How to Run with a Naked Werewolf (Naked Werewolf 3)

I’d learned my lesson. I checked myself out of the hospital against doctors’ orders and ran. I sold everything I had, which wasn’t much after Glenn’s playing Russian roulette with my credit rating. I bought fake IDs and a junker car and drove in jagged lines across the country, until anyone Glenn used to find me would be so confused they wouldn’t know where I was heading. I figured Alaska was as far as I could go without having to switch citizenships.

Most people try to use abandonment as a reason to dissolve a marriage. Glenn had used it as a reason to stall the divorce decree, stating that I should be present for the decision. He used the fact that I couldn’t return home to keep me tied to him.

And now, all these years later, Glenn was looking for me again. And I was running. Again.

How long was I going to live this strange, untethered half life? Would I be an eighty-year-old woman working under an assumed name in a bowling alley in Saskatoon, dreading that day my geriatric ex wobbled up to my door on his walker? Would I ever have a home again? Would I ever have a family? I was lucky to have escaped my marriage without a child. At this point in my life, a child, particularly Glenn’s child, would be a liability, a beautiful burden I couldn’t protect or move without worry. But the idea of never having one of my own put a cold, insistent pressure on my heart. I’d delivered so many children to the valley werewolves. Then again, having a baby would mean trusting someone enough to let him see me naked, perhaps even telling him my real name. If I had to wait until I was eighty to do that, it was going to be disappointing on several levels.

Shaking off those depressing thoughts, I shuffled into the bathroom, whacking my ankle against the bed frame. I showered in the surprisingly clean bathtub, hoping the hot water would help unwind the muscles in my back and neck.

After stepping out of the shower onto an improvised washcloth bath mat, I mopped the water from my skin with the thinnest towel this side of cheesecloth. I carefully sorted through Caleb’s bag, praying I wouldn’t find anything else that would set off my weirdo alarm. The gray boxer shorts swamped me, but they kept me from wandering around a strange motel room bottomless.

I shrugged into an old flannel shirt of his, curled back under the covers for warmth, and buried my face in the sleeve of the shirt. I may have looked like I was wearing the latest in refugee chic, but Caleb’s mossy, spicy smell made me feel . . . safe. As safe as I’d felt in a long time, which, considering how little I knew of him, was disconcerting at best.

I glanced down at the soft, well-worn plaid I was wearing. You will not steal this man’s shirt and shorts, I told myself. There are limits.

I was totally stealing Caleb’s shirt and shorts. I’d never slept more comfortably in my life. No dreams of screaming ex-husbands, confusion, and bruises. No dreams of running down the winding halls of the hospital, looking for coding alarms in a patient room, only to find that battered, flatlining patient was me. I didn’t dream at all, and it was lovely.

I woke up hours later to find Caleb reading through a case file from a plastic mobile drawer I’d seen earlier in the back of the truck. Each file was tagged with its own color-coded label and contained newspaper clippings, police reports, and carefully typed notes. Caleb was sitting on the uncomfortable wooden chair, stretching his long legs against the little wood-laminate dinette table. It would have been more comfortable to sit on the bed, but I appreciated that he gave me the space. He’d taken the time to change into a soft blue-and-gray plaid flannel shirt and jeans. I’d seen men in three-thousand-dollar tailored suits who didn’t make their clothes look that good. The lamp behind his head gave his black hair a bluish corona, as if some dark paper-pushing angel had fallen to earth.

Stupid good-looking, confusing werewolves.

He’d glanced over at me every few seconds, in a pattern that took me a minute or two to pin down. Review a page, check on me, review a page, check on me. It was as if he thought I would jump out of bed and launch myself out the window if he read two pages at a time.

I sat up, blinking blearily at him. “You have very neat files.”

“And you have ink on your back.” He grinned at the outraged expression on my face. “I never would have expected that from a girl like you.”

My cheeks flushed as I pulled at the hem of his shirt, covering the dark shapes dancing up my spine. Somewhere in Indiana, I had started getting tattoos, one star for every place I’d lived for more than a few nights. I’d read somewhere that foster kids do that sort of thing, keeping a list of all the families they’ve lived with. For me, it was a galaxy of tiny stars swirling along the ridges of my spine to remind myself of the number of times I’d managed to start over.

I’m not generally a superstitious person, but all this stuff started happening to me less than a week after I added the thirteenth star for McClusky, Alaska.

“Lucky star, my butt,” I muttered, knowing Caleb probably heard me but not really caring.

“I made some calls to Emerson’s and the motel where you were staying,” he said in a faintly bored tone, without looking up from his files. “Belinda is worried about you, and the state police want you for questioning in connection with the explosion in the parking lot. I told her I was your parole officer. She wasn’t surprised, by the way, figured anyone as quiet as you had to have some sort of past. But other than that, she—and the motel clerk—had nice things to say about you. Hard worker, dependable, honest but cagey.”

My cheeks flushed hot. I supposed I should have expected him to check out my story. He was a sort of semi-private-investigator with a secret supernatural lifestyle. The man had trust issues. Still, the recovering wife inside of me resented the intrusion. I didn’t like people checking up on me. Better not to bring it up. Better to ignore it and distract him with something else, avoid an argument.

“What did Belinda mean by ‘cagey’?” I grumbled to myself. “Just because I didn’t blab all of my personal problems doesn’t mean I’m cagey. I thought we were friends.”

Caleb smirked at me.

“I’m discreet,” I told him.

“Rabbit, I know cagey. And trust me, you’re cagey.”

“Hmph. Where were you while I was in my coma?” I asked, wiping at my face, because I was pretty sure I could feel dried drool patches on my cheeks. That was unfortunate, because Caleb was staring at me. Really hard.

“A bar down the street,” he said. “The owner is a friend of mine, and I thought he might have some information about Jerry. Nothing happens in this town without him knowing about it.”

“Your friend is a big gossip?” I asked as he held out a foam cup of lukewarm coffee, with little packets of sugar and creamer stacked carefully on top, which I drank greedily. It was bitter and tasted a little like battery acid, but it was also caffeinated. I would take what I could get.

“Bartenders are like priests armed with truth serum. People tell them everything,” he said. “If Len ever decides to start a blog, every marriage in Flint Creek will—poof—dissolve, just like that.”

I snorted an unladylike amount of coffee up my nose at the thought of a rural Alaskan bartender turning Gossip Girl. The coffee splashed down my neck, soaking into the front of his shirt. I blotted at it with a minuscule paper napkin. The intensity of his stare as he watched me dab at my chest made me feel . . . warm, fluttery sensations I had not felt in a very long time.

Get a grip, I chided myself. He was probably just irritated that I’d snorked coffee all over his shirt. “Sorry, I find myself in clothing crisis.”

“Looks better on you than it did on me, Rabbit,” he said, going back to his paperwork.