Hungry Like a Wolf noto-8

by Christine Warren

  He felt his lip curl as he closed the closet door. What poor woman could be desperate enough for company that she chose to settle for the charms of Dull-Witted Darin?

  Just as the door closed sufficiently to reveal the window that had been blocked by the open panels, Logan caught a glimpse of the dull, sandy-gray fur and bushy tail of a wolf disappearing into the woods behind the cabin. The last he had heard, there were no native wolf populations in Connecticut, and what he had seen had definitely not been a coyote, which meant a shifted Lupine had been lurking outside of the cabin while Logan snooped. Clearly, someone had been spying on the spy. Logan wondered if that might have been the flash of movement he’d seen through the window when he’d been standing on the front porch. It was possible a Lupine could have been in the house and let itself out through the back when Logan entered. Then it would have been a simple thing to shift in the woods or behind the house in order to keep an eye on what the stranger was up to.

  Logan would have done the same. It was only smart. He’d been through more introductions since arriving in Connecticut than he’d done in most of the last five years, and he still hadn’t met every member of the White Paw Clan. Those he had met had all been introduced in human form. The best way to remain anonymous to him would be to take wolf form. It was hard enough to keep a hundred new faces straight, let alone a hundred furry muzzles. These days, all but the most traditionally minded Lupines considered human form to be the politest one for introductions. It cut down on the need for immediate dominance challenges and therefore on the likelihood of bloodshed. So a Lupine in wolf’s clothing, so to speak, would be the perfect way to conceal his or her identity.

  Instinct told Logan it was a “she,” not a “he.” The wolf he’d spotted fleeing had been too small for an adult male, but not gawky enough for an adolescent. He felt fairly certain he’d seen a female. Maybe even the “she” who at least occasionally shared Darin’s cabin. The intriguing question, then, became who would Darin be that intimate with if he still had feelings for Honor like the ones he’d expressed in her office earlier? If those qualified as feelings, anyway, and not just a bad case of testosterone poisoning, combined with the pain of thwarted ambition.

  Logan stared out the bedroom window for another minute, but the wolf did not reappear, and the night was beginning to grow colder. It had been a long day, made longer by the exhausting run he’d put himself through earlier. He needed to get back to the house and find something to eat, maybe call Graham with an update. Then he’d work on his plan to keep his mate as his mate and figure out how to give the pack she was determined to protect the alpha it needed. Whether that alpha was Honor herself, he still hadn’t decided. Coming up with a workable solution wouldn’t be the easiest thing he’d ever done, but if that was what it took to ease his mate’s worries and lift the burden of holding together a collapsing pack, then it had just become the sum total of Logan’s ambition. Graham would just have to deal with the fallout.

  He closed Darin’s front door behind him and started off down the old logging road toward the main house. He’d even gone a good few strides when the truth kicked him in the chest and he had to pause to catch his breath.

  All of the time that Logan had been savoring the idea of having Honor for his mate, he had never once considered that putting her best interests above those of the Silverback Clan meant that he was no longer really acting as Graham’s beta. Instead, he had begun thinking and planning as though—whether Honor assumed her position as alpha of the White Paw Clan or not—she would be staying here in Connecticut, and that wasn’t exactly the place that Logan had always called home. Logan lived in Manhattan, with the Silverback Clan. Where he was beta, a position he had grown to chafe under more and more with every passing year.

  Well, shit.

  As adaptable and urbane as Logan liked to consider himself, he still had a bit of the basic Lupine dislike for change lurking in his soul, way down there where he could mostly pretend it didn’t actually exist. Right now, he had to stop pretending. He did hate change. He hated it fiercely and unrestrainedly. If he could, he would turn back the clock to the days when he and Graham were a team, when the position of alpha in the Silverback Clan was about tradition, and Logan had been able to pretend that Graham only held the title because his father had held it before him, and his father before that; that it would have belonged to Logan if he had been born a Winters instead of a Hunter. These days, he found that harder and harder to remember, his own need for dominance wearing away at the contentment he had always found in working side by side with the man he considered a brother.

  If he could, Logan would go back to the time before Missy, when women had been women—fun and beautiful and delicious, but for the most part interchangeable. Before he’d smelled her scent and seen her mate pinning her to the floor of their home. Before he’d seen and smelled the changes pregnancy made in the female body, and smelled the scent of fresh milk on a woman’s skin. Damn it, things had been so much easier before any of this had happened.

  Logan threw back his head and howled at the injustice of it all. If he could, he would go back in time and change things that way, make things the way they were before those feelings of dissatisfaction had begun gnawing at his insides. But he couldn’t go back, and only now did he finally begin to realize it. The only thing he could do was to go forward.

  At least forward had its advantages. Forward meant Honor—a very distinct advantage, especially during her heat when she smelled so good he could get drunk on her scent alone, but it also meant Connecticut, and leaving behind his friends and his pack. It meant going from beta to Sol, the mate of the Luna, with no distinct position in the pack but the one he had by her side. He swore again, his hands clenching into fists.

  He’d been having a hard enough time lately dealing with being beta, being second to the leader of the most powerful pack in the eastern U.S. Could he honestly deal with being Sol of the pack with fewer members than the club where he worked? With having to defer not only to the alpha, but to his own mate on every decision that had to be made? Would he be okay with that because the rewards were so great, or would it eventually make him resentful and bitter, strangling the love he had for his woman?

  Double shit.

  Shit with a side order of fuck, no less.

  It all became very plain to him, as if written out before him in black-and-white. He had a choice to make. He could have Honor, or he could have his pride. Now he just had to decide: which of the two things he loved most in the world could he most easily live without?

  Twelve

  There was no rest for the wicked, nor apparently, for the werewolf needing to come up with a plan to save her own life, let alone the pack that apparently wanted to see her mated or dead. On Thursday night, Honor collapsed into her bed, mental and emotional exhaustion sending her spiraling immediately into sleep. Too bad it wasn’t a restful one. Plagued by dreams in which she found herself covered in the blood of those she considered family, or standing over the bloodied body of her mate, the night proved short and restless. When a fist pounded on the door just before dawn, it came almost as a relief.

  “What is it?” she demanded hoarsely, sitting up and pushing a tangle of hair out of her eyes.

  “We’ve got a fence down.” Max’s voice was easy to recognize, even through the thick panels of wood. “Moody’s cows are tramping through the gap to the northeast.”

  Honor cursed.

  While most Lupines much preferred the taste and entertainment value of wild game, when the spirit of a hunt was on them, they occasionally forgot to exercise their better judgment if confronted by the easy pickings of a domestic dairy cow. It kept the farmers happy to know that the “timber wolf” and “red wolf” populations on the supposed wildlife sanctuary next door to them stayed safely contained behind a stout ten-foot-high wooden fence.

  Well, the fence had started out ten feet high and stout. As Honor stood looking down on it twenty minutes after the summons cam
e, it resembled firewood waiting to be stacked. Someone had done a number on it.

  Trouble had come, she heard, when said stout, ten-foot wooden fence wandered directly into the path of a bunch of rowdy teenagers who had decided to do a little cow-tipping and four-wheel mudding to entertain themselves. Their truck had spun out of control on the dirt road—barely more than a path, really—that bordered the fence line, and slammed sideways into the fence, which was already twenty years old and in need of repair. It had collapsed under the strain, and forty of the neighboring cows had stampeded through the opening, enlarging it quite a bit in the process.

  “I smell you and a few of the others,” Honor said to Max, who stood close behind her, “but I’m giving you credit for being too smart for this shit. Inside the car, were the kids ours?”

  If they had been, none of them would be driving for a while. Hell, none of them would be conscious for a while. Not after the smacks she planned to deliver upside their fool heads.

  “No, it was a bunch of townies. Human kids. Tom Sergeant got a whiff of them when they peeled onto the main road trying to get home. He saw the damage to their truck. Definitely not ours.”

  For which both Honor and the teenaged population of the pack could be grateful. The teenagers, because their asses would remain unbeaten, and Honor, because that was at least one thing she wouldn’t have to add to her already overcrowded plate. Although at this point, she probably wouldn’t even notice one more crisis. It could just get in line behind the others, and she’d deal with it in turn.

  Hey, maybe that was a point in favor of not surviving tomorrow night. If she died during the challenges, someone else got to deal with all this shit. The prospect sounded almost appealing.

  “All right.” She sighed, rolling up her sleeves both figuratively and literally. “Let’s get the cows back to Moody first. Get Henry and Jay on that. Animals are usually okay with them. You can help me sort through all this crap to see if there’s anything we can salvage. We need at least half a dozen usable posts. Then someone needs to go to town to the feed store and pick up some razor wire. It will have to do until I can order new material for a permanent replacement.

  “Let’s get to work.”

  It meant a lot of sweaty hours, clearing up all the broken timber and debris of the accident. Thankfully none of the kids had been hurt and the truck had been operational enough to limp back to town under its own steam, so she didn’t have to deal with the headache of injured humans or irate parents blaming her for their progeny’s stupidity. It all just came down to cleanup and repair. Until she could get the materials to replace that section of the barricade, they had to make do with what they had on hand. On the farmer’s side of the old fence, she and a handful of the pack dug temporary postholes and hammered in posts made up of scraps of the former fence. Then they’d strung and stapled razor wire to keep the cattle in their field.

  Keeping curious Lupines out of said field would prove to be a sight more challenging.

  The only effective barrier against wandering werewolves was a fence at least as high and strong as the one the truck had taken down, and that just wasn’t going to happen without time and the proper materials. Actually, even a fence that tall did more to soothe the farmers than it did to actually contain the Lupines. An adult werewolf could easily clear the ten-foot barrier with room to spare. But it did generally serve to make one think twice about leaving the pack’s territory, and that was its primary job.

  This time, since she couldn’t rely on that job being done by wood and post, she would have to be a little more resourceful.

  Wiping a dirt-streaked forearm across her brow, Honor stood in front of the temporary barrier and waved Max forward. The kid had proved to be a lot of help that morning. “Send everyone home and make sure no one like Moody wanders by.” And by “like Moody” she meant human. “I need to finish this off.”

  Max nodded, quickly catching on to her plan. “You got it, boss. Just give me a second.”

  Honor waited until she could scent that her workers had turned and headed back toward the pack’s main buildings, then she slipped deeper into the tree line. Stripping quickly in the cold air, she shifted into her wolf form. Then she walked along the perimeter of the patchwork-fenced area and marked the whole thing with her scent.

  On the one hand, the smell of a mature female close to heat might end up drawing more males than it repelled, but the smell of an alpha was the important part of the equation. If she marked the barrier and therefore the field beyond as her private territory, then any members of the pack would know she meant, “This is mine. Stay away and don’t touch.” It would have to do until she could order wood and permanent posts for the new fence.

  Shifting quickly back, she dressed and looked at her watch. It was nearly noon.

  “Come back up to the house with me,” she said to Max. “Least I can do is feed you for helping out here. Joey can make you a sandwich, or something.”

  “Uh, thanks, but no thanks, boss.” Max shook his head. “No offense, but I don’t think your cousin likes me very much. I’m sure my mom’s got food at home. I’ll grab something at her place.”

  Honor sighed. “Don’t take it personally, Max. These days, Joey doesn’t seem to like anyone, really. Maybe my dad’s death hit her harder than she expected. He was kind of her last link to her own father. I barely remember Uncle Joe, but I do know he and Dad were a lot alike.”

  Still, Max accepted the offer of a lift back to his mother’s cabin, and Honor swung the pickup in that direction before heading back to her own house. She climbed out of the truck slightly sore and extremely grubby, dreaming of nothing more than a nice hot shower. All thoughts of the upcoming Howl had been pushed to the back of her mind and locked away, at least for another few minutes. When she was clean, she’d think about that again. Maybe when she was clean, it wouldn’t seem like such an insurmountable obstacle. She just didn’t have the bandwidth for it yet. She barely had the bandwidth for a shower and lunch.

  She climbed the stairs to the second floor, moving more like a ninety-year-old woman than a twenty-four-year-old Lupine, but she just felt battered. She knew enough to realize that at least half the sore muscles had less to do with wrestling barbed wire than with wrestling a male Lupine yesterday afternoon, but she didn’t mind those aches nearly as much. She knew very well they’d be gone within a couple more hours, and for now she almost savored the reminder … especially since she knew better than anyone that it might have been the last time she’d ever make love with the wolf who had mated her.

  Honor shivered and found herself weaving a little as she padded down the hall to her bedroom. Her mental and emotional exhaustion just kept deepening, and while the end might be in sight—with the Howl coming up tomorrow—the type of end it had the potential to become made it look less like the light at the end of the tunnel and more like the oncoming train.

  Who knew things would work out like this? she wondered as she turned on the shower and stripped while the water warmed. When she’d complained that this wasn’t a good time to find her mate, she hadn’t realized what a fine mate he would be, or how irresistible she would find him. She’d thought all those old pack legends about one perfect mate for each Lupine had been hogwash—romantic, but useless. And yet here she was, finding herself drawn to one man and one man only, not even able to picture touching another as long as she lived. She’d even found herself holding her breath at times while she and the five male members of her pack had been working on the fence. Their scents had been offensive to her, something she’d never experienced with any other Lupine who bathed. It was just weird.

  She almost smiled as she stepped under the shower spray. Having a mate might have turned out to be very interesting, she decided. Provided, of course, that she could have kept him.

  The stinging hot needles of water pounded down over her, rinsing away the worst of the debris and splinters and mud splatters. When she felt the nastiest grime sluice away, she reached for a
washcloth and her soap and began lathering her skin. She lathered and rinsed twice, but the need to scrub off her skin had not reappeared since the day she’d bitten off Paul’s hand. It boggled her mind that the incident had happened only a couple of days ago. So much seemed to have happened since her father’s death. She felt as if she’d lived an extra lifetime in that one week.

  She shampooed and rinsed her hair, leaving the conditioner in while she washed her face with a moisturizing cleanser. Being a werewolf didn’t excuse a girl from a skin-preserving regimen. When she was clean and rinsed, she stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in an enormous towel, using a smaller one to twist into a turban around her hair. She still had to moisturize, or all that nice clean skin of hers would end up dry and chalky before her hair even dried.

  She nearly laughed at herself as she spread the milky cream into her legs. She’d always been a bit too much of a girly girl for a Lupine beta, not to mention an alpha. That might have been part of the reason why it took so long for her father to start paying her any attention. Before she’d begun fighting challenges, she’d been too busy playing with her dolls, and then later painting pretty pictures and decorating the dollhouse her nanny bought her to interest a man who lived and breathed the eternal combat of strength. What use did he have for a pretty little girl who preferred to make things rather than destroy them? Not much, as she’d found out.

  As Honor had grown, she had developed into the sort of daughter her father could love, a woman who could challenge a grown male and win, who could bench-press a small bus and bite a hole through a sheet of stainless steel. She’d had to give up all of her more feminine hobbies and traits to please the man who refused to be pleased. The only thing of her own she had kept was her pottery, and it was the only area of her life where she truly felt at home and at peace. She didn’t feel it when playing alpha or beta, when managing the business or ordering people around. So why was she still doing those things, and why was she planning to fight for the right to continue doing them for the rest of her life?