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

Dr. Moder had taken the body to the clinic. She said Billie had hit her head against the corner of the counter with enough force to break her neck. As if that wasn’t enough, the fall also cracked Billie’s skull, causing a hemorrhage that would have been fatal. The only good news was that the broken neck most likely prevented any suffering. The doc couldn’t tell me how Billie had fallen, but given the state of the kitchen, she’d probably been in the middle of an episode and either lost her balance or passed out. As much as I wanted to blame Billie’s death on some unseen intruder, Dr. Moder said it was more likely that she’d simply fallen hard enough to do that sort of damage. As strong as we are, our bones can only stand up to so much as we age.

I made a mental note to pick up some calcium supplements for Pops.

Suddenly, all of the weird occurrences seemed silly by comparison. I felt indulgent and paranoid for trying to find hidden dangers while missing out on the real threat Billie posed to herself.

For the fourth time in an hour, I picked up the phone to call Matthew. As alpha, it fell to me to inform Billie’s kin of her passing. These were the rare times when my job sucked ass. I’d left three voice-mail messages, but by now, I knew the best method was to keep calling until he picked up. This time, in a near-miraculous show of cell-phone mastery, Matt managed to pick up before it went to voice mail. He chattered from the other end of the line about births and matings in his own pack, physically incapable of letting someone else enter the conversation until he had to take a breath.

“Look, Matt, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Billie is gone.” Blunt, yes, but necessary if I wanted to shut him up for a minute. “We’re not sure what happened, but it looks like she fell and hit her head in the kitchen.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, the longest pause I could remember while talking to Matt. He sighed and gave the expected platitudes about long life and Billie being in a better place. We talked about the funeral, made arrangements for a contingent from Matt’s pack to stay in houses around the valley. Matt had clearly been expecting this call for a while, because he seemed to have the end planned out. He loved logistics, which was part of why he was a pretty effective pack leader. Handling the mundane details seemed to help. I could handle busy work.

As the call was winding down, Matt said, “Maggie, I hope you know how much I appreciate you taking care of Billie in her last months. I know it was difficult, but deep down, I’m sure she really appreciated being able to stay in her own home.”

I smiled and felt just a tiny bit of the weight on my chest wiggle loose. “Oh, I can’t take all the credit. Clay and Alicia did most of the work.”

Another long pause from Matt. Two in one phone call, which was unprecedented. “Who?”

“Clay and Alicia,” I repeated. “Renard. Your cousins? Billie’s nephew and niece?”

“Mags, I have fifty-six first cousins alone, and none of them is named Clay or Alicia. And Billie was an only child. Where did these people say they were from?”

The office door opened, and Clay stepped inside, an amiable grin stretched across his face. All of the blood in my veins seemed to flutter and freeze.

The phone was hanging heavily against the side of my face. I took in a breath, jittery from shock and rage and the knowledge that I had actually kissed this guy. I’d given him the benefit of the doubt when Nick suggested that he could have been the one on the cliff, when I considered the damage to my brakes and his mechanical know-how. I believed he wasn’t capable of it because of the way he took care of Billie.

I steadied my voice and tried to loosen up enough to smile back at the son of a bitch. “OK, that’s great news. I’ll talk to you later.”

Matt noted the suspicious lift in my tone. “Maggie, are you OK?” he demanded.

“Sure, I’ll tell Mom you called. Dinner on Thursday,” I said. “ ’Bye, Coop.”

“Maggie—” Matt’s voice was cut off with a click as I dropped the receiver onto the cradle.

Clay gave me a subdued little half-smile. “Dinner on Thursday? Is it wrong to hope for a doggie bag? Because Mo can make a mean . . . well, pretty much anything.”

I looked up at him. The relaxed expression on his face was what killed me. He’d been lying to us for months, and it didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. He’d lived with my aunt, in her house, living off the pack’s goodwill, for months and seemed to have every intention of continuing. And he wasn’t even nervous.

I sprang over the desk. Clay’s eyes widened briefly before I gripped his collar and slammed him into the wall. But as I snapped and growled, he just looked amused.

“I knew we should have left when Billie died.” He sighed, shoving back at me but not moving me. He didn’t seem perturbed by this, as if I wasn’t this close to ripping his throat out. “Alicia said it would look suspicious if we just ran off now. I think maybe she got too used to living in one place. And she liked the old lady. She wanted to stick around for the service. My sister’s a sentimental girl, never could cure her of it.”

“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

“Oh, Maggie,” Clay said, tilting his head and grinning nastily. “I know we’re not dating anymore, but I hoped we could still be friends.” I sneered at him and swiped my fingernails down his cheek. He didn’t even register the welts of blood I left on his face. “No? Well, that’s a shame.”

He shoved me again, sending me flying over my desk this time, tumbling into the far wall. He’d phased and lunged for me. I shot up to my feet and ran at him again, phasing on the fly. Our wolfen bodies collided, and his teeth scraped my throat. I turned, yanking my exposed fur out of his mouth, and landed on two human feet. He phased to human again, and I head-butted him, the thickest part of my forehead cracking his nose. He grinned. And punched me right in the mouth.

“You know, I was sort of hoping we could avoid all this cloak-and-dagger shit. You’re a pretty girl, and you can be downright tolerable sometimes. I thought maybe you and I could get married, you could make me the alpha male, and I could bring my family in, no questions asked. But you’re just so damned stubborn, aren’t you, Maggie? You have to do things the hard way.”

Papers and books scattered around the room as we pounded on each other in wolf and human forms. But despite several opportunities, he didn’t strike any serious blows. He just kept slapping me around and phasing, wolf to man and back again, and honor sort of dictated that I phase, too, to keep us on the same footing. The exhaustion of the constant shifting combined with being smacked around was draining and demoralizing.

“You still haven’t figured it out, have you?” He sneered, standing over me. “Well, that’s disappointing. You know, you’re not a very smart girl.”

I picked up my desk chair and threw it at him, catching his shoulders and knocking him to the ground. I lunged, kicking him in the ribs and knocking him onto his back. “Who are you?”

“I’m a little hurt that you didn’t notice the resemblance,” he spat, dribbling blood onto the tile floor of the office. “Everybody in my pack told me I looked just like my dad. Of course, you and your brother killed those people.”

I stared down at him, analyzing the sandy hair, the light brown eyes. When I’d seen that mouth, it had been twisted into a feral snarl. The eyes had been sharp and too bright, burning with hate and desperation. I felt my arms drop to my sides, the shock leeching all of the energy out of my limbs.