Молли Харпер - The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf

“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.”

I WALKED INTO NICK’S KITCHEN, exhausted and drained by yet another conversation with Clay about how we could merge the two packs. I closed my eyes and took a moment to appreciate the blessed silence of the house.

It took a while to sort out the whole “sorry my brother killed your dad” mess, but I felt I could trust Clay. He wasn’t a terribly aggressive guy. He didn’t want attention or recognition. He just wanted what was best for everybody in his family, which I considered the mark of a good leader. Being able to respect him made working with him a lot easier.

It might have been more awkward if Cooper was still living in the valley. Cooper and Clay were cutting each other a pretty wide berth. As open-minded as Clay seemed, I doubted that patricide was a basis for the two of them to be BFFs. We were fortunate that so little time had passed. Blood feuds could take generations to take root in a pack. With so few of our kind remaining, we couldn’t afford that sort of pride and vengeance. Clay understood that, where Jonas had not.

As happy as I was that we were working toward tentative peace, I still had a pit of nagging worry that would surface when I least expected it. Something felt unsettled. To help build the trust between us, Clay had accounted for every member of his pack and their whereabouts surrounding the dates when my truck crashed, my office was trashed, Samson was shot, and Billie died. Dr. Moder had ruled the death accidental on Billie’s death certificate, but she couldn’t make a determination one way or the other. It’s not as if we could send the remains to a medical examiner.

The loose threads were still worrying me. I was missing something, and I hated that. But between the chaos of discovering who Clay and Alicia were and trying to keep our two packs from brawling, I was too exhausted to try to figure it out. I needed quiet. And a house that sheltered fewer than a dozen people. Samson had agreed to keep an eye on things for me long enough for a surprise visit to Nick’s place.

Nick was in the final phases of packing up to make room for the next renter. There were boxes strewn all over the living room. The wires for Nick’s DVD player were hanging forlornly from the entertainment center. Several taped cartons near the door were marked “Books that should not be thrown away upon penalty of junk-punching.”

I sincerely hoped Samson was the one who wrote that.

I shut the door, closed my eyes, and reveled in being able to hear myself think.

“Hey!” I called when I was centered, stripping out of my jacket. “You would not believe my day. I was actually glad to get away from the valley for a while.”

I kicked off my boots, which were caked with mud from the recent thaw. “Mo would probably say that’s a sign of personal growth or some shit. But I think it just proves how sexy you are—” The silence of the house hit me full-force. The rooms were empty. It wasn’t just that Nick wasn’t responding. He wasn’t there. I couldn’t hear him breathing. I smelled blood, just the faintest trace of it. It was Billie all over again.

I looked back at the kitchen door, which had been unlocked. The front door was unlocked, too. There were no signs of a struggle, no forks and knives thrown on the floor, no torn pillows. I stumbled into the living room, the bedroom, terrified of what I might find. “Nick!” I yelled.

I forced myself to still, to focus on deep breaths, to pull the scents around me into my head and process. Some instinct was pulling me outside, toward the mountains behind the house. I ran out, following the faint scent of blood, trying to gauge how fresh it was, how much there was.

When the trail disappeared into the woods, I phased without bothering with my clothes, leaving a cloud of scraps in my wake. He’d been dragged. I could see the gouges his feet had made in the softening dirt. But who was doing the dragging? There was no other scent, just . . . dryer sheets.

For years to come, the smell of April Fresh was going to make me gag.

I followed the trail up the north face of the ridge, toward the outcropping of rocks that overlooked the town. Nick had talked about rappelling there a few times but had never made the trip.

Please, please, please, I begged. I can’t lose him now. Not now. Please.

The scent was getting stronger, the higher I climbed the trail. And the trees were getting thinner, meaning that I was getting closer and closer to the rock face. I could hear Nick’s heartbeat, strong and steady, through the trees.

He wasn’t scared. This was a good thing. Nick was calm. And if he was calm, the situation might not be as bad as I thought.

I burst through the tree line to see Nick lying on the muddy ground. He wasn’t calm; he was unconscious.

“Stop!” I yelled as I phased to my feet. “Lee, what are you doing?”

Lee had dropped Nick’s limp body dangerously close to the edge of the cliff. He had a rappelling harness strapped on Nick’s body. The harness was tethered to a tree a few feet away. Lee was rubbing the belay rope back and forth over a sharp rock, fraying it, so that when he tossed Nick over the side, the stress on the damaged fiber would snap.

“It has to look like a climbing accident,” Lee told me, his tone like that of someone explaining how to tie a fishing lure. “We don’t want anybody connecting his death with you.”

“Lee, just step away from Nick,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. Cautiously, I stepped toward Nick, but Lee’s head snapped up. I froze.

Even in my gut-churning panic over Nick’s proximity to the cliff, I couldn’t process what Lee was doing. Why? He’d always seemed so puffed up and harmless. I hadn’t seen. I didn’t want to see. How could someone betray me like this again? It almost hurt worse than Eli’s betrayal, because it was so random and needless.

Lee looked up at me, confused, and frowned. “This has to stop, Maggie. I’m going to help you tidy this one last mess up, but then I expect you to clean up your act.”

“What are you talking about, Lee?” I tried stepping closer, my palms upraised in a submissive gesture, but he stepped in front of Nick, cutting me off. He was so close to the edge. All it would take was the slightest push or movement, and he’d plummet off the rocks. I whimpered a little, shaking away the image of Nick’s body broken on the ground. I had to focus on Lee, make him move away, use some sign of dominance to remind him who the fuck he was dealing with.