He grimaced. “I thought I owed you an explanation.”
“The explanation was just a down payment. Say it. Say, ‘Mo, I was wrong. I’m sorry. You’re not a weak, pathetic outsider.’”
“You are not a weak, pathetic outsider,” he said without any enthusiasm.
That was probably the best I was going to get.
“Thank you.”
“This doesn’t make us friends, you know,” he said, peering up sulkily through the dark hair that had fallen over his brow.
“I don’t want to be your friend,” I assured him. “You’re still pretty much a jerk as far as I’m concerned. Now I know that you’re a jerk who turns into a wolf. Not much has changed.”
“Good. I’ll just be on my way.” Cooper stood, dropping the quilt. He smirked when my eyes wandered south, even when I tried not to look.
Dang it.
Clearly, I had been alone in this cabin for too long. I needed male companionship in the worst way. But not from Cooper, I reminded my racing hormones. I’d done the revenge-sex thing and the strictly-due-to-great- chemistry sex thing with equally satisfying results. But Cooper and his Mighty Morphin Power Penis were absolutely off limits. I did not sleep with people who openly disliked me.
“I have questions for you,” I told him. “Lots of them.”
“About the wolf thing?”
“No, I was hoping you’d give me your opinions about global warming,” I retorted. “Yes, the wolf thing! How is this possible? Were you bitten by a werewolf? Does Evie know about this? What were you doing so close to my house—mmph!”
Cooper was across the room before I could blink. His hands tangled into my hair, yanking my lips toward his. It wasn’t so much a kiss as his attempt to stop my mouth from moving. I squealed in protest, shoving at his bare shoulders, but his hands held my face in place as he seemed to steal the air from my lungs. His thumbs ran along my jawline, and his mouth relaxed into a slow, dragging rhythm against mine. The hands that were supposed to be shoving him away slipped around his shoulders and pulled him closer. His teeth nipped at my bottom lip. He took advantage of my soft little gasp by sliding his tongue into my mouth. His hands slid down to my hips and pulled me tighter against him.
I didn’t care if he was surly. I didn’t care if he was supernaturally gifted. I wanted him. I could deal with the rest. I let loose a happy moan, and something in Cooper seemed to grind to a halt. By degrees, he pulled away, loosened his hold. The man who had just claimed my mouth was replaced by Cooper’s hardened, smirking face.
He stepped away. “Kissing shuts you up. I’ll have to remember that.”
Bastard. Furry werewolf bastard.
I gasped and reached for a handy blunt object to toss his way. Cooper sauntered over to the front door and jerked the handle. I could see that he was about to make one of his patented, oh-so-clever parting remarks, so I beat him to the punch.
“You’re still naked!” I called, smiling nastily. “It’s cold outside. Expect shrinkage.”
“Gah!” He grunted, phased back into his wolf form, and ran out of sight.
AFTER COOPER DID THE naked dash of shame, I went to work as if nothing had happened. I figured it was my best defense against an appointment in a rubber room.
Well, I didn’t pull total nonchalance. Every time the door opened, I looked up, expecting Cooper to walk in, which was stupid, because what on earth would I say to him? Could I possibly behave as if, one, I hadn’t seen him naked, and two, I hadn’t seen him covered in a black fur coat? I poured two cups’ worth of coffee into poor Alan’s lap because I was too distracted to aim for his mug. When I knocked a stack of dishes off the counter with a loud, crashing rattle, Evie made me take a break.
I leaned against the wall of the alley, calculating how much I should offer Evie to replace the broken dishes. She popped out of the kitchen entrance and offered me a bottle of water. “You OK, Mo? You seem kind of hyper.”
I took a deep breath and tried to compose a believable lie in my head. Hot date, too much caffeine, chain- store shopping withdrawal. But then I saw a flicker of recognition on Evie’s even features. Her face wasn’t in its natural warm state. It was a polite, detached mask.
Evie was in on it.
“You know, don’t you?” I said, my eyes narrowing.
“Know what?” she asked, her tone far too guileless to be genuine.
“You know what Cooper is, about his extracurricular nighttime activities.”
Evie started to shake her head, her lips parting to start her denials, but then she sighed. “Yes. How did you find out?”
“Figured it out a while ago. And then last night, there was a thing with a bear trap.”
“Bear trap!”
“Cooper’s fine now, I promise. Can you . . .” I lifted my brow as I let the question hang in the air between us.
“Wiggle my eyebrows?” she asked. I think at this point, she was still hedging against the possibility that we weren’t talking about the same thing.
“No! Can you turn into a wolf?” I asked.
Evie laughed, and her shoulders loosened, as if they had shrugged off some heavy weight. “No one in my branch of the family can. We’re what the pack calls a dead line.”
“Ouch. Wait. You knew about this, and you still tried to set me up with him?”
“Well, it’s not like he’s going to huff and puff and blow your house down,” Evie said, glaring at me. “Cooper was one of the first kids in his generation to become a wolf. Everybody in his line has been able to change. It’s sort of a big deal. Every generation produces a pack. Every pack has a leader. It’s the natural order of things. Cooper was supposed to be his generation’s alpha, the leader. Everyone could tell the minute he first phased. He was the fastest, the strongest. But he chose to leave the packlands, the valley where my family lives, and move a hundred miles away to Grundy. For a werewolf, that’s one of the most difficult things you can do. Even moving this far away was devastating for him.”
“Why? Why is leaving so hard?”
Evie took a pull off my bottle of water and shrugged. “Centuries of instinct. A wolf’s brain is hard-wired to protect a certain area of land, to hunt there, to live there. And that’s the way it’s been for the pack for almost a thousand years. Everything in Cooper’s body is telling him to return home. Imagine fighting against that kind of draw, every waking moment of every day. You’d be kind of cranky, too.”
“But why did he leave?”
Evie pressed her lips together. “That’s pack business,” she said, shrugging. “My line is dead. I don’t change. Anything important that happens while the pack is in wolf form stays within the pack.”
“But that’s so . . . exclusive. Why would they cut off a whole section of their community just because they aren’t part of their special wolf club?”
“It’s nothing personal,” Evie said, and she seemed shocked that I was so put out about it. “And they are friendly and loving and open. They love us deadliners just as much as we love them. But they handle some pretty serious stuff for the village. The fewer people who know about it, the better. They don’t talk about it with us. When Cooper left, all we were told was that the village had been put in danger and that Cooper defended us all. They said he was hurt, taking some time to recover. But then, a few months later, I saw him here in Grundy, and he was fine—physically, anyway. Before, he was always so lively, funny, a lot like our cousin Samson. He wasn’t the same man anymore. He wouldn’t talk about going home, the pack, or the family. He went out of his way to avoid making friends. Hell, I was surprised he talked to me. It was months before anyone in the family admitted that he might not
