“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.