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

“Hey!” I called when I was centered, stripping out of my jacket. “You would not believe my day. I was actually glad to get away from the valley for a while.”

I kicked off my boots, which were caked with mud from the recent thaw. “Mo would probably say that’s a sign of personal growth or some shit. But I think it just proves how sexy you are—”

The silence of the house hit me full-force. The rooms were empty. It wasn’t just that Nick wasn’t responding. He wasn’t there. I couldn’t hear him breathing. I smelled blood, just the faintest trace of it. It was Billie all over again.

I looked back at the kitchen door, which had been unlocked. The front door was unlocked, too. There were no signs of a struggle, no forks and knives thrown on the floor, no torn pillows. I stumbled into the living room, the bedroom, terrified of what I might find. “Nick!” I yelled.

I forced myself to still, to focus on deep breaths, to pull the scents around me into my head and process. Some instinct was pulling me outside, toward the mountains behind the house. I ran out, following the faint scent of blood, trying to gauge how fresh it was, how much there was.

When the trail disappeared into the woods, I phased without bothering with my clothes, leaving a cloud of scraps in my wake. He’d been dragged. I could see the gouges his feet had made in the softening dirt. But who was doing the dragging? There was no other scent, just . . . dryer sheets.

For years to come, the smell of April Fresh was going to make me gag.

I followed the trail up the north face of the ridge, toward the outcropping of rocks that overlooked the town. Nick had talked about rappelling there a few times but had never made the trip.

Please, please, please, I begged. I can’t lose him now. Not now. Please.

The scent was getting stronger, the higher I climbed the trail. And the trees were getting thinner, meaning that I was getting closer and closer to the rock face. I could hear Nick’s heartbeat, strong and steady, through the trees.

He wasn’t scared. This was a good thing. Nick was calm. And if he was calm, the situation might not be as bad as I thought.

I burst through the tree line to see Nick lying on the muddy ground. He wasn’t calm; he was unconscious.

“Stop!” I yelled as I phased to my feet. “Lee, what are you doing?”

Lee had dropped Nick’s limp body dangerously close to the edge of the cliff. He had a rappelling harness strapped on Nick’s body. The harness was tethered to a tree a few feet away. Lee was rubbing the belay rope back and forth over a sharp rock, fraying it, so that when he tossed Nick over the side, the stress on the damaged fiber would snap.

“It has to look like a climbing accident,” Lee told me, his tone like that of someone explaining how to tie a fishing lure. “We don’t want anybody connecting his death with you.”

“Lee, just step away from Nick,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. Cautiously, I stepped toward Nick, but Lee’s head snapped up. I froze.

Even in my gut-churning panic over Nick’s proximity to the cliff, I couldn’t process what Lee was doing. Why? He’d always seemed so puffed up and harmless. I hadn’t seen. I didn’t want to see. How could someone betray me like this again? It almost hurt worse than Eli’s betrayal, because it was so random and needless.

Lee looked up at me, confused, and frowned. “This has to stop, Maggie. I’m going to help you tidy this one last mess up, but then I expect you to clean up your act.”

“What are you talking about, Lee?” I tried stepping closer, my palms upraised in a submissive gesture, but he stepped in front of Nick, cutting me off. He was so close to the edge. All it would take was the slightest push or movement, and he’d plummet off the rocks. I whimpered a little, shaking away the image of Nick’s body broken on the ground. I had to focus on Lee, make him move away, use some sign of dominance to remind him who the fuck he was dealing with.

But at the moment, my hands were shaking so badly I didn’t feel like Maggie Fucking Graham. I felt like throwing up.

“Overall, I think I’ve been pretty understanding about your little quirks,” Lee said, snapping me back to reality. “But really, a human?” His face flushed, darkened; his eyes narrowed. “Did you think I was going to sit by and let you humiliate me like that? Do you know what it was like for me, when members started whispering and snickering about my girl—my future mate—carrying on with a human?”

“Lee—”

“Stop saying my name like that!” Lee hissed. “Like I’m crazy! Like you’re trying to talk me down from a ledge. You don’t even know what I’ve done for you. You never appreciate how hard I’ve tried. You never see me. It’s always about you.”

“Just explain it to me,” I said. “Baby, please, I’m sorry. Just explain what I did, and I’ll apologize.” My voice shook as I called him “baby,” probably because it made me gag. But it seemed to calm him, to make him a preen a little, as if this was how he wanted the conversation to go. “What did I do wrong?”

“You never turned to me,” Lee said, exasperated.

“What do you mean?” I asked, stepping back, leading him away from the cliff.

“I wanted you to turn to me!” Lee yelled, pounding his chest with his fist. “I thought that if you could get off your damn high horse long enough to ask me for help, we might finally connect. But you always ran to Cooper or Samson. You never had time for me. And I thought maybe if Samson wasn’t there, in the way . . .”

“Did you take a shot at Samson?” I asked. He nodded. I groaned. “And the brakes on my truck?”>Clay threaded a handed through his hair, leaving it disheveled. He looked tired and scared and much younger than he was. “I’d spent so much time talking it up, I couldn’t not bring them here. I already have a couple of cousins who think that I shouldn’t be alpha, considering the fuck-up my Dad made of the position. If I backed out, I would lose any authority I had. There was no way out of it. And now I don’t know what to do. I can’t go back to them now and tell them that the story we’ve been surviving on for years was a load of crap. That we’re not even going to try to fight for this place.”

“But you don’t have to fight. You could have a home here.”

Clay stared at me as if I’d grown a second head. He scoffed. “What, you’re just going to let us waltz in and join you? Sure.”