Free The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf by Molly Harper

running past Mo’s house while he was wolfed out, feeling at peace for the first time since he’d left the valley. He said it was like the primal part of his brain was leading him there every night, just to be near her. He’d been torn up for years over leaving home, and with Mo, he was given a little glimpse of tranquillity. And when they stopped being idiots and admitted that they were crazy for each other, that contentment had become part of his everyday life.
    After watching Nick’s house, I’d woken up and felt calm, warm. I usually woke up thinking of all the things I had to get done, my mind racing and raring to get started. But the moment my eyes had popped open, I felt . . . light, I guess. I stretched under the covers and smiled into my pillow, reveling in the feeling of serenity washing over me.
    Crap.
    I forced myself to jump out of bed, to go through my normal routines. I kept trying to recapture my normal patterns and feelings. I knew it sounded like one of Mo’s lame pop-psychology rants, but in the absence of that anxiety, I was a little depressed. I’d never realized how much pressure I put on myself. The idea that Nick was somehow a solution to a problem that I didn’t know I had was upsetting.
    My mental self-torture was interrupted when my cousin Will stuck his grizzled brown head through my office door. Will was one of my gruffer cousins, quick with the sarcasm and quicker to attack if a packmate was threatened. He’d married Angie, a wry, blond female from a Seattle-area pack, and produced two towheaded little boys, the only wolf boys to be born to our pack in the last five years.
    “Hey, Maggie,” Will said, tossing me a Baggie of Angie’s famous oatmeal-raisin cookies. I opened the bag and inhaled the heavenly, spicy fragrance before shoving one into my mouth. Angie was known to shove dozens of cookies into Will’s coat pockets before he left for the day. If he hadn’t married her, he probably would have had to fight Samson and half the valley’s male population for her, just for the potential cookie privileges.
    “I was just running along the east border, and there’s a hiker up there. Seems harmless enough, but I thought you’d want to know.”
    “Blond?” I asked, frowning. I held my hand far over my head. “Yea tall? Looks like a hot, annoying Viking?”
    “I don’t know how to respond to that,” Will said, shaking his head, taking a cookie for himself. “Not without you making fun of me later. But yeah, I think that would cover it.”
    I snorted. “Did he see you?”
    “Nah, I was being all stealthy-like,” he said, grinning. “I’m like a ninja with fur. Quiet, quick, and a mind like a steel trap.” He tapped his temple and winked at me.
    “Yes, steel traps are scary and dangerous, too,” I muttered.
    He laughed, and I told him to go on home. I shed my clothes, phased, and ran toward the east border. I might not have been as big as Samson or as strong as Cooper, but no one in the pack could match me for speed. Still, I kept my pace even, light. I didn’t want Nick to hear me coming.
    What did he think he was doing? Forget the all-out rudeness of coming to my valley—again—without so much as stopping in town to let us know he was tromping around in our backyard. He was supposed to be touring the eastern Wheeler range. What was Nick looking for? He thought Mo was the wolf, so what was he doing up there instead of in Grundy?
    Werewolves in the movies always had some convenient crypt or basement where they locked themselves up during the change. Did he think we had some bunker carved out for Mo in the woods somewhere? Did her family think we spent three nights a month tossing her rabbit carcasses and hoping for the best? The more I thought about it, the more his whole “Mo as a werewolf” scenario insulted me. Nothing about Mo screamed predatory or even vaguely threatening, unless you cut her off from chocolate. I was the tough one. I was the one who could take