“But the worst of this?” Keegan said. “My dilemma in having to turn in my own sister for something I think is just as ridiculous as all of you just because I’m in charge. It’s not like I can hide the fact that Harry was a human and now he’s suddenly a werewolf. You knew damn well it wouldn’t be long before rubbing your scent all over him, or whatever crazy plan you hatched to keep him hidden, wouldn’t work anymore. You were just buying time. If I don’t do something about this, they’ll launch an investigation and corner Harry to find out how this happened, if they don’t already know.”
Harry shook his head, his jaw tight. “The hell they’d get it out of me. I’ll just act like I don’t remember. They can’t make me confess something I refuse to confess.”
Mara’s heart beat a tribal call of love for Harry. Even though he hated the idea of being one of them, he was protecting her anyway.
“And that’s all well and good, Harry, but is it fair? To you? To put you through a rigorous investigation, have the council invade your life? Mimi’s and Fletcher’s lives? Because that’s what’ll happen.”
Harry squared his shoulders, his jaw tight. “I don’t care. I’ll do whatever I have to do to keep Mara safe.”
“You know,” Keegan shook a finger at Mara, “if you’d come to me sooner, Harry’s suggestion might have worked, Mara. But you didn’t. You didn’t trust me enough to handle this—or to help you. Now, what if this information I have is leaked, accusing you directly, and it spreads like wildfire through the pack? You know what gossip is like. It’s hard enough to deal with weres and humans working together side by side. Then there’s the fact that in the thirty-five hundred employees we have here, there are a total of twenty or so humans.”
“Actually fourteen, if my records, and my nose, are correct,” Harry offered.
Keegan nodded. “There’s a reason for that. First, office affairs happen whether we like it or not. There are some pack members who are single. Single plus working closely together can create trouble and unwanted drama. Add in paranormal trouble, and we’ve got a problem. We’re careful about who we hire, not just because of this purity law, which I also think is ridiculous, but because what if the wrong human, one who becomes involved with a were, finds out, freaks out, tells the world?”
“We end up an episode of The Werewolf Diaries?” But her attempt at the joke fell flat. Much like most jokes fell flat with Keegan.
“No, funny girl. We’re a little sunk. You know why the rule to keep to your own was implemented in the first place. Sure, it’s a little more lax since Marty and I happened, but we didn’t just do it to protect our own kind. We did it to protect humans from the trauma Marty, and now Harry, have experienced. We’re as equal opportunity as we can be in the situation without risking the wellbeing of thousands.”
Everyone stood silent. No one could deny Keegan’s logic.
Tears streamed down Marty’s face. If Mara regretted one thing, it was that Marty had brought them all so close together, and now she was ripping them apart, leaving Marty the challenge of making peace with both sides of the issue, Keegan’s duties and her friendship with Mara.
Wanda held out a hand to Marty, squeezing it, just as Nina grabbed a tissue and blotted her friend’s tears before shoving it under her nose and dabbing. “Don’t cry, blondie—you get all blotchy and it’s damn ugly,” Nina snarked, pulling Marty into her embrace.
But Keegan wasn’t done. Yet Mara saw the effort it was taking for him to steel himself against his wife’s tears. “Harder still is keeping our paranormal business from leaking to the outside world. If pack members are all abuzz about this, what if someone slips? It isn’t like employee A slept with employee B and folks are whispering about it behind their hands. That’s harmless gossip about an act with consequences meant only for the two people involved. You created a baby-making formula—or at the very least, a formula that produced an actual werewolf. How can I hide that from the council? Pack members will want answers, and as well liked and respected as you are, you have a dangerous mind. What that mind made in a lab with some hormones and whatever else you used to do this will scare the hell out of everyone. I’m scared by it.”
The lump in her stomach hardened until she thought she might vomit. The chaos she’d created had a domino effect she had, in all her smarts, never considered—making the choice she’d been toying with in her head since Keegan had called them up here clearer. “Which is why I’m turning myself in. No guilt. No conspirators. No blame—just me,” Mara said before breaking away from Harry and jumping out of the fourth-floor window to the tune of crashing glass and Harry’s howling roar of protest.
* * *
“DUDE!” Nina roared in Harry’s face as he struggled to break her grip, clenching his wrists so tight he forgot all about the badass he’d been back at the office today with Lloyd.
Fighting a very unmanly wince, he relaxed like he was the one who’d decided to give in, rather than Nina forcing him to submit. “If you don’t sit the fuck down in this chair, I’ll break off your nerd fingers one by one and you’ll never play Call of Duty again. Got that, dork?”
Oh, no. Not the dreaded threat. Hah! Nothing would stop him from trying to find Mara.
It’s Call of Duty, Harry. Dude—think hard.
Wait. What was happening here? Why was he so enraged about Mara’s sacrifice? You’d think he liked her or something.
Shit. He liked her.
He liked her enough to want an opportunity to see if they could find their way through this together. Maybe date. See a movie. Have a pizza with the kids.
The kids. He was thinking about Mara with the kids.
Harry tipped his head back and grinned up at Nina, fighting the urge to stick his tongue out at her. “But I’m a werewolf, Crypt Keeper. That means I heal quickly. Break away.” Hah, and hah again!
Nina flicked his hair. “Let’s hope your pride heals as fast after I wipe the joint with you, Square Root Man.”
Marty stood before him, one hand on her slender hip, the other holding her dog Muffin like a football under her arm. “Harry? Chasing after Mara is a sure way to garner your own trouble with the council.”
Wanda sat on his lap hard. She wasn’t heavy by a long shot, but she was as strong as, if not stronger than, Nina, judging by the grip she had on his face.
Her usually serene features remained as such. There was little strain in her effort to keep him seated, which was totally affecting his manhood. “Look at me, Harry. Look and listen. You’ll only make things worse if you try to find Mara. Now, hear me, Harry. You’re not going anywhere. We absolutely won’t make things worse for her. There are rules and protocol when addressing the council—rules I won’t allow you to break with your poor imitation of the Hulk. So, we’re going to use our big brains and talk this through rather than Nina it, okay?”
Nina let go of one of his hands and gave Wanda the middle finger. “Fuck you, Wanda. My way gets results.”
Wanda’s gaze narrowed. “Your way gets us kicked out of places and shunned by the socially acceptable. I will not risk Keegan’s status or Mara’s future because Harry’s gone all rage-ish. Got it? No muscle today, Elvira.”
Nina rolled her beautiful eyes. “Fine, but if he keeps this shit up, I’m gonna clean house.” She gave Harry one last shove. “Now knock it the fuck off, or we’re gonna tango. You cool?”
Wanda patted his face and smiled, giving his cheek a pinch. “If I let you up, you have to promise not to bolt. I take a man’s word very seriously, Harry. Plus, I know your ego can handle only so much. Two women dragging you back here by force will only make your self-esteem cry salty tears of regret. So, you in or are you out?”
Harry lifted his chin, yanking it from Wanda’s grasp, and puffing his chest outward like any man who’d just cried uncle to two women would. They knew these council people better than he did. The last thing he wanted to do was rock
the boat for Mara. “I’m in. I apologize. I’m still dealing with my hormonal surges. Sometimes they get the better of me.”
She ran her finger down the length of his nose, popping the tip of it. “I get it. So, let’s put our heads together.” Wanda hopped off his lap and smoothed her hair from her face.
As the women kept a cautious eye on him, they scattered to different areas of Mara’s cottage, settling in for some brainstorming.
But Harry couldn’t sit still and let Mara take the hit for him. He also couldn’t go back on his word to the girls. At all costs to their personal and even professional lives, they were always there for him.
Instead, he paced the floor of Mara’s cottage while Nina taught Carl the art of duct-taping his limbs back on if the need should arise, frantic with worry about this council that Marty had flat out refused to allow him to surrender himself to.
Damn Mara and her sense of honor. If she could have just held out for a little longer, maybe they could’ve found the person who’d ratted her out and stopped this all before it got any worse.
He could have made something up for this crazy council, and kept them from ever knowing Mara had anything to do with it.
And now, she’d been gone ratting herself out for over four hours. He was going to lose his mind.
Yet, here everyone was, all in a huddle of support for Mara. Christ, he admired their unity.
Marty sat on the couch, hugging one of the million pillows Mara had flung all over while Wanda held Muffin, Marty’s poodle, and the catalyst for this whole string of accidents.
“Anyone hear from Keegan?” Harry asked, fighting the lump in his throat.
“Nothing yet. Hey, Harry?” Wanda called out. “Come sit, would you? You’re going to wear a hole in the floor with all this pacing, or wear me out in the process.” She reached over the back of the couch, holding her hand out to him.
Harry squeezed it before dropping to the raised hearth in front of the fireplace. “We need to figure out who sent Keegan that anonymous tip.” He was damned if he even knew where to begin. He’d never been in trouble in his life, nor could he remember anyone hating him so much they’d want revenge. He was a nerd, for Christ’s sake.
“Swear it, as sure as I sit here before you, Harry, if I find out who did this, I’ll kill them myself. Pack laws be damned,” Marty spat, running a weary hand over her eyes.
His head throbbed when he dropped it into his hands. “I keep going over and over it in my mind, and I can’t even come up with one person who could have seen what happened that night. The whole damn place was deserted. Even Cal had gone home for the night,” Harry said, referring to the janitor at Pack. “I saw him on my way down to the lab.”
“I’ll tell you this much, dude. Whoever the fuck this is, it’s the same assclown who took the kids and Carl. I can smell it,” Nina said, pulling Carl to the small window seat and handing him the duct tape to practice.
“It makes sense, but it doesn’t make any sense. Where did this grudge for me and Mara, or whatever we’re calling it, suddenly come from?”
“Hey, Harry?” Marty’s head popped up. “Question? Did we ever ask you why you were in the lab? I mean, you’re in accounting. What were you doing in the lab to begin with?”
Huh. He’d never given thought to that. How could he have missed it? “I was meeting Jeff Grandy. He texted me and asked me to meet him there so he could pass on an expense report to me. Said he was too wrapped up in a project, and didn’t want to leave the lab. You know how the lab group is—always wrapped up in one thing or another. They get in deep. Jeff and I worked out together all the time at Pack’s gym. He was always talking about his projects.”
“And where was Jeff when all of this went down?” Wanda asked, her hand cupping her chin. “Where is Jeff now, for that matter? Did you ever see him that night?”
Harry bolted off the hearth, startling Carl. Shit. “I never saw him that night. I’d just finished working out, which is why I had the vitaminwater. I dropped into the lab to find all the lights on, but nobody home. Went to Jeff’s desk to see if maybe he’d left it there, but nothing. That was when I drank the baby-making juice by mistake.”
Marty sat up straighter, tucking the pillow closer to her chest. “And have you seen Jeff since that evening? Since you’ve been back at work?”
Shit. Sounds of alarm clanged in his head. “No. No, I haven’t.” He reached for his phone with hasty hands, scrolling back to the texts for that night. It had definitely come from Jeff’s phone.
Whether he’d been the person using that phone was another story. “Let me text him now and see if we get a response. I forgot all about it with everything else going on.” He sent off a text to Jeff and waited, clutching his phone with tight fingers, pacing once again.
Marty scrolled her phone, her brow furrowed. “I’m checking to see if Jeff’s been in this week.”
Shit, shit, shit. Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner? He’d been so wrapped up in his own bullshit he never considered he hadn’t seen Jeff since this began.
His phone remained silent. Damn it.
Marty slid to the end of the couch, the pillow dropping from her lap. “Jeff hasn’t been in since the night of your accident, Harry.”
“Christ,” Harry murmured, running his hand over his jaw.
“But wait,” Marty interjected, her face smoothing from a frown to a smile. “Jeff has the flu, according to his mother who called him in sick. Phew. Okay, then. All’s well. Bet he’s just in bed and not answering texts. That makes sense, right?”
“Well, it would.”
“I feel a fucking ‘but’ coming on, Harry. So say it,” Nina ordered.
Harry took one last hopeless glance at his phone before shaking his head. “But . . . Jeff’s mother is dead. She died when he was in college.”
* * *
MARA laid her head against the cottage door before opening it, loving the smooth surface of it, the reflection of the lights pouring through the oval stained glass in the center.
All of her hard work, all of the long nights she’d spent renovating a space to call her own would be replaced by a dank, square cell in werewolf prison, if the news from the council was even close to correct.
Maybe she could be like the Bill Nye version of Martha Stewart while she served out her sentence? Teach her fellow inmates about DNA strands and evolution? Because learning was so popular in prison.
Her ears caught the sounds of Harry, Marty, Wanda, and Nina, voices raised in panic and anxiety, filtered through the door.
She just needed a second to process where she stood, and then she’d face the next hurdle. Just a second . . .
Snowflakes began to fall, dusting her nose and cheeks as tears welled in her eyes. She’d really done it this time. For all the times she’d been as close to perfect as she could get, mostly because her brother Sloan had been so out of control, and Keegan was always caught up in dealing with his antics, she’d made up for it on one fell swoop.
She’d trashed Harry’s life, and now it was in total upheaval. He couldn’t go home. He’d been taken from his children because someone had lured them away, and that was probably indirectly related to her, too. Worse, he didn’t want to even consider the idea he’d remain a werewolf. No offense, of course.
When she made snowballs, they turned into avalanches.
There’d be no babies, no strollers in the park, no midnight feedings, no scouring baby name websites.
There’d also be no Harry, and that hurt so hard she almost couldn’t breathe from the pain. Despite his wildly swinging moods, and his resentment toward what she’d done, she still liked him. His deep sense of honor, his love for his sister’s children, his work ethic were all things she admired in a man—in Harry.
He’d really stepped up to the plate for her today, leaving her not just grateful, but even more deeply enamored
than she’d already been.
Which wasn’t good, considering she was going to end up clanging a cup against some cell bars, and he’d probably go on to accept his fate, find a rich supermodel werewolf who was five-ten and gorgeous, marry her, and live on her private island where Mimi and Fletcher would body surf and be homeschooled by the natives.
The voices behind her door rose, forcing her to wipe her eyes and set about confronting whatever was going on inside.
Mara closed her eyes one last time before reentering the madness that had become her life.
Taking a deep breath, she sent up a wish, I don’t care what happens to me. Put me in the clinker, leave me to rot in solitary, whatever, but please, please, please, keep Harry and the kids safe.
CHAPTER
15
“How could I have missed the fact that Jeff was absent from the lab?” Mara groaned into her hands. Harry was crammed into the driver’s side of her Smart Car, his large body filling the small space, navigating the back roads of Buffalo behind the Jeff Gordon of the paranormal world—aka Nina. The race to get to Jeff’s house was on.
Every nerve in her body screamed for relief from the tension she felt just thinking something had happened to Jeff. Who would use his phone to text Harry and summon him to the lab if it wasn’t Jeff?
“How were you supposed to know it had anything to do with this, Mara?”
In exasperation for her selfishness, coupled with yet another blunder on her part, she snapped. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry! He’s a coworker. He works closely with me in the lab, and I didn’t even realize he was out for almost a whole week? I’m as selfish as they come. Always too wrapped up in some chemical for a product we’re creating to pay attention to the people I respect and work with on a daily basis!”
“Baby-making juice can be distracting and taxing.” His smile glowed against the rush of oncoming headlights.
The Accidental Werewolf 2: Something About Harry (Accidentally Paranormal Novel) Page 21