Молли Харпер - How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf

“Well, it’s not like he’s going to huff and puff and blow your house down,” Evie said, glaring at me. “Cooper was one of the first kids in his generation to become a wolf. Everybody in his line has been able to change. It’s sort of a big deal. Every generation produces a pack. Every pack has a leader. It’s the natural order of things. Cooper was supposed to be his generation’s alpha, the leader. Everyone could tell the minute he first phased. He was the fastest, the strongest. But he chose to leave the packlands, the valley where my family lives, and move a hundred miles away to Grundy. For a werewolf, that’s one of the most difficult things you can do. Even moving this far away was devastating for him.”

“Why? Why is leaving so hard?”

Evie took a pull off my bottle of water and shrugged. “Centuries of instinct. A wolf’s brain is hard-wired to protect a certain area of land, to hunt there, to live there. And that’s the way it’s been for the pack for almost a thousand years. Everything in Cooper’s body is telling him to return home. Imagine fighting against that kind of draw, every waking moment of every day. You’d be kind of cranky, too.”

“But why did he leave?”

Evie pressed her lips together. “That’s pack business,” she said, shrugging. “My line is dead. I don’t change. Anything important that happens while the pack is in wolf form stays within the pack.”

“But that’s so . . . exclusive. Why would they cut off a whole section of their community just because they aren’t part of their special wolf club?”

“It’s nothing personal,” Evie said, and she seemed shocked that I was so put out about it. “And they are friendly and loving and open. They love us deadliners just as much as we love them. But they handle some pretty serious stuff for the village. The fewer people who know about it, the better. They don’t talk about it with us. When Cooper left, all we were told was that the village had been put in danger and that Cooper defended us all. They said he was hurt, taking some time to recover. But then, a few months later, I saw him here in Grundy, and he was fine—physically, anyway. Before, he was always so lively, funny, a lot like our cousin Samson. He wasn’t the same man anymore. He wouldn’t talk about going home, the pack, or the family. He went out of his way to avoid making friends. Hell, I was surprised he talked to me. It was months before anyone in the family admitted that he might not be coming back. If you really want to know, you should ask him.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s likely.” I snorted. “Does Buzz know about this whole wolf thing?”

“It wasn’t really something I could work into our dating conversations,” she said, smiling as she shook her head.

“But if he didn’t know, why did he get so wound up over not telling the police about the wolf attacking Teague?”

Evie gave me a sheepish little smile. “He thought maybe you imagined the wolf. He didn’t want that to get around. This is a small town. You don’t want to become known as Crazy Mo.”

“I knew it!” I exclaimed. “I knew he didn’t believe me.”

Evie shook her head at my incensed tone. “Mo, my family, the pack, we don’t tell outsiders our secret. For Cooper to have trusted you with this, it means something.”

We pushed our way back through the kitchen entrance. I sighed. “Evie, don’t start—” I stopped short when I saw Buzz, Abner, Walt, Nate, and Gertie gathered around the counter, looking stricken. Nate’s arm was around Gertie. Gertie was wiping tears from her face, leaving streaks of mascara on her round china-doll cheeks. Walt looked as if he wanted either to cry or to punch something.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Buzz.

Buzz squeezed Evie’s hand. “There was an attack, out at Susie Q’s place. Gertie found her in her driveway this morning. Susie’s pretty messed up. Her throat’s practically torn out. If Gertie hadn’t come along when she did . . .” He cast a sidelong glance at Gertie, who let loose a little sob. “The ambulance took her to the hospital in Dearly. She’s in intensive care.”

I pulled Buzz and Evie aside, my voice low. “Did someone beat her up?”

“No,” Buzz said, his jaw clenched. “This wasn’t a person, Mo. It was an animal. There were tracks everywhere and some fur. It looks like Susie was attacked by a wolf.”

My stomach flipped. How could it be a coincidence that the morning after Cooper went on a “wolf run,” Susie was found bleeding and bitten in her driveway? Honestly, how many giant wolves could there be running around Grundy?

Wolf-Cooper hadn’t so much as snapped at me, even in the painful aftermath of the trap. He’d been gentle, friendly. And he hadn’t had a speck of blood on him besides his own. But what if he’d just been too weak to want to eat me? Maybe werewolves knew better than to bite the hand that bandaged them. What if I’d rescued the wolf that had attacked Susie Q?

People came and chewed over Susie’s attack with their burgers and fries, and each seemed to have some story about seeing a wolf or chasing one off their property. Walt grumbled that the “damn tree huggers” and their programs that declared wolves a protected species increased the population, and now we were all going to be overrun with predators. Alan gently reminded Walt that the government had instituted bounty programs for hunters who brought in wolf carcasses and allowed hunters to shoot wolves from aircraft as “predator control.” Abner retorted that maybe we should start our own bounty program in Grundy. The conversation had me reaching for my Tums and praying for a distraction.

I was grateful when Gertie mentioned that someone needed to go by Susie’s place to take care of her dog. I volunteered to go on my lunch break. I loved to scratch behind Oscar’s ears whenever I visited Susie at the post office. The idea of him padding around the house, alone and confused, was a little heartbreaking.

As I pulled up to Susie’s neat little A-frame house, two miles outside town, I could hear Oscar frantically scratching at the door. He was used to being out and about all day and seemed indignant about being locked up. I walked to Susie’s door, ignoring the obvious bloody patch of grass near the driveway, and used Gertie’s key to let Oscar out.

Oscar was a pitiful black-and-tan specimen of dachshund-hood. If you looked in the breeding manuals for dachshunds and saw all of the things professionals try to eliminate from their lines, you’d have a description of Oscar: barrel-chested, with a wide, fat head and flat, chubby paws and a perfectly rounded stomach that refused to arch. He looked like a Rottweiler that had been shrunken and then stretched out horizontally. And to top it off, he’d lost part of his ear in a fight with an unnamed woodland suspect, so it was permanently stuck out, a spade-shaped sail on the side of his head.

At the moment, Oscar was wearing a seafoam-green doggie sweater with a turtleneck. When I opened the utility-room door to look for his food, I saw that this was just one of many sassy ensembles for Oscar. There were little doggie sweaters, a doggie parka, even a little dog-sized bumblebee Halloween costume.

Yikes.

I let Oscar run for a few minutes while I filled his food and water dishes. I walked along the perimeter of Susie’s yard, looking for . . . something, some proof that Cooper was innocent of postmaster mauling. Near the edge of the driveway, I found tracks, huge paw prints in the mud. They were big enough to be Cooper’s, but for all I knew, they could be bear prints.

“What are you looking for?”

“Shit!” I yelped, turning to find Cooper standing behind me, his hands shoved into his pockets. He looked so upset—scared and upset and pretty pissed off to see me crouching over wolf footprints as if I was some cross between Nancy Drew and Steve freaking Irwin.