clay was a few years younger than me. He was a likable, easygoing sort of guy, friendly and helpful, without being a pain in the ass about it. He was as close to the all-American type as werewolves got, with a strong, square jaw, high, sharp cheekbones, and light blue eyes. Even though his hair was brownish-gold, he had dark eyebrows that served as exclamation points on his open, expressive face. I liked the way they tilted when he smiled. And he had a cute little overbite that caught his bottom lip when he tucked the smile away.

  “Hey, Clay, what are you doing with the mail?” I asked, grinning at him.

  Clay shrugged. “Samson was pressed for time, so I stopped by the Grundy post office to pick up the mail for him.”

  I frowned. Clay worked in a garage on the outskirts of Grundy. But the errand still meant he had to drive twenty minutes out of his way to do something Samson was supposed to do three times a week.

  “Oh, you did, did you?” I narrowed my eyes at my cousin. “You were pressed for time? Would that be nap time?” Samson shrugged. “I’m giving Clay half of your paycheck.”