How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf (Naked Werewolf 1)

“I honestly don’t know,” I said, shaking my head.

“Well, lost limbs aside, this is great. I’ve wanted to revamp the menu for a while,” she said as we whispered over the crackle of the fryer. “But when you don’t do the cooking, it’s pretty difficult to try to change what’s cooked. We’ll just tell Buzz that Pete dropped all of the menus in the sink and we have to print new ones.”

“There’s no way Buzz is going to believe that,” I said with a laugh.

“Hey, Pete,” she called into the dining room. “Could you bring me that stack of menus?”

I watched in shock as Evie went to take the menus from a compliant Pete, bumped his arm, and sent the menus plopping into the dishwater with a loud splash. My mouth popped open. Pete stammered an apology.

“Oh, honey, don’t worry about it. It was mostly my fault. Why don’t you go serve Abner his coffee, and I’ll clean this up, OK?” Clearly rattled, Pete nodded, grabbed the coffeepot, and slunk out of the kitchen. Evie looked very pleased with herself.

“I underestimate you,” I told Evie.

She shrugged. “Most people do.”

Eager to erase the dirty gray smear Teague had put on the Glacier for me, I threw myself into our plans for the next week. I even solemnly stood by Evie as she fed Buzz her “Pete dropped the menus” story with an alarming lack of guile.

One afternoon, fresh from Larson’s Antiques, a glorified secondhand shop that specialized in the leavings of former Grundy residents who wanted to make a fast escape from town, I breezed into the saloon. I had a mile-wide smile on my face as I carefully balanced a box of glass cake plates on my hip. I’d managed to get six plates for fifty dollars and hired Sarah Larson’s son, Nick, to come chop a load of firewood for me that weekend. All in all, it had been a very productive afternoon.

“Hey, Mo!” Buzz said in his best impression of Curly from The Three Stooges. It had taken him all of a week of knowing me to come up with that inside joke, but now that he considered himself my de facto big brother and protector, he felt free to tease me at will. Quietly pulling me aside a few days before and telling me that Teague’s body had been positively identified had been some sort of bonding moment for him. Alaskan men were very strange.

Pete stepped around the bar and helped with the heavy box of leaded glass.

“Look what I found, Evie!” I said, gingerly unwrapping my purchases. “I figured we could use them to display the new desserts. None of them match, but I thought that would be sort of quirky and fun.”

“Looks great, Mo.” She offered a wide smile as I tied on an apron and looked over the pending orders.

“When’s the big launch?” I turned to find Cooper sitting at the counter, glaring at me despite the relative calm of his voice.

“We start the new menu on Monday. What can I get for you?” I asked.>6

Kiss My Patois

IT WASN’T NEARLY AS difficult to talk Evie into changing the menu as I thought it would be.

Whether it was residual guilt over my being assaulted on the premises or the power of the almighty chocolate chess square, I was just happy she was open to new ideas. And it gave me something to think about other than the “incident.”

Against Evie’s protests, Buzz and I had decided not to tell anybody about my near-miss in the alley. The menfolk tended to get a little overvigilant when the delicate flowers of Grundy womanhood were threatened, despite the fact that most of those flowers could wield a chain saw with a surgeon’s precision. Still, Buzz didn’t want to cause a panic.

If customers asked about the scrape on my cheek, I told them I tripped on a porch step and took a header onto the ground. Abner and Walt offered to come by and fix the step for me, which made me feel loved but slightly guilty.

When Lynette asked me what happened, I told her Leonard Tremblay forgot our safe word.

Buzz and I managed a discreet meeting with Trooper Brent, a short, squatty bulldog of a man, in the saloon’s office. Trooper Brent was far more worried about whether we had more applesauce cake than about taking my statement. As far as he was concerned, I was unharmed, so there was no foul. I identified John Teague from a photo lineup. When Buzz tried to hand over the pictures of my injuries, Trooper Brent slid the envelope right back to him.

“There’s no need,” Brent said gruffly. “Teague’s truck was found twenty miles outside town. We think he lost control of his rig and rolled off an embankment into a ravine. Nobody saw the wreck, so it was burning for hours before anybody showed up. We’re still waiting for dental records to identify the body, but we’re pretty sure it’s him. And you can’t charge a dead man with assault.”

It seemed as if all of the air had been sucked out of the room. I couldn’t seem to feel anything but the rush of relief flooding through me. The man was dead, and I was glad. Well, not just glad. I was almost dizzy with savage delight that he was dead and that he had probably suffered quite a bit. What the hell was wrong with me? What kind of person would be filled with glee over another person being pinned in a burning vehicle? Maybe the changes I was going through in Grundy were not entirely positive.

What had happened to John Teague? What had happened to the wolf? I found that I cared far more about the wolf’s welfare than about Teague’s.

“Did Teague have any injuries besides what he might have sustained in the wreck?” I asked.

Brent lifted a bushy brown brow, as if he were surprised I knew such big words. Asshole.

“Well, as you can imagine, since the body was burned to the point that we’re relying on dental records to identify him, there wasn’t much left of it. Why do you ask?”

Buzz interjected before I could open my mouth. “Mo punched Teague in the nose in the alley. I think she thinks maybe if the body has a broken nose, it might make it easier to identify.”