Free The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf by Molly Harper Page A

care of myself. I’d spent most of my life defining myself by those qualities. Why didn’t he see them in me?
    This level of introspection could not be healthy. This was why I avoided self-help books.
    I found him sitting on a rock, overlooking the valley. There was a backpack beside him on the ground, and he had a big coil of neon orange rope attached to it, with some carabiners and a few climbing blocks. He’d said he was a climber; was he planning on rappelling down the rock wall? That seemed like a rude thing to do in someone’s backyard without permission.
    At the moment, he seemed content to sit. He could see everything from this spot, the green expanse of the valley walls, the thick forest that sheltered us from the harsher winds coming down the mountain and provided the rich supply of game we needed to keep the pack fed. It was a spot Cooper often used for “thinking,” a.k.a. “getting the hell away from Maggie and Samson for a few minutes of peace.” I’d come here a few times, but I always got my best ideas while running.
    And there sat Nick, scribbling in that notebook again with a silly grin on his face.
    Under the shelter of low-hanging spruce, I sat on my haunches and watched him. I watched the light and the wind play against his hair. Damn it, the sight of his wire-rim glasses sliding down his nose was bringing out some sort of professor fetish that I didn’t even know I had. My heart did this weird skittering thing, as if it was going to jump out of my chest and run away. I really needed to get this thing under control,
    He turned suddenly and saw me.
    The smartest thing to do would be to bolt, as a real wolf would do. But I just sat there frozen, staring at him. His face. There was such an expression of joy there, stretching his smile from ear to ear. I wasn’t one to throw around pretentious phrases like “childlike wonder,” but it was the only way to describe his face. Moving with slow, deliberate steps, he hunched down and stretched his hand out toward me.
    Innocent wonder or no, if he tried to scratch behind my ears, I was so going to bite him.
    “Mo?” he whispered, smiling down at me. “Is that you?”
    I huffed and stepped back. He retracted the hand. “Wait!” he called as I backed into the tree line. “Mo?”
    Mo? He looked at me that way, left me hanging for days on end, and now he thought I was Mo ? I growled, the low, threatening sound resonating deep in my chest. This was beyond messed up. He flirted with me in human form and had a weird little werewolf crush on my sister-in-law.
    Wasn’t this a story line in one of those lame-ass teen-vampire movies?
    I was the one who’d spent weeks doing a sad little avoidance shuffle around him. And he was thinking of Mo? Not happening.
    I cantered back over to him, huffing at him to get his attention. We locked eyes, and I did my best to glare at him, which is difficult to do without eyebrows. He narrowed his gaze. “You’re not Mo, are you?”
    Too damn right, I wasn’t. I huffed again and pivoted in the opposite direction, to make him think I was leaving. Then I feinted left. Nick only had a second to turn before I lunged, sinking my teeth into his nicely rounded butt cheek.
    “Yipe!” he cried, clutching at his ass. “What the? Hey! Come back here!” He hobbled after me, wincing in pain.
    I made a sort of whickering sound, spitting out a chunk of the denim from his jeans. He gaped down at me. I sniffed, stuck my nose in the air, and trotted home, feeling a lot better about the situation.
    T HE FARTHER I got from Nick, the more that heavy guilty feeling crept into my chest. I wasn’t used to feeling remorse. It sort of sucked. Maybe I should go back and check on him. I slipped back into my jeans and sweater inside my office. I would just amble up there and pretend I was taking a long walk around the valley. I’d just make sure he made it to his truck OK and then come right back. I slipped on my boots and was bounding out of