The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf (10 page)

This was a completely inappropriate time to be thinking about nibbling on Clay’s earlobes.

“More competition, Maggie?” Lee asked, giving Clay a long appraising look before dismissing him with a sniff.

I gave Lee a dead-eyed stare. “Clay is a member of our pack.”

Lee shot a scathing glare at Clay. My lips quirked into a twisted smile. Lee was all swagger and smirks until he realized he was on an even playing field.

“He doesn’t have the close family ties that I do.”

“Which some people would consider a good thing,” I muttered.

Clay stepped out of the house and took none-too-subtle steps toward us, positioning himself at my side. Despite the comfort of his presence at my elbow, I wanted to tell him not to bother. Lee was all lazy, no action. In the years I’d known him, he’d never once been in a real fight. He backed off the moment he realized he might have to make an effort to cover his own ass. But he wouldn’t hesitate to, say,
attack a lone human wandering around our valley in some misguided attempt to prove himself to me. There was no way I could go check on Nick now. My chest sort of ached at the thought, and I rubbed my hand against my sternum absentmindedly.

“Maggie and I go way back,” Lee told him.
“Way
back. We’ll be married and mated any day now.”

Clay arched his eyebrows and smiled at me. I shook my head. Clay snickered.

“She tries to deny our love.” Lee trailed a finger along my cheek. “Makes her feel like she’s playing hard to get.”

Clay growled. I barely resisted the urge to clamp my teeth down on Lee’s offending digit, but I put a restraining hand on Clay’s arm. As much as I appreciated it, it would hardly do to have him “sticking up” for me. It would make me look weak, and that was exactly the sort of thing that got around to other packs.

“Ah-ah-ah, Lee, we’ve talked about this,” I said, clucking my tongue. “Anything that touches, I get to keep.”

But as I said, Lee was none too bright, and he seemed to like the idea of staking his claim in front of Clay. He kept rubbing his freaking hands along my cheek. So I wrapped my fingers around his, yanked his hand palm up, and jerked his arm. He yowled and dropped to his knees. I smacked him on the back of the head for good measure.

The arm would heal, probably by tomorrow morning. But it would keep him from phasing until then, keep him from snooping around the valley and
stumbling onto unsuspecting humans who had probably made it to their trucks by now.

I walked away, hooking my arm through an astonished Clay’s as we walked into his house. I wanted to visit Billie before we headed home for dinner.

“Good talking to you, Lee,” I called over my shoulder.

His voice was hoarse as he choked out, “You, too, Maggie.”

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
Saturday, which meant a long run, in human form, for me. Sure, it was easier and more fun to run as a wolf, but I liked the challenge that came with running on two feet. Plus, it was really difficult to keep an iPod clipped to fur.

I had a hard-packed dirt path worn up to the north point of the valley, beside the river, through a dense thicket of pine trees. It was rare that anyone joined me on my Saturday runs. As much as I loved running with my pack, I liked that it was just me, the wind, and the scent of pine. Every girl needs a little time to herself to hash things out in her head, even if my problems were a little more complicated than “Which dress should I wear tonight?” or “I need something waxed.”

Waxing was sort of a moot point for me.

I was reaching the hardest part of the incline
up the valley wall, when a strange presence in the woods stopped me in my tracks. I lifted my face to the wind and waited, fighting the instinct to phase, just in case it was Nick again. I scanned the trees. This didn’t smell like Nick. It smelled like . . . nothing. It was like an olfactory blank space. The little hairs on my arms and neck rose as I felt the scrutiny intensify, as if whoever it was was trying to decide what to do. I stood my ground, waiting.

Eventually, the presence faded away, and I shook off the feeling. It was just before noon when I jogged up the steps to find my mother standing at the door with the cordless phone.

“It’s for you, hon,” she said, kissing the top of my sweaty head. “It’s your brother. He doesn’t sound happy. I’m making waffles for when he’s done yelling at you.”

I groaned, stretching my aching legs and pressing the phone to my ear.

“Would you like to explain to me why Nick Thatcher showed up at the Grundy clinic last night with a bite wound on his ass?” my brother demanded without bothering to say hello.

Shit.
I’d forgotten about Nick. After the Lee incident, Billie had had another spell, in which she claimed strangers were breaking into her house every night and moving things around. I ended up spending the night with her while Dr. Moder monitored her at the clinic. If nothing else, it helped give Alicia some rest. Dr. Moder had forced me to leave at around four
A.M.
I crashed and completely blanked out Nick’s mangled butt cheek.

“I was provoked.” Cooper was silent on the other end of the line, so I continued, “He saw me, and he thought I was Mo. He was looking at me like I was Christmas morning, and then he called me by Mo’s name. Mo would have done the same thing.”

Cooper didn’t dignify that with a response. “You’re lucky he’s telling everybody around here that he had a run-in with a stray dog. I don’t know why, but he doesn’t seem to want to make a fuss. If he had been anyone else, he would have called the
Weekly World News
as soon as his butt cheek got stitched up.”

“Stray dog?” I spat. “Stray dog!”

“Maggie, you were the one who said we should stay away from Nick. And then you not only let him see you in wolf form, but you bit him? What were you thinking?
Were
you thinking? You could have seriously hurt him.”

“By biting his ass?”

“Mo says there are lots of important nerves and stuff back there. She was laughing too hard to get a lot of information across. I’m serious, Mags. I’m not cleaning up this mess, you got it? You’re always going on about you being the alpha. Great, you’re the alpha.
You
take care of this.” He slammed the phone down.

I yanked the receiver away from my ear, wincing. My dramatic eye roll was interrupted by a knock at the door. “What now?”

I opened the door to find Mo, holding one of her sinful brownie cheesecake pies. Two of my favorite desserts combined in a chocolate graham-cracker crust.

“Are you guys guilt-stalking me?” I huffed, closing the door behind me so my mother wouldn’t overhear. Mo, used to this sort of response from me, only smirked and stepped out of my way. “I told Cooper biting Nick was a mistake.”

Mo’s coal-black eyebrows winged up. “So that
was
you. Nice, Maggie. Excellent job keeping a low profile.”

I growled at her. “So, you drove all this way, bearing pie, to make sure Cooper’s lecture sank in?”

“Cooper doesn’t know I’m here. I’m on the clock.” She pressed the pie into my hands and then pulled a note out of her jacket pocket. “Nick called the saloon last night—thoroughly hopped up on pain meds, I might add—and begged Evie to arrange for your favorite food to be delivered to you ASAP. Offered her an obscene amount of money and then rambled on about you being ‘Uhura pretty’ and how you were ignoring his calls and he had to find some way to get through to you. I guess he knew the way to that teeny-tiny Grinch heart of yours is through your stomach.”

“Uhura pretty?” I repeated.

Mo shook her head, exasperated. “I gave up trying to understand men around here a long time ago. Are you going to read his note or not?”

Bobbling the heavy pie tin, I opened the little white envelope. I read Evie’s neat block print aloud. “Thinking of you, Nick. P.S. I think you may need to check your voice mail. It’s full.”

I frowned. Voice mail? I hadn’t looked at my cell phone in days. Not since I drove to the Glacier.

Aw, hell.

As usual, I’d left the phone in my truck. I only used it when I was driving, and I tended to forget about it otherwise. I plopped the pie into Mo’s hands and ran to retrieve my dead phone. Mom was hugging Mo while I bolted back to my room to connect it to the charger on my dresser. I had five missed calls. And three voice-mail messages. All starting the day before, from a weird area code that could only be Nick’s.

“Hey, Mom, when Nick asked for my number, which one did you give him?” I called, not really wanting her to answer.

“Your cell phone,” Mom called back. “I thought you’d probably want any messages he left you to be private.”

I heard Mo give a soft snicker.

Well, now I felt horrible. I’d marred perfectly good ass cheeks for no reason. It was as if I’d sneezed on the
Mona Lisa.

Mo was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, while my mother mixed more waffle batter. “Mom, I’m going to need those waffles to go. I’m driving to Grundy.”

“Driving?” Mom asked, cracking a half-dozen eggs into her mixing bowl. “Today’s your running day.”

“I owe Dr. Thatcher an apology . . . or something.”

Mo hid her smirk behind her teacup, and Mom’s gaze narrowed. “For what?”

I took a precautionary step back. “It was just a
misunderstanding, Mom. I might have hurt his, uh, pride a little bit.”

“Just his pride?” Mom asked pointedly.

I smiled innocently and dashed for the shower.

“You know, you’re going to have to get better at lying if you’re going to survive as a public servant,” Mom called after me.

T
HE DRIVE TO
Grundy was spent coming up with really awkward apologies for biting Nick on the ass. And then I remembered that Nick didn’t know I was the one who bit him on the ass and that saying so would tip him off to the whole “world of werewolves” thing. Maybe I could just continue to let him think Mo bit him on the ass. That wouldn’t make things awkward.

The smart thing would be to send a detached, polite thank-you note for the pie or ignore him completely. But I felt this new, unpleasant gnawing sensation in my chest. I actually cared about what Nick thought of me. I worried about him thinking badly of me. I felt guilty for hurting him, not just little pangs of regret but full-on spasms of “why did I do that?”

I was maturing emotionally.
Ew.

OK, pie. I’d stick with the pie. He’d taken the time to order me pie while he was laid up on a doughnut pillow. That he’d send me something edible was oddly touching. Courtship in this part of the country rarely centered on flowers and perfume. Nick had made an effort, and he’d put some thought into it. And that was doing strange things to my
ability to produce coherent thoughts. By the time I pulled my truck into Nick’s driveway, I’d come up with “Thanks for the pie.”

Brilliant, I know. I was considering a career in speechwriting if this whole werewolf-leadership thing didn’t work out.

I forced myself out of the truck and considered Susie’s former home. “Susie Q” was the town’s former postmaster and the first victim of Eli’s weird string of attacks. I’d like to think that she was just a victim of opportunity, that Eli had stumbled across her as she was letting her ridiculous little wiener dog, Oscar, out to pee. Because the possibility that he spent time stalking a harmless, though eccentric, middle-aged country music fan was plain icky.

Susie saw the world through Dolly Parton–colored glasses, you might say. Platinum blond and blessed with more boobs than sense, Susie wore tight western shirts and jeans that looked painted on. But when it came to running the post office, she’d been all business, save for the fact that she kept Oscar in the mailroom for company.

Mo took Oscar in after Susie moved in with her daughter to recover from her injuries. When Susie’s daughter claimed to be asthmatic and allergic, Mo kept him. As a rule, werewolves don’t keep dogs. There are food-competition issues. However, Cooper considered it a mission of mercy. Susie was awfully fond of doggie sweaters.