Something's Got To Give

Mooney stooped behind the shrub under Nick’s office window, grinning like a loon. It had taken some planning, but he had finally found just the right payback for Nick running him up a flag pole a couple weeks ago. The delay was for the best, anyway, since Nick had probably forgotten all about it or thought that he wasn’t going to get his big brother back for it.


Besides, it wasn’t his fault his pups had decided to try and reproduce the sound of sexy bleating. It also was not his fault that the boys decided to demonstrate their attempts to him and Nick; that was all Marissa’s fault. Not that he thought she was at fault, of course. Truthfully, that had been an awesome stroke of genius on her part. But he was the one who’d been chased up a flag pole right in the middle of town just as all the office people were heading out for lunch. Therefore retribution was in order.

He had waited for Nick to go to lunch before sneaking into his office to hang the poster he had ordered from that on-line gag poster site. Now he was waiting for Nick to get back from lunch so he could reap the benefits of listening to Nick go ballistic when he saw it.



**********

Nick stood staring at the poster. It was huge, three feet, at least five foot long, and it was thumb-tacked to the ceiling right above his desk. This was Mooney’s doing. He knew it was. He didn’t smell any fresh scents in his office and his obnoxious little brother was the only wolf he knew that could completely mask his own scent this well.

“Where the hell did he find a poster of a sheep in thigh-highs and stilettos?” he murmured to himself. He made sure to keep his voice down. There was no way Mooney wasn’t lurking somewhere close by, waiting to witness Nick’s reaction. No way was he going to give the butt-sniffer the satisfaction of knowing just how very creaped out he was right now. “And why the hell did he hang it on the ceiling?”

He couldn’t let this insult slide, of course. It didn’t matter that he had it coming. He was an alpha and no one got away with punking and alpha. For instance when he had accidentally walked in on his dad boffing Ellie, he’d called Hannibal and—wait. Yeah, he though. He’d made sure Hannibal got an earful of the sexy bleating, too. He stood up on his chair and began pulling thumb tacks out. His dad was always telling him he should be nicer to his step brother. Sharing was part of being nice, right?



**********



Marissa looked up when she heard her boys cheering wildly, automatically nervous. With most human kids, quiet was very suspicious. With wolf pups, she had learned, it was random noises. Cheering on a quiet afternoon in the middle of the week definitely qualified was random noises with Loki and Thor.

“Mom, Mom, come quick!” Thor shouted excitedly. Marissa dropped her wiping rag onto the counter and rushed over to the window the boys were staring out of. The few customers in the coffee shop during the early afternoon lull joined her.

“What the?” muttered one old man.

“Is that a bighorn sheep chasing a wolf down the street?” one woman asked incredulously.

“Look, Mom! Uncle Hannibal and Uncle Nick are playing tag! Can we go play, too?” Loki shouted, bouncing up and down.

“No, I think that would be a bad idea—” But before she could finish, the boys were gone. The door to Java Joe’s slammed and two small wolf pups were running down the street. As she watched with a mix of horror and growing amusement, one pup launched himself onto the back of the huge bighorn and the other scuttled under the wolf’s feet tripping him up. Hannibal, with a wolf pup now on his head and covering his eyes, didn’t see Nick wipe out, so he tripped over his adversary and went sprawling himself. As she watch, both Nick and Hannibal lay there on the grass of the city park, trying to figure out what had happened while two very excited wolf pups tried to get them to play.

“Hm. Maybe that was the best solution,” Marissa thought.