Something About Harry(23)
Maybe.
“Then I guess I have no choice, do I?” Harry baited, his words tight.
Mara gulped in some air, not realizing she’d been holding her breath. “Then it’s settled. I’ll make coffee and Marty can tell you what happened to her. Okay?” She followed up her statement with a forced smile, slipping between tension-filled bodies and menacing eyes to get to the kitchen.
Her hands shook when she began to open cabinets as Marty’s voice, beginning the tale of how she and Mara’s brother Keegan had met, swirled in her ears.
They often laughed about Marty and Keegan’s love story. How ironic it was. How uncanny the two met the way they had. Mara could listen to it over and over. It made her sigh with dreamy happiness.
But when she flipped the tap on to fill the coffeepot, Harry wasn’t laughing. He was sitting in his recliner, arms crossed at his chest, stiff and unyielding.
Clearly, Marty’s quasi-charming story about some werewolf love wasn’t going to penetrate Harry’s wall of anger—not right now, anyway.
But she’d find a way to scale it.
If it killed her.
CHAPTER
5
Harry slipped out of his bathroom window at approximately two thirty in the morning, leaving the women of OOPS and Mara sound asleep on various pieces of furniture in his house, with Nina tucked next to Mimi’s side after a nightmare.
The frozen night air clawed at his face, but it didn’t sting the way it usually did. In fact, it felt refreshing to his overheated skin, soothing his bursts of unwarranted anger.
He made his way down his short driveway, rubbing his hands together, and flexing his fingers before he put his shoulder to the bumper of his Volkswagen and gave it a shove, pushing it down the driveway until it was on the road. Thankfully, the women had parked their big SUVs along the curb.
Before he nudged the bumper, he sucked in more of the cold air—still unsure. In all the werewolf talk Marty and the women had spouted, somewhere along the way he’d heard he now had superstrength, something he’d mentally planned to use to his advantage in order to keep from starting his car and waking the women, all of whom possessed super hearing.
Or something like that.
They’d offered to stay the night in case his shift happened against his will, and Fletcher and Mimi needed someone to look out for them. He wasn’t thrilled about these strange women having contact with his niece and nephew.
Yet innately, he sensed they meant no harm. How or why he was suddenly a good judge of character had to be chalked up to more of the fantastical—because he’d sucked ass at it for most of his life.
He’d been screwed by the character gauge he lacked more often than not. The one that set off alarms in your gut or imaginary warning bells in your ears. Donna used to tell him all the time, not only did he miss most social cues and lack a universal sense of humor, but he sucked when judging a person’s character.
At the time, he’d been convinced Donna just didn’t understand that “Beam me up, Scotty” or any of his sci-fi humor could be used in almost all situations and still be funny. Of course, that’s what Donna had said to him when he’d showed up at the bank to find out his ex-girlfriend, Brigitte, had drained his bank account and left him with a buck eighteen in his checking account.
An odd number to most, but to Harry—it was a message from Brigitte. She’d left him with just enough money to buy a cup of coffee in the cafeteria at Pack because he’d once said he’d die if he couldn’t have their coffee, and she’d joked she’d be sure, if she ever raped their mutual account, she wouldn’t let him die coffee-less.
“Okay, so point, Donna,” he muttered up at the clear, cold sky. “I lose all sense of reason when it comes to a woman I like. That’s why I’ve been sticking to my numbers and avoiding temptation. But what the hell am I supposed to do when a passel of women are the very persons I’m supposed to try to logically figure out?”
But the confidence he felt about the women and their genuine concern for his sister’s kids rang true. It was different this time. It wasn’t him pulling the covers over his head to hide from an inevitable clue Donna’d found—or he’d found and pretended it meant nothing when, in the scheme of things, it meant everything.
He didn’t feel a shred of doubt the women from OOPS wanted to help him with the kids.
The kids . . .
They were killing him in a slow agonizing slew of defiant acts and buckets of tears. No matter what he did, he was the enemy. He missed the hell out of the days when he’d been goofy Uncle Harry, but the way they’d responded to Nina and Mara had astonished him. They were no longer the sullen, pouty, disobedient children of the past few months. Suddenly, with Nina of all the unlikely suspects, everything was colorful rainbows and cotton candy giggles.