How to Flirt With a Naked Werewolf - Molly Harper [42]
If my mother had been there, she’d have made a tincture of yarrow and applied a poultice to the wounds. She would have sprinkled cayenne over his abrasions and chanted to the western winds. I, on the other hand, put my faith in a higher power: Neosporin. I went to the kitchen for my first-aid kit. I grabbed the peroxide and ran back into the living room. Even when I poured the bubbling mixture over his ravaged skin, he didn’t wake up. The wounds didn’t seem as bad after I cleaned them. The edges seemed smoother, shinier. I turned my head to reach for bandages and saw that the wounds had shrunk. The surrounding skin was a healthy pink. I packed the punctures with antibiotic ointment and wound gauze around his leg.
I threw a quilt over Cooper and another two logs onto the fire. I sank to the couch and wondered what exactly you did in a situation like this. I was overwhelmed with the compulsion to boil water. For what I had no idea, but in the movies, when someone is injured in the wilderness, they’re always boiling water.
I tilted my head, watching the firelight play on Cooper’s skin. I don’t think I’d ever really grasped how huge he was—long, rangy arms and well-muscled legs that stretched well beyond the limits of the blanket. His feet were long, narrow, and highly arched; the pads were dirty and covered with shallow, healing scrapes.
In all of the injury hubbub, I hadn’t had the acuity to look at his . . . lower forty-eight. How wrong would it be for me to lift the quilt? I mean, technically, he did owe me his life. And if he had an incredibly small penis, it might explain why he was such an ass all the time. Watching his face, I lifted the blanket and snuck a peek.
Wow.
“There goes that theory,” I muttered.
Cooper shivered and stirred as the cooler air seeped under the blanket. He whimpered, curling his body protectively around his leg. Blushing, I tucked the quilt around his body.
If I were smart, I would call Evie or even Alan right now. But something about this Cooper, the vulnerable, honest Cooper, made me want to protect him. Or at least find out what the hell he was doing. There had to be a compelling reason for him to be running around outside my house naked with a bear trap on his leg. Even with the odd assortment of characters I’d met in Grundy, even when you factored in the werewolf issue, that was the sort of thing that merited attention.
I coiled in the corner of my couch and pulled the quilt up to my chin. I closed my eyes, enjoying the way the lights danced behind my eyelids. I dreamed of running. I was racing through the woods. My feet were bare, slapping against the blanket of pine needles on the ground. A living canopy laced over my head as my legs stretched in front of me. I expected the leaves, the low-hanging pine branches, to slap and sting, but they were caressing fingers, welcoming me to come deeper into the forest. I wasn’t afraid. There was something waiting for me deep within the dense gathering of trees. Something I needed.
When I woke, there was a large black wolf curled up on my rug. I shrieked, springing up from the couch. I scrambled over the back and landed with a thump.
Ow.
For the briefest second, I thought I was going insane. Or that my mom had slipped peyote into her honey-oat cookies. Really, either option was possible.
“It’s true,” I whispered. “Holy shit! It’s true?”
The wolf lifted his head and looked up at me. I tensed and wished I had thought to grab the fireplace poker. I wasn’t frequently confronted with fairy-tale stock characters. I didn’t know what to expect.
Cooper had told me, no matter what I saw, not to be afraid, that he wouldn’t hurt me. So I stood slowly. The wolf yawned and lowered his head to rest on his paws. He didn’t look vicious. He looked tired. His eyebrows quirked up with