The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf (Naked Werewolf 2)

Using the toggle thing, he scanned past the signal coming from my mom’s front door and did a cartoonish double-take. “What the?”

Nick squinted at the screen, aghast at the image of what appeared to be a dozen or so of my male cousins, lined up in front of my house with their pants around their ankles and their bare asses aimed directly at the camera. There were enough full moons to orbit Jupiter.

“You really shouldn’t have shown Samson where the cameras are,” I muttered.

“How did he organize that so quickly?” Nick asked, nodding toward Samson’s naked rear at the end of the butt-cheek chorus line.

“Well, when properly motivated, Samson can do just about anything. We’re fortunate that his main interests are food and pranks.”

“I mean, I can see grabbing one or two guys, but so many? He could take over the world,” Nick marveled.

I snorted. “As long as the world’s governments could be cowed into submission by a bottomless army, yes.”

He shuddered. “Well, there’s an image that will never leave my head. Thanks for that.”

“I do what I can.”

* * *

FULL-BLOWN WINTER CLOSED in on the valley like a fist. The temperatures dive-bombed below freezing, putting us all in instinctual panic mode. And even though we spent the better part of the year preparing our houses, putting up food, winterizing our vehicles, I still ended up scrambling around, helping my aunt Doris patch a weak spot on her roof, helping Samson with last-minute runs to the bulk warehouse store in Burney for toilet paper and batteries. Clay and I took a day trip to a big pharmacy in Burney, where we could stock up on Billie’s meds. When the snow blew in and covered the valley in a fluffy white blanket and I finally had a chance to stop and breathe, I sort of collapsed and slept for two days.

Weeks passed, the holidays came and went, and even with the relative quiet, I was scared to relax into the season, to give myself downtime. I used pack morale as an excuse. Werewolves tend to get sort of restless when we’re boxed in. Little disagreements over a poker game or the last buffalo wing can turn into full-on duels to the death if you’re not careful. So, I spent a good portion of my day sending my family members on random errands, finding some weird chores that needed to be done, or sending them on extra patrols around the perimeter. I organized checkers tournaments, darning bees, Scrabble nights. I basically became the pack’s cruise director.

The pathways between Grundy and the valley were kept warm. Mom worried too much for Mo to drive the baby from Grundy, so she phased every few days so she could run over and visit Eva. Neither snow nor sleet nor an act of God would keep my mother from snuggling that fuzzy-headed baby.

Eva seemed to be on some sort of mission to work her evil/cute baby magic on me. Ever since she’d started toddling around on those chubby little legs, she’d been targeting me, the least enthusiastic baby person in the room. I think she enjoyed the challenge, which proved that we were related.>Nick clearly didn’t follow this line of logic, which was unsurprising, since even I was having a hard time with it. “Or he could come back and catch one of the other females by surprise. You’ve got to tell somebody, Maggie. Cooper, Samson, somebody.”

“No.” I pushed to my feet, trying to brazen my way through the fact that I was bare-ass naked. “I’ll take care of this myself. And if anyone finds out, I’ll know it was you who told them. And then—”

“Yeah, yeah, no one will be able to find my body, yadda, yadda.”

“I need to come up with new threats,” I muttered, picking up the jeans. Like the bag, it reeked of fabric softener. I could probably track him, but at the moment, I didn’t feel quite strong enough to confront the guy who tried to choke me with cheap luggage. Plus, Nick would probably follow me, and that could get ugly. I grunted, tossing them off the cliff. “If he comes back, he’s not going to be able to find his pants.” Nick gave me a questioning look. I shrugged. “It’s about the small victories.”

“I’m walking back with you,” he insisted.

“What about Clay?”

“I really don’t give a shit about Clay.”

“Fine,” I sighed as he wrapped his jacket around my shoulders and we started back to the valley. “So Pops doesn’t like you, huh?”

“No, he does not,” he said, shaking his head. “I asked him if I could keep him company while he worked in the shop, and he shut the door in my face. Actually, he shut the door on my face.”

“But he likes everybody. Even Mo.”

“Well, apparently, he draws the line at humans who are ‘sniffin’ after’ his granddaughter,” Nick said, in a spot-on impersonation of Pops. “His exact words.”

I laughed weakly. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Says the person who didn’t have a door shut on her face.”

11

Karma Is One Organized Wench

I GOT MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Nick’s spider-monkey powers about a week later, when I found him gallivanting through the freaking treetops without so much as a harness, clinging to the branches by the goodwill of gravity.

I thought I was imagining that flash of red jacket a good thirty feet off the ground from a distance, a sort of signal flare against the patches of white and green. Pops had told me that Nick and Samson were headed in this direction with a bunch of Nick’s hightech gear earlier in the day. While he didn’t seem thrilled to see Nick in the valley again, he seemed to approve of whatever Nick was planning to do . . . which he said I would have to see for myself.