Weremones Read Free Page B

of adrenaline through her veins.
    Her clean hand found her own dirty tee shirt. The underwire of her bra poked reassuringly into a breast. Her shorts were in a twisted wedgie.
    Assured that she was relatively safe and unmolested, Diana forced herself to calm down. She focused on her visitor. Younger than her son, the boy was dressed in a ragged, oversize pair of jeans and an equally disreputable tee shirt that should have been thrown out by its first owner.
    Familiar chocolate brown eyes watched her. The boy’s prominent cheekbones and chin were all angles under the shaggy mess of rich, dark brown hair. The promise of a well-built man was there, needing only more weight and age to fulfill what nature had begun.
    “Brandon Starr?”
    He flushed and drew his knees up to his chin, wrapping his arms protectively around them. The boy’s insecurity and underlying fear was a raucous noise inside her.
    This was familiar too.
    Instinctively, she wanted to cuddle him and make it better. She pushed down the urge to mother everyone. Her own kids were nearly grown. Every day she was able to reclaim a little more time for herself. She didn’t need to add someone else’s to her list.
    She was almost home free from the awesome responsibility of parenting.
    Brandon and his twin brother Bradley were from the pre-adolescent gang her daughter used to drag home for dinner. Over the years her, Karen had brought every kind of stray imaginable, human and animal, for Diana to mother. She’d been Room Mother, Club Den Mother, and neighborhood sitter.
    Karen had a different dinner gang now—more giggling girls than the motley bunch of rough and tumble boys.
    Of the twins, Brandon was a shy, sweet boy that often faded into the background.
    The others bossed him relentlessly until she pulled him into the kitchen to help with one thing or another. Diana didn’t realize how much she missed Karen’s old buddies, and almost thought of them as her own.
    College was just a year away.
    “Where am I?”
    Diana tried not to sound harsh, she really did. Waking from starring as the prey in her very own werewolf flick in a strange man’s bedroom set her on edge. The stack of Three Stooges videos on the bedside table were a dead give away.
    She was physically exhausted. Nightmares tended to do that. And she had no memory of how she’d gotten here.
    At any rate, her tone of voice fell short of friendly. Well within the range of a PMS moment. That state that every woman hits where simply existing was annoying.
    Warm and fuzzy memories weren’t going to get poor Brandon off the hook.
    Brandon, being male, and young and shy, did what any man with an ounce of selfpreservation did. He froze.
    “Well?” Diana raised her eyebrows, waiting for an answer.
    He ducked and mumbled unintelligibly into his knees.
    Oh, well. He wasn’t forthcoming and she needed to find the bathroom. Diana slid off the edge of the bed.
    “Don’t mumble, hon. Which way is the—”
    Her legs gave out. She gasped and crumpled into a surprised, painful, heap. She clutched at her calves as the muscles in both seized into rock-hard charlie horses.
    “Are you okay, Miz Ridley?”
    Diana glimpsed Brandon’s head over the edge of the bed. Worry filled eyes peered down out of the shaggy mop that framed his face.
    The bed moved, and then he was crouching down beside her. She closed her eyes against the agony in her calves and gritted her teeth.
    “This is going to be weird.” Brandon’s insecurity threaded with a quiet confidence. “But pinch this little bit of skin between your nostrils.”
    A long forgotten Lamaze class floated in her memory. In the blink of an eye the boy turned from shy and intimidated to competent and nurturing. Like a pro, he massaged the hard knots out of her legs.
    “That’s better now, isn’t it?”
    One side of his mouth raised in a faint smile. His hand worked down her calf once more and dropped to pick fuzz balls out of the thick pile of navy carpet. Not