“What?” I asked Cooper.
“Damned if I know,” he said, watching her bustle back and forth. “I’m still working on the whole ‘my sister’s a grown-up, and it’s normal for her to date’ thing. Why do you think I’m still drinking?”
I snorted. “Nice.”
“Just to be clear, I don’t like either one of them. It’s in the guy code. ‘Thou shalt despise any man who wants to nail your sister.’ “
“You’re coping well,” I noted.
His lips twitched as he raised the beer bottle to his mouth. “I’m seething on the inside.”
I placed a hand over Mo’s as she swept by with a damp rag. “What is going on, Mo? What’s got you all OCD?”
“Nick,” she said, wincing a little.
I looked around. Nick had disappeared like Wet Wipes on a porn set. “What about him?”
“He left,” she said hesitantly, which was a weird look for Little Miss Resolute Face. “While you were outside. With Clay.”
“Oh,” I said. I realized that meant he probably saw me kissing Clay, all snuggly against the side of Clay’s truck. My stomach felt sort of ripply and cold. “Oh.”
“Sorry!” she exclaimed. “We couldn’t keep him from leaving. I was afraid he would interrupt whatever you had going out there with Clay, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep him away from the door. I thought throwing myself at him and dragging him back inside would send an upsetting mixed message.”
“I think I would be upset by that,” Cooper dead-panned. “The only person I want you throwing yourself at is me.” Mo smiled at him in that gross, lovey-dovey, cartoon-eyes way that didn’t exactly help my icky stomach.
I shuddered. “Look, it’s no big deal. Nick and I, we’re trying to be friends. He knew I was here with a date. It’s not like I got all wound up when he was dancing with Saint Darby, the Animal Rescue Princess.”
“So, you’re OK with this?” Mo asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because you called her Saint Darby, the Animal Rescue Princess,” Mo said. “It expresses a certain amount of latent hostility.”
“Don’t try to shrink my head, hippie spawn,” I snapped at her.
“Well, now you’re expressing direct hostility,” she said. “Which is more your speed, anyway.”
“Shut it, Moonflower,” I shot back, using the super-secret, never-to-be-spoken-in-public legal name bestowed on her by her hippie parents.
“That was too far,” she growled. “See if I ever help you again.”
“Hey!” I shouted as she stormed toward the coat rack. “If you consider pulling my eyelashes out by the root help, you can keep it!”
10
I Need to Find New Places to Hide Pepper Spray
I HUFFED OUT A BREATH through my muzzle as my paws hit the ground. I turned to see that Clay had cleared the fallen fir tree right after me.
He gave me a triumphant little wolfy grin and leaped ahead of me. I barked and chased, falling into step with him. Clay had insisted on taking me running after another grueling pack meeting, and I couldn’t help but be grateful that he knew exactly what I needed. The pack structure had been somewhat unsettled over the past week.
Somehow, my abandoning Lee in the middle of a patrol to chase after Nick’s scent was some sort of final straw for Uncle Frank. He went from quietly grumbling about how I wasn’t doing what he would do in this situation to straight-out questioning my ability to lead. Frank told the uncles that maybe he voted for the wrong alpha candidate. Maybe having a woman for an alpha wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe they should consider my first year on the job a “probationary period,” during which I was failing miserably. After all, there had been attempts on my life and destruction of pack property in my first few months on the job. It had taken Cooper years to get into that much trouble.
Still, I’d stayed true to my word and let Nick study the valley. We started out with short visits, introducing him to my aunts as a cultural anthropologist studying communities in remote rural areas. It raised a few eyebrows, but with Cooper’s endorsement and my own, Nick was soon charming his way into kitchens. He was stuffed with cookies and roast hare, while he asked innocuous questions about how the ladies of the pack spent their days. What were their favorite recipes? How often did they get to visit friends outside the valley? How did they meet their husbands? He never mentioned werewolves or packs or mates, but I gathered that he was picking up information about our other nature, here and there. He could see things that the average human couldn’t, just because he was open to it.
Nick had this engaging way about him when he was interviewing that kept people talking. He asked questions, kept a funny running commentary. It was subtle without being sneaky or manipulative. Hell, he found out things about my relatives that even I didn’t know. For instance, I had no idea my uncle Louis once ran away to Canada to try to join a carnival . . . although when I thought about it, it made a certain amount of sense.
I found myself accompanying Nick on these visits, telling myself that I was just keeping an eye on the outsider and learning more about my own pack history. But more than anything, I just wanted to watch him work.