“Sorry,” he said, loosening his grip when he saw my distress. “I just don’t want you to slip away.”
Before I could cobble together some response, someone tapped on Alan’s shoulder. We turned to find Cooper standing behind us. “Mind if I cut in?”
My stupid, traitorous heart fluttered against my rib cage. I’d only seen people “cut in” on dancers in old movies. Alan didn’t seem too pleased by the interruption. His grip on my waist grew just a fraction tighter before Cooper blithely peeled Alan’s arms away and twirled me to a corner across the room, leaving Alan scowling in the middle of the dance floor. Lynette sidled up to him and offered him another beer.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” I murmured as Cooper’s hands slid against the fabric over my back. My breath caught, and a warm, liquid wave of sensation spread from my chest to my belly. Gah! Stupid sexy werewolves! This was why I couldn’t take Alan home. Because as much as I cared for him, he had never made me, could never make me, feel the way Cooper did. I would know it. And considering my responses so far, if I went to bed with Alan, he would know it. And the last thing I wanted was to hurt him.
Fine. Alan wasn’t the right choice, but that didn’t mean sleeping with Cooper made any more sense. I had to think of nonsexy things. Baseball. Bill O’Reilly naked. The dead, fetid smell of Delta mud on an August day. Leonard Tremblay’s hot tub. Wet socks. Muddy, wet, naked Cooper in a hot tub. Dang it!
“Well, you are waving the red flag in front of an awful lot of bulls,” he said, glancing down at my crimson dress. He smirked, not bothering to hide the fact that he was looking straight into my cleavage. “And you know me, always coming to your rescue.”
I gave him a sweetly acidic smile. “Oh, really? Well, maybe if you’d spend less time lurking, you wouldn’t feel the need to come to my rescue all the time.”
“Lurking?”
“You heard me.”
Irritation crept into Cooper’s voice. “Well, maybe if you had the sense not to walk into dark alleyways alone or go wandering blind into the wilderness, I wouldn’t feel the need to stay so close.” He lowered his voice so our dance-floor companions wouldn’t hear us.
“You know, I know where to get more bear traps. I’ll bet if I told Alan I was having a problem with a wolf wandering outside my house at night, he would set up a minefield of them,” I hissed back.
“Well, hell, I’ll bet you he’d move right in.” Cooper scowled back. “Now that you two are—”
“What I may or may not be doing with Alan is none of your business,” I said, my cheeks flushing. “And why would you even care?”
He admitted, “I don’t like seeing you dancing with him.”
“So it’s a dog-in-the-manger thing?” I snorted, lowering my voice. “I’m sorry, is that culturally offensive to werewolves?”
His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared as he demanded, “What do you mean, dog in the manger?”
“You don’t want me, but you don’t want anybody else to have me.”
“I never said I didn’t want you,” he said, his husky voice so soft I was absolutely sure I was the only person in the room who heard it. He was looking down, his thick black lashes resting on his cheekbones. His hands pulled me closer, pressing me against his chest. My heart thudded erratically. Every face and every voice in the room faded away as I focused on Cooper’s mouth, the generous peach-soft curve of his lips. I surrendered to the gravitational pull that had me leaning closer, mingling my breath with the spicy warmth of his.>Great, that was just vague enough to let Alan assume that we were having torrid monkey sex on my front porch when we were rudely interrupted by the bear.
Alan’s own teeth showed. “Well, it’s nice to hear that people are keeping a close eye on Mo for me.” He slid his hand across the counter and laced his fingers through mine.
I was not an expert in animal behavior, but even I recognized when territory was being marked. Alan might as well have been peeing a circle around my feet. He grinned up at me. Cooper scowled. I arched my eyebrows and pried my fingers gently out of Alan’s.
“I am choking on all the testosterone, so I’ll back away into the kitchen,” I muttered.
When I was at a safe distance, the tension seemed to ebb out of Alan’s face, while Cooper seemed to grow more agitated. He slid off his stool and slapped his baseball cap back onto his head.
“I’ve got to go,” he grumbled.
“What about your order?” Evie called as the front door jangled closed.
“Feed it to Alan,” he huffed.
“What was that about?” Evie asked me, putting aside the list of supplies we would need for our party menu of crab cakes, fancy ham biscuits, and “cheese pies.” (We couldn’t call them mini-quiches, or the male guests wouldn’t eat them.)
“I don’t pretend to understand the male mind, Evie, that one in particular.”
Evie shook her head. “The Amazons had the right idea. Keep men around for procreation only.”
I nodded. “And don’t let them speak.”
IN THE END, I wore the red dress to the Big Freeze party, just to get Evie off my back. And because I’d decided that I wanted to take Alan home with me that night. If anything would get that message across, it was the red dress.