No matter how bad a mood you were in, you could count on Marty to mother you. She was milk and cookies, a sympathetic ear, a soft vanilla-scented shoulder to cry on. She was home to Mara after four years of marriage to her brother Keegan.
Marty shoved the phone in her face. “Read.”
Noting Nina’s use of Twitter to convey her messages with Marty, Mara frowned. “Why does she tweet you instead of text? Aren’t you worried other people will see?”
Marty’s smile was sly. “Silly. Us solving a paranormal crisis right in front of all eighty-four of our followers makes for good marketing.”
Mara nodded with an encouraging grin. “Wow. Eighty-four now? Last count was at thirty-six. Go, team OOPS.”
Marty shoved the phone back at her. “So read.”
Mara focused on Marty’s phone. Her eyes went wide when she read Nina’s tweets.
OOPS@MissClairol#222 “911 at Pack. Go to lab. See Hairy Harry. Rawrrr!”
MissClairol#222@OOPS “WTF, Team Edward? Busy here. English, pls!”
OOPS@MissClairol#222 “Situation in ur lab at Pack. Go downstairs. Meet u ASAP.”
MissClairol#222@OOPS “???”
OOPS@MissClairol#222 “Harry Emmerson says he’s trapped in Pack lab. Called me on hotline w/crisis. Go!”
What did Harry have to do with an OOPS emergency? It didn’t matter. She couldn’t read any more of the tweets because of the subject matter.
Harry.
Mara bit the inside of her cheek as her eyes flew to the lab doors. Please, God. Not the Harry Emmerson.
Marty planted a hand on her hip and peered into the doors of the dark lab, her brow furrowed. “I checked with personnel on the way down, Mara. We do have a Harry Emmerson working at Pack. In the accounting department.”
Mara’s nod was stiff. Yep. They had a Harry Emmerson in accounting. Harry Ralph Emmerson, to be precise. Born on May 18, 1973. Thirty-eight, six feet one, probably about two hundred pounds of fit, yummy, goodness. Size eleven shoe, FYI.
Loved all things sci-fi, running, working out at the Pack gym while totally unaware he was making all the female employees fan themselves because of his geeky hotness, lover of numbers and order, with a brain like a human calculator.
Driver of a conservative, but still attractive Jetta Volkswagen—diesel, for anyone who cared to know, and no stranger to a tennis court. The object of more fantasies amongst the unattached women at Pack than he’d ever realize—or maybe even believe. Oh, and single, single, single.
Marty waved her hand in front of Mara’s eyes and snapped her fingers. “Do you know him?”
Know him . . . not in the biblical sense of her choice. No. As a valued, and one of the few human employees of Pack Cosmetics? Yes. “Sort of,” she offered, vague and noncommittal, her eyes straying to the tile floor. “I see him sometimes in the cafeteria.” And in my dreams. And in my daydreams. And in all sorts of places I shouldn’t.
Marty blew out a breath. “Well, apparently, Harry Emmerson’s had a little bit of an accident, and it happened here on Pack’s turf. So c’mon, let’s go see what the problem is.” She hooked her arm through Mara’s and tugged her toward the lab doors.
Mara frowned, pulling at her ID tag. An accident? She still wasn’t making the connection to how Harry’s Pack accident correlated to an OOPS accident . . .
Again, it didn’t matter. She was never showing her face to Harry Emmerson again—not willingly anyway.
Mara clung to Marty’s faux-fur vest and shook her head. “Oh, no. Absolutely not. I am not going in there.” She nodded toward the darkened lab with the surrounding glass windows. Not with hot, geekified, slurpilicious, totally-oblivious-to-her-existence Harry Emmerson on the other side of that door.
Emphatic no here.
“Honey?” Marty soothed, staring into her sister-in-law’s eyes. “We have to help him. It’s our duty as his employers to help him. At least give me a hand until Nina and Wanda arrive. He’s trapped in there. Plus, if what he says is true, he’s suffered a huge trauma.”
Ah, but it probably wasn’t the kind of trauma her self-esteem had suffered because Harry didn’t even know she existed. As far as Mara was concerned, he deserved all the trauma he got. How the trauma had happened, right here at Pack in the lab she’d just exited an hour ago, left Mara a little worried.
Which made her pause.
No. It couldn’t be. She shrugged off her concern and took in Marty’s pleading blue eyes. “I’m sorry he’s suffered a trauma, but I’m no trauma specialist. You three are. I just work here at Pack.” With Harry. Scrumpdelicious Harry.
“Mara Flaherty?”
“Marty Flaherty?”
“If you don’t help me, I’ll take away your lab coat and your pocket protector.”
Mara waffled. Oh, noes. Not her lab coat. It was new and shiny. “That’s a cheap shot. You’re a mean taskmaster, Marty.”
Marty’s snort was sarcastic. “Nina’s my best friend. Nobody does cheap shots better ’n me, honey.” But Marty’s eyes held sympathetic warmth when she made an obvious note of the fear her sister-in-law was displaying.
She brushed a strand of Mara’s hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “Why don’t you want to help me, sweetie? I don’t get it. Whenever there’s a Pack crisis, you’re the first one to roll up her sleeves and help out. This isn’t like you at all. So tell me what’s going on.”
Here’s what’s going on, dear SIL. I’m a dirty, dirty whore and once, long ago, and far, far away, I attempted, awkwardly, foolishly, and miserably failed, mind you, to seduce Harry Emmerson. Totally against my better judgment, and worse, mostly against Pack rules.
Since that night, she’d hidden behind her group of friends at lunch whenever possible, avoided and sometimes even run from Harry, due to her embarrassment.
Oh, God. She couldn’t say that to Marty. Never, as long as she lived, would she ever confess to what happened that night at the Pack Christmas party.
So she lied. Like all washed-up temptresses did. “Um, I’m afraid? So, so afraid.” Mara cocked her head in the direction of the sound of something smashing. “Whatever’s going on in there sounds pretty bad. Maybe he’s hurt and all gushy with blood. Ick.” She made a big show of wrinkling her nose. “I hate blood.”
Marty ran her tongue over her lips with a frown, her blond hair perfect and smooth under the lights of the hallway leading to the lab. “Afraid of blood. You? A lab tech and the woman who threatened to rip off her brother’s head and shit down his windpipe?”
Oh, stop. She’d just been joking. All her brothers ever did was razz her about her pathetic lack of dates, and during family dinner date night, mostly because the accusation was true, she’d flipped and made one little threat while she had Sloan in a choke hold. Now they all called her the Mara-nator. Ha. Ha.
“I was just joking. Sloan and Keegan are always harping on me about mating and having babies. They got the better of me, that’s all. It was just once . . .”
A low, definitely feral growl from behind the lab’s doors brought both women to silence.
But not for long. Not with Marty. “You did hear that, didn’t you?”
A thread of fear and a moment of startling realization accosted Mara all at once. Nuh-uh . . .
But wait. Here was a thought. If Harry were hurt, why wouldn’t he call 911? How the heck had he gotten hold of the OOPS hotline? Unless . . . Oh. The connection was becoming clearer.
Can ya hear it now, Mara? She shook her head at the niggling voice. No way. She gulped, shuffling in her knee-high boots. It couldn’t be. “Did Nina say what this nine-one-one is about?”
“Somehow, according to the tweets Nina’s been sending me, this Harry Emmerson ended up inside the lab, and he claims he’s been turned into a werewolf. He took the test on the OOPS website and everything. Now, I don’t know about you
, but my ears say he sure sounds like a werewolf. And if you let your nose do the walking, this Harry smells like one. Which means he needs help.”
Oh, bullshit. He was no more werewolf than she was vixen. “But Nina said she’d be here ASAP to help. She’s a vampire. She runs fast. Also, might I point out, Keegan already pitches a hissy every time you and your cohorts get involved in an OOPS case. Imagine the hell I’d get if I did, too . . .” Which was ridiculous. Mara, as well as anyone knew, if Marty wanted to do it, her brother wouldn’t dream of stopping her.
Sure, he groused. Sometimes he even complained out loud, but he loved his wife’s commitment to saving others who’d gone through what she’d gone through, whether he liked to admit it or not.
“And you always, always listen to your brother,” Marty jabbed with sarcasm and rolled her big, blue eyes. “Look, if you don’t want to help, I’ll go in alone. But sometimes, in situations like these, things get a little wonky. I only have so many limbs to use to my advantage. He might get loose.”
A high keening wail, one that sent shivers up Mara’s spine, made her grab Marty’s arm. “Wait!” The moment she thwarted her sister-in-law was the moment that first ludicrous suspicion moments ago turned into a terrifying thought.
Marty shrugged her off. “I can’t wait, Mara. He needs help. Jesus, it sounds like he’s giving birth in there. Now let go!”
She had no doubt Marty could handle Harry. None at all. But there was a little something else troubling her . . . She tightened her grip on Marty’s arm. “No!” Mara licked her lips in nervousness. “First I need to know something.”
Marty’s mouth pinched when Harry crashed against the door. “Hurry it up—he’s going to take the door out!”
“How did this accident allegedly happen?”
“Nina said something about vitaminwater. I don’t know the rest, and I don’t have time to scroll through the tweets. We have to help poor Harry!”
Mara’s gut clenched tight. Vitaminwater? Right. Harry liked vitaminwater. He drank one with his bologna and mustard sandwich on whole wheat every day at lunch and two when he worked out. He liked the kiwi-strawberry best.
But there was something Harry probably wasn’t going to like: the fact that the alleged vitaminwater he’d mistakenly sipped from wasn’t vitaminwater at all.
Because she’d grown weary of searching for her Prince Charming, Mad Scientist Mara had made a concoction for making werewolf babies sans a male werewolf—easily disguised in a bottle of vitaminwater.
If she couldn’t pull off something as simple as “Operation Seduction,” not just with Harry but with any man she found interesting and attractive, she surely couldn’t be trusted to obtain something like a sample for artificial insemination. Not to mention the guilt she’d harbor if she used a man to create a child he didn’t know about just to ease her burning desire to have children.
And in one crazy, ridiculously stupid, insane moment, single, childless Mara Flaherty had decided she didn’t need a husband or pack mate to have a family. She’d make one of her own. Lots of single women did it. But lots—nay, most—single women weren’t werewolves.
It wasn’t like there was a sperm bank for paranormals. She wanted a baby that was full werewolf. She didn’t know how to raise a half human, and there weren’t any half-human men beating down her door anyway. No one was beating down her door. Not even a Girl Scout selling Thin Mints.
Her as-yet-unfulfilled desire to be a mother had sent her to the lab after Pack hours and sometimes long into the night to create something that would make it possible for her dreams to come true. So she made her own baby formula. At that point, she wasn’t even sure it was going to work, but the ingredients of said baby-maker wouldn’t harm her, either.
Just an hour ago, in the midst of preparing to transfer it from a beaker to a secure vial, Mara had realized she couldn’t find any vials. A new batch of vials was four floors up. So she’d sterilized the empty vitaminwater bottle and dumped the serum into it, in order to keep it from being compromised for an extended period of time, until she could hunt down some vials.
Because just like Harry, she liked vitaminwater, too.
But then an emergency upstairs had arisen, and she’d been called away from the lab—a lab that no one was supposed to be in until tomorrow morning, long after she was gone and the evidence of her baby mama formula had been cleared.
Okay, so she’d forgotten the bottle. A bottle she’d left on the lab table just an hour ago.
A bottle Harry must have mistaken for his own.
Wow. Harry probably wouldn’t like that at all.
CHAPTER
3
Wanda and Nina skidded down Pack’s hall past a still stunned Mara, bursting through the doors of the lab just as Harry was about to go for Marty’s throat.
Nina went for him first, fangs flashing, her snarl ringing out through the coldly white room.
“No!” Mara screamed, her heart pressing against her ribs, a high-pitched panic to her shrill cry. “Don’t hurt him, Nina!”
Nina stopped short with a skid of her work boots seconds before Harry flew over her head in an arc of fur and slobbering drool, slamming into the far wall behind her. His groan matched his slide down the dented drywall, where he fell at Wanda’s booted feet, clearly unconscious.
“Oh, Harry!” Mara yelped from just outside the door, then bit her lip to hide her overly concerned reaction.
All eyes landed on Mara, narrow and suspicious.
Which, she noted, was a little uncomfortable.
Marty and Wanda were the first to react, scurrying to the lab’s closet to find extra lab coats to cover Harry’s naked form, chatting like girlfriends might if they’d just arrived at the prom instead of an accidental turning.
Nina sidled up to her, toeing Harry along the way with a light nudge in order to check his status. She clapped Mara on the shoulder. Her eerily pale, yet stunningly beautiful face loomed down at her. “How’s it going?”
Mara looked down at her white tennis shoes, pinching off a rush of tears. “Not quite the way I’d hoped my Monday night would turn out. But c’est la vie, right?”
Nina nodded, her cascading dark hair tucked into her signature hoodie, rippled over her shoulders. “Yeah, c’est whatever. Me neither, kidlet. I should fucking be at home watching Revenge and hanging out with Charlie.”
If she could just avoid Nina’s prying eyes and her all-seeing, emotion-reading mind-meld, maybe she’d go home and watch Revenge, too. Whatever that was. “How is Charlie?” Charlie, Nina’s infant gifted to her by a genie, was one of the myriad reasons Mara wanted a baby. Charlie, and Marty and Keegan’s daughter, her niece Hollis.
“She’s good. Real good.”
“Crawling yet?”
Nina smiled with such serene beauty, if Mara didn’t know her, she’d swear she was someone else. “Nah. Seems the half of her that’s a vampire is beating down the genie half of her. She’s growing faster than most vampires do, or so Clay tells me, but it’s slow going.”
Mara nodded her understanding of the vampire aging process. Clay, mated to Casey, one of Nina’s best friends and Wanda’s sister, was the only other vampire in the world who had unwillingly turned offspring—that they knew of, anyway.
Naomi, Clay and Casey’s daughter, had been turned as a young child way back in the days of Vikings, so they had some iffy knowledge on the subject of vampiric aging. Nina’s baby, Charlie, was one of the first half-vampire infants physically born to a vampire.
Mara rocked back on her heels, fiddling with the pencil that held her thick hair up on top of her head. “So teething in perpetuity, huh?”
Nina made a face. “Teething in what?”
“It means eternity.” Harry popped his darkly delicious head upward and groaned from the floor, just completing his return to human form.
Nina rol
led her coal black eyes. “Look. It’s your soul mate, Mara. He likes words, too. And he fucking likes ’em big.”
Yet another thing they had in common. How uncanny. Oh, Astrid and the girls would just love this.
Harry groaned once more before passing out in a lump of lovely naked limbs and drywall dust.
“So, girlie,” Nina drawled, unzipping her hoodie to reveal a navy blue T-shirt that read WHEN I WANT YOU TO SPEAK, I’LL RIP OFF THE DUCT TAPE. “Talk to me. And keep that shit real. Got it?”
Must. Avoid. Nina’s. Eyes. Mara looked down at the white floor, following the thready gray pattern woven into it. “Yep, real. My shit’s always real.”
“Good. Then why don’t you tell me what the frig all that screaming was about?”
“Screaming?”
One of her almond-shaped eyes scrunched up as she sucked in her cheeks. This was Irritated Nina. Only mildly so, if Mara was judging correctly. Meaning she was still safe. The Nina you didn’t want to see was Irate Nina. According to numerous reports, Irate Nina was a sight you couldn’t unsee.
She pushed the black hoodie off her head with long fingers. “Remember the word real? Sure you do, kiddo. It’s the one I told you to keep this situation in. I know it ain’t a big word like perpetuity, but words aren’t my thing. Now fists? That’s my thing.” She cracked her knuckles and formed a fist to show Mara just how much her thing they were.
Mara winced, taking a step back. She might have the strength of ten humans, but she preferred talking things through rather than resolving them physically. “I just didn’t want you to hurt him. From what Marty’s told me, it’s a delicate time in his change from human to werewolf. He didn’t mean to lunge at Marty, I’m sure. He doesn’t know what he’s doing right now. You do. You know, with your real fists.”
The Accidental Werewolf 2: Something About Harry (Accidentally Paranormal Novel) Page 3