How to Flirt With a Naked Werewolf - Molly Harper [67]
“Can I get anything else for you?”
“Nah.” Alan patted my hand and then seemed to think better of it, pulling away from me. “This has been good, though. Thanks.” He cleared his throat and added, “So, I’ve been meaning to ask . . . We haven’t talked much since the party, and uh, I’ve just wondered, did I do something to offend you?” He lowered his voice. “I know I had a couple of beers the other night, and I might have been a little . . . forward.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed, suddenly remembering Alan’s mild case of Roman hands. I laughed, which seemed to startle him. “No, no, don’t worry about it. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve just been a little preoccupied the last few days, that’s all.”
“So we’re OK?” he asked, his brow creasing, as if he still wasn’t hearing exactly what he wanted.
Hmm. How to define “OK” between Alan and myself? Were we still friends? Of course. But now that I’d started some semblance of a relationship with Cooper, whatever I’d been heading toward with Alan was completely derailed. It felt unfair, wrong, to make him think otherwise. But he was exhausted, stressed, and sitting in the middle of a gaggle of his closest manly-man friends. Now was not the time to try to explain anything to him.
I gave him a quick nod. “We’re going to be fine, Alan.”
He seemed to relax, drinking deeply from his mug and sagging against the bar for support. And I felt like an awful, awful person.
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning, the dining room was buzzing about the missing hikers, Craig Ryan and Jacob Bennett, and how they might have met their gruesome end. With the pawprints found at the campsite fueling their paranoia, the locals were getting restless. Walt wanted to organize a “wolf shoot,” which I guessed was similar to the turkey shoots my high school used to fill local food pantries—only, you know, much scarier. One more thing to worry about, my boyfriend getting shot by an angry mob of our neighbors.
On the opposite end of the spectrum was calm, cool, and collected Nate. He was worried about the potential loss of tourists to the area. I tried not to think badly of him. Nate was a big-picture kind of guy. And he was right. All it took was a couple of news stories about killer wolves and missing hikers, and Grundy’s tourism-based economy would dry up. Tourists brought money into the town without using its tax-funded resources, and losing that would be devastating. As jobs dried up, families would move away, and the town Nate had spent his life preserving would slowly die.
In the middle of this kaleidoscope of worry was yours truly. My brain was caught in an almost constant loop of contradicting explanations. The most cheerful opinion was that the culprit was indeed just a sick, injured wolf that was straying too close to people. A tiny, needling voice in the back of my head reminded me that I’d seen Cooper sink his teeth into John Teague myself and that he would be the most likely suspect. I tried to keep a lid on that voice as much as possible. Stupid voice.
I rubbed my eyes and remembered with fondness the days when my biggest worry was my mother sneaking into my apartment to toss my junk food.
I hadn’t thought of my parents in weeks. I hadn’t heard from them in almost two months. They’d stopped calling, stopped leaving voice mails, and it was . . . fine. In her e-mails, Kara mentioned seeing them, so I knew they were OK. I wasn’t wracked with guilt for not calling. I wasn’t worried about whether their electricity, phone, or water had been turned off. They were grown-ups. If they didn’t pay their bills, that was their problem. I chuckled, just a little bitterly. I wished this level of emotional maturity hadn