The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf nw-2

by Молли Харпер

  “You are . . . awesome?” I suggested. He leveled me with eyes that contained no amusement whatsoever. “I’m sorry! I’ve never said it before. OK, if feeling like your heart’s been ripped through your chest, jammed back, and scrambled around means you’re in love, it’s possible that one day I could be in love with you. “

  He quirked his lips. “Well, that was . . . descriptive, while still remaining vague.”

  “I will say that I don’t want to be without you. The idea of you leaving makes me want to throw up. When you’re not around, I feel empty and nauseated.”

  “Aha!” he crowed. “So you admit it! I have a profound effect on your stomach . . . Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking.”

  “That was a terrible segue.”

  He ignored me pointedly. “I was thinking, what if you went and found some werewolf who didn’t gross you out entirely and you mated with him? You could have as many babies with him as you wanted. As long you came home to me every day, I think I could live with that.”

  I kissed him long and hard. “Just the fact that you’re willing even to consider that means I couldn’t possibly go through with it. First of all, it wouldn’t exactly be fair to the random werewolf I picked. He wouldn’t be able to have babies with the female of his choice.”

  “You could pick a gay werewolf who wouldn’t want a female—”

  “You came up with this scenario pretty quickly,” I muttered.

  “I’m a creative thinker.”

  “Oh, my God,” I groaned, burying my face in my hands. I laughed and shook my head. “OK, second, it wouldn’t work anyway, because I chose you, I marked you. Remember? No substitutions, no take-backs. My body won’t accept, uh, contributions from anyone else. You’re my mate, for better, for worse. Human or werewolf. You’re mine, and I’m yours.”

  “Good,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “ ’Cause I’m going to ask you to marry me, sometime soon. I know this is sort of a good moment, what with the successful deflowering and biting and all. But I didn’t want to do it when you were expecting it. And I didn’t know whether you wanted an engagement ring or not. I didn’t see any of the women in the pack wearing them.”

  I smiled and was amazed at how easily I accepted the idea after a lifetime of sneering at happy married couples Then again, engagement is sort of a bump in the road, compared with lifelong bonding through a bite on the ass.

  “Rings slip off too easily when we change,” I told him. “Most of us have our bands tattooed on our fingers. But if that’s too much for you, some of the women accept necklaces as a sign of betrothal. The chain has to be sturdy and long enough to wrap around our necks in either form.”

  He grinned. “Is that what you want?”

  “I’m not much on needles.” I wiggled my eyebrows. “I like stones with some color to them. Don’t get me a door-knocker-sized diamond. Just a little stone.”

  “What color?”

  I grinned up at him, pushing the blond strands of hair out of his eyes. “Blue. I’m awfully partial to blue.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Some Orphans Have All the Luck

  I WOKE UP, THANKFUL TO be in my human form.

  I was in Nick’s bed, snuggled up on his blankets. I could smell him all over me, as if I’d been rolling around on him all night. I smiled, stretching across the bed and its cozy, nestlike arrangement of pillows. I don’t think I’d ever been more comfortable.

  I sat up, propping myself on my elbows, listening for sounds of him moving around the house. Through the bedroom door, I felt a weird tension coming from the living room. I threw on one of his T-shirts and padded toward the sound of his voice.

  “You know exactly why not!” Nick was in a shirt and tie, complete with a tweed jacket, pacing back and forth with the cell phone clutched against his face. He noticed me standing there and froze as the person on the other end of the line seemed to be whining at him. He gave me an embarrassed shake of the head and then shouted, “I don’t care! I don’t care if you end up ‘evicted,’ which we both know is code for ‘dealer is going to beat me up.’ I don’t owe you a fucking dime. If we’re going into debts, let’s talk about the money Dad sent over and over to help you ‘move home’ that never seemed to get your ass on the bus. Or how about the shit you took from my apartment when you just had to sleep on my couch for a week? Trust me, I’ve paid back whatever you spent on my miserable childhood twice over.”

  With my supersensitive hearing, I could hear the tenor of the caller’s voice change from helpless sobs to a vicious stream of curses.

  “You know what, go ahead and call the press. Tell your fake fucking sob story to whoever will listen. I don’t give a shit. Hell, people will probably feel sorry for me. Game subscriptions will go up by the thousands.”

  He clipped the phone shut and roared, tossing it across the room, where it bounced off a steer skull and landed on the counter with a clatter.

  “You’re right, it was a bad phone,” I said, lifting an eyebrow. “Look at it, lying there, all superior. The phone had it coming.”

  He swooped in on me, claiming my mouth with a ferocity that took my breath. “Your family,” he said, his hands trembling at my cheeks. “Do you know how lucky you are to have that?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Now, what’s wrong?”

  “My mother.” He sat down and sighed, his head slumping forward. I straddled his lap, pushing his hair out of his face. “Same old song and dance. She’s living in Nashville. When she’s sober, she wants to be the next big country star. She’s behind on her rent. She just needs a measly thousand to make it until the end of the month. Doesn’t see why I’m being so unreasonable and stingy when I have so much. She had to chase her dreams, and she did me a favor, leaving me with my dad. She couldn’t help it if he turned out to be a drunk. And she did send me a birthday card that once. And she would hate to have to resort to selling her story of an impoverished mother of a gaming magnate to survive. To tell about how she bought me my first computer secondhand at a yard sale, sob sob. I don’t even write the code for the damn game. But she doesn’t realize that. She doesn’t take enough of an interest in what I did, just how much money I made.”

  I couldn’t fathom that. Until Eli’s betrayal, I’d never experienced family members turning on each other. It was a foreign concept to want to suck resources away from a pack member. Of course, in the pack, if you needed money, it was practically in your pocket before you could even ask. We took care of our own. And if some people tended to mooch more than others, we just accepted it as part of their personality and teased them about it.

  I stroked my hand down his cheek. And he looked up at me with his baby blues, begging for some sort of acceptance, comfort. I kissed his forehead. “Don’t worry about her. People like that, you can’t make them go away by giving them what they want. They’ll only come back for more,” I told him. “Besides, you don’t need her. You have a new family. We’re not exactly normal, but once you’re ours, you’re ours for life.”

  I tipped my forehead so it was touching his. “I love you,” he said in a voice that had my heart breaking.

  I covered it by stroking his arms, gently rotating my hips over his. “I love you.”

  “And it’s very naughty of you to dress this way right before you leave town,” I purred as his pulse quickened and his breath grew ragged. His hands slipped under my shirt and traced frantic little patterns on my back. “You did this on purpose to provoke me,” I murmured against his mouth as I unzipped his pants, sliding my hand under his waistband and wrapping my fingers around his hard, hot length. “This is like the nerd version of answering the door in Saran Wrap.”

  He gently eased me back onto the couch, settling his weight over me as I pushed his jacket from his shoulders. “I’ve been thinking—”

  “I love it when you’re thinking.”

  “I know you don’t want to have a baby right away. And I’m fine with that. I don’t think we should stop using birth control anytim
e soon. But we can, say, lessen our chances by participating in activities that aren’t as chancy but just as satisfying.”

  I laughed as he eased out of his jeans and kicked them off. “Why do I have the feeling that you have charts showing the fertilization risks of various sex acts hidden behind the couch?”

  “I’m just saying we should test a few theories,” he said, rolling off the couch and settling in front of me on the floor, stroking his fingers along my instep.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Well, I mean, touching you with my hands doesn’t count as sex, so there’s no danger there,” he said. He wiggled his eyebrows, ghosting his fingertips along my shoulder, up my chin, and over my lips. “It doesn’t count as sex.”

  “So we’re going with Clinton’s rules?” I asked, just before catching his thumb with the edge of my blunt front teeth and biting down gently. He trailed his fingertips between my breasts, over my belly, and through the wisps of dark hair between my legs. He traced the outlines of my sex, dipping the very tip of his finger just inside me, barely brushing his thumb across my clit. My head thumped back against the table behind the couch as my hips shot up off the couch.

  “That’s so mean,” I moaned.

  Chuckling, he kissed across my hips, biting gently on the little bumps of my hipbones, before nibbling his way down my thighs, to my knees.

  “There’s no danger in kissing you,” he said, running his lips along the little bone in my ankle, brushing them lightly over my shin, tickling my knee with his beard. He grinned at me, balancing his chin on my kneecap. “No matter where I do it.”

  “Hmm.” I arched my eyebrow skeptically.

  “No, really,” he insisted, kissing my kneecap again and pushing me back against the cushions. He spread my thighs, settling between them. He pressed soft, hot little kisses along the smooth skin, his beard leaving a little ticklish trail in its wake.

  “Even if I kissed you, say, here.” He kissed the juncture of my leg and thigh, nibbling the sensitive skin that stretched as I held this weird yoga pose. “Technically, that’s not sex.”

  His breath puffed hot and moist over me, and I bucked up toward his mouth. Seriously, he wasn’t going to . . . yes, he was.

  He smirked up at me and slid his tongue from the very lowest point to the top, dipping and twirling his tongue across my clit. My head dropped back, thwacking against the table behind the couch. I knew I should be seeing stars, but I didn’t care. All that mattered were the shapes he was drawing against me with the tip of his tongue. As soon as I thought I found the pattern, I lost it to the spiraling pressure coiling in my belly like a snake.

  I closed my eyes and melted into him. Hearing those words and feeling his teeth pinch lightly over my clit sent me reeling right over the edge into a dark tunnel of screaming, pulsing sensation. My eyelids snapped shut as I howled out my release and fell into soft, sweet oblivion.

  I felt Nick slide up onto the couch and pull me against him. I pressed my face into his chest and hummed happily. “You’re wrong, that was dangerous. I think I’ve gone blind. Which is too bad, because I was planning on reciprocating.” Nick gently nudged my eyelids with his fingertips. I popped them open. “Oh, there we go.”

  “I’m a problem solver,” he said as I kissed my way down his chest. I stopped, my ears perking at a soft noise outside. I cocked my head toward the door. “Hey, is your door unlock—” Cooper stuck his head in through the front door and called, “Hey, Nick, you ready to go?”

  His jaw dropped at the sight of me lying at eye level with Nick’s navel, both of us buck naked. He clapped his hand over his eyes.

  “Ack!”

  “Cooper!” I yelled.

  “Sorry!” he exclaimed, stumbling into the door frame and smacking his head into the wall. “So sorry! I’m just going to go . . . gouge out my eyes now.”

  “I forgot he was coming over,” Nick groaned as Cooper turned a corner and continued whacking his forehead against the wall. “You were naked, and I lost track of time.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “The whole leaving early thing was sort of a smokescreen. I’ve been talking to Cooper whenever I go into the saloon. He was worried about you not having a truck. And since I sort of played a role in its destruction, I wanted to help you replace it. We were going to go look at dealerships in Burney before I drove up to Anchorage. Surprise . . .” he finished weakly.

  “You were going to buy me a truck, just like that?” I asked, my heart doing that weird fluttering thing again. “And you were wearing your professor duds to cover your trail?”

  “No, I wanted to look respectable at the dealership,” Nick said, all defeated and puppylike. “I was going to make it look like Cooper found some older model for a song.”

  “Aw!” I rose on the balls of my feet and kissed the tip of his nose. “That’s incredibly sweet but unnecessary. I have money of my own saved up. It’s not like I pay Mom rent or anything. And Clay thinks he might be able to save my old truck.”

  “I hate to be the one to break up this little love fest, but could you two go put on some clothes, please?” Cooper demanded.

  I rolled my eyes. Nick threw me some sweats and a T-shirt.

  Cooper finally uncovered his eyes. “Look, I like you, Nick. I’ve seen the way you are with my sister, and I approve. The love of my life is a human and an outsider . . . and an incredible smart-ass. So, who the hell am I to judge who Maggie chooses? And considering the fresh bite I see on your neck, I know you’re mated and not doing anything wrong. But right now, I’m trying to control my brotherly instincts to kill you . . . just give me a minute, OK?”

  “Yep,” Nick said, wisely stepping away from my brother and bracing himself behind the breakfast bar.

  “So, um, Mags, would you mind telling me why you’re here at this hour? Without going into specifics, please?”

  “Nick and I are putting on a puppet show, Coop,” I responded dryly.

  “Please, Lord, don’t let that be a position I haven’t heard of,” Cooper said, shuddering.

  CHAPTER 13

  Damn You, Milton Bradley

  NICK HAD TO LEAVE for his lecture, though I managed to talk him out of the truck purchase so we could spend the extra day . . . um, talking. Cooper was happy to leave us alone before we could start another conversation.

  And because my brother is basically a gossiping old woman, nobody was surprised when I returned to the valley and announced that Nick and I were mated. In fact, the aunties had already arranged a potluck supper in our honor when Nick returned a week later, which was a little embarrassing. Nothing says family closeness like a “Congratulations on Doing It” dinner.

  I can’t say every member of the pack was thrilled with my choice. An aunt or two sniffed at another Graham taking a chance with the family wolf genes. And a few of my cousins took bets on how long it would last before Nick’s body turned up in a gulley somewhere, which was sort of mean.

  Pops’s contribution was to shake Nick’s hand, level him with that inscrutable gaze, and say, “You’re not good enough for her.”

  It was times like this that I wished I wasn’t Pops’s favorite granddaughter. But Nick, who was managing not to fold like a cheap card table under Pops’s unrelenting grip, simply smiled and said, “I know that, sir, but no one is.”

  Pops sniffed and sauntered toward the beer weenies. I gave Nick a wink to let him know he’d handled that very well.

  And at the end of the night, as much as it pained me, Nick went to sleep at Samson’s house. Because as evolved and open as my family was, the idea of having sex under my mother’s roof really creeped me out. It was bad enough having the first “post-game” conversation with my mom. After I made the mating announcement, she took me aside and asked me if I “wanted to talk about it.”

  I sprang up from my chair, suddenly very keen to know whether the top drawer of my filing cabinet was locked. “God, no!”

  Mom seemed perplexed. “I don’t know why no
t. It’s nothing to be afraid of. My first time with your father was fantastic.”

  “Mom, I don’t want to hear about your honeymoon hijinks, OK?”

  “Oh, honey, it wasn’t on our wedding night. We took care of that a long time before we got married.”

  “Ohmygod!” I howled. “Why would you tell me that?”

  “Well, we were already mated. Your dad had claimed me. Why wait until the wedding when we wanted to have kids right away? Honey, what are you doing?” she said as I rifled through my desk drawers.

  “Looking for something to gouge out my eardrums.”

  It was obvious that Nick and I were going to have to make some sort of separate living arrangement soon. Obviously, I couldn’t move too far away. There was no way we could stay at his place in Grundy. Sure, I’d been relieved that despite my dire sense of foreboding, I came home to find nothing had happened while I was gone. Still, I needed to be among my packmates, to help with the everyday management of the valley. And it helped to have some semblance of authority in their midst. I’d worked too hard for their respect and trust to walk away now.

  But the idea of a separate address, where we could be alone at the end of the day, was definitely appealing. I mulled it over for a few days, trying to find a way to fit it into the conversation that wouldn’t make me sound like a demanding potential wife. Mom saw this as some sort of sign of maturity, that I was actually taking his feelings into account.

  The problem was that there were a limited number of houses in the valley, and all of them were occupied at the moment. Houses were passed through family lines, like everything else in the pack. And there hadn’t been a new house built since the early 1980s. Then again, we didn’t get a lot of new arrivals here in town. Alicia and Clay were the last people to move to the valley since my mother had arrived.

  Speaking of Clay, he seemed to be spending less and less time in the valley. I wasn’t sure if that was because of my choosing Nick or because the garage was keeping him that busy. When I realized how little consideration I’d given him during the whole mate-choosing thing, I felt a pulse of guilt constrict my chest. Even if we weren’t committed or exclusive, he deserved more than that. I kicked myself for not ending things with him before taking any sort of step with Nick. But sometimes life is messy and complicated, and you just don’t have time to pencil things into your schedule, such as “Dump perfectly nice werewolf suitor before getting naked with human sweetie.” Clay skipped the pack dinner, and he didn’t seem to want to talk to me or Samson, and I couldn’t blame him. And because I didn’t want it to fester, I ended up cornering him down in the work shed one afternoon as he tinkered with a chain saw.