had to be today,” Finn says carefully. “But Sue? It’s got to be soon. Whatever you can do to smooth this over with her? Do it.”
Susan’s eyes search his. Then she looks at me.
I drop my gaze.
I also remember her earlier question. “I’m ready to say our goodbyes.”
“You don’t need to grab any of your things?” Susan asks.
“Nah. I’m set,” I tell her. I move to Finn, throwing my arms around him and catching him in a rib-crushing hug which he returns just as abusively.
Susan calls, “Girls? We’re going to be leaving soon. Say goodbye.”
Maggie picks up Liam, grinning, ecstatic. “Mom, can Liam sit on my lap in the car?”
Susan smiles at her daughter. “Honey, Liam has to stay.”
Maggie’s face falls. She stares—horrified—at her mother, clearly heartbroken to hear this. “But… but he’s mine!”
Finn drops down to one knee beside her, patting her gently on her shoulder. “I’m afraid he might belong to his mam and da just a bit more than you. Not that they want to claim him.”
Liam, for his part, gives forlorn eyes to Maggie and licks her face.
“You three-legged jackal,” Finn laughs, knuckling the pup’s ears, making his tail thwap Maggie’s arm. “Fine, m’girl, you can carry him to your car. But then you have to leave the little shi—erm, stirrer.”
We walk back to the Half Moon House’s drive where we’re parked. Before we reach the car, Maggie loses arm strength. Oh, she fights tooth and nail to keep holding Liam, but he has to weigh nearly as much as she does, and soon, we don’t have to physically peel her away from her new friend because gravity does it for us.
Liam howls and Maggie begins to tear up as his furry butt plops to the ground at her feet.
“Maggie,” Susan warns. “Say goodbye.”
Maggie throws her arms around Liam’s neck. “I’m going to miss you!” she tells him as if he’s a dog she’s grown up with all her life, not a boy she met all of a few hours ago. “I wish I didn’t have to leave you!”
His older brother, Rory, helpfully offers to make her dreams come true by giving full abduction privileges. “If I could, I’d pay you to take that coyote!”
Finn stops dead, and so do I. And very unfortunately for Rory, his mother Jenn has just pushed open the door to ask us a question, which means she overheard his comment.
Wolves scatter as she storms out the door and takes ahold of Rory’s ear before he can so much as howl.
To the shocked newcomers, Jenn smiles apologetically. “Somebody needs help washing his mouth out with a good bar of soap. ‘Scuse us!”
Ginny looks at Finn, troubled. “I take it ‘coyote’ is a bad word?”
Finn nods solemnly. “Hell, I don’t even use that word.”
“And he calls women cunts,” Maggie adds helpfully.
Susan turns on Finn with dangerous deliberation.
“I did not use that word in front of her,” Finn cries. “I haven’t got the foggiest how she knows this about me!”
“And yet she does,” Susan growls. She points to where Jenn and Rory disappeared to. “Maybe somebody else needs to make friends with the soap.”
Finn, still looking appropriately apologetic, also manages to turn on the charm. And the flirtation. “For you, Sue, I’d do it.” His wink is dirty. “I’d go down on anything you tell me to—even a bar o’ soap. ‘Least this first time.”
Susan slowly crosses her arms. Fur sprouts on me, I get so nervous just from the aggressive way she’s faced off with Finn. In an admirably threatening tone, she warns him, “You have two seconds to apologize for that or you’re going to be sporting more bubble froth than Cujo.”
My snicker is a total surprise. It comes out of nowhere. Both of them turn to look at me.
I drop to the ground.
Susan remarks to Finn, “See that? I feel like his mother raised him right. What’s your excuse?”
Finn grins down at her, eyes twinkling. “I’m an alpha.”
CHAPTER 20
SUSAN
We’re in the car, and it seems like the whole Pack is here, or at least everyone we met at lunch. We said our goodbyes over a half-hour ago, and we still haven’t left the driveway.
This, Deek informed us, is what’s known as ‘an Irish goodbye.’
“I thought an Irish goodbye was when you leave a party without saying your farewells to anyone first,” I’d said to him.
Deek, eyes lowered, quirked his lips and gestured at our surrounded car. “And this is why the phrase is used for that. Eventually, you’ll learn to