The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf

3





Chuck Norris and the Calendar of Death





I SAT AT MY DESK in the community center/town hall, writing out the whopping four paychecks the village issued each week. One to myself; one to our village physician, Anna Moder; one to my cousin Teresa, who taught twenty-six kids in all twelve grades at the village school; and another to my gargantuan cousin-but-might-as-well-be-my-brother, Samson, who was the closest thing we had to a civil engineer. He delivered the mail, ran our modest recycling program, and maintained our handful of public buildings. He also occasionally fell asleep while driving a snowplow, but he was such a cheerful guy it was hard to stay pissed at him. Besides, every village needed an idiot.

I didn’t live in a normal little town. Every single household in my valley was either were or descended from were. And I was related to each and every person there on one side or the other, and I’m very aware of how wrong that sounds.

Dating as a werewolf is complicated, particularly for packs in the Great North. Every pack has to maintain close relationships with other packs and “import” mates at every opportunity, to prevent inbreeding. You practically have to review your extended genealogical history before you can agree to a movie and dinner.

This might sound isolated and sort of claustrophobic, but wolves don’t know any other way. A pack generally lives in close quarters, filling an apartment complex, a subdivision, or a gated community in the case of more urban, affluent clans. In southern packs, it usually means parking a number of double-wide trailers on a farm. For us, it was a self-contained, nearly self-sustaining, community surrounded by some of the richest hunting lands known in the Great Northwest.

Not that I like to brag or anything.

I munched on a handful of red Swedish Fish I kept in a huge apothecary jar on my desk. I had to refill the damn thing about once a week, depending on how often Samson stopped by. The rest of my morning would consist of checking on a pothole in the parking lot of the village clinic and writing up a schedule for the community center that might finally settle the ongoing feud between the local quilting group and the bridge club.

It was good to be the queen.

OK, so I had the most boring job in the village. I considered it a trade-off because the rest of my responsibilities—running, hunting, protecting the borders of the valley, and so on—were pretty awesome. And busting my ass for a few hours that morning meant I could get a few precious moments of quiet and read the copy of the new J. D. Robb paperback I had hidden in my filing cabinet. I wasn’t a classics girl, despite Mo’s best efforts. The woman actually bought me a subscription to the English Writer of the Month Club. I was shameless in my supermarket-shelf mass-market taste. I loved King, Evanovich, Grisham, and Brown. I won’t lie; the official-looking filing cabinet in the corner is actually stuffed full of my paperbacks.

I might have been reading at that very moment, if I could manage to concentrate long enough to write a damn check correctly. I’d slept about three hours each night since my humiliating meeting with Nick Thatcher. I kept waking up all sweaty and tangled up in the sheets, with visions of his cheeky little grin still dancing behind my eyelids.

Jumpy and irritated, I spent hours trying to get back to sleep, only to end up stomping out of the house to run through the woods on all fours. It was the only thing that could clear my head. By the time I got back to the house, everybody was bustling around town. And it hardly served as a good example for me to flop back into bed. Lazy never works for wolves. Read a few fables. So, for the last four days, I’d basically been skimming by on caffeine and luck.

Beyond day-to-day operations, I also served as a sort of figurehead for the pack. I was “the face” for the valley and its inhabitants. And that face had some pretty serious undereye luggage. Now that I was alpha, the pressure for me to settle down and birth a litter went from good-natured rumbling at holidays to an all-out roar. I couldn’t walk from my office to my house without one of my relatives accosting me with some promise of the man of my dreams.

While a lot of girls—particularly girls living in one of the most remote, eligible-werewolf-bachelor-starved regions in the world—would be thrilled to have such a devoted network of matchmakers, I thought about following in the shoes of Jan Brady and making up my own “George Glass” to get them off my back. Most of their recommendations were either far more interested in becoming the alpha for my pack than in me as a person. Or they were more interested in Samson than they were in me—which was disappointing. Then there were Cro-Magnon wolves who hadn’t quite grasped the whole “females are my equal” concept.

Fun times.

I was not counting on a love match. Not everybody had a marriage like my parents’. My mother had come from a pack in Oregon. She moved to Alaska after meeting my dad on one of his rare trips to the mainland. He came into her uncle’s garage to get a part for some motorcycle Samson’s dad wanted. My mom was doing the books in the office. She looked up and smiled at him, and he was so distracted by that smile that he walked into a wall. Dad died when I was a baby, but Cooper told me a lot of stories about what I’d missed growing up. The silly jokes, the googly eyes, Dad bringing bunches of wildflowers to her when he came home from a run. He once told Cooper that the trick to a happy life was to find the person you can’t breathe without and marry her.

How was any guy I chose going to compete with that sort of romantic goo?

So, given my candidate pool, marriage and kids weren’t exactly things I was looking forward to. I loved Eva. I loved cuddling her, the sweet apple and baby-shampoo smell that radiated from that crazy hair. But the best part was that I could give her back. When the cuteness was over and she had a smelly diaper or a tantrum, I could just claim ignorance and hand her over to Mo, who somehow had the patience needed to deal with stuff like that.

I was basically a selfish creature. I liked sleeping and being able to leave the house without making sure I had a half-dozen toys and a Baggie full of Cheerios. But not having kids wasn’t an option. For one thing, I wasn’t planning on dying a virgin. And in my family, if you have sex, you’re going to have kids. And second, I sort of owed it to my bloodline to pass the werewolf magic along.

It seemed blatantly unfair that I seemed to be suffering from some hormone surge when Nick Thatcher came into the picture. Clearly, some wire labeled “Don’t mess around with men who could ruin your life” had short-circuited in my brain. I’d known plenty of guys with big blue eyes, guys with pouty, kissable lips, guys who smelled like Sunday lunch. I’d just never met one who had all three qualities.

That was the problem. It was all looks. It was my primal brain at work. It wasn’t that he was smart or funny or that he actually managed to thwart me in conversation, which until now, no one but Mo could do. And it definitely wasn’t because I’d developed some weird, creepy, stalker-at-first-fascination thing with him. . .

Moving on.

As hard as I tried to shrug off his thrall, Nick just kept popping up, like one of those damn plastic whack-a-moles. First, I found out my cousin, Evie’s husband, Buzz, unaware of his wolfy in-laws’ involvement in the debacle, had given Nick an extensive interview about his search for the killer wolf. Alan Dahling had taken Nick up the mountain to the area where Walt and Hank had shot the huge male timber wolf we were letting the public believe was responsible for the attacks. I had to hand it to Nick, he was good at his job. If you considered being a giant pain in my supernatural ass a job.

And the final blow? Mo was delivering Tupperwared meals to his house like some cross between a Welcome Wagon and Marie Callender. He tried to pay for it, and she refused to take his money. She considered it some sort of outreach program. I think the point was reaching out to drive me crazy.

“Let me get this straight,” I’d hissed at her over the phone. “I say don’t have anything to do with the nosy outsider, and you start delivering care packages to his door? I can’t get your meat loaf in my freezer, but you’re dropping them on Thatcher’s doorstep with reheating instructions?”

“I saw him at the market the other day, and the poor guy had twenty Banquet dinners in his cart,” Mo said, her voice rising to a disturbing, defensive octave. “Do you have any idea how expensive those things are up here? Plus, they’re all fat and sodium, and he’s too pretty to be allowed to get all bloated.”

“But I told you—”

“Look, with all the questions Nick is not so subtly trying to work into conversations, it would look weird and suspicious if I went all silent religious-compound wife whenever he walked into a room. Doesn’t it make more sense that we would remain neighborly?”

There was silence on my end of the line . . . unless you counted the sound of my teeth grinding.

“Maggie?”

“I’m trying to find a hole in your argument that doesn’t involve me threatening you,” I grumbled. “I got nothing.”

She snorted.

“What sort of questions is he asking?”

“Oh, little things, about how Cooper and I got to know each other. He heard from a few of our neighbors that we weren’t exactly an instant love connection. Some of my better insults are fondly remembered. So he’s using ‘getting to know you’ conversations to ask what turned the tide, what couples around here do to date, that sort of thing.”

“And what are you telling him?” I asked.

Mo huffed. “Oh, I told him that Cooper showed up on my doorstep with a bear trap clamped around his leg, told me he was a werewolf, and we decided to go steady.”

“Ha freaking ha.”

My sister-in-law was not to be trusted.

My embarrassment was replaced by annoyance, frustration, a desire to be rid of Nick that bordered on religious. It was obvious that he had been sent to torment me for some horrible wrong I’d committed in a past life.

I failed to see how turning me into a blithering, sleep-deprived idiot was going to make me a better person. As a concept, karma was ass-backward.

“Oh, good gravy, snap out of it, you loser!” I groaned, thunking my head against the desk.

“Well, that seems harsh. I just walked in the door,” a voice boomed over me. I looked up to see Samson towering over my desk.

I snickered, leaning back in my chair.

“Now, what kind of werewolf doesn’t even notice when her office has been invaded?” Samson smirked, ruffling my hair. “What’s up, Midget?”

My cousin Samson, ladies and gentlemen, the five-year-old trapped in a pro wrestler’s body, the man who gave me the Chuck Norris Fact of the Day calendar on my desk, which was why I tolerated abuse from him more than I would from most people. I loved him just as much as I loved Cooper. His mother had died before I was born, and his dad was a screwup of the first order, abandoning him to live with us when we were just kids. He’d been the one who helped keep me somewhat in line when Cooper left, and as my unofficial second in command, he was the first member of the pack to call me out when I was being a jerk.

Well, the first to call me a jerk to my face and walk away without a limp . . . ok, without a permanent limp.

He walked it off.

I scowled up at him, but there was no real heat in it. “Everyone’s a midget compared to you.”

“Doesn’t make the nickname any less fun.”

“You know, the ink isn’t even dry on this yet,” I retorted, pointing to his paycheck.

“It’s not signed, either,” he noted. “You only think I don’t pick up on stuff like that.”

“Go on, you’ve claimed your thirty pieces of silver, go do something crazy like put gas in that penis replacement you call transportation.”

“First of all, don’t mock the truck or my junk,” he said sternly, pointing out the window toward the mammoth F-250 required to haul his ass around. “And it’s not compensating for anything if it’s to scale.”

“Ew.” I shuddered but was grateful for something to think about that did not involve hot outsider eggheads. I was still shuddering in revulsion when a sandy-haired werewolf stuck his head in the door, toting a jam-packed postal box.

Clay Renard was one of a handful of people in the valley not related to me by blood or marriage. In fact, that handful was pretty much limited to Clay, his widowed sister, Alicia, and her two boys. Clay was a few years younger than me. He was a likable, easygoing sort of guy, friendly and helpful, without being a pain in the ass about it. He was as close to the all-American type as werewolves got, with a strong, square jaw, high, sharp cheekbones, and light blue eyes. Even though his hair was brownish-gold, he had dark eyebrows that served as exclamation points on his open, expressive face. I liked the way they tilted when he smiled. And he had a cute little overbite that caught his bottom lip when he tucked the smile away.

“Hey, Clay, what are you doing with the mail?” I asked, grinning at him.

Clay shrugged. “Samson was pressed for time, so I stopped by the Grundy post office to pick up the mail for him.”

I frowned. Clay worked in a garage on the outskirts of Grundy. But the errand still meant he had to drive twenty minutes out of his way to do something Samson was supposed to do three times a week.

“Oh, you did, did you?” I narrowed my eyes at my cousin. “You were pressed for time? Would that be nap time?” Samson shrugged. “I’m giving Clay half of your paycheck.”

“I knew I should have made you sign it,” Samson muttered.

Clay chuckled. “I don’t mind. I got to stop by the saloon for one of Mo’s burgers.”

“Aw, why’d you have to go and mention Mo’s burgers?” Samson moaned.

“Oh, cheer up, buttercup, Mom made chicken and dumplings,” I told him.

“Meh,” Samson said in a disinterested tone.

“You’re going to be in soooo much trouble when I tell Mom you said that.” I laughed. Samson cringed. “Clay, are you too full to join us?”

“I am never too full for anything,” Clay said solemnly.

“I’ll call Mom, let her know you’re coming,” I told him. I turned to my cousin. “You, on the other hand, have some mail to deliver. Jackass.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” Clay said, following a grumbling Samson out the door.

“Suck-up,” Samson shot back.

I was in a much brighter mood as I finished up a few housekeeping tasks and closed down my computer. I called my mom to warn her we’d be having a guest for dinner, but she didn’t pick up, which was weird. But Mom always cooked enough to feed an army with Samson around, so I figured we were covered.

I left my office without bothering to lock it. I mean, seriously, there were sixty people in the village, and they had just as much business going into the building as I did. That was the benefit of being related to nearly everyone you lived with. There was a certain level of trust that was expected. As I walked the whopping half-block to my house, I congratulated myself on finding a pleasant evening’s distraction from plotting the violent demise of one Nicholas Thatcher.

Clay and I had been on a few friendly outings that didn’t quite qualify as dates. I’d taken him hiking up the north pass, near the elk hunting grounds. We’d gone to see a movie, some date-appropriate Will Ferrell comedy we’d abandoned halfway through in favor of the action flick two theaters down. As a candidate, he was far less complicated than . . . other people, but he was a cautious soul, which I respected.

Besides Clay, I’d gone on a fix-up or two with boys from other packs in Olympia and Anchorage. It always had this weird game-show feel to it. The grand prize being “lifelong mated bliss and a half-dozen purebred werewolf pups.” And then I realized that the reason these guys needed to be fixed up by the interpack dating service wasn’t the scarcity of female candidates but the fact that they were obnoxious, stupid, or creepy—or all of the above.

Every once in a while, I thought an entrepreneurial were should set up some sort of online supernatural dating service. But, you know, that is the sort of thing that attracts attention. Some smartass little hacker would get into it, and next thing you know, there’d be a complete list of supernatural creatures in America, and some nut job might take it seriously and go Van Helsing on our asses.

I spotted Clay’s truck in my great-aunt Billie’s driveway and decided to duck in to tell Alicia that her brother would be at our place for dinner. I took a few deep breaths before I knocked. Visiting Billie was always sort of awkward. Besides being a murderous, back-stabbing traitor, her son, my alpha predecessor, Eli, had also been the primary caretaker for Billie. Between setting us up for a takeover with another pack, attacking humans at random to drive Cooper away, and trying to kill Mo, I honestly don’t know how he found time for it all.

Billie had dementia, a rare affliction among werewolves, and it had wiped her once-sharp mind like a slate. She needed almost constant care to keep her from phasing and running away. The last time she did this, she was found wandering naked in human form at the grocery store in Grundy.

The pack didn’t hold a grudge against Billie for her son’s actions. As the mate of my grandfather’s late brother, James, she would always be considered one of us. And while the rest of the pack was more than willing to take over her care, it seemed right when Clay and Alicia, Billie’s niece and nephew, left their pack in Ontario a few months before to move in with her. They were a welcome addition to the group; they were smart and hardworking, and they could hunt like nobody’s business.

Still, considering that it was Cooper who brought Eli down, with my help, I always felt little twinges of guilt when talking to Billie, even though she probably had no idea that Eli was gone.

I knocked a little harder on the front door, but there was no answer. Nudging it open, I could hear a cartoon blaring from the living room. Someone was moving around in the kitchen. “Hello?” I called.

Paul, Alicia’s youngest, toddled up to me. His four-year-old brother, Ronnie, sat mesmerized by dancing animated bears. The boys didn’t resemble Alicia or Clay with their white-blond hair and huge brown eyes. But they were adorable. Sort of sticky and always had runny noses, but adorable. “Up!” Paul commanded, tugging on my jeans. I slid my hands under his arms and hoisted him onto my hip as I walked into the kitchen.

“Nana?” he said, his tone hopeful as he eyed the fruit bowl on the counter.

Billie was in a rumpled blue and green plaid housedress, her thick white hair tumbling around her face. She was shuffling back and forth between the cabinet and her counter, spreading peanut butter on six slices of bread. I peeled a banana for Paul, which he promptly devoured.

“Aunt Billie?” I murmured quietly.

She turned, her deep brown eyes focused and alert but vacant. Whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t what I was seeing. She smiled, her still-smooth cheeks dimpling prettily.

“Oh, Maggie, honey, have you seen Eli?” Billie asked, topping each of her half-dozen sandwiches. “You need to tell him it’s time for lunch. He can go out and play with Samson and Cooper later.”

I swallowed the little lump in my throat and nodded. “OK, Aunt Billie, I’ll tell him.”

“I’m cutting the crusts off for him,” she said, adding the sandwiches to a massive pile on the counter. I found myself blinking back against hot, wet pressure in my eyes. Sure, Eli had turned out kind of evil, but he was still my cousin. I’d grown up with him. I could remember the afternoons that had trapped Billie’s mind. I could remember him as a little boy, arguing with Cooper and Samson over who had to be Aquaman when they played Justice League. And I’d taken a part in killing that little boy. It was a weight on my heart that wouldn’t go away.

“Oh!” Alicia said, nearly dropping her laundry basket as she came through the kitchen door. Alicia was a compact little female, with short-cropped dark blond hair. She smiled, seeming relieved that the surprise guest in her kitchen was me.

“Sorry, Alicia, I just stopped by to see how Billie’s doing. I knocked, but . . .”

“I was in the laundry room,” she said, putting the laundry basket on the table and surveying the gummy mess on her counter. “I didn’t hear you. Did Maggie give you a ’nana, little man?”

Paul grinned at her, his cheeks puffed out with fruit. “Nana!”

“Clay’s going to be at our place for dinner,” I told her. “Did you want to join us?”

Alicia smiled, ruffling Paul’s hair. “Thanks, but we’ve got a pretty good routine going. And any interruption to that routine kind of sets Billie off.”

“Does this sort of thing happen often?” I asked, setting Paul down as he strained toward the living room. I’d served my purpose as the ’nana provider, and the theme music for Barney was starting up. It’s hard to compete with that chipper purple bastard.

Alicia shrugged, giving me a tired smile. “She has good days and bad. Today hasn’t been a good day.”

“Do you guys need anything?”

The village kept an account to pay for most of the pack’s seniors’ groceries and medicine, including Billie’s. Alicia moved to a little Filofax by the phone and handed me a short stack of receipts for reimbursement. She watched as Billie continued to make sandwiches. “Well, it looks like we need more bread and peanut butter.”

Billie turned, as if she was just now registering Alicia’s presence. “Who are you?” she asked, suspicion creeping into her voice. “What are you doing in my kitchen?”

Alicia sighed, and smiled at her. “I’m Alicia. I’m your sister Judy’s daughter.”

“I don’t know you!” Billie cried, throwing the butter knife across the room at her. Alicia plucked it out of the air, looking tired and worn.

“She does this at least once a day,” Alicia told me. “I’m your niece, Aunt Billie. We’re here to help take care of you.”

“I don’t know you! I don’t know you!” Billie yelled, throwing herself toward me. “Maggie, make her go away. Tell Eli. Tell him I don’t want her in my house! I don’t want strangers in my house!”

I looked to Alicia for guidance. She was more accustomed to Billie’s episodes than I was. Looking sort of tired and resigned, Alicia reached up into one of the cabinets and pulled out a pill bottle. She put a little white tablet in my hand with a juice box. “Nap,” she mouthed.

“Billie, we’ll get this all straightened out, OK?” I said, putting my arm around her and leading her to her room. The dresser was dusty. And the sheets looked as if they hadn’t been changed in a while. Alicia wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Then again, I couldn’t imagine trying to keep up with two toddlers and a senile werewolf who occasionally played knife thrower.

“I don’t know her,” Billie whispered. “Tell Eli I don’t want her in the house, please?”

“I will,” I promised. “But why don’t you just stay here in your room for a while, get some rest? Eli and I will work this out.”

I handed her the pill, which she took without a fuss, and she drank the juice. I lifted her legs onto the bed and pulled the blankets up to her chin. “You’re a good girl, Maggie,” Billie said, her voice slurring slightly from the pill’s effects. “I don’t care what Eli says.”

I smiled. “Thanks, Aunt Billie.”

I walked home, feeling a bit deflated. Alicia’s intentions were good, but she was stretched so thin. Billie wasn’t exactly cooperative. And Clay didn’t seem to know what to do with the kids. I started composing a schedule in my head, arranging for the aunties to come by and give Alicia a break—give her some help with Billie and maybe even watch the boys, so Alicia could do some errands or just go for a run.

I stomped the mud off my boots and shucked them near the front door, knowing better than to track dirt into Grace Graham’s house. I might be the baddest, toughest wolf in my pack, but there are still times when my mother can make me cower like a newborn pup.

Mom never had much money while we were growing up, but her home was a showplace. The living room was meticulously clean, decorated with scattered photos of Cooper, Samson, and me in various stages of childhood. The walls were a warm, creamy color. A bright blue throw rug was settled comfortably in front of a large brick fireplace. On the mantle were three carved wooden wolves that Cooper made with his own hands. The house pulled you in, made you feel instantly at ease and at home. While other wolves might disarm you with fangs or claws, my mother did it with kind words and good meals.

“Something smells good!” I called, inhaling the scent of my mother’s chicken and dumplings. She served huge vats of it with fresh, crusty sourdough and as much of her homemade applesauce as you could eat. “I hope it’s OK, we’re going to have some company for dinner.”

“Yes, I know!” she called back. “I’m in the kitchen.”

I rounded the corner and heard Nick Thatcher in mid-sentence, “There are a lot of theories about where exactly the line between man and animal is drawn. Psychologically, spiritually, physically. Where do the two lines split on the evolutionary scale? Is the missing link some step along the way? Or could legends that link man and animal be signs of a step forward? A mix of the best of both worlds.”

Nick freaking Thatcher was sitting at my kitchen table while my mother served him chamomile tea and a piece of her special apple cake. My favorite apple cake.

“Oh, my God! Is nothing sacred?” I howled.

Faced with my mental tormentor, the interrupter of sleep, and his head-clouding scent, I’d expected to feel awkward and bashful again. But mostly, I felt anger. Sweet, clarifying anger. Who the hell did he think he was, waltzing into my valley, with his stupid feet under my table, eating my freaking cake?

His feet did look awfully big, I noticed, biting my lip. And from what I could gather from a lifetime spent around men who were comfortable in the nude, the old wives’ tales about foot size tended to be accurate.

Gah!

Focus, Maggie, I commanded my wandering brain. My eyelid actually twitched when he looked up at me.

“Hi, Maggie, it’s nice to see you again,” he said, smiling so sweetly I thought I might need insulin.

“Your work sounds so interesting, Nick,” Mom said, ignoring my outburst and turning back to the stove to stir the contents of a huge iron pot. “But how do you even study something like that?”

Nick smiled. “Eyewitness accounts. As many police reports as I can get my hands on. Local legends. Scientists tend to downplay the importance of oral history.”

While he ticked down the list with his long, strong fingers, my mouth went dry. My worst fears were confirmed. He was just smart enough to be dangerous.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, tired of being ignored.

“Well, I thought we got off on the wrong foot the other day, so I wanted to come by and try to make a better second impression. Your mom was nice enough to keep me company while I waited and serve me some of this delicious cake.”

I scowled. I had to stop thinking about the cake. And Nick. And Nick smeared in cake icing. I glared at my mother. Clearly, this conspiracy was wider spread than I thought. I gritted my teeth and reached for my mother’s cake plate.

“No cake for you,” Mom said, smacking my hand away. “You’ll spoil your dinner.”

“He has some!” I pointed out, shaking my smarting fingers.

“He’s a guest.”

I narrowed my eyes at Nick while he smarmily chewed on a big bite of cake.

He would pay for this. Dearly.

“And I wanted to ask about your brother’s suggestion that you’d show me around. I’d be more than happy to pay you whatever you’d charge for guiding me around the trails. I’ve hiked around a little bit myself. But I haven’t seen much in the way of wildlife. Your brother has such a solid reputation in the field guide community, I was hoping you might show me the best places to look.”

“I just don’t have the time,” I lied.

“Nick, you’re going to stay for dinner, yes?” Mom asked, stirring the huge vat of chicken and dumplings on the stove. She had a knack for relieving the tension in a room by pretending my rudeness away with cooking. Many, many chickens had given up their lives to cover my conversational shortcomings.

“No, he’s not.”

“Maggie, I know you have better manners than that.”

Damn it. Mom was right. Werewolves have this whole thing about hospitality and making sure that guests are safe and well served. Guests never left werewolf land hungry or unhappy. I was behaving very badly, and I should have been ashamed, even if I wanted to make him swallow that stupid Yankees cap along with my cake.

I cleared my throat, recognizing when my mother had been pushed too far. “I’m sorry. What I meant to say was that Samson already invited Clay for dinner,” I said. “I wouldn’t want Nick to be uncomfortable.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” Nick said, his cheek dimpling.

“Shut it,” I hissed under my breath.

He smirked at me and pushed back from the table, pausing to scrape one last bite from the plate. Just to irritate me. “I’d love to stay, Gracie. And as much as I appreciate the invitation, I’ve got to head back to Grundy before it gets dark,” he said, packing his little notebook into his messenger bag. “I’m moving out of the motel into a rental place in town.”

“Rental place?”

“Yes, Mr. Gogan set it up for me,” he said, hitching his bag onto his shoulder. “I think the owner’s name is Quinn?”

My lip rippled back from my teeth just a tiny bit. Susie Q had been the first person Eli attacked the year before. She’d had to move in with her daughter in Texas because of her injuries. I wondered if he’d chosen the house on purpose or if it was a coincidence. More important, renting a house meant Nick was planning to stay in Grundy for more than just a “little research trip.” And despite the fact that I knew this was a bad thing, I couldn’t help but be a little happy about it.

Damn it.

“Could I have a rain check?” he asked my mother.

“Absolutely. Anytime you’re close by, come on over,” she said, shaking his hand. “It was lovely to meet you.”

“He’s a nice boy,” Mom told me as Nick shrugged into his jacket and moved toward the front door. “He has good manners.”

“You cannot invite a man into your home just because he calls you ma’am,” I reminded her.

“What if he has eyes the color of the morning sky and a butt that won’t quit?” she whispered.

“Ew, Mom!”

She lowered her voice to a range only she and I could hear. “I’m middle-aged, sweetheart. I’m not dead.”

My mother had been widowed young, and she hadn’t been on so much as a movie date since. It was starting to show. Filing that under “problems I have to solve before they become psychologically traumatic,” I followed Nick onto the porch.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to pull,” I told him as he took the steps. “But I want you to stay away from the valley. You’ll scare the locals . . . or annoy them into kicking your ass.”

He seemed honestly insulted, frowning up at me and pouting those soft-looking, pouty, full, pouty lips . . . and there went my train of thought. . .

“Why don’t you like me?” he asked. “I’m a fairly likable person. I could get you testimonials from a half-dozen or so people.”

“My mom doesn’t count,” I spat.

He objected, “Your mom should count twice. She loves me.”

“No shit,” I deadpanned. “Why are you here, Dr. Thatcher? Why are you so hell-bent on spending time around me?”

“I like you,” he said, shrugging. “You’re funny and prickly, which works for me. You know you’re beautiful, but you don’t seem to care about it all that much. And your bullshit tolerance is low—”

“Then you should realize that I’m not buying your answer.”

“Fine.” He lowered his voice and leaned ever so slightly toward me. We were at eye level and so close I could feel his warm, frosting-scented breath fanning over my cheek, making my mouth water. I could almost feel the burnt-gold strands of his hair brushing against my skin. “Besides hoping to charm you into a date, which is obviously not working, you know exactly why I’m here, Maggie. Your family can’t expect to protect Mo forever.”

Insert awkward pause in which I stare at Nick as if he’s whistling “O Canada” out of his left nostril.

“Wait . . . what?”

“Your sister-in-law has been sweet, polite, downright hospitable. But she has an uncanny way of wiggling out of answering questions.”

Hmm. Mo was way smarter than I gave her credit for. But I would never, ever tell her that to her face. I scoffed. “Why would you even talk to Mo?”

“Because I studied the reports for the wolf attacks last year. Do you realize that besides the occasional bar fight, there’s nothing in the state police reports even mentioning Grundy for the last two years until Mo reported being attacked by a trucker named John Teague?” he asked. I gave a noncommittal nod, so he just barreled on. “And then, all of a sudden, there’s a rash of wolf attacks around town. And wolf attacks are pretty rare. Wolves don’t normally come close enough to humans to attack them.”

“Unless they’re sick, which was Alan Dahling’s theory about the timber wolf Walt and Hank shot last year,” I told him.

“That wolf wasn’t nearly big enough to leave the bite marks left on Abner Golightly. And it certainly wasn’t big enough to kill two fully grown hikers,” he said. “Look, everything seemed to start with Mo. And she was connected to each of the attacks thereafter. She took in Susan Quinn’s dog. The missing hikers ate at the saloon just before they disappeared. She found Abner in the woods. Everything comes back to her. I think that Mo could be something more than human. And I think you and your family are helping her cover it up.”

If he was trying to imply that Mo was a werewolf, I was going to pee myself laughing. Wait, I think I was going to do that anyway. I had propped myself against the siding and was trying to contain the loud, hiccupping guffaws. “So, you think my sister-in-law, the shorthand cook, loving wife, and mother, is a werewolf?”

Somehow he managed to say with a straight face, “I think it’s possible that John Teague was a werewolf and that somehow, when he attacked Mo, he changed her.”

And now I was back to laughing. “That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard!”

“Why? There are shape-shifting legends found in almost every civilization. The Central Asian stories about snakes that could assume human form and the Japanese kitsune, fox spirits that were able to become beautiful women. When you go westward, you find the Wendigo, the Deer Woman, skinwalkers—”

“What does this have to do my with my sister-in-law supposedly wolfing out and terrorizing the townsfolk?”

“Why won’t Mo talk to me about the attack, Maggie?”

My laughter died as if he’d flipped a switch. From what I understood, Mo had been closing up the saloon last year, alone, and John Teague decided she was a prime target for robbery and possibly way more disturbing activities. He’d knocked her around when she wouldn’t cooperate, leaving her with bruises and scrapes across her face. She’d managed to get a few good licks in before my brother swooped in on four paws and saved the day. Mo didn’t connect human-shaped Cooper to the wolf at the time and thought maybe her furry savior had eaten Teague. However, Teague had managed to make it to his truck, then passed out from his injuries and died in a fiery crash outside town.

“She won’t talk to you about it because she won’t talk to anyone about it,” I growled. “Do you realize that most people in Grundy don’t even know about that night? Mo didn’t want a big fuss, the questions, the pitying looks. She just wanted to go on with her life. And then you come along with your questions, stirring everything up again. You’re surprised she’s not just hopping up and down to give you the full Barbara Walters treatment?”

For a moment, a flash of shame flickered across Nick’s face. “I didn’t realize. She seems so sturdy, you know? No-nonsense. I just . . . That doesn’t change what happened after the Teague incident. It doesn’t explain why she was so close to every wolf attack that followed.”

“Shit happens!” I exclaimed. “We live in the middle of one of the biggest untamed wildernesses left on earth. We’re bound to run into animals every once in a while. Sometimes there are no explanations! No matter how hard you try to force it to fit one of your bullshit theories, there’s just no explanation.”

“There’s always an explanation,” he countered, color rising into his cheeks as he stepped closer. I could hear his heart beat in his chest, practically hear the blood humming through his veins as we stood nose-to-nose. “Sometimes you have to sift through a couple of ‘bullshit theories’ before you find the right one, but eventually something clicks. If you would just explain to Mo that I don’t mean any harm. If anything, I want to help her.”

“Who says she needs help?”

“Well, then, why are you being so difficult?”

“Because it’s fun!” I shot back.

Nick tilted his head back and groaned in frustration.

“Maggie, are you driving another guy over the edge?” Samson asked from behind me.

I looked over to find Samson and Clay smirking at us. Well, Samson was smirking. Clay seemed to be glaring a little bit. Nick turned and made a motion to introduce himself to Samson, but I cut him off.

“Dr. Thatcher was just leaving,” I told them.

Samson’s face hardened at the mention of his name, and Nick, wisely, drew his hand back. Samson muttered, “Good.”

Apparently, Cooper had filled Samson in.

“Clay, why don’t you go inside?” I said. “Mom’s just setting the table. You, too, Samson.”

Clay moved past me, his hand squeezing mine, and warm little tingles sizzled up my arm. He shot Nick a curious look before walking through the door. Moving after Clay, Samson didn’t break eye contact with Nick, who couldn’t seem to understand the sudden shift in demeanor. It would have been far more impressive if Samson hadn’t nearly walked into the doorjamb headlong.

“So, that guy in there, Clay,” he said, jerking his head toward the door. “Are you dating him?”

“Yes, he is my possessive, recently paroled fiancé.”

His lips quirked. “So . . . no?”

“None of your business!” I yelled. “How did we go from ‘Your sister-in-law’s a werewolf’ to ‘Are you seeing anyone?’ Can’t you just have one conversation at a time, like a normal person?”

He shook his head and gave me another beautiful, irritating smile. “I’ll call you in a few days, to see if you change your mind about the guide thing.”

“I won’t change my mind, because you are clearly insane.”

“I’ll call you then,” he said, shrugging as he hopped into his truck. “And ask you out on a proper date. Your mom gave me your number.”

“Well, I won’t answer!” I called as he turned the ignition and waved before speeding off. I huffed out a breath. “How did that happen?”