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

I spotted Clay’s truck in my great-aunt Billie’s driveway and decided to duck in to tell Alicia that her brother would be at our place for dinner. I took a few deep breaths before I knocked. Visiting Billie was always sort of awkward. Besides being a murderous, back-stabbing traitor, her son, my alpha predecessor, Eli, had also been the primary caretaker for Billie. Between setting us up for a takeover with another pack, attacking humans at random to drive Cooper away, and trying to kill Mo, I honestly don’t know how he found time for it all.

Billie had dementia, a rare affliction among werewolves, and it had wiped her once-sharp mind like a slate. She needed almost constant care to keep her from phasing and running away. The last time she did this, she was found wandering naked in human form at the grocery store in Grundy.

The pack didn’t hold a grudge against Billie for her son’s actions. As the mate of my grandfather’s late brother, James, she would always be considered one of us. And while the rest of the pack was more than willing to take over her care, it seemed right when Clay and Alicia, Billie’s niece and nephew, left their pack in Ontario a few months before to move in with her. They were a welcome addition to the group; they were smart and hardworking, and they could hunt like nobody’s business.

Still, considering that it was Cooper who brought Eli down, with my help, I always felt little twinges of guilt when talking to Billie, even though she probably had no idea that Eli was gone.

I knocked a little harder on the front door, but there was no answer. Nudging it open, I could hear a cartoon blaring from the living room. Someone was moving around in the kitchen. “Hello?” I called.

Paul, Alicia’s youngest, toddled up to me. His four-year-old brother, Ronnie, sat mesmerized by dancing animated bears. The boys didn’t resemble Alicia or Clay with their white-blond hair and huge brown eyes. But they were adorable. Sort of sticky and always had runny noses, but adorable. “Up!” Paul commanded, tugging on my jeans. I slid my hands under his arms and hoisted him onto my hip as I walked into the kitchen.

“Nana?” he said, his tone hopeful as he eyed the fruit bowl on the counter.

Billie was in a rumpled blue and green plaid housedress, her thick white hair tumbling around her face. She was shuffling back and forth between the cabinet and her counter, spreading peanut butter on six slices of bread. I peeled a banana for Paul, which he promptly devoured.

“Aunt Billie?” I murmured quietly.

She turned, her deep brown eyes focused and alert but vacant. Whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t what I was seeing. She smiled, her still-smooth cheeks dimpling prettily.

“Oh, Maggie, honey, have you seen Eli?” Billie asked, topping each of her half-dozen sandwiches. “You need to tell him it’s time for lunch. He can go out and play with Samson and Cooper later.”

I swallowed the little lump in my throat and nodded. “OK, Aunt Billie, I’ll tell him.”

“I’m cutting the crusts off for him,” she said, adding the sandwiches to a massive pile on the counter. I found myself blinking back against hot, wet pressure in my eyes. Sure, Eli had turned out kind of evil, but he was still my cousin. I’d grown up with him. I could remember the afternoons that had trapped Billie’s mind. I could remember him as a little boy, arguing with Cooper and Samson over who had to be Aquaman when they played Justice League. And I’d taken a part in killing that little boy. It was a weight on my heart that wouldn’t go away.>And the final blow? Mo was delivering Tupperwared meals to his house like some cross between a Welcome Wagon and Marie Callender. He tried to pay for it, and she refused to take his money. She considered it some sort of outreach program. I think the point was reaching out to drive me crazy.

“Let me get this straight,” I’d hissed at her over the phone. “I say don’t have anything to do with the nosy outsider, and you start delivering care packages to his door? I can’t get your meat loaf in my freezer, but you’re dropping them on Thatcher’s doorstep with reheating instructions?”

“I saw him at the market the other day, and the poor guy had twenty Banquet dinners in his cart,” Mo said, her voice rising to a disturbing, defensive octave. “Do you have any idea how expensive those things are up here? Plus, they’re all fat and sodium, and he’s too pretty to be allowed to get all bloated.”

“But I told you—”

“Look, with all the questions Nick is not so subtly trying to work into conversations, it would look weird and suspicious if I went all silent religious-compound wife whenever he walked into a room. Doesn’t it make more sense that we would remain neighborly?”

There was silence on my end of the line . . . unless you counted the sound of my teeth grinding.

“Maggie?”

“I’m trying to find a hole in your argument that doesn’t involve me threatening you,” I grumbled. “I got nothing.”

She snorted.

“What sort of questions is he asking?”

“Oh, little things, about how Cooper and I got to know each other. He heard from a few of our neighbors that we weren’t exactly an instant love connection. Some of my better insults are fondly remembered. So he’s using ‘getting to know you’ conversations to ask what turned the tide, what couples around here do to date, that sort of thing.”

“And what are you telling him?” I asked.

Mo huffed. “Oh, I told him that Cooper showed up on my doorstep with a bear trap clamped around his leg, told me he was a werewolf, and we decided to go steady.”

“Ha freaking ha.”

My sister-in-law was not to be trusted.

My embarrassment was replaced by annoyance, frustration, a desire to be rid of Nick that bordered on religious. It was obvious that he had been sent to torment me for some horrible wrong I’d committed in a past life.

I failed to see how turning me into a blithering, sleep-deprived idiot was going to make me a better person. As a concept, karma was ass-backward.

“Oh, good gravy, snap out of it, you loser!” I groaned, thunking my head against the desk.