Something About Harry(17)

Harry’s wheels began to turn again.

Aha! But then Mara cringed. When he’d made mention of the heartburn he’d experience from Missy’s famous taco dip, he’d been across the room with a group of his equally geeky friends from accounting, and she’d been eavesdropping because every word Harry spoke was like an angel’s wings fluttering in her eardrums.

“Wait. You heard that?” he asked, incredulous and again wary, the lantern-shaped light beside his front door enhancing the hesitance in his eyes.

Mara tugged her half-frozen ear. “Werewolf hearing. Sorry. It happens sometimes. But the point is, Garvin worked for Pack for over thirty-five years before he retired, and he was a human.” A kind, unassuming human, who’d been good friends with her father and wouldn’t have hurt a soul.

Harry popped his luscious lips in a “not flyin’ with me” way. “How do I know that? Maybe he was one of your people, and he hid it just like you and your sister-in-law and God knows who else. It’s not like I could smell what he was.”

“Garvin was a vegetarian, Harry. You know that. He shared his recipes all the time. We’re not vegetarians. We need meat. A lot of it. He wouldn’t be grazing on spinach salads at lunch every day if he was a werewolf. He’d need to eat red meat in order to keep his energy levels up.”

“Like that couldn’t have been a cover up?”

“Would you eat tofu just to hide you were a werewolf, especially feeling the way I know you’re feeling right now? Not to mention he’d have had to deny the gnawing hunger we experience. You feel it right now. I know you do.” Mara glanced down at his stomach for emphasis. On cue, it growled.

Realization struck him then. His eyes went wide like the Harry of old. “Holy shit! That’s why there’s steak on the menu in the cafeteria? And not just the crappy kind you’d expect in a cafeterialike setting. You know, injected with dyes and packed in water? The good stuff.”

While he chewed on that revelation, Mara nodded again, hoping to worm her way a little closer to the door. “Yes! And if you’ve ever really paid attention, you’ll see almost all of the Pack employees eat red meat for lunch. I’m sure, as health conscious and smart as you are, you’ve made note of that without ever realizing you’d made note of it. Until now.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, the fine sprinkling of dark hair on them part of many of her fantasies where he held her close in a hammock under a palm tree on some tropical island and told her no one else in the world was like her. Ahem . . .

“Fine,” he conceded. “So a lot of people eat red meat at Pack. I don’t even remember what your point was. I also find myself incredibly irritable right now. Unusual for me. So I’m having trouble focusing. Sorry. Guess it’s the werewolf in me,” he sneered.

Mara ignored his jab, focusing on her mission. Besides, Harry deserved a few pokes at her expense. She had two brothers who poked like they’d created the word. “The point was, we would never hurt you or anyone else, and you can trust us. So let us help you. Please.”

He eyed them both, and again Mara watched uncertainty and hesitance flit across his handsome face. And then it stuck. “I said I’m fine. We’re fine.”

Nina’s impatience exploded. “Bullshit,” she hissed in his face. “Now you can either let us in, or I can let myself in. Choose, Harry. Choose well, friend. Because if you choose not to, I’ll have to break things you’ll have to fix, and I get the impression you’re not Bob the Builder.”

“You watch that?”

“Yeah. With my kid. She loves Bob. Her Grandpa Arch bought her the DVD collection.”

Noting he was again relating to the enemy, Harry’s jaw tightened, silently expressing his anger in that all too sexy way he’d acquired just tonight.

Nina’s impatience only served to make Mara more agitated and more determined to convince him they were here in peace.

But without so much as another protest, he suddenly shoved the door open with a low grunt, revealing his inner sanctum.

The place she’d daydreamed about a million times since she’d begun to crush on him over a year ago. Her heart melted at the idea of seeing the house where she’d imagined his seductions—all with Harry as the lead, of course.

But her crush’s crib hadn’t included a Barbie Dreamhouse with its accessories scattered from one end of the room to the other. Nor had it included canned ravioli, dripping from the buttery soft leather couch and the hyper bouncing of a noisy, if not adorable, little boy, who happened to look a great deal like Harry, on said couch.