Hot Springs Werewolf Complete Series (BBW Werewolf Erotic Romance) (8 page)

I pushed the bacon to the side of the pan and cracked two eggs into the hot fat.

To be fair.

He didn't tell me. I didn't ask.

To be fair.

I just moved here and he's a werewolf! I was off-balance. And I didn't see any girl stuff in his house.

To be fair.

My heart was aching and if he appeared at my front door right now and kissed me, I might just pull him into my bedroom and throw my heart right over that cliff once more.

I looked down at the golden yolks in the pan and suddenly realized the dark side of a year in this cabin. I'd lived alone before but never like this. At my last place my he-shall-not-be-named ex (dick) who called me that bad three-letter word when we were breaking up had been there most nights. I had a job to go to (shitty but still social contact) and I had some friends to see. Now I had a job which was good but the rest of the time I was going to be in this cabin with just me and my thoughts. It was entirely possible I could go from Saturday morning to Wednesday when I arrived at work without speaking to a single person.

Maybe I was going to go all Jack Torrance up here.

All work and no play makes Harper a dull girl.

All work and no play makes Harper a dull girl.

All work and no play makes Harper a dull girl.

I dropped tomato quarters into the pan and thought about the ultimate in the crazy-old-spinster transition: getting a cat. I could stay here, write my novel, go slowly mad due to a broken heart and become a crazy cat lady. Wander around in a long gray night-shirt with bird-nest hair babbling about werewolves. Have teenage kids dare each other to knock on my door.

I sighed at myself (seemed to be happening a lot this morning) and looked across at the battered plastic bag sitting full of Red's clothes sitting on the table. I should have just dumped them at the car-park last night but for some reason I hadn't. Maybe because I wanted to a reason to see Red again. To smack him in the face. Throw his boots at him. To kiss him.

I turned on the spot, gave another sigh and rolled my eyes at my mirror reflection. He's
married
Harper. He has a wife and still went after you which means he's a lousy cheating son-of-a-bitch.

And he's a werewolf so he really is a son-of-a-
bitch
.

Which means crazy-eyes from last night is probably a werewolf too.

Despite all that, I couldn't forget the feel of his fingers on my skin. The taste of his lips. His scent which seemed embedded in my soul. I wanted him. I wanted him now and tomorrow and I didn't care if he was married. Some part of me knew that he wanted me too.

I turned back to my breakfast and moved some mushrooms around the pan. Between drinking a fireball, dancing with Red and then
dancing
with Red, I hadn't asked him a single question that I'd planned to. The new Finch. The old Finch. In the end, dancing with Freyr (who'd abandoned me in the middle of the dance floor like a jerk) had yielded more information than anything else. He claimed the Guile family had stolen his land with the help of a Finch. And there was the newspaper headline up in the office to investigate: MASS SLAYING AT FINCH FARM.

It was Sunday but it was a fair bet the Historical Society would be open today cleaning up from last night. I had writing to do but this mystery was too much for me not to look into.

I turned off the hotplate and started compiling a list of questions in my mind as I served up breakfast.

*

I
pulled up at the Historical Society and turned Boris off. It looked different in the day. Lonely, empty. The front car-park had only a few cars sitting there and I saw rubbish from last night scattered around the front from when the crowd had milled outside.

Because they heard a werewolf howl
.

I got out of Boris and saw the window of the upstairs office had a piece of plywood nailed over it. Gotta move quickly when a werewolf smashes out your window. Don't want the rain getting in. My guess had been correct: the front doors were open and I could see people moving around inside.

I walked over and entered the front hall and then nearly jumped out of my skin when a voice spoke from nowhere.

"Can I help you?"

I turned, my heart thumping, as the wrinkled-like-a-raisin lady from last night approached me.

"Yes dear?"

I took a deep breath and found my voice.

"Hi, I'm Harper Finch. I was here last night and I saw some photos of my family and newspaper headlines. I was wondering if there was anyone I could talk to for more information."

"Harper Finch. Hmm."

She pursed her lips at me and looked me up and down as though she was trying to decide something.

"I'm Eadie Crisp. When did you see the newspaper headlines?"

I glanced towards the back of the hall and saw it was all photographs. The framed newspapers were upstairs in the room where Red and I had ... broken the window.

I was busted. She knew it. I knew it.

"It was last night. I was upstairs when the window broke. I'm sorry."

"Did you break it?"

I shook my head.

"Then why are you sorry?"

"I just... I'm generally sorry the window is broken. I don't have much money but I can help pay to fix it."

She smacked me on the back of the hand in the way old women do. "You didn't break it so you don't pay for it. Don't worry about it."

Eadie gave me a brief smile and then waved at a volunteer who'd just arrived. She pointed him towards the back of the hall where others were moving hay bales towards a side door as carefully as possible.

"My husband Donald is the expert on the whole Finch-Toulouse-Guile history. He's not here at the moment because he has a sore head. He'll be here on Tuesday from ten in the morning and I'll be sure to tell him you're coming."

Finch-Toulouse-Guile? I knew two of those names but who were Toulouse?

"That would be wonderful. Are there any documents or things I could look at right now just to get started?"

"Sorry, everything is locked up. You could drive to the Finch Mansion. I believe it's being renovated."

Finch Mansion - since when did my family have a mansion? I turned on my phone and took the address from Eadie. Or to be more precise, she took the phone from me and pinned the destination to my online map before handing it back to me. For someone so old and wrinkled, she was down with the new technology.

'Thank you so much. Please tell Donald I'll be here on Tuesday."

She waved a finger in my face. "Wait here. I do have something for you."

Eadie walked away across the hall and through the back door. I stood there watching the volunteers slowly transform the hall back to normal. The hay bales were dropping bits off them like crazy and there was a lot of huffing and puffing as the volunteers tried to move them to the side door.

Eadie returned a few minutes later and handed me a yellow business envelope.

"Open it in the truck dear." She nodded at me and then winked.

"Um, okay. Thanks."

I left the hall wondering who I could speak to in my family to find out more about the Finch family in Hot Springs. Dad had been a direct-line Finch but he'd been gone since I was sixteen. We'd never met his parents (as far as I knew they were deceased) and while I was aware Dad had a brother, I had no idea what his name was and had never met him either.

I got into Boris and opened the envelope to find my giant grandma underwear inside, folded flat. I blushed with such intensity I swear the temperature in the cabin went up a few degrees. I started Boris, determined to get out of there before I self-combusted. As I pulled out, I looked back to see Eadie watching me from the door with a twinkle in her eye and a definite cheeky old lady smirk on her face. She waved at me and I managed a head-down-don't-look-I'm-so-embarrassed wave back.

*

T
he Finch Mansion was on the far side of town, almost opposite to where I was living. The drive gave me time to cool down which was a good thing because I was all kinds of shades of red and pink.

I knew I should be writing (it was the whole point of being here) but at the same time I knew if I didn't find out the Finch history in Hot Springs it would drive me mad. That wolf who'd turned into a girl had called me the new Finch. So did Freyr. And what was his deal anyway? The Guile family stole his land with the help of a Finch and he didn't want it to happen again? I had to talk to Red.

Of course, I had bigger things to discuss with Red than family history. Like the matter of his wife. They must be separated or maybe she'd been away. There was definitely no feminine influence in Red's house.

As soon as I thought that, I rolled my eyes at myself. Like what Harper? Flowers? Something girly? Dork.

Soon I reached the edge of town and headed out a road that quickly downgraded to busted up rough dirt. It had been asphalt at some time in the distant past but clearly hadn't been maintained. I slowed Boris down and jolted along, feeling every bump in the road in my bones and hearing him squeak and creak.

I saw the mansion long before I reached it. Or the peaked roof at least. There was a tall grove of trees standing between the city and the property. I reached the driveway and found that someone had laid down lumber at some point which had sunk down into the road, like it had once been liquid mud. I slowed Boris to a crawl and crept up the winding path which curved around to the left and then opened up to reveal a spectacular mansion of dark brick.

Spectacular in the sense of multiple storeys up, gigantically big sideways and clearly run down and decrepit. I saw three stone gargoyles up at the top and the ruined nubs where others must have stood. Most of the windows on the bottom floor were boarded up with plywood. Up on the second storey some of the windows were intact but looked dirty. There were cracks all over the place and it looked like one good earthquake (or maybe even a good sneeze) would bring the whole thing tumbling down.

I turned Boris off and sat there in the not-quite-silence. Birds were quietly chirping away, the wind was rustling the leaves and the sound of a thousand living things murmured softly to themselves. The mansion looked gothic and a little ominous but the shining sun took the edge off.

I got out of Boris and walked to the front door, expecting it to be locked but it swung open when I turned the handle. Was there someone here?

"Hello?"

My voice echoed through the house, sounding like the start of every horror movie I'd ever seen. Hello? Is there anyone here? Oh, I'm just going to skinny dip in the lake where all those teenagers died on this very day ten years ago.

I knocked on the solid ornate door and called out again but there was no response. The place was empty.

I edged into the entrance hall and then told myself off. If I started thinking scared I was going to freak myself out and run. I stopped edging and walked boldly in. Directly ahead of me was a giant staircase that led up to the second storey. From there was another staircase curving along one wall up to the third floor. From where I stood I could see gaping holes in it and I decided I would avoid that floor rather than fall to my death. To the left and right the corridor went a little way before curving. Whomever had built this place didn't believe in straight lines. Directly above me hung the tattered remnants of a chandelier. The structure of it was still there but only a few glittering pieces of glass remained. I saw that someone had used bright orange rope to secure it to the ceiling.

As I looked around I saw more evidence that someone had been working here. The bright orange rope was peeking out near the stairs. The windows were boarded over with plywood and there was a pile of rubble and dirt in the far left corner where someone had attempted to clear the floor. I headed in that direction for no particular reason and followed the curved corridor.

I don't know what I was looking for really. It was an abandoned old house and although it had been the Finch mansion I wasn't expecting there to be anything there. I just wanted to look. To wander around and get some sense of who my relatives had been.

I quickly found bedrooms branching off the corridor. One still had a bed in it, quietly rotting away, the mattress sagging down in the middle and the whole thing listing to the side like a ship crashed on a coral reef. There were bits of smashed up wood all over the place that looked to be from wardrobes or armoires perhaps. I left the bedrooms, continuing to explore until I came to a gaping hole in the floor and saw another complete room below me. I froze and realized I'd been walking around on a very old and very fragile layer of wood above a good twelve-foot drop. Feeling like the floor might collapse at any moment, I carefully turned around and make my way back down the corridor, careful to step only where I had already walked.

I reached the main entrance with my nerves buzzing and the sounds of the house not being so friendly. It was creaking and sighing and in my mind the thousand living things gently murmuring to themselves had become rats and spiders waiting for me to fall through the floor and break my legs. I wouldn't even be dead when they started to eat me.

I was about to bolt out the front door when I saw it. A cup of coffee sitting on the staircase, a curl of steam floating above it. A blue ceramic cup where there had been no cup before.

"Boo."

I screamed and whirled, my hand already a fist, ready to attack and then Red caught my arm, stopping me.

"Harper, it's just me."

I pulled my arm out of his grasp and then pushed him away from me. Or tried to. It was like pushing a tree.

"You asshole!"

My heart was thudding in my chest like it might explode and cold adrenaline was fizzing away through my body.

"You always break into houses on a Sunday?"

I was taking deep breaths, trying to calm myself down but it was only working slowly.

"The door was open. I didn't break in."

Red smiled at me (and for a moment I wanted to slap him for scaring me) and went to the stairs to pick up his coffee. He sat down and took a sip.