How to Flirt With a Naked Werewolf - Molly Harper [50]
“If God didn’t want us to eat the animals, he wouldn’t have made them so tasty, Mo.”
“You know, I got grounded once for wearing a T-shirt that expressed that very sentiment to an animal-rights rally,” I said. Cooper flashed a wide, sincere grin at me. It knocked me back on my heels. He’d never smiled at me before, unless he was mocking me in some fashion.
It felt as if someone had dropped a Malatov cocktail at my feet. My whole body became flushed, hot, uncomfortably tight. I muttered some excuse about burning eggs and ducked back into the kitchen. Cheeks aflame, I made a beeline for the walk-in freezer, slammed the door behind me, and braced myself against a rack of frozen beef. Maybe I was coming down with the flu, I told myself. Please, Lord, I prayed, let it be the flu.
It was not healthy for one man’s smile to make my panties spontaneously combust.
I did not want Cooper to have that sort of power over me, especially when I was on such shaky ground with him. I just had to concentrate on other things, other people. Alan, for instance, who, as far as I could tell, had only one corporeal form.
I spent a good five minutes in the freezer, fanning cold air onto my face. I was careful to spend the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen. I cooked with my back to the dining area and worked like a dervish to keep the kitchen clean so I could leave the minute my shift ended, a rarity for me.
Oscar was waiting for me at my door, looking quite dandy in his little red argyle sweater. I gave him a scratch behind his ears before he streaked into the yard. We took a longer-than-usual route around the house that afternoon as I mulled the odd turn my life had taken. Why was Cooper being nice all of a sudden? And why was I responding to it? Hell, I was excited by it.
Maybe it was just an overabundance of hormones, a response to a sexual starvation diet. I’d been without for so long that my body was craving the worst possible thing for me. Cooper was carnal triple chocolate cheesecake, deep-fried on a stick.
Alan, on the other hand, was angel food cake, sweet, wholesome, and nothing you’d regret. He was smart, honest, open, and thoughtful. So why did I keep thinking of him as “my friend Alan” when what I should have been thinking was “sex on legs with a side of fantastically compatible personality”?
I cursed my contrary id and looked up at the sky. It was getting darker much earlier these days. I wondered what it would be like in a few months, having just a few hours of sunlight each day. But I wasn’t uneasy now. The verdant jungle surrounding my hometown had always seemed so forbidding, with a constant, threatening undercurrent of man-eating mosquitoes and water moccasins, not to mention the occasional alligator. Here, I felt welcomed by the fragrant green, the cool, deep shadows. But as enchanted as I was, I knew that I didn’t need to be this far from my cabin after dark, bear mace or no bear mace.
“Time to go back to the house, Oscar. Come on, buddy,” I called. Oscar, who seemed to see leashing as some sort of personal insult, took two steps toward me, then suddenly turned as fast as his chubby little legs would carry him and took off into the trees.
“Oscar, no!” I cried as he began barking frantically.
I chased after him, slowed by thick branches and underbrush.
“Oscar!” I yelled after the echoing barks. I muttered to myself, “This is not a smart thing, Mo, following a tiny canine canapé into the woods when there’s a bloodthirsty wolf on the loose. Why not just rub yourself in meat tenderizer and put an apple in your mouth?”
I thought about turning around and letting Oscar find his way home. Clearly, he could get through the brush easier than I could. And he could smell a predator coming, couldn