Page 75 of Accidentally Wedded To A Werewolf

“How would you feel about helping me set up a fair?”

Luna blinked. It sounded like a lot of admin, but she’d already been learning so many new skills this month that didn’t usually fall under her “secretly marketing” wheelhouse—setting up subscriber buttons, ordering bookmarks in bulk, organizing the ETA for clay shipments to arrive by plane instead of boat. She’d even learned a little bit of coding to help people set up their online stores.

“I’d love to,” she said, mind already running through a dozen different poster and slogan ideas and brands that would be interested in sponsoring them. Then she looked out the window at the snow. Or moreprecisely, the lack of it. There was sludgy ice around the edges of the street, but that was it.

“I might have to coordinate a lot of it over email,” she said. “Once the snow’s thawed, I’m… I’m gone.”

“Email sounds great. I look forward to working with you,” Christopher replied with that easy, trusting smile. It wasn’t difficult to smile back, even as anxiety strangely grew in her gut, appearing whenever she talked about leaving Claw Haven.

“Please tell me you’re getting paid for this,” Oliver said as they jogged through the forest several hours later. “It sounds like a hell of a lot of work.”

“I’m getting paid,” Luna panted. “He even paid me more than I asked for! Said it was back pay for everything I’ve done so far. One of Claw Haven’s suspiciously nice residents strikes again.”

“He’s the nicest guy I’ve ever met,” Oliver said. “I hated him for months.”

Luna laughed. Her elbows jostled his as they turned around the forest path. Each touch sent a small fissure of warmth up Luna’s arm. How did they cope with this in the summer? Arizonan summer, anyway. She doubted Alaskan summers got anywhere close to the heat they were both used to.

“Seriously,” Oliver said. “I could not believe this guy was for real. He had to have something hidden up those tight sleeves. But nope, he’s just this weirdly polite,devoted dude who loves his wife and wants this town to be okay.”

They skirted around a tree and fell back into place next to each other.

“He looked excited,” he added. “Never seen the guy look so excited about anything but his wife.”

Luna preened. “He was very impressed with my work! He said evenhedidn’t know this much about the local businesses. Said I wasveryskilled.” As soon as she registered the pride, caution rushed in behind it. “I mean, a lot of it is just knowing people, you know? Emailing people that I talked to at parties two years ago and asking if they want to sponsor a skincare store. So, it’s not me so much as it is talking to the right people.”

Oliver huffed. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

He shook his head, eyes on the trees ahead of them. “You’re so cocky about everything. Then you bring up your work, and you start saying all these disclaimers.It’s not me, I didn’t do anything. Bullshit. You did everything! Half of these people didn’t know what a mailing list was or how to design a Facebook ad before you came along.”

Luna eyed her sneakers, cheeks burning. She was used to getting praise—everyone told her how gorgeous she was, how fun, how sophisticated—but she wasn’t used to getting praise forthis. Her family treated her degrees like something she did to feel smart. Whenever she tried to make a marketing suggestion, she got an eye roll and a quick subjectchange.

Their elbows brushed. Luna shivered as another burst of heat ran up her arm and into her heart.

Oliver sighed. “Don’t tell anyone I said this. As much as this town pisses me off, you’ve started something here. I think your family are idiots for thinking you can’t do this. You’ve done a lot of good in Claw Haven. It’s really going to make a difference.”

Luna looked over at him, shocked. He was still staring up at the trees ahead, which were thinning out as they got closer to the ocean. There was a muscle fluttering in his jaw like he was clenching it.

“You can speed up, you know,” Luna said. “We can put some real space between us now. Last time you even went out of sight!”

“And you immediately got lost,” he reminded her.

Luna’s phone rang.

“Told you it was worth it to buy sports leggings with pockets,” she told Oliver as she fished it out. “Hello?”

“Hey,” said Ben. “Oliver with you?”

“Obviously.”

“Great,” Ben said. “Tell him I’m going up the mountain tomorrow. It’s flower time.”

Twenty-Three

Adistraction, Grandmother Musgrove called it. Something to take his mind off Ben and Sabine’s trek into the mountains. Oliver had assumed she would show him a mysterious stain she’d discovered in one of the rooms. He didn’t expect her to lead him into her room to find her desk covered in the instruments he was never allowed to touch as a child: a slim blue bottle with a curled handle, a battered golden bowl, a small silver knife, pungent dry herbs tied in bundles. The smell reminded him of those nights when he’d climbed into her bed in the months after his parents died. Ben came too, and he’d fall asleep with his face buried in Grandmother’s hair and Ben’s foot sticking somewhere uncomfortable and the scent of those dried herbs hanging in the air. It smelled like safety. Like being stuck in his head, unable to climb out, only to have his grandmother reach a hand down and lift him free.

He touched the sleek blue bottle that had gotten him into this mess. “What’s all this?”

---