Honor’s stomach launched a violent protest at the thought of food, reminding her exactly how badly she needed to brush her teeth. “Just leave it near the chair, Jo. I’m almost done in here.”
“Okay, then. Is there anything else I can get for you?”
Some warm milk, perhaps?
“Nothing. Thank you.”
Grateful for her Lupine hearing that could pick out the sounds of Joey moving around the bedroom even over the roar of the tub jets, Honor listened until she heard retreating footsteps and the sound of the bedroom door opening and closing. Only when she was sure Joey had gone did she sit up in the tub and turn off the jets. Time to brush her teeth and flush that dinner down the toilet so Joey would think she’d eaten.
She dragged herself dripping from the tub and wrapped herself in a huge towel before padding over to the sink and the comfort of her toothbrush. The cinnamon flavor of the paste improved greatly on the lingering traces of blood and bile in her mouth. She scrubbed for several minutes, making sure to brush her tongue thoroughly before she rinsed out her mouth and reached out to unwind the towel from her hair. The long, dark strands, almost black with the weight of the water, fell down her back in ripples that would dry into semiwild curls. She ran a comb through them quickly then left her hair to dry and headed back into the bedroom.
As she had expected, Joey had turned down the bed, lit a couple of lamps, and touched a match to the fire laid in the hearth. The tray of stew, biscuits, and chilled dark beer sat next to her father’s overstuffed armchair. It looked like a room well prepared for the lord-of-the-manor routine, except that she didn’t feel a bit like a lord.
But the man staring at her from the door to the hallway certainly looked like he did.
* * *
Logan watched the slim, young brunette emerge from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, and placed an immediate stranglehold on his need to pounce. And sniff. And lick. And maybe taste. Even through the perfumy fragrance cloaking her natural scent—bath salts?—she smelled nearly good enough to eat. He inhaled deeply and considered whether or not to try a nibble. Suddenly she turned and noticed him standing in the door, and he revised his plans.
Definitely nibble.
“How did you get in here?”
Logan tore his eyes from the plane of creamy, pale skin rising from the top of the woman’s towel and saw the weary suspicion in her gaze. He also made note of the long, fresh scratch across her forehead and the bite mark on her right shoulder. It looked as new as the scratch. Seeing the obvious wounds, he made a surreptitious inspection of the rest of the skin he could see—which was quite a lot, praise be—and noticed a good dozen bruises. Some looked a few days old, others just pale shadows, not yet fully formed. She also had one skinned knee and a slowly bleeding cut on her left shin. This would-be alpha had gone through an interesting couple of days.
“Your housekeeper let me in.” He looked her in the eye as he answered her question, curious to see how she would react to the aggressive action. It also helped him ignore the stirring of involuntary interest he had immediately felt in her. She met and held his gaze, her brown eyes steady and serious, but made no other show of force. Maybe alpha, but not stupid with it. “She also offered me dinner but I stopped in town and ate while I got directions up here. You aren’t exactly easy to find.”
“She’s my cousin, not my servant. Now, who the hell are you?”
Logan raised an eyebrow. “Some say they’re all servants to the alpha.”
She didn’t answer.
“My name is Logan Hunter.” He watched her face for a reaction. “I’m beta of the Silverback Clan. My alpha has requested that I offer you his condolences on the recent death of your father.”
“Beta. Sent to offer his condolences.” She blinked; her wide, chocolaty eyes seemed slow to focus, but her expression didn’t shift. “Right. Tell your alpha to shove them.”
Then she turned her back on him and walked to a closet.
Logan tore his eyes from the point where her towel dipped down far enough to threaten to reveal what looked like a truly luscious bottom. Before Missy, he’d never really been an ass man, but as Graham could tell you, that little human had an ass that could inspire men to poetry. It had inspired Logan to a thing or two over the last few months, but now the image of this stranger’s derrière had all but supplanted Missy’s from his mind.
The thought caught him by the scruff. Lately, part of Logan’s subconscious had compared any female he encountered with the Luna, because he couldn’t get the woman out of his head. Just because he knew he couldn’t have her didn’t stop his wolf from insisting that no other female was worth his trouble. Until now. When he looked at Honor Tate, his finicky beast made not a peep of protest.
Huh.
With all that going on in his head, it took Logan a few extra seconds to register what she had said.
Shove them?
“Excuse me?” he ventured.
“You heard me. Tell him he can shove his condolences up his ass with a pogo stick. I don’t want them, and I didn’t ask for them.”
Logan watched as she pulled some things from a drawer inside the closet and tried to keep his mind off the possibility of that towel coming loose and landing on the floor. And of him coming loose and landing on top of her.
“He knows that. He doesn’t offer you sympathy because you asked for it. It’s just the right thing to do.”
“No, the right thing to do would have been to come here himself instead of sending his lackey. And to have agreed to my very sensible request for a formal recognition of my new position as alpha of this pack. Since he has done neither, he can go take his pogo stick and have a little moment of privacy with his thoughts.”
She began pulling on clothes with that peculiar talent women have for dressing without undressing first. She pulled a pair of loose cotton pants on under the towel and topped them with a tank top that she managed to don without displaying one additional millimeter of skin.
Logan bit back the wave of disappointment and shoved his hands into his pockets while he attempted to wrestle his attention back to the question at hand. “The Silverback alpha hasn’t made up his mind about whether he’s going to agree to that request or not. That’s why I’m here. Before he makes a decision, he wants to hear an outside opinion of the workings of the White Paw Clan.”
“The White Paw Clan works just fine,” she growled, turning to face him and tossing aside the towel. “You can tell Graham Winters I said that. And you can tell him that if he will not honor the request of his fellow alpha, then he and his pack members are not welcome in our territory.”
Logan heard the fierceness in her tone and scowled. “That sounds like a hasty decision. Breaking ties between the clans won’t benefit either one of them. And in your current situation, frankly, it can only make your position in the pack even more precarious. Your people are not going to like hearing that you bu-fued three hundred years of cooperation between our clans in a fit of pique.”
He hadn’t expected her to move so quickly, and only instinct kept him from jerking backward when he blinked and found her about three inches from the end of his nose, snarling up at him with a fierceness that surprised him.
And aroused him.
“This. Is. Not. Pique.” The low rumble in her chest told him she meant every word she spoke. “And I am not the one who ‘bu-fued’ anything between our clans. That would be your alpha, the one who has denied our request in our time of need.”
Logan did not back down; it wasn’t in his nature—the only creature on earth he backed down from was Graham, and even that was a struggle these days—but he willed his hackles not to rise to the bait she presented. He could make her regret taking this attitude with him, but he was here on a diplomatic mission and pinning and mating the alpha of another pack with no warning, no invitation, and no permission stretched the bounds of allowable behavior. Actually, it was out of bounds. But it would have been satisfying.
“If you would liste
n more carefully to my words, you wouldn’t need to make an ass of yourself by making groundless accusations and hurling unnecessary insults.” He spoke through clenched teeth until he managed to force his jaw to relax enough for normal speech. “Graham Winters has denied you nothing. What he has done is to send me to observe the situation in your pack and conclude exactly what decision he can make that will result in a positive long-term outcome for both our packs. Graham has no horse in this race; he doesn’t personally give a shit who leads this pack, but as the alpha of this region, he most definitely does give a shit that whoever leads is qualified to do it. The most important thing to him at the moment is preserving the peace we currently enjoy in this part of the country, and he’s not going to let anyone jeopardize it.”
She sneered at him, her tempting pink lip curling up to expose her white canines. “Right. And what exactly do you plan to conclude then, Mr. Hunter? How long will you hang around here pretending to mull things over before you run back to Papa Wolf and tell him no female could ever be qualified to lead a pack as well as a male?”
“I won’t be pretending anything, Ms. Tate.” He tried not to make it a growl, but a man could only do so much. “I’m here to do a job, and I intend to do it, not just go through the motions or phone it in. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got better things to do with my time than play games like that. I was sent here to check out the situation, so that’s what I’ll be doing, and if it takes me a day or a week or a fucking year and a half, then that’s how long it takes. This isn’t something I can rush, Ms. Tate, and neither can you. When we last spoke, the alpha and I figured it would take at least a week or more before any conclusions could be drawn.”
She laughed then, though the sound had not a trace of humor that Logan could detect. “Right. In a week or more, I won’t need your alpha’s endorsement, Mr. Hunter. Because I will already have been forced to cripple every adult male in my pack. So don’t you tell me about waiting for a royal blessing from his majesty, the King of Indecision.”
* * *
Honor turned her back on him then, but not before she saw his nostrils flare and his lip curl at the insult. She really couldn’t have cared less. Her day had already been for shit; this just topped the cake. She had been counting on Graham Winters, and now she’d found out her problem wasn’t even important enough to get his personal attention. He’d sent a worker bee instead. Well, fuck him. She’d been dealing for this long, she could deal a while longer. As long as it took.
She stalked back toward her closet, determined to don a pair of fuzzy slippers, find a bottle of Valium, and dose herself into oblivion at least until morning. She didn’t want to hear one more thing about Lupines, packs, alphas, challenges, or even the remotest connection to reality for at least eight hours. After that she’d go back to coping, but damn it, she needed a break.
It was a lovely thought, but it didn’t last much past the foot of the bed. She got about that far before she sensed his movement. She spun around just in time to avoid being tackled to the carpet, but not fast enough to prevent his getting a good grip on her upper arm. She felt his fingers digging into her skin, nearly bruising her, and she instinctively bared her teeth.
“I just took off one man’s hand, Silverback. I don’t have a problem with taking another.”
“And I don’t have a problem with putting you in your place, White Paw.” She saw his golden eyes snapping and felt her stomach knot at the knowledge that he spoke the truth. “I came here as an impartial observer, but if you want to make this personal between us, feel free. No one dismisses me but my alpha. Understand?”
She growled at him. “Oh, I understand perfectly well, beta.” She spat the title like a curse. “But you need to understand that no one gives me orders in my own territory. I don’t care how big, bad, and wolfie you might think you are. I am alpha here, and I don’t take insults lightly.”
“You might be alpha of this pack, but you still answer to the Silverback Clan. Don’t forget that.”
“I respect the Silverback Clan, beta. I answer to no one.”
Their gazes clashed for a long moment, a heavy silence weighted with rapid pulses and the sharp smell of temper. Neither of them blinked. Then the Silverback beta’s hand slid from her arm to the back of her neck, and he hauled her forward, mouth descending on hers for a rough, violent kiss.
It lasted no more than a handful of seconds, but it seared her senses with lips, tongue, teeth, and hunger. She tasted the thick, spicy flavor of him, smelled the musky, woodsy scent that clung to his skin, and felt the sharp edge of his strong, white teeth. When he pulled back, she blinked up at him, silent.
“We’ll see, honey. We’ll see what happens once I get around to asking the right question.”
Then he turned on his heel and strode out of her bedroom, closing the door softly behind him.
Honor stared at the white wooden panels for a long time before her knees unlocked enough for her to sink to the bed, where she sat for a while longer, trembling.
Three
Damn him and the horse he rode in on.
Honor lay in her father’s huge sleigh bed and stared at the ceiling in frustration. The clock on the bedside table gave off an eerie green glow announcing three A.M. and Honor’s fifth unsuccessful hour of attempted sleep. She blamed it all on her unexpected visitor from Manhattan.
Next, she planned to blame the instability in the Middle East on him as well.
She really could kill him for … well, for nothing that was actually his fault. But far be it from her to buck the long-standing and honorable tradition of killing the messenger. In reality, her father was the one to blame, but he was inconveniently dead, and therefore a much less satisfying target than the arrogant, sexy beta from the Silverback Clan.
Sexy?
Shit.
Honor groaned and rolled onto her side. The second to last thing she needed in her life was to develop a mad crush on any man, let alone the beta of another pack sent to evaluate her leadership capabilities in the first week of her rule. Because no matter how politely Logan Hunter had phrased it, that was exactly why he’d come to this remote corner of northwestern Connecticut to mingle with the White Paw Clan.
He’d come to grade her like a teacher on report card day, and Honor didn’t like it one bit. She didn’t like it because no alpha’s earned position in a pack should ever be called into question, especially not in any way so transparent to subordinate pack members. She doubly didn’t like it because she really wasn’t all that confident she would be given a passing grade.
She didn’t doubt her ability to lead the pack, to make decisions that would benefit them as a whole and help ease them into the twenty-first century in a way her father had never been willing to attempt. She didn’t doubt her ability to hold her own among the international council of packs, where decisions affecting Lupine society as a whole were discussed and debated and voted upon once every five years. Honor didn’t even doubt her ability to win any alpha challenge that presented itself to her. Lord knew she’d won three since the moment her father had drawn his last breath, and she knew in that sick place in her gut that’d she’d face even more; but she also knew the wolves in her pack. She knew their strengths and weaknesses, and unless a new, stronger wolf tried to come in from outside the pack, she didn’t fear for her position. No, Honor didn’t doubt for a second that she had the ability to become as confident and capable an alpha as the White Paw Clan had ever seen.
What she doubted was her desire.
“I was happier being beta.”
She whispered the words to the ceiling and heard the truth of them ringing all the way down into her soul. It felt like a sin to speak them, but the good kind of sin; one of the ones involving lust and gluttony and sloth, like staying in bed on a Sunday morning to make love and sleep and nibble on decadent pieces of dark, rich chocolate. Possibly all at the same damned time. She knew that if any of her pack could hear her words, they’d assume she’d lost her min
d. Hell, if any nonsubmissive wolf in the whole damned world could hear, they’d think the same damned thing. Dominant wolves always wanted to lead. Period. The end. Happily ever after, and all those old clichés.
So, maybe Honor wasn’t so dominant after all?
She thought about that, mulled it over, tested out the taste and feel of it while the sounds of weighted tree branches settling and night critters scurrying drifted in through her open window.
It was a more complicated question than it seemed, but then, among Lupines, dominance was a complicated issue. No matter what their furry instincts might tell them at times, Lupines were not wolves. Not entirely. They could take the shape of wolves, they shared some physical, some psychological, and even some emotional characteristics with wolves, but they had their human sides, too. They might have the instincts to rip out the throats of any people who angered them, but they had the ability to reason through why that might not be a good idea. They might understand that one of the best ways to get to know someone was to take a good whiff of their scent, but they still knew better than to greet newcomers by sticking their noses into other people’s crotches.
Like wolves, but not wolves; like humans, but not humans.
Among wolves, packs really amounted to little more than families, and in those families, the oldest—and therefore most often the strongest—male led the way. It was, if not simple, then at least a fairly straightforward and logical method of organization among animals, but when you factored in the human side of a Lupine’s nature, any thoughts of logic and straightforwardness flew right out the nearest window.
Lupine packs were definitely not family groups. They contained families, but because of their integration into wider human society, they needed to become more than that. Instead, wolf shapeshifters grouped in territorial packs, with all of the Lupines in a designated geographical area falling under the authority of the alpha of that area. In the beginning, it had probably started as a security measure, allowing all the Lupines in a community to keep an eye on each other and protect each other against threats from hunters, witch hunters, werewolf hunters, and the like. Over the centuries, it had become a political measure, maintained in order to keep the peace among groups of Lupines with no relationship to each other, to temper their natural instincts to get to the top of the food chain. Lupine alphas spent less time making sure everyone in the pack was fed and more time making sure they didn’t eat each other, to be blunt, something that required managing not only wolfish instincts, but human egos, emotions, and psychodramas. Frankly, Honor would rather lead an actual wolf pack any day of the week. At least wolves didn’t lie to each other.
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