“I’m confused.”
“You’ve been a girl without a home for a long time, Mo. It’s time to stop looking. You know where you’re supposed to be. When trouble comes, you’re going to stick. You always have, you always will,” she said, eyeing my Tots. “Are you going to finish those?”
I blinked awake, and I swear I could still smell the car exhaust and the chili dogs. Cooper stirred beside me, his arm tightening instinctually around me as he felt me sit up. I pressed a kiss to his shoulder and flopped my head back onto my pillow.
It didn’t surprise me, as it had on occasion, to wake up with a large, naked werewolf curled around my body. These days, we were together morning, noon, and night. Naked Cooper Time was like a drug. No matter how much I got, I ended up jonesing for more. Winter was passing, and I hardly noticed. Don’t get me wrong, it was cold, so cold that I occasionally feared losing outlying areas of my body just from walking to and from my truck. There were days when the roads were impassable, even with four-wheel drive, as drifts of snow reaching over my head piled in some lanes. Buzz would have to come pick me up for work on his snowmobile, and I would make minuscule batches of food for the handful of people willing to brave the roads so they could gather around the big iron stove in the dining room and avoid their own cooking.
There were afternoons when the darkness closed in on me like a smothering blanket and the wind howled like some horrible, rabid thing. The light, or absence thereof, controlled what I did, where I went, when I ate. But the claustrophobia and depression I’d expected never really set in. It’s not difficult to spend days at a time trapped inside when you’ve got a warm fire, good food, and generally nude company. It was like a prolonged snow day. The one time I’d gotten a snow day in my brief tango with public school was when we had a freak ice storm my junior year. Hail isn’t that much fun to sled on.
Christmas came and went. I counted my blessings that my parents didn’t care enough about Christian holidays centered on meat consumption to call and guilt me into coming home. Abner came to the saloon dressed as Santa and gave everybody bottles of his homemade vodka. Cooper said it made a handy antiseptic, but drinking it was taking your life into your own hands.
Cooper didn’t mention going home to see his family, so I prepared a low-key feast for him, Buzz, and Evie. I wasn’t sure what a girl should buy her werewolf boyfriend, so I stuck with something safe: a sweater. Mind-numbingly boring, I know. Cooper made me a little carved wooden wolf, which we promptly put on my mantel to watch over me when he wasn’t there. It was either endearing or a little creepy.
My favorite werewolf seemed to have moved into my house without my noticing. His T-shirts started showing up in my closet. His toothbrush was next to mine on the sink. He showed up with bags of groceries to replace the mountains of food he consumed. We didn’t talk about it. It just was. Normally, this sort of invasion of privacy, the blurring of boundaries, would have me panicking. But I wanted him nearby. I had difficulty remembering what it was like not having him in my home, in my bed, nipping and nuzzling and rolling all over each other until his scent seemed absorbed into my pores.
The exceptions to our constant togetherness were the guiding jobs he took and the nights he was a wolf. He could choose not to change, but staying human for too long made him antsy. Besides, he said it was good for other predators to sense him prowling around the house. And it made the nights he was home that much sweeter. I knew what I was missing when he was gone. And it wasn’t just the sex . . . It was home, what home was supposed to be, someone to eat with, to talk to, to sleep with, always touching, always connected, as if we were afraid that when one of us woke up, the other would disappear like a dream.
We didn’t talk about Susie, unless it was in relation to Oscar. And he tended to clam up whenever I asked Alan for updates on the missing hikers, so I stopped talking about them in front of him. While Cooper insisted that it was probably just a sick or injured wolf, the probability that a plain old run-of-the-mill wolf was attacking people seemed to be shrinking.
Few of our neighbors remarked on our sudden couplehood, probably because Cooper growled if they did. Responses were limited to smirks and snickers. And Abner assured me that he would wait for me until I realized I needed someone with more experience. While Nate seemed somewhat surprised by my choice of Cooper, he said he just wanted me to be happy in Grundy, which was the equivalent of his blessing. Then he mentioned something about finding a girl for Alan on the Internet, which just made me feel horrible.
For his part, Alan had trouble keeping up a gracious front. I couldn’t say I blamed him. I pulled him aside at the saloon and tried to tell him about Cooper, but he cut me off. He understood, he said, but he couldn’t help feeling as if something special had been yanked out from under him.
“I’ll settle for being your friend, Mo,” he said, his eyes tight and unhappy. “But if Cooper ever drops the ball, all bets are off. I’m gonna sweep you off your feet before you know what hit you.”
I could only assume that I was the ball in this scenario.
Alan’s manner never changed with me. He was just as open and friendly as ever. But he rarely spoke to or about Cooper, especially if I was around.
I blinked again, hoping to get my eyes to adjust to the darkened bedroom. I patted the nightstand until I found my glasses so I could see the alarm clock. It was only 12:20, but it felt as if it should be morning already. With the sun setting so early, my internal clock was ticking out of balance. I sat up, wondering if baking at this hour would be considered workaholism.
Obviously, this dream of Kara was my subconscious reminding me that I was neglecting the people not currently in my bed. The only contact I’d had with Kara over the last few weeks was with pictures I’d sent her of the first measurable snow. I’d had Cooper photograph me standing in a waist-deep drift, grinning like a fool. She immediately started making plans to visit me at the spring thaw. I think that was based more on the pictures she saw of Cooper than on an overwhelming desire to see me. The subject line of her response e-mail was “Do they all look like that?”
“You all right?” Cooper asked, reaching to stroke a hand down my bare shoulder. He nudged the ridges of my spine with his nose, inhaling deeply and nipping at my neck.
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “Weird dream about the beach . . . and chili dogs.”
Cooper yawned, drawing me close. “Well, I’m no expert, but that sounds like a Freudian field day.”
“Yes, because I’m so sexually deprived,” I retorted.
Suddenly, Cooper’s ears perked up. He leaped out of bed, landing soundlessly on his feet and dashing to the front window. His eyes scanned the yard, and he grimaced.
“Cooper?”
“Wait here. Lock up behind me,” he told me, phasing as he opened the door. “Don’t come out until I call for you.”
I bolted the door, scrambling back into my bedroom for jeans and a shirt. I could hear deep, staccato barks outside. It sounded like a greeting or a warning or possibly a combination of both. I pulled back the curtain and tried to make out shapes in the dark front yard as I slipped my bare feet into a pair of Cooper’s boots. All I could see was the outline of Cooper’s wolf form just beyond the porch, at full attention, the fur on his back standing straight up. An answering series of barks sounded from the woods, and Cooper was off the porch in a flash. Just inside the tree line, I could see a huge reddish-brown wolf, almost a head and a half taller than Cooper’s own furry form, lumber into view. Cooper lunged at the strange wolf in a sort of canine tackle, latching on to the fur near the red wolf’s tail. The red wolf snapped its teeth around Cooper’s front leg, sweeping Cooper off his paws and pinning him to the ground. They rolled in the snow, barking and biting. I fumbled through the contents of my purse for the bear mace and ran outside.
“Cooper, get away!” I shouted, flipping the cap off the bear mace and preparing to spray the strange wolf as soon as Cooper was clear. I took a swinging kick at the red wolf’s side. “Get the hell off of him, you big, furry motherfu—”
The wolf dodged at the last minute, and the toe of my boot just barely caught its rib cage. The strange wolf yelped. I pressed the trigger, and a long stream of chemical spray came shooting out of the canister, right into the wolf’s eyes. I coughed as traces of the burning liquid roiled through the air. Cooper rolled away and phased onto his very human feet. He knocked the mace canister out of my hand.
“What are you doing?”
“He was hurting you!” I cried. “I was trying to help.”
“I wasn’t hurt,” he insisted. “That’s just how we say hello.”