Again, it didn’t matter. She was never showing her face to Harry Emmerson again—not willingly anyway.
Mara clung to Marty’s faux-fur vest and shook her head. “Oh, no. Absolutely not. I am not going in there.” She nodded toward the darkened lab with the surrounding glass windows. Not with hot, geekified, slurpilicious, totally-oblivious-to-her-existence Harry Emmerson on the other side of that door.
Emphatic no here.
“Honey?” Marty soothed, staring into her sister-in-law’s eyes. “We have to help him. It’s our duty as his employers to help him. At least give me a hand until Nina and Wanda arrive. He’s trapped in there. Plus, if what he says is true, he’s suffered a huge trauma.”
Ah, but it probably wasn’t the kind of trauma her self-esteem had suffered because Harry didn’t even know she existed. As far as Mara was concerned, he deserved all the trauma he got. How the trauma had happened, right here at Pack in the lab she’d just exited an hour ago, left Mara a little worried.
Which made her pause.
No. It couldn’t be. She shrugged off her concern and took in Marty’s pleading blue eyes. “I’m sorry he’s suffered a trauma, but I’m no trauma specialist. You three are. I just work here at Pack.” With Harry. Scrumpdelicious Harry.
“Mara Flaherty?”
“Marty Flaherty?”
“If you don’t help me, I’ll take away your lab coat and your pocket protector.”
Mara waffled. Oh, noes. Not her lab coat. It was new and shiny. “That’s a cheap shot. You’re a mean taskmaster, Marty.”
Marty’s snort was sarcastic. “Nina’s my best friend. Nobody does cheap shots better ’n me, honey.” But Marty’s eyes held sympathetic warmth when she made an obvious note of the fear her sister-in-law was displaying.
She brushed a strand of Mara’s hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “Why don’t you want to help me, sweetie? I don’t get it. Whenever there’s a Pack crisis, you’re the first one to roll up her sleeves and help out. This isn’t like you at all. So tell me what’s going on.”
Here’s what’s going on, dear SIL. I’m a dirty, dirty whore and once, long ago, and far, far away, I attempted, awkwardly, foolishly, and miserably failed, mind you, to seduce Harry Emmerson. Totally against my better judgment, and worse, mostly against Pack rules.
Since that night, she’d hidden behind her group of friends at lunch whenever possible, avoided and sometimes even run from Harry, due to her embarrassment.
Oh, God. She couldn’t say that to Marty. Never, as long as she lived, would she ever confess to what happened that night at the Pack Christmas party.
So she lied. Like all washed-up temptresses did. “Um, I’m afraid? So, so afraid.” Mara cocked her head in the direction of the sound of something smashing. “Whatever’s going on in there sounds pretty bad. Maybe he’s hurt and all gushy with blood. Ick.” She made a big show of wrinkling her nose. “I hate blood.”
Marty ran her tongue over her lips with a frown, her blond hair perfect and smooth under the lights of the hallway leading to the lab. “Afraid of blood. You? A lab tech and the woman who threatened to rip off her brother’s head and shit down his windpipe?”
Oh, stop. She’d just been joking. All her brothers ever did was razz her about her pathetic lack of dates, and during family dinner date night, mostly because the accusation was true, she’d flipped and made one little threat while she had Sloan in a choke hold. Now they all called her the Mara-nator. Ha. Ha.
“I was just joking. Sloan and Keegan are always harping on me about mating and having babies. They got the better of me, that’s all. It was just once . . .”
A low, definitely feral growl from behind the lab’s doors brought both women to silence.
But not for long. Not with Marty. “You did hear that, didn’t you?”
A thread of fear and a moment of startling realization accosted Mara all at once. Nuh-uh . . .
But wait. Here was a thought. If Harry were hurt, why wouldn’t he call 911? How the heck had he gotten hold of the OOPS hotline? Unless . . . Oh. The connection was becoming clearer.
Can ya hear it now, Mara? She shook her head at the niggling voice. No way. She gulped, shuffling in her knee-high boots. It couldn’t be. “Did Nina say what this nine-one-one is about?”
“Somehow, according to the tweets Nina’s been sending me, this Harry Emmerson ended up inside the lab, and he claims he’s been turned into a werewolf. He took the test on the OOPS website and everything. Now, I don’t know about you, but my ears say he sure sounds like a werewolf. And if you let your nose do the walking, this Harry smells like one. Which means he needs help.”