SEAL Wolf In Too Deep(67)
“You haven’t had one made of you?”
“No. Nor has Paul. We couldn’t believe he had Lori sitting long enough to do hers.”
“Maybe he takes photographs.”
“He says he can’t capture the essence of the wolf unless he paints the actual wolf.”
“How come he was turned?” Debbie asked, afraid he’d seen someone shift and was forced to be one of them.
“You know Hunter, the leader of Paul’s and my SEAL team?”
“He lives on the Oregon coast.”
“Right. He fell in love with a woman who had wolf genes from a parent. She wanted to be mated to Hunter, and she was really close to her brother.”
“So they turned him?”
“Tessa did. He was glad because they are really close, and he would have been left out of the family otherwise.”
“If he had these wolf roots too, it’s not exactly the same as with me.”
“Well, it is, in that they didn’t have any of the wolf senses, the shifting, none of that. So since Hunter is Tessa’s mate, he oversees her shifting, and others watch Michael because he has no mate.”
“He came here to the art festival. I saw him. No one was with him.” Then she thought back to how either Allan’s mother, sister, or Lori’s grandmother had been nearby. They had a booth where they were selling jams and salsas and hand-beaded moccasins. “Oh, scratch that. I remember he was with your family. He must have had the shifting down fairly well then if he was out in public.” She hoped it hadn’t been long so she could have some of her old life back. Although it would never be quite the same again.
“He does. But it’s been two years now. Even at that, he has trouble during the night that the moon is at its fullest and some days after.”
“Two years? Ohmigod. I will never last two years at this.”
Allan rubbed her arm. “Yeah, you will. You’ll learn to cope with it and be just fine.”
She couldn’t believe being with him like this felt so natural, but she figured it would have gotten to this if they’d continued to make love like they had at her place. Something about her playing with him as a wolf and then napping…she didn’t know. But she was already feeling like she was closer to him than she’d ever been to a man she had been interested in being with.
Had turning her into a wolf made that happen? She didn’t think so. She’d been fascinated with him from the beginning. Maybe he was right in saying that somehow they saw in each other what they needed to feel complete. Even before he should have thought that way, because he was a wolf shifter.
If they continued to get naked like this and ended up in bed together every time? She figured he wouldn’t need to date her. She’d be all marshmallows and agree to a mating before she was ready. Until she turned into a wolf again.
*
Later that afternoon, Franny agreed to come and talk with them to see if she could aid them in discovering Otis’s whereabouts and how he came to be here and caused her accident. She hadn’t known him by that name, but when Lori had showed her the picture of Otis, Franny said he was the same man who had dated her and then stalked her.
It was sunny and a bit warmer when she arrived. Lori’s grandmother was taking care of her baby while Franny’s husband was busy with his chef duties at the Italian restaurant.
Franny sat across from Allan and Debbie, who was sitting on the couch in her wolf form, annoyed that she couldn’t hold her human form for an hour or so while Franny talked to them.
“Debbie was concerned you would feel uncomfortable with her listening in on the conversation as a wolf,” Allan said, not wanting to mention it because he knew Franny wouldn’t mind at all. Like everyone else in the pack, Franny wanted Debbie to feel at ease around them in any form she was in. But Debbie had insisted he mention it, right before she had to shift.
Franny shook her head, looking tense.
“Okay, what we’re trying to put together is when you were seeing Otis and then stopped seeing him. He killed Sarah around the day of your accident, maybe the night before, according to the autopsy reports. From what we understand, he was in a LARP group and Sarah became his best friend’s lover.”
“Lloyd.”
“Right. So then she turned Lloyd. Had she then convinced him to come up here with her to join our pack instead of joining Devlyn’s in Colorado? I assume she knew Devlyn wouldn’t have approved of her turning Lloyd when he wanted to be a werewolf hunter. And he was best friends with Otis, also a werewolf hunter, who was ready to kill any werewolf he could locate and genuine wolves too. Because of her desire to come out as a werewolf, Devlyn wouldn’t accept her in the pack.
“What if she and Lloyd were together still and she told him to come here? Then he told Otis? We never found any evidence she had a car anywhere in the area. Then Otis murdered Lloyd because he was also a werewolf. Lloyd had no defensive wounds on him, making it appear as though he didn’t believe his friend Otis was going to kill him.”
“Otis must not have had any of your names, or he would have tried hunting you down, don’t you think?” Franny asked.
“I believe that’s why he just shot wolves that were checking out the blood left at the site. But it seems like too much of a coincidence that he ran you off the road, that he knew you were here, when he was most likely trying to learn who else was a werewolf in the pack Sarah planned to join.”