The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf

4





Of Mistaken Identities and Wounded Ass Cheeks





COOPER DIDN’T LOOK HAPPY when he answered his door—probably because I was beating on it. A lot.

“If you wake up the baby, I will smack you down like the hand of God,” he growled as I moved past him, deliberately shoulder-checking him.

I was in a foul mood. Despite his easy promise that he would, Nick had not called. It had been two days, and not a peep. I can’t say I was sitting by the phone staring it down, but there were a few times I ran across the room to grab for it when it did ring. I also might have unplugged and replugged it a few times to make sure it was working, but I will never admit that to a living soul.

This was unacceptable. I was Maggie F*cking Graham. I did not get wound up over some man. Yet here I was, twitching and pacing across my brother’s living room, with no idea what stupid excuse I would make for coming over beyond “I’m confused, and I want to hit something.”

Fortunately, the tension breaker I needed came in the form of Mo stumbling into the room wearing what looked like a sports bra, one of Cooper’s flannel shirts, and some basketball shorts. Her hair was pulled into one of those weird shih tzu puffs on top of her head. She blinked at me blearily. “What’s going on?”

I recoiled. “Gah! Is that outfit what you’re doing for birth control now?”

“Shut up,” she grumbled, pulling the ponytail out and fluffing her hair.

“Yes, because the ponytail was the problem.” I snorted. She punched my arm and yawned. I chuffed and shoved her back.

“So, what brings you to our door at this time of night, besides insulting me?” she asked, handing me one of the many bathrobes she kept on hand for when I dropped over on a run. She had this thing about not wanting naked people on her upholstery. Prude.

Clothing can make life awkward for werewolves, for whom the most comfortable state is to be in wolf form. In an environment where we’re relaxed, sometimes we don’t even realize we’ve changed. There’s a shift of light, and suddenly there’s a full-grown wolf standing next to you. It’s difficult to change form while dressed. At the same time, adult werewolves become conditioned to associate clothing with being out in public among humans. It becomes less of an issue for us as the weather gets colder, but for southern packs, clothing is handy as a reminder to stay on two feet.

You would think it would be weird to see your male relatives running around naked all the time, but really, you stop noticing. It’s sort of sad, really. You’ve seen one penis, you’ve seen them all.

I had to stop saying that in front of my mother, because she said it was something a hooker would put on a business card.

Cooper flopped down on the couch, throwing his arm over his eyes. Mo slumped next to him and buried her face in his shoulder. There was a fond little twitch to his lips as he nuzzled his nose along her brow line.

Gag me.

“It’s seven-thirty!” I exclaimed.

“Maggie, as much as I appreciate your dropping by to call us lame, please get to the point,” he muttered. “Keeping in mind that if you raise your voice above a whisper—” He stopped and gave a jaw-cracking yawn while waving his right palm at me. “Hand of God.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, showing my big brother exactly how much he intimidated me. “I thought you should know that Nick doesn’t think you’re a werewolf.”

Cooper sat up, his brow furrowed. “But that’s a good thing, right? Problem solved, you can go home now.”

“He thinks Mo is a werewolf,” I said, biting my lip and waiting for the reaction that would, indeed, wake up my niece.

Cooper locked eyes with me, looked over at his wife, grinned at me again, and then laughed so hard he nearly toppled off the couch.

“Bwahahahaahaha!” Cooper guffawed. “He thinks . . . he thinks . . . Mo?”

Mo threw up her hands. “I don’t see why it’s that funny!”

Mo’s indignant hiss was just what I needed to double over laughing. “Grr!” I gave a exaggerated fake growl. “I’m Mo, fierce predator. I could catch you if my designer thong wasn’t riding up!”

Cooper laughed. “Or how about, ‘I’m Mo, the baking werewolf. I’ll stuff you so full of chess squares you won’t be able to run away!”

“Are you done?” Mo asked in a dead, flat voice.

Cooper sucked in a breath. “Sorry, baby, it’s the sleep deprivation. It’s getting to me.” His face flushed as he spluttered. “Nope, I have one more.” Mo scowled at him. He bit his lip, suppressing a snicker. “I’m done.”

She scowled. “Can we get back to why Nick thinks I’m a wolf, please?”

I wiped at my eyes while she stared daggers at both of us. “Whew. Sorry, I have to catch my breath. He, ahem, he thinks John Teague turned you into a werewolf and then you were on some sort of Wolf-man rampage across the countryside,” I said, rubbing the ache in my side.

“And what stopped my rampage, exactly?” she asked dryly.

“Oh, Cooper,” I said, a giggle escaping my tightly pressed lips. “He saved you from yourself. And we, your loving human in-laws, are helping you suppress your homicidal urges.”

“Well, that’s awfully nice of us,” Cooper said blandly.

“Actually, we can use this,” Mo said, sitting up, getting that “I’ve got a project” expression that always scared the hell out of me. “I’ll just start eating raw meat, standing out in the street, howling at the moon. It will totally throw him off.”

“Yeah, and then we’ll go into Susie’s attic, rattle some chains, and make him think the house is haunted,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Susie Quinn’s place?” Cooper asked.

“Yeah, he’s renting it.”

Mo frowned. “That’s sort of ghoulish. Besides, how would we even get into Susie’s attic?”

“You know, I hadn’t considered that. I got sort of hung up on the fact that this means he’s going to be here for a while. Which is bad.”

“Well, it’s not good,” Cooper said, scratching his bare stomach and shuffling into the kitchen. “I’m getting something to eat. Mags, pecan pie?”

“I’m insulted you have to ask,” I told him as he unloaded one of Mo’s calorie-laden pie plates from the fridge. He cut two huge slabs and brought one to me.

Mo eyed the pie with longing, obviously thinking of the postbaby weight she was still shedding. “I hate you and your damned werewolf metabolism.”

Cooper offered his wife a little bite of pie, which was quite a concession for a wolf. We generally don’t share food if we can help it. She took a tiny birdlike nibble, which we all knew wouldn’t satisfy her. But the gesture on Cooper’s part was the important thing.

As was his habit, Cooper asked about Mom, Samson, Pops, the cranky aunties in the bridge club, and the kids who kept dipping tobacco behind the school. I told him that I’d solved the underage “chaw” problem the same way Pops had when he caught Cooper and Samson dipping when they were twelve. I let our young cousins Ricky and Benjamin finish off the can of Red Man they’d swiped from my uncle Steve, indulging until they were an unpleasant avocado color and finally upchucking violently while they paid Steve back for the stolen can.

“They’ll never dip again. Trust me.” Cooper shuddered. “And how’s Aunt Billie doing?”

The teasing smile evaporated from my face. “Good days and bad. Alicia says she’ll be lucid one minute and then freaking out the next. Or she just sits in a chair staring into nothing. I always seem to stop by when she’s having a bad spell, and sometimes I find myself trying to find reasons not to go over, which, of course, makes me feel even worse for taking advantage of Alicia and Clay.”

“You’ve got a lot on your plate,” Cooper told me, squeezing my shoulder. “And I know your ego and your God-given stubbornness make you think you can do it all. But it’s natural to want to try to find ways to lessen the load. Billie’s family, and you’re going to do right by her no matter what. Don’t feel guilty for letting Alicia and Clay shoulder some of the burden. They’re her family, too. You’re no good to anybody if you’re worn down to nothing.”

“I know,” I admitted softly, picking at the pie.

“I would say I’m proud of how you’re handling yourself as alpha, but I’m pretty sure you’d sock me one for being a sissy,” he said, nudging my arm.

I nodded but nudged him back.

“Speaking of Clay, how are you two doing?” Cooper asked, trying and failing to seem nonchalant.

“We’re fine,” I said, my brow crinkled. “Why?”

“Because Lee dropped by yesterday. With a moose carcass,” he added, chuckling nastily. “I just thought maybe Clay should be told about his competition.”

I groaned, which made Cooper that much happier.

Big, brawny, and without discernible brain function, Lee Whitaker was my uncle Frank’s brother-in-law’s son, raised in a pack eighty miles west of the valley. He’d been thrown in my face as a potential mate since I was, oh . . . born.

We went out on two measly dates, one of which was dinner at his mother’s house. And Lee seemed to think our getting married was already sewn up. He tried to monopolize my time at any and all gatherings between our packs. I once spent an entire Memorial Day pretending to have pinkeye just to keep him away.

Lee had good intentions but was dumb as a post. He also had some strange ideas about what he would be “entitled” to as my husband. He seemed to think I would be just handing the reins of my pack over to him, that I was just waiting for a big, strong man like him to sweep me off my feet so I never had to worry my little head with decisions like what to eat for breakfast or whether to go outside.

Clearly, he had never paid attention when I spoke.

If he hadn’t been Uncle Frank’s favorite nephew, I would have just beaten the hell out of him and sent him on his way. But Uncle Frank, my dad’s brother, had always been “sensitive” about his position in the pack. He resented the fact that Cooper had assumed the alpha role so young and felt that he hadn’t been given a fair shot. Which was sort of ridiculous, because he wasn’t even in the running. He protested—loudly—when Eli took over Cooper’s leadership role and became an all-around pain in Eli’s ass. Believing that I would one day marry Lee and give him some sort of power base within the pack had kept him quiet under my leadership. So, I put up with Lee and his blithe advances and contented myself with giving him minor injuries whenever he tried to touch me.

“I’ve meant to ask, is there a significance to the moose carcass?” Mo asked. “Beyond ‘ew’?”

“Lee is officially opening negotiations for Maggie’s paw,” Cooper said, his eyes glinting gleefully.

I huffed, gritting my teeth. “That’s so insulting, and just like him. He shouldn’t be coming to you to negotiate for my hand. He should be coming to me. I’m your alpha, not the other way around. Not to mention the fact that he’s a big pain in my ass, and I will never, ever . . . ever, marry him.”

“Not even if he was the last fertile werewolf on earth?” Cooper prodded.

I growled. “He would have to be the very last,” I muttered. “And I would look into artificial insemination.”

Cooper nearly choked on his pie, trying to contain his laughter.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” I barked.

“I really am,” Cooper said. “Just so you know, I told him that if he wanted to marry you, he was going to have to talk to you about it. He just shrugged and said he’d get around to it.”

“Well, this was completely unhelpful. I’m leaving now,” I told them. “Enjoy the many, many hours left in the evening, none of which you will spend sleeping. And I don’t mean that in the fun way.”

“That was mean,” Cooper told me. I blew him a raspberry and waved good-bye to Mo. As I walked out, I made like I was going to shut the door quietly, then slammed it at the last minute. I counted to three and waited for the baby to wail.

Just before I phased, I heard Mo mutter through the door, “If we’d moved to Australia when I suggested it, this wouldn’t be a problem.”



THE NEXT DAY, Nick still hadn’t called. I’d gone from making excuses for him to sitting at my desk, enjoying imagined scenarios where he might have been digested by a bear.

I ran past Susie Quinn’s place on my way home from Cooper and Mo’s . . . just because it was on my way. Seeing the warm, homey light shining through the windows, I’d paused. I’d sat on my haunches at the edge of the tree line. And I’d felt like a creepy stalker. But through that disquieting interest, I’d felt better, settled, to be sitting there, knowing he was inside, safe and well. When Cooper and I had started talking again the year before, he’d described his compulsive habit of running past Mo’s house while he was wolfed out, feeling at peace for the first time since he’d left the valley. He said it was like the primal part of his brain was leading him there every night, just to be near her. He’d been torn up for years over leaving home, and with Mo, he was given a little glimpse of tranquillity. And when they stopped being idiots and admitted that they were crazy for each other, that contentment had become part of his everyday life.

After watching Nick’s house, I’d woken up and felt calm, warm. I usually woke up thinking of all the things I had to get done, my mind racing and raring to get started. But the moment my eyes had popped open, I felt . . . light, I guess. I stretched under the covers and smiled into my pillow, reveling in the feeling of serenity washing over me.

Crap.

I forced myself to jump out of bed, to go through my normal routines. I kept trying to recapture my normal patterns and feelings. I knew it sounded like one of Mo’s lame pop-psychology rants, but in the absence of that anxiety, I was a little depressed. I’d never realized how much pressure I put on myself. The idea that Nick was somehow a solution to a problem that I didn’t know I had was upsetting.

My mental self-torture was interrupted when my cousin Will stuck his grizzled brown head through my office door. Will was one of my gruffer cousins, quick with the sarcasm and quicker to attack if a packmate was threatened. He’d married Angie, a wry, blond female from a Seattle-area pack, and produced two towheaded little boys, the only wolf boys to be born to our pack in the last five years.

“Hey, Maggie,” Will said, tossing me a Baggie of Angie’s famous oatmeal-raisin cookies. I opened the bag and inhaled the heavenly, spicy fragrance before shoving one into my mouth. Angie was known to shove dozens of cookies into Will’s coat pockets before he left for the day. If he hadn’t married her, he probably would have had to fight Samson and half the valley’s male population for her, just for the potential cookie privileges.

“I was just running along the east border, and there’s a hiker up there. Seems harmless enough, but I thought you’d want to know.”

“Blond?” I asked, frowning. I held my hand far over my head. “Yea tall? Looks like a hot, annoying Viking?”

“I don’t know how to respond to that,” Will said, shaking his head, taking a cookie for himself. “Not without you making fun of me later. But yeah, I think that would cover it.”

I snorted. “Did he see you?”

“Nah, I was being all stealthy-like,” he said, grinning. “I’m like a ninja with fur. Quiet, quick, and a mind like a steel trap.” He tapped his temple and winked at me.

“Yes, steel traps are scary and dangerous, too,” I muttered.

He laughed, and I told him to go on home. I shed my clothes, phased, and ran toward the east border. I might not have been as big as Samson or as strong as Cooper, but no one in the pack could match me for speed. Still, I kept my pace even, light. I didn’t want Nick to hear me coming.

What did he think he was doing? Forget the all-out rudeness of coming to my valley—again—without so much as stopping in town to let us know he was tromping around in our backyard. He was supposed to be touring the eastern Wheeler range. What was Nick looking for? He thought Mo was the wolf, so what was he doing up there instead of in Grundy?

Werewolves in the movies always had some convenient crypt or basement where they locked themselves up during the change. Did he think we had some bunker carved out for Mo in the woods somewhere? Did her family think we spent three nights a month tossing her rabbit carcasses and hoping for the best? The more I thought about it, the more his whole “Mo as a werewolf” scenario insulted me. Nothing about Mo screamed predatory or even vaguely threatening, unless you cut her off from chocolate. I was the tough one. I was the one who could take care of myself. I’d spent most of my life defining myself by those qualities. Why didn’t he see them in me?

This level of introspection could not be healthy. This was why I avoided self-help books.

I found him sitting on a rock, overlooking the valley. There was a backpack beside him on the ground, and he had a big coil of neon orange rope attached to it, with some carabiners and a few climbing blocks. He’d said he was a climber; was he planning on rappelling down the rock wall? That seemed like a rude thing to do in someone’s backyard without permission.

At the moment, he seemed content to sit. He could see everything from this spot, the green expanse of the valley walls, the thick forest that sheltered us from the harsher winds coming down the mountain and provided the rich supply of game we needed to keep the pack fed. It was a spot Cooper often used for “thinking,” a.k.a. “getting the hell away from Maggie and Samson for a few minutes of peace.” I’d come here a few times, but I always got my best ideas while running.

And there sat Nick, scribbling in that notebook again with a silly grin on his face.

Under the shelter of low-hanging spruce, I sat on my haunches and watched him. I watched the light and the wind play against his hair. Damn it, the sight of his wire-rim glasses sliding down his nose was bringing out some sort of professor fetish that I didn’t even know I had. My heart did this weird skittering thing, as if it was going to jump out of my chest and run away. I really needed to get this thing under control,

He turned suddenly and saw me.

The smartest thing to do would be to bolt, as a real wolf would do. But I just sat there frozen, staring at him. His face. There was such an expression of joy there, stretching his smile from ear to ear. I wasn’t one to throw around pretentious phrases like “childlike wonder,” but it was the only way to describe his face. Moving with slow, deliberate steps, he hunched down and stretched his hand out toward me.

Innocent wonder or no, if he tried to scratch behind my ears, I was so going to bite him.

“Mo?” he whispered, smiling down at me. “Is that you?”

I huffed and stepped back. He retracted the hand. “Wait!” he called as I backed into the tree line. “Mo?”

Mo? He looked at me that way, left me hanging for days on end, and now he thought I was Mo? I growled, the low, threatening sound resonating deep in my chest. This was beyond messed up. He flirted with me in human form and had a weird little werewolf crush on my sister-in-law.

Wasn’t this a story line in one of those lame-ass teen-vampire movies?

I was the one who’d spent weeks doing a sad little avoidance shuffle around him. And he was thinking of Mo? Not happening.

I cantered back over to him, huffing at him to get his attention. We locked eyes, and I did my best to glare at him, which is difficult to do without eyebrows. He narrowed his gaze. “You’re not Mo, are you?”

Too damn right, I wasn’t. I huffed again and pivoted in the opposite direction, to make him think I was leaving. Then I feinted left. Nick only had a second to turn before I lunged, sinking my teeth into his nicely rounded butt cheek.

“Yipe!” he cried, clutching at his ass. “What the? Hey! Come back here!” He hobbled after me, wincing in pain.

I made a sort of whickering sound, spitting out a chunk of the denim from his jeans. He gaped down at me. I sniffed, stuck my nose in the air, and trotted home, feeling a lot better about the situation.



THE FARTHER I got from Nick, the more that heavy guilty feeling crept into my chest. I wasn’t used to feeling remorse. It sort of sucked. Maybe I should go back and check on him. I slipped back into my jeans and sweater inside my office. I would just amble up there and pretend I was taking a long walk around the valley. I’d just make sure he made it to his truck OK and then come right back. I slipped on my boots and was bounding out of my office to do just that when I heard a sly voice to my left.

“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.”

I cringed.

There stood the pretender to my throne, all overdone muscle and wavy black hair. If Nick was my Aragorn, Lee was Lando Calrissian: handsome, confident, and about as trustworthy as a used-snowmobile salesman.

Lee quirked his full lips as he struck a casual pose against the wall of the community center. I was thankful that my body seemed as annoyed by Lee as the rest of me, and whatever hormones had been surging through my blood had now retreated like low tide. Clearly, despite the many lures of Lee’s exterior, my primal brain had some taste.

“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie,” Lee said again, because he was incapable of saying my name just once. He winked down at me with his wide brown eyes. And once again, I cursed Cooper and Samson for getting all the height in the family.

“Lee.” I acknowledged him, my voice as flat as Aunt Winnie’s ass.

“I had an interesting conversation with your brother the other day.”

I bared my teeth, making him take the slightest step back. “I heard about that.”

“So, Cooper told you we settled things?”

“You didn’t settle anything. Because Cooper isn’t going to arrange my marriage. I’m afraid you’re going to have to deal with me.”

He shrugged, and his voice dropped to this weird cross between seductive and condescending, as if he was trying to lure me into his van with candy. “I was just following the rules, Maggie. Cooper is the rightful alpha and the oldest male member of your family.”

“Do you really think that’s the tack you should take with me?” I demanded.

“Look, baby, when we’re married and you’ve grown up a little, you’ll see how silly you’re being.” When I stared at him, shocked speechless for once, he added, “Uncle Frank says you’ve had a human hanging around.”

“And?” I asked, wondering how Uncle Frank had heard about my interest in Nick and how many other pack members were talking about it.

“Well, I don’t know how I feel about my girl spending time with a human,” he said, stepping close enough that he could almost run the tip of his nose down the side of my face. I resisted the urge to shrink away. “You never get that smell out of your clothes.”

“What I do is none of your business, Lee.”

“I’ll never understand why so many of our females are letting humans sniff around them,” he continued, as if I hadn’t even spoken. “I mean, why dilute the blood? Just look at your brother’s little girl. She could have been the pride of the pack. And now what’s that pup good for?” He sniffed dismissively. “She’s not even breeding stock. She’ll live a quiet little life as some human’s wife, and no one will care. What a waste.”

I tried hard to remember that from Lee’s perspective, he wasn’t saying anything offensive. His pack was a little more “conservative” than mine. He was repeating the opinions he’d heard his whole life. And he just wasn’t bright enough to keep them to himself.

But I guess the way I was gritting my teeth gave me away, and Lee said, “Oh, don’t pretend that you and Cooper are back to being attached at the hip. I remember how you talked about him after he ran off. You can’t say you’re any prouder now that he’s a coward and a dead-breeder.”

I scowled at his use of a rarely spoken epithet for a dead-liner’s parent. I bunched my hand into a fist and had it half raised when Clay stuck his head through his front door.

He saw the fist and the pissed-off, uncomfortable look on my face and frowned. “Mags, you all right?”

I lifted an eyebrow. Enter Clark Kent or, at least, Val Kilmer as Batman. My packmates rarely asked me if I was OK, particularly the males. They usually assumed I was fine, as long as I wasn’t griping at them or hitting them in some way. But somehow Clay had managed to ask without making it sound patronizing, as if he was about to swoop in and rescue me. And it was sort of nice. The decency of the gesture made me feel a genuine rush of affection for him. “I’m fine, Clay. Thanks.”

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.”