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looked up and smiled at him, and he was so distracted by that smile that he walked into a wall. Dad died when I was a baby, but Cooper told me a lot of stories about what I’d missed growing up. The silly jokes, the googly eyes, Dad bringing bunches of wildflowers to her when he came home from a run. He once told Cooper that the trick to a happy life was to find the person you can’t breathe without and marry her.
    How was any guy I chose going to compete with that sort of romantic goo?
    So, given my candidate pool, marriage and kids weren’t exactly things I was looking forward to. I loved Eva. I loved cuddling her, the sweet apple and baby-shampoo smell that radiated from that crazy hair. But the best part was that I could give her back. When the cuteness was over and she had a smelly diaper or a tantrum, I could just claim ignorance and hand her over to Mo, who somehow had the patience needed to deal with stuff like that.
    I was basically a selfish creature. I liked sleeping and being able to leave the house without making sure I had a half-dozen toys and a Baggie full of Cheerios. But not having kids wasn’t an option. For one thing, I wasn’t planning on dying a virgin. And in my family, if you have sex, you’re going to have kids. And second, I sort of owed it to my bloodline to pass the werewolf magic along.
    It seemed blatantly unfair that I seemed to be suffering from some hormone surge when Nick Thatcher came into the picture. Clearly, some wire labeled “Don’t mess around with men who could ruin your life” had short-circuited in my brain. I’d known plenty of guys with big blue eyes, guys with pouty, kissable lips, guys who smelled like Sunday lunch. I’d just never met one who had all three qualities.
    That was the problem. It was all looks. It was my primal brain at work. It wasn’t that he was smart or funny or that he actually managed to thwart me in conversation, which until now, no one but Mo could do. And it definitely wasn’t because I’d developed some weird, creepy, stalker-at-first-fascination thing with him. . .
    Moving on.
    As hard as I tried to shrug off his thrall, Nick just kept popping up, like one of those damn plastic whack-a-moles. First, I found out my cousin, Evie’s husband, Buzz, unaware of his wolfy in-laws’ involvement in the debacle, had given Nick an extensive interview about his search for the killer wolf. Alan Dahling had taken Nick up the mountain to the area where Walt and Hank had shot the huge male timber wolf we were letting the public believe was responsible for the attacks. I had to hand it to Nick, he was good at his job. If you considered being a giant pain in my supernatural ass a job.
    And the final blow? Mo was delivering Tupperwared meals to his house like some cross between a Welcome Wagon and Marie Callender. He tried to pay for it, and she refused to take his money. She considered it some sort of outreach program. I think the point was reaching out to drive me crazy.
    “Let me get this straight,” I’d hissed at her over the phone. “I say don’t have anything to do with the nosy outsider, and you start delivering care packages to his door? I can’t get your meat loaf in my freezer, but you’re dropping them on Thatcher’s doorstep with reheating instructions?”
    “I saw him at the market the other day, and the poor guy had twenty Banquet dinners in his cart,” Mo said, her voice rising to a disturbing, defensive octave. “Do you have any idea how expensive those things are up here? Plus, they’re all fat and sodium, and he’s too pretty to be allowed to get all bloated.”
    “But I told you—”
    “Look, with all the questions Nick is not so subtly trying to work into conversations, it would look weird and suspicious if I went all silent religious-compound wife whenever he walked into a room. Doesn’t it make more sense that we would remain neighborly?”
    There was silence on my end of the line . . . unless you counted the sound of