Молли Харпер - How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf

“Have we talked about your tendency to sneak up behind me?” I growled.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I’m checking on Oscar.”

“Oscar’s over there.” He jerked his head toward the driveway. Oscar was on his belly, crouched down near the spot where Susie must have been found. He looked miserable and confused, peering up at me with those brown-black eyes. “What are you looking at?”

I stepped out of his way. “You tell me.”

He looked down at the ground and, with a pained expression, said, “It’s a wolf print. A big one.”

“What do you think of that?”

“What do you think I should think of it?”

“Look, let’s just cut through the bullshit, OK?” I cried. “You show up at my house after being caught in a bear trap as a wolf, and the next day we find out that one of our neighbors was mauled by a wolf. The timing, to me, seems a little weird. So I’m curious, Cooper. What do you make of that?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed, his face downcast. “I don’t remember being here last night. I don’t smell my scent here. I just smell . . . blood. Susie’s blood. I don’t know what to think.”

The hollow anguish in his voice let all of the steam out of my good old-fashioned storm cloud of mad. I was deflated and helpless, which seemed to be how he felt as well. I took a deep breath and stepped closer to him. He mirrored my movement, backing away. “For right now—just for right now—I’m going to choose to believe you didn’t have anything to do with this. You can be a real jerk sometimes, but I don’t think you could hurt a defenseless woman—even knowing what you did to John Teague.”

Much to my frustration, Cooper looked away and shoved his hands into his pockets. His mouth was set in a thin, unyielding line to keep any errant words from escaping. I lowered my voice and stepped closer, almost close enough to touch him. I kept my hands at my sides. “You’ve had plenty of chances to hurt me, in human and in wolf form, and you haven’t. So I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. I’m not going to tell a soul what happened at my house. I’m not going to behave any differently toward you. But so help me, Cooper Graham, if I find out that you’re taking advantage of that trust, if you’re the one who hurt Susie Q, I’ll tranque-dart your ass myself and deliver you to Alan’s front porch wrapped up with a little pink bow.”

His lips quirked. “You’ve got a dark streak, Mo Wenstein.”

I jabbed my finger into his shoulder. “Don’t you forget it.”

Oscar let out a long, plaintive howl. I turned to him and called, “Hold on just a second, Oscar.” I continued with Cooper, “I have a couple of questions, though, about being a werewolf. Now, what do you mean—” I turned back to where Cooper was standing.

He was gone. He’d managed to disappear into the woods without making a sound.

I grumbled, “And now I’m talking to myself. Damn werewolves.”

I ambled toward Oscar, muttering to myself about Cooper’s poor social skills and how easily ipecac could be slipped into a certain werewolf’s chili special.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” I said, scratching behind Oscar’s ears. “Susie’s not going to be coming back for a while. But we’ll take care of you. Come on, let’s go get you something to eat.”

I tried to coax Oscar into the house. No dice. I tried carrying him in, and he trotted right back outside. I took the doggie dishes out to him, and he rolled onto his back and turned his nose away from the bowl. “Not hungry?” I asked, holding a few pellets up to Oscar’s snout. Oscar rolled away.

Stupid cylindrical dog.

“OK, Oscar, I’ve got to go bye-bye, so if you’re not going to eat—” The moment I said “bye-bye,” Oscar hot-footed it toward Lucille . . . just in time for me to realize that in my haste to get the caterwauling Oscar out of the house, I’d left my driver’s-side door open. “No, no! Gah! Oscar, out of the truck!”

Who knew that dachshunds could leap five times their height? Oscar, who had made himself quite comfortable in my passenger seat, woofed as if to say, Too late. I called shotgun.

“Crap.” I laughed and shook my head at the silly dog. I doubted that Gertie would be in any shape to come back to Susie’s house after what she’d seen that morning. So my feeding Oscar was probably going to be a long-term arrangement until Susie got out of the hospital . . . if Susie got out of the hospital. It would probably be easier for me just to take Oscar to my house anyway. I rolled my eyes and ran back into the house for Oscar’s bag of food and bed. Oscar’s tail was thumping impatiently against the seat when I climbed back into the truck.

“No loud parties. No smoking. And you get no remote-control privileges,” I told him. Oscar yapped and turned in a circle, which I took as an OK.

“I’m a cat person,” I grumbled, pulling the truck into gear.

SUSIE Q’S PROGNOSIS was good, but she was still in intensive care. She had suffered extensive damage to her trachea and jaw, broken ribs, and internal injuries and had lost two fingers from her right hand trying to fend off the wolf. The doctors didn’t know whether she’d ever speak again. The idea of never hearing that bawdy twang again struck me as the saddest part of this ordeal. Between the injuries and the painkillers, Susie hadn’t been able to scribble more than a few words for the state police: “big wolf bit me.” For days after the attack, Alan hiked in circles around Susie’s house, searching for signs of the wolf, but he said the trail dried up a few miles into the woods.

“The tracks just disappeared, like the wolf sprouted wings and flew away,” he told me one day at lunch.

“Um, they can’t actually do that, right?” I asked him.

“Not that I’m aware of,” he said, shaking his head, but the idea seemed to lighten his foul mood a bit. “I called an expert in wolf behavior at ASU. He said it’s not unusual for a wolf to attack a lone, defenseless person if they happen to be out at night. But he said an attack like this is usually preceded by signs that the wolves are circling closer to town, problems with livestock being killed, pets going missing.”

“I haven’t heard anything like that,” I said.

Alan shrugged. “He said he’d send me a bunch of articles that should help me try to predict the wolf’s behavior patterns, unless, of course, it’s sick or wounded, in which case there’s no way to predict what it will do. I just want to find it before people go looking for it. This is the sort of thing that can get people crazy.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Have you seen Jaws? All those crazy fishermen going after a twenty-foot shark with a dinghy and a flare gun? It’s like that. People get all fired up about protecting their own. They’re far more likely to hurt themselves or each other than catch a monster.”

I shuddered at the image of my neighbors forming a torch-toting mob and hunting Cooper.

“Hey,” Alan said, seeing my stricken expression and squeezing my hand. “It’s OK. Don’t worry. I’ll catch it before anybody else gets hurt.”

I smiled, a little shaky. “I know you will. Is there anything I can do?”

He shook his head. “Just stay inside at night. Don’t leave the house after dark, even to take out your garbage. And carry that bear mace I gave you—at all times.”

“That doesn’t really help you.”

“Knowing you’re safe will help me considerably,” Alan told me. “I hear you’re keeping Oscar for a while?”

I nodded. “Gertie asked if I wouldn’t mind keeping him until further notice. And I don’t. He’s the best roommate I’ve ever had. He doesn’t eat my carefully labeled food or run up the phone bill. I don’t have to fight for TV or computer access. As long as we keep rent out of the equation, I think we’ll be fine.”