The Accidental Werewolf 2: Something About Harry (Accidentally Paranormal Novel) by dakota cassidy Page B

his entire demeanor. He rolled up the sleeves of his green and black flannel shirt, rumpled and buttoned incorrectly, and repeated, “I’m fine.”
    Mara held up her hands as a sign of peace. “I know we’ve freaked you out, and I get it. But I swear to you, if you’ll just use your new sense of smell, you’ll be able to tell we’d never hurt you.”
    Now he went all skeptical, his tone incredulous. “My nose . . .”
    “Yeah,” Nina groused. “You’re officially an ass-sniffer now, which means you can smell danger.” She used her hand to push at the air under her neck, shooing it in Harry’s direction. “Sniff me.”
    Harry almost did as he was told, rocking forward on the heels of his feet, but then he caught himself and stepped squarely back as though there were no way he was going to be caught falling for Nina’s joke. “That’s ridiculous.”
    “No, no! It’s true!” Mara infused as much sincerity as she could into her reassurance. “Look, even if you can’t smell that we’re not dangerous, where’s your sense of reason, Harry? How long have you worked for Pack now?”
    Harry’s eyes narrowed again, but he was still wavering. If he couldn’t smell his own uncertainty about not trusting them, Mara could, and she was going to take that and run with it. “Long enough.”
    Now that she had a point to make, Mara was all business. If they were talking logical conclusions, she wasn’t the timid wallflower she became when she put on her man-eater underwear. “And in that period of time, has anyone ever hurt you, Harry? Caused you to fear for your physical well-being? Ever?”
    Again, more waffling, but he was stubbornly hanging on by a thread. “Not unless you count today. Today, I’d say my well-being was wholeheartedly and carelessly abused.”
    Fair. “Today was an accident, Harry. I swear it. I was careless. I thought everyone had gone home and I was alone in the lab. It was stupid and reckless of me to put something so untested and dangerous in an empty bottle of vitaminwater. But all of us, at Pack or those who are part of our werewolf pack, respect humans. Humans do work at Pack, Harry you are—were—one of them. We’ve had human employees retire from Pack without a hair on their heads harmed. Don’t you remember Garvin Smithfield?”
    “He had no hair,” he said it like werewolves had ripped it from his very scalp.
    Mara rolled her eyes, tucking her chin into her coat. “That wasn’t because of us. Do you remember his
retirement
party? You were there. As I recall, you ate a lot of Missy Harver’s taco dip. You joked about it. Said you’d be feeling it for at least a week. Garvin was a human.”
    Harry’s wheels began to turn again.
    Aha! But then Mara cringed. When he’d made mention of the heartburn he’d experience from Missy’s famous taco dip, he’d been across the room with a group of his equally geeky friends from accounting, and she’d been eavesdropping because every word Harry spoke was like an angel’s wings fluttering in her eardrums.
    “Wait. You
heard
that?” he asked, incredulous and again wary, the lantern-shaped light beside his front door enhancing the hesitance in his eyes.
    Mara tugged her half-frozen ear. “Werewolf hearing. Sorry. It happens sometimes. But the point is, Garvin worked for Pack for over thirty-five years before he retired, and he was a human.” A kind, unassuming human, who’d been good friends with her father and wouldn’t have hurt a soul.
    Harry popped his luscious lips in a “not flyin’ with me” way. “How do I know that? Maybe he was one of your people, and he hid it just like you and your sister-in-law and God knows who else. It’s not like I could
smell
what he was.”
    “Garvin was a vegetarian, Harry. You know that. He shared his recipes all the time. We’re not vegetarians. We need meat. A lot of it. He wouldn’t be grazing on spinach salads at lunch every day if he was a werewolf. He’d need to eat red meat