“By biting his ass?”
“Mo says there are lots of important nerves and stuff back there. She was laughing too hard to get a lot of information across. I’m serious, Mags. I’m not cleaning up this mess, you got it? You’re always going on about you being the alpha. Great, you’re the alpha. You take care of this.” He slammed the phone down.
I yanked the receiver away from my ear, wincing. My dramatic eye roll was interrupted by a knock at the door. “What now?”
I opened the door to find Mo, holding one of her sinful brownie cheesecake pies. Two of my favorite desserts combined in a chocolate graham-cracker crust.
“Are you guys guilt-stalking me?” I huffed, closing the door behind me so my mother wouldn’t overhear. Mo, used to this sort of response from me, only smirked and stepped out of my way. “I told Cooper biting Nick was a mistake.”
Mo’s coal-black eyebrows winged up. “So that was you. Nice, Maggie. Excellent job keeping a low profile.”
I growled at her. “So, you drove all this way, bearing pie, to make sure Cooper’s lecture sank in?”
“Cooper doesn’t know I’m here. I’m on the clock.” She pressed the pie into my hands and then pulled a note out of her jacket pocket. “Nick called the saloon last night—thoroughly hopped up on pain meds, I might add—and begged Evie to arrange for your favorite food to be delivered to you ASAP. Offered her an obscene amount of money and then rambled on about you being ‘Uhura pretty’ and how you were ignoring his calls and he had to find some way to get through to you. I guess he knew the way to that teeny-tiny Grinch heart of yours is through your stomach.”
“Uhura pretty?” I repeated.
Mo shook her head, exasperated. “I gave up trying to understand men around here a long time ago. Are you going to read his note or not?”
Bobbling the heavy pie tin, I opened the little white envelope. I read Evie’s neat block print aloud. “Thinking of you, Nick. P.S. I think you may need to check your voice mail. It’s full.”
I frowned. Voice mail? I hadn’t looked at my cell phone in days. Not since I drove to the Glacier.
Aw, hell.
As usual, I’d left the phone in my truck. I only used it when I was driving, and I tended to forget about it otherwise. I plopped the pie into Mo’s hands and ran to retrieve my dead phone. Mom was hugging Mo while I bolted back to my room to connect it to the charger on my dresser. I had five missed calls. And three voice-mail messages. All starting the day before, from a weird area code that could only be Nick’s.
“Hey, Mom, when Nick asked for my number, which one did you give him?” I called, not really wanting her to answer.
“Your cell phone,” Mom called back. “I thought you’d probably want any messages he left you to be private.”
I heard Mo give a soft snicker.
Well, now I felt horrible. I’d marred perfectly good ass cheeks for no reason. It was as if I’d sneezed on the Mona Lisa.
Mo was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, while my mother mixed more waffle batter. “Mom, I’m going to need those waffles to go. I’m driving to Grundy.”
“Driving?” Mom asked, cracking a half-dozen eggs into her mixing bowl. “Today’s your running day.”
“I owe Dr. Thatcher an apology . . . or something.”
Mo hid her smirk behind her teacup, and Mom’s gaze narrowed. “For what?”
I took a precautionary step back. “It was just a misunderstanding, Mom. I might have hurt his, uh, pride a little bit.”
“Just his pride?” Mom asked pointedly.
I smiled innocently and dashed for the shower.
“You know, you’re going to have to get better at lying if you’re going to survive as a public servant,” Mom called after me.
THE DRIVE TO Grundy was spent coming up with really awkward apologies for biting Nick on the ass. And then I remembered that Nick didn’t know I was the one who bit him on the ass and that saying so would tip him off to the whole “world of werewolves” thing. Maybe I could just continue to let him think Mo bit him on the ass. That wouldn’t make things awkward.
The smart thing would be to send a detached, polite thank-you note for the pie or ignore him completely. But I felt this new, unpleasant gnawing sensation in my chest. I actually cared about what Nick thought of me. I worried about him thinking badly of me. I felt guilty for hurting him, not just little pangs of regret but full-on spasms of “why did I do that?”
I was maturing emotionally. Ew.
OK, pie. I’d stick with the pie. He’d taken the time to order me pie while he was laid up on a doughnut pillow. That he’d send me something edible was oddly touching. Courtship in this part of the country rarely centered on flowers and perfume. Nick had made an effort, and he’d put some thought into it. And that was doing strange things to my ability to produce coherent thoughts. By the time I pulled my truck into Nick’s driveway, I’d come up with “Thanks for the pie.”