Oh, bullshit. He was no more werewolf than she was vixen. “But Nina said she’d be here ASAP to help. She’s a vampire. She runs fast. Also, might I point out, Keegan already pitches a hissy every time you and your cohorts get involved in an OOPS case. Imagine the hell I’d get if I did, too . . .” Which was ridiculous. Mara, as well as anyone knew, if Marty wanted to do it, her brother wouldn’t dream of stopping her.
Sure, he groused. Sometimes he even complained out loud, but he loved his wife’s commitment to saving others who’d gone through what she’d gone through, whether he liked to admit it or not.
“And you always, always listen to your brother,” Marty jabbed with sarcasm and rolled her big, blue eyes. “Look, if you don’t want to help, I’ll go in alone. But sometimes, in situations like these, things get a little wonky. I only have so many limbs to use to my advantage. He might get loose.”
A high keening wail, one that sent shivers up Mara’s spine, made her grab Marty’s arm. “Wait!” The moment she thwarted her sister-in-law was the moment that first ludicrous suspicion moments ago turned into a terrifying thought.
Marty shrugged her off. “I can’t wait, Mara. He needs help. Jesus, it sounds like he’s giving birth in there. Now let go!”
She had no doubt Marty could handle Harry. None at all. But there was a little something else troubling her . . . She tightened her grip on Marty’s arm. “No!” Mara licked her lips in nervousness. “First I need to know something.”
Marty’s mouth pinched when Harry crashed against the door. “Hurry it up—he’s going to take the door out!”
“How did this accident allegedly happen?”
“Nina said something about vitaminwater. I don’t know the rest, and I don’t have time to scroll through the tweets. We have to help poor Harry!”
Mara’s gut clenched tight. Vitaminwater? Right. Harry liked vitaminwater. He drank one with his bologna and mustard sandwich on whole wheat every day at lunch and two when he worked out. He liked the kiwi-strawberry best.
But there was something Harry probably wasn’t going to like: the fact that the alleged vitaminwater he’d mistakenly sipped from wasn’t vitaminwater at all.
Because she’d grown weary of searching for her Prince Charming, Mad Scientist Mara had made a concoction for making werewolf babies sans a male werewolf—easily disguised in a bottle of vitaminwater.
If she couldn’t pull off something as simple as “Operation Seduction,” not just with Harry but with any man she found interesting and attractive, she surely couldn’t be trusted to obtain something like a sample for artificial insemination. Not to mention the guilt she’d harbor if she used a man to create a child he didn’t know about just to ease her burning desire to have children.
And in one crazy, ridiculously stupid, insane moment, single, childless Mara Flaherty had decided she didn’t need a husband or pack mate to have a family. She’d make one of her own. Lots of single women did it. But lots—nay, most—single women weren’t werewolves.
It wasn’t like there was a sperm bank for paranormals. She wanted a baby that was full werewolf. She didn’t know how to raise a half human, and there weren’t any half-human men beating down her door anyway. No one was beating down her door. Not even a Girl Scout selling Thin Mints.
Her as-yet-unfulfilled desire to be a mother had sent her to the lab after Pack hours and sometimes long into the night to create something that would make it possible for her dreams to come true. So she made her own baby formula. At that point, she wasn’t even sure it was going to work, but the ingredients of said baby-maker wouldn’t harm her, either.
Just an hour ago, in the midst of preparing to transfer it from a beaker to a secure vial, Mara had realized she couldn’t find any vials. A new batch of vials was four floors up. So she’d sterilized the empty vitaminwater bottle and dumped the serum into it, in order to keep it from being compromised for an extended period of time, until she could hunt down some vials.
Because just like Harry, she liked vitaminwater, too.
But then an emergency upstairs had arisen, and she’d been called away from the lab—a lab that no one was supposed to be in until tomorrow morning, long after she was gone and the evidence of her baby mama formula had been cleared.
Okay, so she’d forgotten the bottle. A bottle she’d left on the lab table just an hour ago.
A bottle Harry must have mistaken for his own.
Wow. Harry probably wouldn’t like that at all.
CHAPTER
3
Wanda and Nina skidded down Pack’s hall past a still stunned Mara, bursting through the doors of the lab just as Harry was about to go for Marty’s throat.