How to Flirt With a Naked Werewolf - Molly Harper [95]
He sighed, plucking at my sleeves with nervous fingers. “I’m standing there in the woods surrounded by my whole family. All I could think to do was offer them a place in the valley. To share it with them. He declined. This fucker has my baby sister by the neck, shaking her so hard I can still hear her teeth rattle, and everybody’s looking at me like I’m supposed to know what to do. And the worst part was Maggie—she wasn’t even scared. Because she knew her big brother was going to fix it. I was scared out of my fucking mind, and Maggie was sort of smirking at me, like, ‘Come on, Cooper, just kick this guy’s ass, already.’”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I just froze. And the look on Maggie’s face when she realized that I had no clue what to do . . . I still have nightmares about that look.” He shuddered. “You want to know how we got out of it? My baby sister sank her teeth into Jonas’s arm, kicked all six foot four inches of him in the balls, and called him a jerkoff.”
“Wow. That sounds nothing like her.”
He gave a little smile. “She always was tougher than me. But I was faster. And when Jonas went for her throat, I was able to change before Maggie. I held him off, but both packs phased, and nothing could prevent blood from being shed. Maggie just wouldn’t stay away from Jonas. She kept lunging at him, no matter what I did to keep her away. I got distracted when another male jumped on my back. Jonas got Maggie down on the ground. His teeth were at her neck, and I just lost it. It’s one of those rare clear memories I have as a wolf, killing that male without a second thought, knocking Jonas off Maggie, holding him to the ground, and ripping his throat out.”
Cooper looked a little green just remembering it. I squeezed his hands, trying to bring him back to the present. “What about the rest of their pack?”
“Maggie took down one. But I killed the rest, one by one. Some of my own pack members tried to help me, and I snapped at them. There were twelve wolves in the other pack, and when I phased back to human, they were all dead.” Cooper buried his face in his hands, as if he couldn’t look up to see my face.
I was at a loss to understand why. I shook his shoulder. “But isn’t that a good thing?”
“No, it’s not a good thing!” he yelled.
“You saved your sister. You defended your home and your pack. I’m failing to see the bad here.”
“I killed people, Mo! Yeah, they had fangs and fur at the time, but they were people, just like every member of my own pack is a person. Men and women alike. I killed them all. Something in me was able to do that. I couldn’t stomach what I’d done. Everybody tried to tell me how proud my father would have been, how I’d shown myself to be a great leader. And every night, I woke up screaming from the nightmares. Nothing helped. I couldn’t be around my family anymore. I couldn’t trust myself with them. I didn’t deserve them.”
Cooper stared into the fire, his lips barely moving as he spoke. “Maggie could forgive my hesitation. She could forget that I’d killed people in front of her. But when I couldn’t just go back to being her goofy big brother, she started to hate me. She hated me for not being able to accept a position that she was obviously more suited for, for betraying the pack. When I left, it was like she was relieved, because she had a reason.”
I crawled into his lap, part of me expecting him to shy away from me, to shove me away. “What do you want me to do? Yell at you? Hit you? Scream ‘Get away from me, you monster’? Because if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re going to be disappointed.”
Cooper sighed deeply, the tension easing out of his body. He nuzzled