The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf

16





Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli





ONCE MY FACE HEALED up to something that didn’t resemble a recalled eggplant, I called a pack meeting and instructed members to bring all of their family members—even the dead-liners. After I convinced them that I was not kidding and they went back home to retrieve said dead-liners, I laid everything on the line for those who hadn’t been invited to pack meetings until now, every weird coincidence and hinky feeling I’d had since Clay had moved into the valley. And when I dropped the bomb about Clay and Alicia’s dubious family connections, two of my uncles literally wolfed out and chose to destroy a couch to express their anger.

The reaction was a sort of venting by proxy for the other pack members, and by the time Uncle Jay and Uncle Rob were trying to digest spring coils, my relatives looked a little bored.

“Does this happen at every pack meeting?” Mo asked Evie. Having never attended a pack meeting before, Evie shrugged.

Nick was grinning like an idiot. “This is the coolest thing I have ever seen!”

I buried my face in my hands for a second and contemplated chlorinating my gene pool before wedging myself between the furry idiots and shaking them by the napes of their necks until they phased back to human.

“Sit,” I told them both as they shuffled back to their seats and looked as sheepish as two wolves could. “So, do we have that out of our systems?”

Rob and Jay refused to meet my gaze. I outlined what I considered to be a pretty damn reasonable plan. Able-bodied adults, wolf and dead-liner alike, would stay in the valley. My mom and the older aunties would take the kids, even self-proclaimed badass teenagers, and split them between Cooper’s and Nick’s places for the next few days.

“And then we go to the mattresses, right?” Jay said, his white teeth gleaming. Evie rolled her eyes. For Jay, all situations related somehow to The Godfather.

“And then we try to talk to them,” I countered.

Jay’s face fell into a contemplative frown. “I did not expect that.”

“But they killed Billie!” Uncle Rob protested.

“We don’t know that,” I snapped. “It’s a possibility. But from what Dr. Moder said, Billie could have tripped and hit her head. Which is sort of my point. If we rush into this, rush into judgment, rush into action, we’re going to find ourselves even more vulnerable and screwed up than we were after Cooper left, and we all know how that turned out. Sorry, Cooper.”

Cooper shrugged.

I added, “What if we say, ‘F*ck it, we’re going to kill them all’? Say we chase them down, and we find that their pack is twice the size of ours. Or that they’ve set some trap that we’ve walked right into? What happens then? We’re dead.”

“Never took you for a coward, Maggie.” Jay snorted and then turned white after the look I gave him.

“OK, fine, we go after them with both barrels. We’ll lose a couple of our pack and take down a few of theirs. And in a few years, their kids are going to show up and what? Fight our kids for what we did? We’re going to leave our kids to make this same choice? What would you want them to do?”

Rob, whose little girl was two and as wolfen as kids could be at that age, shrank down in his seat at the thought.

“I’m not saying we won’t end up fighting them anyway, but we at least have to try to figure out what’s going on in their heads.”

“So, we talk to them?” Rob said, as if it was the first time he was hearing the concept.

“Yes.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” Jay prompted.

“Then we go to the mattresses.” I sighed.



ONE OF THE uncles must have tipped Uncle Frank off about the coming “invasion.” Lee called to volunteer his packmates, but I told him to stay home and keep safe. Sure, the extra bodies would have been handy, but we were less likely to get Clay’s pack’s respect if we ran tattling to another pack for backup. Plus, the situation was likely to escalate too quickly if Lee was around, posturing and growling.

Lee was pretty smug about the whole “Clay’s a traitor” thing. He went on and on about how you “just didn’t know who you could trust these days” and how Uncle Frank had never liked Clay anyway.

But we actually had a conversation that didn’t end in my threatening him, which I took as progress. Until a few seconds later, when he started making noises about taking me out for a movie as soon as the snow cleared, you know, if we survived the inter-pack war thing. And then he followed that charming invitation up with “Who knows what could happen when you and I are in a dark room?” And I threw up in my mouth a little bit.

“Lee, I’m mated now,” I said in a clipped, businesslike tone, remembering that Uncle Frank hadn’t been around for the “big announcement” about Nick. And I doubted that any of my packmates wanted to call Uncle Frank and listen to the bitch-storm that would follow if they told him about my formal mating to a human. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t make comments like that. And by appreciate, I mean I will restrain myself from shoving your head up your own ass.”

“What do you mean, mated?” Lee shouted. “But Clay—why wasn’t I told?”

“You weren’t told because it was none of your business.”

“But if it’s not Clay, who is it?” he demanded. “It’s not that human, is it?”

“I’m hanging up now, Lee.”

“With the human!” Lee shrieked petulantly as I set the phone down on the cradle.

“And this is why I haven’t let Mom send out the wedding invitations yet,” I grumbled.



THE NIGHT BEFORE Clay’s “deadline” was hectic. I’d underestimated the amount of persuasion, strong-arming, and, finally, begging it would take to get the aunties out of the valley. None of them wanted to miss the fight. None of them wanted to be left, as Mo said, sitting on her hands, wondering if we would come home. And my mom was the ringleader of the rebellion.

“I don’t understand why you’re asking this of me,” Mom growled as I shoved her inside Mo’s truck, where Eva was blowing bubbles in her own spit.

“Mom, look at Mo.” I nodded. “You think it’s easy for her to pack her daughter into her car seat and watch Eva blow bye-bye bubbles, not knowing how this is all going to turn out? But at least she’s handling it with some dignity.”

“That’s because you didn’t hear the argument she and Cooper had earlier. I’ve never heard Mo cuss that way before. I thought she’d blister paint. I think you’re a bad influence on her.”

I was really sorry I’d missed that. Cooper and Mo had several blow-ups over Mo’s decision to stay at his side. Cooper tried to appeal to her motherly instinct and the possibility that Eva could be left without either parent. Mo countered that that was far less likely to happen if she was covering Cooper’s back. And around and around they went, until Cooper was blue in the face and Mo was threatening him with a large frying pan if he tried to force her into the truck. It didn’t stop him from trying. And now he had a pan-shaped bruise on his back. We considered it a draw.

I sighed. “Mom, if you get into the truck right now and we all survive this thing, I will let you plan the wedding, from bottom to top, without any arguments.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I’ll even let you do that stupid white-dove-release thing.”

Her eyes narrowed at me. “Well played, Margaret.”

After a little more prodding, Mom finally got into the truck and led the caravan of kids and aunts out of the valley. I looked around at the clenched, determined expressions on the parents’ faces as they waved good-bye to their departing children. And I felt a little twinge of emptiness.

Mo snickered and slipped her arm around my shoulders. “You know, for the alpha—”

“Don’t say it,” I warned her.

“Not that many people listen to you.”

“You can be such a bitch sometimes,” I told her.

She smiled sweetly at me. “I’m becoming more and more like you every day.”

Behind her, Cooper shuddered.

* * *

I MANAGED TO talk everyone into a sundown curfew. The larger, younger of us were running alternating patrols along the border to watch for an early ambush. I did a door-to-door check to make sure everyone was tucked away safely for now. As I slumped toward Mom’s house, exhausted to my bones, Rob and Jay kept yelling lines from 300 at my back, which made me think they weren’t taking the whole Gandhi approach very seriously. It felt like lights-out at a particularly violent summer camp.

Mo and Cooper had agreed to stay at Samson’s for the night. It struck me as sort of crappily ironic that our first night alone in the valley was so dark.

Nick had cooked, or at least warmed up something Mom left behind. Without speaking, we settled on the couch. I took his face between my palms and kissed him.

“Is this the part where you tell me it’s my duty to sleep with you because you’re going off to war and you could be killed?” Nick asked.

“That is so wrong,” I told him. “But yes, it would be a nice gesture.”

He pulled me into his lap, sliding his hands along my ribs

“Are you scared?” he asked. “About tomorrow?”

“I’d be stupid not to be,” I said. “I’m not thrilled that you’re going to be there, but given the Lassie conversation and Mo’s cast-iron-pan antics, I know it’s a waste of breath to try to push you out of harm’s way.”

“Damn straight.”

“I love you. I’m not trying to make this some dramatic good-bye moment. I just want to tell you now, while it’s quiet and we’re not facing certain ass-whooping, that I love you. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you. I’m going to love you until the day I die.”

He pursed his lips. “Wow, you will do anything to get laid, won’t you?”

I laughed. “Thanks, I needed that.”

“I love you, too,” he told me, kissing me.

He pushed my shirt over my head, pulling my hair from its ponytail and letting it fall around us in a dark, shiny curtain. He took his time, touching me with an aching slowness that built a searing heat in my belly. His kisses consumed my breath, my fear, my worry. I eased his zipper down, and he moaned as my hand slipped around him. He pushed up from the couch, with my legs still wrapped around his waist, and carried me down the hall.

We’d never managed to make it to my room, in a bed, with the lights off before. It was sort of decadent and naughty, getting naked in the room where I used to have Smurf curtains. He trailed kisses from my neck to my belly button, taking the time to nip lightly here and there, leaving little marks behind. I tugged at his shoulders, bringing him back to eye level, so I could thread my fingers through his hair while he settled between my thighs.

When he reached for the condoms in my night-stand, I stopped his hand. His eyebrows arched. I’d told myself that I would know when I was ready, and I did. I wanted a baby with Nick. There were things in life I still wanted to do—school, travel, leading my pack. But I didn’t think Nick would let me get out of doing them. In fact, he’d probably drag me to whatever pipe dream I was shying away from if he spotted any backtracking on my part.

“I consider it a hopeful gesture,” I told him. “We might get pregnant, we might not. We might get through tomorrow only to get smooshed by a semi next Tuesday.”

“This is the worst declaration of hope ever,” he told me. “What’s next, detailed forecasts of my possible male-pattern baldness?”

I snickered. “The point is, I love you, and I don’t want to put any more restrictions on however much time we have left together, whether it’s hours or decades. I don’t care what tomorrow brings, as long as I have you.”

He smiled and kissed me, then slipped inside me without a barrier between us, skin on skin. I sighed at the warm intrusion as his fingertips traced the lines of my face. He rocked into me, and we settled into a soothing, gentle rhythm. This was different, quiet, better. And when we both were sated, he pulled my back against his chest and held me without speaking. And somehow I managed to fall asleep.



THE MORNING ROLLED in quietly, leaving us restless and edgy. I didn’t know what I expected—Clay and Alicia leading a parade of tanks down Main Street, maybe. And when the strange pack seemed to coil out of the trees like mist, I thought I was seeing things. There were thirty or so of them, fewer than half of what we had gathered against them. They were so young, a handful of them as old as me, with the rest in their late teens. They all had that lean, ragged, wary look of someone who’s had to survive. I wondered where they’d been while Clay and Alicia spied on us. How close had they been all this time?

The kids were trailing behind, holding on to the hands of a few older ladies, including Ronnie and Paul, who were waving at us. I realized then that Jonas had probably done the exact thing we’d done, all those years ago. He’d left the kids with the older women, while he marched off to conquer their “new home.” And he’d never come back. I thought of my mom, taking care of dozens of kids, waiting for news. And my throat grew a little tight.

I felt the pack align behind me, watched as my packmates guarding the borders paced them on four paws as they entered our territory. A chorus of growls sounded behind me, and I felt several of my packmates phase as Clay sauntered toward me. I held up my hand, and the sounds faded to a dull, constant grumble. The light glinted off his light brown hair, and he grinned that same crooked smile at me, but it was hollow, a stupid boy’s ploy to try to cover the fact that he was scared shitless.

When Jay and Ron, who were part of the escort, sniffed a little too close, I made a little warning growl, and they backed off immediately. Yes, they were excited and twitching for a fight, but these were the situations where you had to listen to your alpha if you wanted to get out unscathed. I felt my fear and my anger subside a little. This wasn’t the snarling, hate-filled foe I was expecting. They were a bunch of scared kids.

Clay stopped just a few feet in front of me, and I was struck by a sense of déjà vu. He looked so much like his father now, minus the crazy eyes. Clay gave me a hard stare, and I returned it.

“What now?” I asked him, my head tilting.

Clay looked a little startled at my light and conversational tone. Not at all like my more recent threats to “end him.”

“You know why we’re here, I just can’t believe you were dumb enough to stick around.”

My voice so low only he could hear me, I said, “Clay, I think we both know what’s going to happen if I give an order for my pack to take yours. Please don’t make me do it.”

“You’re not giving me a choice,” he whispered, glancing over his shoulder. His jaw was so tense I could hear his teeth grinding.

“Do you want to talk privately?” I asked.

“What, so you can drag me off to the woods and let one of your uncles rip my throat out?” he said loudly enough so the rest of his pack could hear.

I growled. “Clay, stop being a jackass,” I snarled. “You bring your second, I’ll bring mine.” Samson stepped forward and gazed longingly at Alicia, which was not appreciated by one of the younger males in Clay’s pack. I added loudly, “And everyone here will behave themselves like good boys and girls!”

Uncle Jay, wolfed out and ready to go, huffed and rolled his canine eyes.

I led Clay to a little clearing behind the clinic, with Samson and Alicia trailing on our heels. The farther we got away from Main Street, the more Clay’s shoulders seemed to sag. By the time we reached our destination, he looked liked a haggard old man.

“OK, this is just us here, and when we leave, no one’s going to know what was said, right Samson?” Samson was busy giving Alicia moon eyes. “Samson?”

“Huh?”

I looked across the clearing to see Alicia giving him the same stupid look. I rolled my eyes. “Never mind.”

“Before we go any further, I have to ask, did you hurt Billie?” I asked. “And I’m not just talking about at the end. Did you ever lay a hand on my aunt?”

“We wouldn’t have hurt Billie,” Alicia insisted, her eyes welling up with unexpected tears. “We actually liked the old lady, no matter how many butter knives she threw at me. She reminded us of our own aunties. And she had these moments, I think, when she knew we weren’t who we said we were, but she knew that we were taking care of her. I always thought of those as her good days.”

Clay shook his head. “I’m a lot of things, but I wouldn’t hurt a defenseless old woman.”

“What happened the day she died?” I asked.

Alicia wrung her hands a little bit, looking more at Samson than at me. “When I left, she was napping, I just wanted to take the kids out for a breath of fresh air. I just wanted to get out of the house for a few minutes. I wasn’t even gone that long, just long enough for Paul to need a fresh pull-up. I came back, and you were there, and she was dead.”

I looked to Samson, who seemed relieved. And although I didn’t quite trust his skewed judgment on the subject, I found I believed her. Why would they lie at this point? They didn’t have much to lose. If anything, Clay would have used killing Billie to provoke me into a fight when he was outed.

“OK, and I want honesty here, what about the brakes on my truck? Or the break-in at my office? Or me getting my head bagged that day we went for a run together? Or Samson getting shot?”

Alicia shook her head. “Honestly, no. We were just as surprised by all that as you were. The sneakiest thing we did was tell our packmates where the video cameras were planted, so they could sniff around without being seen.”

“We came here to watch you, to try to find a way in,” Clay said. “That was all.”

“Considering your dad tried to kill my whole family, I have a hard time believing that.”

He shot back, “Well, your brother did kill my entire family.”

“He was provoked!” I yelled.

“Don’t you think I’ve considered that?” Clay yelled back. He took a steadying breath. Several inquiring howls drifted up from the valley. “Look, I see my Dad’s mistakes. What he did was wrong. But he was still my dad. Do you know what happened after your precious brother killed my father? We’d been drifting around for months, nomads, before Dad finally decided to make a move on your valley. There were only three old women left to take care of us. Our parents were supposed to come back, take us to our new home. We went to bed, feeling like it was Christmas Eve. When we woke up, everything was going to be different. No more sleeping in the woods. No more bathing at campgrounds, when we were lucky. No more shifting around without a home. And it was different, all right. We woke up, and my aunt Sarah was crying. She didn’t know what had happened. She and Aunt Linda waited and waited for my parents, for the other adults to come back. But they never did. I was too young to join the fight but old enough to know that we’d been screwed out of what was ours. That my mom and dad were dead, and I couldn’t let that go unpunished. Aunt Linda tried to convince me that it was time to forget, to move on. When she died, I found letters from my dad to Eli, plans for the new pack they were setting up.

“So I contacted our good friend Eli. I told him I was going to blow his whole ‘man of the people’ thing wide open. I wanted to meet him, but he kept putting me off, said he had an ailing mother to care for. It made it hard for him to find time. Your brother killed him off before we could meet up, so he wasn’t of much use. But thanks to his letters, it was easy to tell you some nice story about being Billie’s long-lost relatives. You were so willing to let us step in, to let us take care of Billie. It was disappointing, really. I thought you’d put up more of a fight. I thought you’d be less trusting. But we moved right in. Hell, you practically rolled out a red carpet. And we stayed, and we stayed, and hell, I even started to like it here a little bit. And the whole time, I kept going back to my pack and telling them to be patient; just a little longer, and we’ll have the home we always deserved. And then Billie died, and it all went to hell.”

“But why did you come back now?” I asked him, scanning his pack. “You knew how many of us would be here. Why would you come back, knowing that we could destroy you?”

Clay threaded a handed through his hair, leaving it disheveled. He looked tired and scared and much younger than he was. “I’d spent so much time talking it up, I couldn’t not bring them here. I already have a couple of cousins who think that I shouldn’t be alpha, considering the f*ck-up my Dad made of the position. If I backed out, I would lose any authority I had. There was no way out of it. And now I don’t know what to do. I can’t go back to them now and tell them that the story we’ve been surviving on for years was a load of crap. That we’re not even going to try to fight for this place.”

“But you don’t have to fight. You could have a home here.”

Clay stared at me as if I’d grown a second head. He scoffed. “What, you’re just going to let us waltz in and join you? Sure.”

“We would. Don’t make the same mistake Jonas made, Clay. Take the offer,” Samson said, his gaze never leaving Alicia.

Clay’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Cooper offered Jonas a place in the valley. He offered your pack a home, and Jonas refused,” I said.

“That’s a lie.”

“It’s not,” Samson insisted. “And you can ask any member of the pack who was there. Cooper only acted when Jonas threatened to kill Maggie right in front of him.”

“He threatened to kill you as leverage?” Clay’s face paled. “But you were just a kid, just a few years older than me.”

“He must have been desperate, to do something like that,” Alicia said, her lip trembling. “He wouldn’t have accepted an offer to share, Clay. You know that. He was a proud man, too proud. He wouldn’t have accepted help. He wouldn’t have accepted letting his packmates see him as weak.”

“And I’m supposed to let my packmates see me as weak?” he demanded.

“I’m just saying maybe we should think about it,” she said.

“There’s a way out of this, Clay,” I said. “We can avoid another bloody scene if you would just—”

“Like you would trust me enough to let us live here,” he spat. “You’d watch me like a hawk every minute. No pack can work with two alphas.”

“Well, I’d kick your ass at the first sign of you trying to take over, true. But who says it couldn’t work? Most packs have an alpha couple. We’ll still have an alpha male and an alpha female. We just won’t be, you know, together.”

“But—”

“Stop giving me reasons why this wouldn’t work!” I cried. “The way we live is changing; we have to change with it. I’m not saying it’s the ideal situation or that there’s not going to be a lot of resentment and hurt feelings we’re going to have to get over, but what other choice do you have? Both packs need fresh genes. You need a place to call home. We can make it work.”

“How are we going to explain this to them?” Clay said, nodding toward the packs.

“It will be our first official joint alpha duty,” I told him.

Clay gnawed on his lip and looked at my outstretched hand as if it was a coiled snake.

“Clay, stop being an ass and say yes, already,” Alicia said, giving Samson a long, meaningful look.

“Please, make the better choice,” I said. “Be a better leader, a better man, than our predecessors.”

Clay huffed a breath and put his hand in mine. “On a trial basis. That’s all I’m willing to promise.”

All of the tension drained from my body as if a plug had been pulled. I smiled. “That’s all I ask. It’s going to take some work, but we can do this, Clay.”

“Can we at least tell my pack that I beat you bloody and then we arrived at a compromise?” he grumbled.

“No.”