How to Flirt with A Naked Werewolf (37 page)

Eli’s features stretched obscenely as the transformation began. His body shifted to all fours, blocking me from the exit. I clutched the wrench in front of me and prayed that it would be enough. Eli pulled his lips back, revealing his fangs, and lunged for me.

I heard a howl from over my shoulder, the most beautiful music ever to reach my ears. Cooper barreled into the barn on all fours, shouldering Eli out of the way and crouching in front of me in a defensive stance. Maggie, speedy and savage, was hot on his heels, leaping onto Eli’s back and sinking her teeth into his neck. The sound of ripping flesh made my stomach flip-flop again. Eli shook violently, throwing Maggie off, sending her crashing into a wall. She yelped but struggled to her paws, taking a place at Cooper’s side.

“Cooper. You have the worst timing,” Eli said, sighing, shifting back into human form as he rolled to his feet.

Cooper phased to human while Maggie stayed a wolf. The fur on her back bristled as she stepped between Cooper and Eli.

Cooper was a little calmer; pushing me behind him, he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Don’t touch her, Eli. Your problem is with me, not her.”

Eli snarled. “Oh, it’s one and the same. As long as you’re around, they won’t follow me. You had the lead position, and you just wasted it. Well, no one handed anything to me. I took it.”

Eli smirked, circling dangerously close to me. Maggie followed him step for step. Cooper growled and feinted, angling him away. This rotation brought me closer to my goal, the tranq gun. With no one looking at me, I grabbed the gun, aimed at the back of Eli’s neck, and squeezed the trigger.
Hiss-pop.
Nothing.

The damn canister was empty. I waved it like a club and smacked Eli over the head with it. Or I would have, if he hadn’t turned on me and phased on the fly, lunging at me. Cooper snarled, phasing mid-leap as he jumped between me and Eli.

“Damn it,” I grumbled as Maggie butt-checked me into a safe corner.

She stood there, fur on end, fangs exposed, watching as the two other wolves circled. Eli and Cooper scanned each other, alert for openings, weaknesses. Losing patience, Cooper snarled and charged. Eli lunged for Cooper’s leg. Cooper dodged out of the way, turning to claw at Eli’s back. Eli snapped, catching Cooper’s left rear haunch and dragging him across the floor. Cooper yowled, jerked out of Eli’s grasp, and butted his head into Eli’s stomach.

Cooper was shoving him farther and farther out of the barn, away from me. He fought with deadly concentration, until Eli made a move toward me or Maggie. Eli picked up on that, used it to distract and disorient Cooper. Maggie apparently didn’t like being used this way. Huffing impatiently, she leaped over Cooper’s back and pounced on Eli, digging teeth and claws into places Eli would definitely feel later. He yowled, reached over his shoulder, and clamped his jaws over the back of her neck, throwing her off. Cooper barked, a warning to his little sister to back off, but Maggie just kept rushing Eli until he threw all of his weight on her. Eli looked up at Cooper, speculation evident in his golden animal eyes, and lunged at Maggie’s pinned form. Cooper crouched low and sprang, knocking Eli away from his sister and forcing him to the ground. Cooper’s jaws closed over Eli’s neck, ripping into the flesh viciously.

Eli’s last whine was cut short, and a large red pool spread onto the grass. Seeing that the struggle was over, Cooper detached and circled, putting himself between me and the dying creature. Maggie whimpered and ducked her head into Cooper’s side. Cooper licked the top of her head.

As Eli wheezed his last breath, Cooper sank to the ground, resting his chin on his paws. With a deep breath, he phased back to his human form, blood spattered across his face and neck. Maggie followed, rising unsteadily to her feet and offering me an awkward little wave.

Cooper stumbled toward me. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pressed his face against my stomach. I stroked his back and murmured, “I know this is a bad time for ‘I told you so’ . . .”

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled. “You were right. I wasn’t homicidal. I was wrong.”

“Let us hope that all of our arguments end this way,” I said, rubbing soothing hands down his still-tense muscles.

Maggie snickered, cradling her arm to keep the weight off her injured shoulder. Still, I could see the bite mark fading. Her skin was reknitting itself before my eyes.

“I’m glad to see you,” I told her. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders.

“Never thought you’d say that, huh?” she asked, grinning cheekily.

I shook my head. “No.”

“Maggie tracked my hunting party down. And after she made it clear that she wasn’t planning on doing me any long-term damage, we had a long—”

“Incredibly long,” Maggie muttered.

“—talk,” Cooper finished dryly. “And we straightened some things out.”

Maggie said, “I wanted to believe the worst about Cooper, because it was a lot easier than seeing how I might have hurt him. And Eli saw it, fed right into it. I let Eli blow so much smoke up my skirt I’m surprised I don’t have ass cancer.”

“Eloquent.” I snorted.

“And I didn’t exactly man up and stick around to explain myself,” Cooper admitted. “I used Maggie as an excuse to stay away.”

“And you didn’t answer your phone during this long heart-to-heart. Why?” I asked.

Cooper winced. “I left my cell phone at the camp. I didn’t get any of your calls.”

“We started putting the pieces together, all the times Eli played me like a cheap violin,” Maggie said, blushing slightly. “And we wondered why. If he was as reluctant to lead as he said he was, why was he finding ways to keep Cooper away? We started talking about you, Pops’s heart attack, the attacks in Grundy, and it all just started clicking. Eli taking little trips into Dearly, the timing of the attacks—it all matched up. Cooper went back to the camp to let his clients know he was leaving. And he heard your messages. When Cooper realized you were here alone with Eli, he just about lost it. It’s the first time he’s ever outrun me.”

“I’m glad you finally beat her at something,” I told him.

Maggie sighed dramatically. “He’s going to be impossible from now on, you watch.”

“What do we do about this?” I asked, nodding toward the prone gray form. “How do we explain?”

“He’ll stay in his wolf skin,” Cooper said. “I’ll take him back to the pack, tell them what he’s done. They’ll give him a proper burial. I’ll be as kind as possible. They don’t need to know every detail, just what he tried to do to you, to the baby. For that alone, I had a right to kill him.”

“What about his family?” I asked.

“Eli’s sort of the last of his line,” Maggie said. “His dad died when we were in high school. He takes care of his mom, our Aunt Billie. She’s been really sick lately. Alzheimer’s. The pack will take over for him there. We take care of our own.”

“No regrets,” I told Cooper when I found him staring at the ground. “No torturing yourself. No guilt.”

“None,” he agreed, wrapping his arms around me. “I guess I’m going to have to marry you now,” he muttered, his chin tucked over my shoulder.

“My parents aren’t even married,” I scoffed.

His warm hand closed over mine, skimming it over the belly that would be full and round in just a few weeks. He sighed, snuffling at my neck. “Please marry me, Mo. Raise our baby with me.”

I leaned into him, nuzzling his neck. “I have one condition.”

He sighed again, much more content this time. “Shoot.”

“We pick a normal, traditional name for this kid. The baby is going to have enough to deal with, what with the whole half-werewolf deal. So, no flower names, no tree names, no gemstones, no names of musicians who asphyxiated on their own vomit, no intellectual ideals as middle names—”

“How about Noah for a boy and Eva for a girl?” he suggested, his hands up in a surrendering gesture.

“I agree,” I said, thinking of how happy Evie would be.

“What, we’re not naming the baby after a favorite aunt?” Maggie demanded testily. When I arched a brow at her, she rolled her eyes. “All right, too soon. You could at least put me in the running for the middle name.”

“We are not naming my son Noah Margaret,” Cooper told her.

“Why are we making up again?” she asked grumpily.

“No idea,” he replied, wrapping an arm around each of us.

I made a sudden conversational lane change. “How do you have the big bad evil confrontation moment with a naked guy and keep a straight face? I didn’t know where to look.”

Maggie shrugged. “It’s a matter of eye contact.”

“Blech.”

Molly Harper

23
 
 

Smothering at 20,000 Feet

“T
AKE IT EASY, SWEETHEART,”
Cooper said as my parents’ little puddle jumper of a plane landed at the Dearly Airport. We were waiting at the airport’s single gate, watching through the glass doors as the plane taxied down the tarmac. I found myself wanting to rush out toward the plane, eager to set eyes on the very people who’d driven me to Alaska, to Cooper.

“I’m fine,” I promised as he buttoned my light jacket, skimming his fingers protectively over the ever-growing bump of my belly. It was hard to believe I was only four months along. If this were a human pregnancy, people would have guessed at least seven or eight. Other than the accelerated timeline, I seemed to be having a normal, healthy pregnancy. Well, almost normal. Dr. Moder had sworn that the baby wouldn’t be born with a tail, though a full set of teeth was a distinct possibility. This had me seriously reconsidering breastfeeding.

My stomach was quite the topic of conversation when Cooper and I had married a month before in a small civil ceremony in my front yard, overseen by a beaming Nate Gogan. People ribbed us good-naturedly about shotgun weddings and pretended to be highly offended by my fallen state. But there were worse reasons to get married, and most people forgot the “scandal” of an expectant bride by the end of the reception. Heck, some of the guests had forgotten their own names by the end of the reception.

I’d wanted our wedding to be traditional, as traditional as the union between a werewolf and his pregnant bride could be. I wore a white dress and flowers in my hair. Kara had made what she called a “once in a lifetime” trip from Mississippi as planned and served as my maid of honor. She hadn’t left yet. She and Alan started making goo-goo eyes at each other during the ceremony and hadn’t stopped since. Having learned his lesson from taking his time with me, Alan was more overt in his attentions to Kara. He asked her to stick around for the Big Freeze party, which was still months away. They were currently shacked up at the ranger station, only emerging for occasional trips to Bulk Wonderland for mega-packs of condoms. I was ecstatic for both of them.

As a wedding present, Evie and Buzz had offered me a twenty-percent share in the saloon, since I’d increased the receipts by at least that much since my arrival. They’d already set up a little nursery in the office at the Glacier, so I could keep working after my maternity leave. As wrong as it seemed to have a baby in a bar, I knew there would always be a patron there to cuddle or coo . . . assuming that his or her father wasn’t already there, in Cooper’s words, “showing off his son.” I asked him what he would do if the baby was a girl. Cooper turned a little green and started muttering about setting traps around the house when she turned thirteen.

Cooper still had no interest in being the pack’s alpha, but in the wake of Eli’s loss, he did visit the packlands more often. After an all-night meeting, the pack finally decided on a more democratic process of selecting an alpha: secret ballot. Maggie won by a landslide.

Samson had been nominated, but none of the wolves believed he would take the job seriously. Maggie stepped into the job and was handling it all beautifully. Even without the genetic conditioning required, she had the authority of a true alpha. Because most of the pack was terrified of her. Her judgment was surprisingly fair, swift, and, generally, in the best interests of her people. And she was finally happy. She’d actually smiled at me during my last visit to the valley.

Well, it was more of a lip twitch, but it was devoid of face-melting hatred, so I’m counting it.

My parents hadn’t been able to make it up for the wedding, but I didn’t resent that the way I thought I would. They did things in their own time. I sent pictures, and they sent a long, heartfelt letter filled with good wishes. This visit was to be the first step toward a happier balance.

Cooper and I waited patiently while my parents’ plane slowed to a stop. After a few minutes, the door opened with almost frantic
pop
. The two pilots and a handful of passengers scrambled over one another to get down the little staircase and onto safe ground. They cast frantic glances over their shoulders as they rushed to the gate’s entrance.

“I see my mother is being her charming self.” I sighed, keeping a determined smile on my face.

“She’s not going to talk about my colon, is she?” Cooper asked, grimacing.