Right now, like this, she wasn’t sure what to do. Unless she quit coming to bed with him as a wolf, she was bound to keep waking up against him as a naked woman so she might as well just get used to it.
He must have felt her tense, because he opened his eyes and sighed. “I’ve been thinking—”
“I’m not dating you.” She closed her eyes and snuggled against him, giving up the pretense that she wasn’t happy with this—here, with him.
“Okay. But I was thinking about the week of the new moon.”
“Which is three weeks from now.” She couldn’t help but be irritated about it.
“Right. We’ll do everything during that week. Investigations into the murders, diving, rescuing. Wherever we’re needed. We’ll do our investigative work at home until then. Internet searches, whatever we can run down. During the week you’re free from shifting, we can go to the movies, eat out, shop, whatever you’d love to do.”
“I can’t really go anywhere for three weeks, can I?” she asked, hating that she would be confined like that. She loved the outdoors and she loved her job because she could go diving and help rescue others or help solve crimes. She hated that she’d be cooped up in the cabin for weeks on end, which she suspected would be the ultimate case of cabin fever.
“After a time, you only will have trouble during the full moon. We’ll have get-togethers with other pack members. If you have to shift, you can do so in a bedroom, and then you can rejoin the party.”
“As a wolf,” she said skeptically.
“Yeah. But we’re all lupus garous, so everyone will understand and have no problem with it.”
“But me.”
“It would be a safe way to learn to get used to it. After a while, it will seem like no big deal to you.”
“I don’t see how I’ll ever get used to it.”
“You will. Do you remember Michael, the artist?”
“Who paints pictures of wolves? Is everyone a wolf but me?”
Allan smiled. “He’s fairly newly turned. He’s just as happy as can be.”
“No wonder he paints such beautiful portraits of wolves. I thought they were drugged so that they could sit and be photographed with people or out in nature.”
“Nope. He’s one of us, and the portraits he does? Only of the lupus garous who are willing to sit still long enough to have their portrait taken.”
“You haven’t had one made of you?”
“No. Nor has Paul. We couldn’t believe he had Lori sitting long enough to do hers.”
“Maybe he takes photographs.”
“He says he can’t capture the essence of the wolf unless he paints the actual wolf.”
“How come he was turned?” Debbie asked, afraid he’d seen someone shift and was forced to be one of them.
“You know Hunter, the leader of Paul’s and my SEAL team?”
“He lives on the Oregon coast.”
“Right. He fell in love with a woman who had wolf genes from a parent. She wanted to be mated to Hunter, and she was really close to her brother.”
“So they turned him?”
“Tessa did. He was glad because they are really close, and he would have been left out of the family otherwise.”
“If he had these wolf roots too, it’s not exactly the same as with me.”
“Well, it is, in that they didn’t have any of the wolf senses, the shifting, none of that. So since Hunter is Tessa’s mate, he oversees her shifting, and others watch Michael because he has no mate.”
“He came here to the art festival. I saw him. No one was with him.” Then she thought back to how either Allan’s mother, sister, or Lori’s grandmother had been nearby. They had a booth where they were selling jams and salsas and hand-beaded moccasins. “Oh, scratch that. I remember he was with your family. He must have had the shifting down fairly well then if he was out in public.” She hoped it hadn’t been long so she could have some of her old life back. Although it would never be quite the same again.
“He does. But it’s been two years now. Even at that, he has trouble during the night that the moon is at its fullest and some days after.”
“Two years? Ohmigod. I will never last two years at this.”
Allan rubbed her arm. “Yeah, you will. You’ll learn to cope with it and be just fine.”
She couldn’t believe being with him like this felt so natural, but she figured it would have gotten to this if they’d continued to make love like they had at her place. Something about her playing with him as a wolf and then napping…she didn’t know. But she was already feeling like she was closer to him than she’d ever been to a man she had been interested in being with.
Had turning her into a wolf made that happen? She didn’t think so. She’d been fascinated with him from the beginning. Maybe he was right in saying that somehow they saw in each other what they needed to feel complete. Even before he should have thought that way, because he was a wolf shifter.
If they continued to get naked like this and ended up in bed together every time? She figured he wouldn’t need to date her. She’d be all marshmallows and agree to a mating before she was ready. Until she turned into a wolf again.
* * *
Later that afternoon, Franny agreed to come and talk with them to see if she could aid them in discovering Otis’s whereabouts and how he came to be here and caused her accident. She hadn’t known him by that name, but when Lori had showed her the picture of Otis, Franny said he was the same man who had dated her and then stalked her.
It was sunny and a bit warmer when she arrived. Lori’s grandmother was taking care of her baby while Franny’s husband was busy with his chef duties at the Italian restaurant.
Franny sat across from Allan and Debbie, who was sitting on the couch in her wolf form, annoyed that she couldn’t hold her human form for an hour or so while Franny talked to them.
“Debbie was concerned you would feel uncomfortable with her listening in on the conversation as a wolf,” Allan said, not wanting to mention it because he knew Franny wouldn’t mind at all. Like everyone else in the pack, Franny wanted Debbie to feel at ease around them in any form she was in. But Debbie had insisted he mention it, right before she had to shift.
Franny shook her head, looking tense.
“Okay, what we’re trying to put together is when you were seeing Otis and then stopped seeing him. He killed Sarah around the day of your accident, maybe the night before, according to the autopsy reports. From what we understand, he was in a LARP group and Sarah became his best friend’s lover.”
“Lloyd.”
“Right. So then she turned Lloyd. Had she then convinced him to come up here with her to join our pack instead of joining Devlyn’s in Colorado? I assume she knew Devlyn wouldn’t have approved of her turning Lloyd when he wanted to be a werewolf hunter. And he was best friends with Otis, also a werewolf hunter, who was ready to kill any werewolf he could locate and genuine wolves too. Because of her desire to come out as a werewolf, Devlyn wouldn’t accept her in the pack.
“What if she and Lloyd were together still and she told him to come here? Then he told Otis? We never found any evidence she had a car anywhere in the area. Then Otis murdered Lloyd because he was also a werewolf. Lloyd had no defensive wounds on him, making it appear as though he didn’t believe his friend Otis was going to kill him.”
“Otis must not have had any of your names, or he would have tried hunting you down, don’t you think?” Franny asked.
“I believe that’s why he just shot wolves that were checking out the blood left at the site. But it seems like too much of a coincidence that he ran you off the road, that he knew you were here, when he was most likely trying to learn who else was a werewolf in the pack Sarah planned to join.”
“He must not have seen Rose and Lori arrive,” Franny agreed.
“Yeah
, we got damn lucky on that.”
Allan sensed Franny knew more than she was letting on. Suddenly, Debbie bolted from the couch, sending decorator pillows flying as she raced to the bedroom. He suspected she was shifting again, but it was the first time she was able to do so that soon after the last shift.
He and Franny waited for Debbie to rejoin them, not wanting her to miss out on the talk.
When she stalked back in the room, she was wearing a pale blue sweater, jeans, and fluffy blue slippers. She curled up with him on the couch and he wrapped his arm around her, glad she was happy to be back to her human form.
“Did you know Sarah?” Debbie asked.
Allan had never considered such a thing. As far as he knew, Sarah was a stranger to the pack and somehow had heard they were looking for wolves—courtesy of Lori’s grandma and his mother.
Franny hesitated, looking a little panicked.
“How did you meet Otis?” Debbie asked.
Franny let out her breath. “Through Sarah. We knew each other in drama classes at the community college in Boise. She was really wild; I wasn’t. She’d met these two guys—Lloyd and Otis. Only Otis went by the name of Cleveland when I knew him. She started dating Lloyd, and I went out with Otis. Then I met Gary, my wolf mate, and I called it quits with Otis. He was really angry about it. Kept stalking me and Gary. Then Sarah left for southern Montana and said that Otis and Lloyd had headed out that way too.
“I didn’t hear from her again until right before…before Lori and Rose found her. Sarah and I had been close friends. She had some notion we should come out as lupus garous—tell people what we were. That people would see we weren’t vicious or anything. I’d hoped someone would convince her how foolish the notion was. I figured she might get in trouble with a wolf pack over her wild ideas. Not that she’d die at the hand of some professed werewolf hunter.”
“Did you know Otis had notions of killing werewolves?” Debbie asked.
Franny looked at her lap. “Yes. His talk about finding werewolves amused me. He hadn’t found any, but he said he was looking. I said they could be just anyone, didn’t he think? No way did I believe he’d ever really run across any, other than Sarah and me, and he was clueless about us. We figured he always would be. I feel I am to blame for indulging in his illusion too.”
“Why didn’t you tell us before that you knew Sarah?” Allan asked.
“She wanted to be a member of the wolf pack in Boise that Gary belonged to. He was one of the sub-leaders who voted her down. He said she should be put out of her misery before some of our kind were killed because of her wild ideas. When I met him and heard how he felt about her, I didn’t want him to know I had been running with her. I hadn’t wanted him to know about Otis either because I’d stayed with him much longer than is safe for our kind. I just wanted that part of my life to be over and to start anew with Gary.”
“But you knew her name and the men who had been involved with her when we didn’t. We might have caught up with him sooner,” Allan said, annoyed.
“I was really shaken up with the car accident and nearly losing my baby. No one showed me the picture of the woman Lori and Rose had found.”
“Okay,” Allan said, backing off a bit. That had probably been Lori’s call.
“I didn’t learn of it until recently… I heard you went to southern Montana to investigate some lead, but not anything about it. As far as I knew, Otis had learned where Gary and I were and was stalking me, and now he wanted to kill me for leaving him. I had no idea he was in the area because Sarah was.”
“Sarah told Rose she was coming in a few weeks,” Allan said.
“I didn’t know she was coming. She had gotten in touch with me about my pack, sent me a letter and her new phone number. I had talked to her about it. I thought between you and Paul, because you were SEALs, you could set her on the right path. She never got in touch with me to say she was coming or had arrived. I just thought the dead woman was someone else who had come to check out the pack. Or a random wolf in the area.” Franny swallowed hard. “I jeopardized the whole pack. She said she was leaving Lloyd. She never told me she had turned him. If she had told him about our pack, I believe Otis would have tortured her until he knew her contact.”
“What if she told him you were the contact? And that’s why he tried to kill you?” Debbie asked.
Franny chewed on her bottom lip. “Why didn’t he try to coerce the truth out of me then?”
“Maybe he planned to but we came upon the accident scene too quickly,” Debbie said.
“Did you see him stop, then leave?” Allan asked.
“No. I was trying to get myself unbuckled and get out of the SUV because it was filling up fast with water. I was upside down, I think I was unconscious for a few seconds. I don’t remember the SUV flipping, just the rough ride down the slope. After I managed to get out, I was attempting to open the back door to reach Stacy. I don’t believe I was thinking straight at the time. Now, I realize I should have crawled between the seats and released her. It didn’t even come to mind.”
Allan could relate. “That’s understandable. You were hypothermic and in shock.”
Franny nodded. “He might have figured we had drowned when I didn’t leave the car right away, and then he left when he heard or saw you coming.”
“Do you have any idea where he might be staying?” Debbie asked.
“We all went camping together. Lloyd and Otis might not be wolves, but they know survival training from their time in the military and growing up. Otis is a survivalist. He might be staying at some rundown motel, or he could be living off the land.”
“It’s damn cold out there,” Allan said.
“He’s originally from Alaska. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all this before, but I didn’t even know Sarah was the one Otis had killed. When I learned about it, you seemed to already know everything I did. I…didn’t want to talk about it.”
“We’re a pack,” Allan said. “That means sharing any information that could lead to protecting our pack.”
She nodded.
“Why would you want her to join the pack when your mate didn’t like her?” Allan asked.
“She seemed so lost. I worried about her. I really thought you and Paul could help her.”
“Do you want to have lunch with us?” Debbie asked cheerfully.
Allan and Franny looked at her. He was as surprised as Franny looked.
“I’m hungry, and I’m fixing lunch.” Debbie got off the couch and headed for the kitchen.
“I should get back to Stacy. I didn’t mean for Emma to have to look after her for that long.”
“Nonsense,” Debbie said. “From what I’ve heard, Emma and her quilting friends can’t get enough of taking care of babies. They are all adopting the little ones in the pack.”
Allan smiled. He hadn’t thought Debbie liked babies all that much. Maybe just not the idea of having her own.
Chapter 19
When Franny left after lunch, Debbie took Allan to the guest room where he’d set up both their computers. “I want to check all the rundown motels in the area.”
“I’ll call Paul and ask if he can put someone on the detail. You can’t go anywhere.”
“I know, but that’s what I would have done if I could have. What if they assign you another dive partner while I’m ‘recuperating’ from my injuries?”
“The sheriff knows I’m here taking care of you and I’m not going anywhere.”
She was glad to hear it. She figured if the sheriff found another female diver for Allan to work with, she wouldn’t be able to control her wolf half one bit.
“Why did you end the interview with Franny and serve lunch?” Allan asked.
“She had told us everything she knew. She felt bad her friend had died, and she felt she was responsible.”
Allan pulled Debbi
e into his arms and hugged her. “Women are so much better at some things.”
She smiled up at him and hugged him back. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me.”
“No. I was surprised, but women and men think differently. I could tell you made a real friend in Franny this afternoon. And that’s a good thing.”
“She felt guilty that her actions could have resulted in Sarah’s death.”
“I think now she understands she has to keep the leaders informed if something might affect the pack. You got a lot further than I would have with her. We make a good team.”
* * *
That evening, Tara came over with her brother and mother, Lori and Paul to Allan’s cabin to discuss why she had been running as a wolf and what had happened to her.
Tara wrung her hands as she sat on the couch next to her mother and Everett. She reminded him of the way Franny had acted earlier—guilty, beta-like, anxious.
“I…know I shouldn’t have done what I did,” she said so demurely, Allan felt bad for her. Everyone had wanted him to date Tara, but she was so mousy, she just wasn’t his type. He did care for her like a sister, and at that moment, he wanted to give her a hug and tell her what she had to say was significant.
By doing what she did, she had jeopardized all of their lives, not just her own. They wanted to understand her reasoning and ensure no one else was tempted to do anything like it.
“Everyone is important to the pack,” Tara continued. “But me. I wanted to do something to help. I thought if I could draw him out, I could stop him. Not that I thought I could stop him in what he was doing exactly, but maybe I could locate his vehicle and learn where he was staying locally.”
“So how did you find him? Or did he find you?” Paul asked.
“I followed six different hunters that day. All were armed with rifles, and I was careful to keep out of sight. They were hunting elk, and none of the men looked like the picture that you had passed around to the pack. I really didn’t expect to find him that day. But I prayed I would. I’d been doing this for several days, really. Every day, I’d find hunters, follow them, listen to their conversations, then look for others, hear shots fired, and check them out.