Hungry Like a Wolf

Six

The meaty, spicy scent of chili hit Honor the minute she stepped into the meeting hall and clashed immediately with the sick knot of tension that had been twisting around in her stomach all afternoon. Only a mighty act of will—or perhaps sheer cursed stubbornness—kept her from spinning on her heel and racing to the nearest tree trunk to lose what little contents her stomach might have on offer. Damn her father, and damn Logan Hunter. Between the two of them, she hadn’t been able to go a day without nausea in close to a week.

As if she didn’t have enough to worry about.

Fortunately, all of the recent practice Honor had gotten in recently at keeping her thoughts and feelings (and recently consumed meals) to herself kicked in and reminded her to clench her teeth, take short, shallow breaths, and fake it with authority. With that plan in place, she managed to nod and exchange greetings with the gathered pack members as she made her way to the alpha’s dining table at the rear center of the huge room. In pride of place, the table sat apart from the long rows that stretched the length of the hall, allowing the alpha to see and be seen by every other Lupine in the room. Ethan Tate had graced its center chair like a modern, furry Genghis Khan surveying his Mongol hoards. To Honor, it held about as much appeal as an executioner’s electric chair. In her mind, she’d taken to calling it Sparky in a morbid attempt at humor. The way she saw it, the title fit—it was the ultimate hot seat.

Of course, that didn’t stop her from making her way steadily toward it, nor would it stop her from planting her ass in it and keeping it there while she shared the pack’s traditional communal Wednesday-night meal. Her father had designated it as the alpha’s seat, so as the new alpha, that was where Honor would sit. Everyone expected it of her.

She felt the eyes on her as she settled into the carved wooden chair and pretended to ignore them, which was easier said than done when you considered that more than two thirds of the pack tended to show up at these twice-weekly group meals. For as long as Honor could remember, the alpha had hosted the pack on Wednesday and Sunday nights in the enormous barnlike meeting hall with the attached industrial kitchen at the back. When she’d been a child, Honor’s Aunt Marie had been the head cook, whipping up mammoth pots of chili or stew, or roasting entire deer and cows on spits outside the back door. These days, Joey had taken over, of course. She was her mother’s daughter, after all, and feeding anyone who stood still long enough seemed to be her calling in life. That and reorganizing Honor’s T-shirts according to some system Honor had yet to figure out but seemed to always get wrong.

“Tonight is the last of the bison,” Joey said as she set a heaping bowl of fiery red chili and an open bottle of beer in front of her cousin. “Sunday we’ll turn three sheep into stew, but hopefully after the Howl there will be enough clear heads around here to bring down some deer and leave them whole enough to share. Everyone has been asking for venison.”

Wrenching her attention back to the present, Honor threw the other woman a smile. “Thanks, Joey. The way you roast it, I’m sure they have been. You let me know if you don’t get what you need, though. I’ll make sure we bring you a buck or two.”

Joey nodded, drying her hands on her apron, but making no move to head back to the kitchen. Feeling awkward, Honor reached for her spoon and stirred her chili. She really didn’t feel much like eating at the moment, but she didn’t want to insult her cousin. Usually, Joey was so busy at the big meals that she didn’t have time to stay around and chat.

“How have things been going with the beta from the city?” her cousin asked after a moment, and Honor reflected that the answer to that question had more to do with the death of her appetite than she would care to admit.

She lifted a spoonful of food to her lips and blew on it. As if she had the faintest intention of eating anything. “Fine.”

“He’s been asking a lot of questions. The girls mentioned it to me.” Joey nodded toward the kitchen doorway where half a dozen women bustled around finishing dishing out tonight’s dinner and cleaning up from its preparation. “Most of us haven’t been exactly sure what to tell him.”

Tell him to go fuck himself.

“I’ve noticed that myself,” a deep voice drawled, and Honor had to exercise a considerable amount of strength not to plant her face in her bowl in a reckless attempt at drowning by chili. If she offed herself that way, at least it would take care of her inner wolf. Her approaching heat had the furry little slut panting and howling every time Logan Hunter got within ten feet of her.

“M-Mr. Hunter,” Joey stuttered, her color leaching away and returning just as quickly in a flash of bright red embarrassment. “I didn’t notice you come in.”

Logan smiled his charming smile. “I’m not surprised. There’s quite a crowd in here, but I’m pretty certain that can be explained by the amazing scents I’ve been smelling for the last couple of hours. Someone around here evidently knows their way around a kitchen.”

“Oh, it’s just chili. Would you like me to get you a bowl? I meant it when I said in the note that I’d be happy to fix you something back at the house if you’d rather not eat with everyone else.”

“Note?” Honor growled, wondering when her cousin and their uninvited guest had gotten cozy enough with each other to start exchanging notes.

“Your cousin thoughtfully left me a note in the kitchen up at the house letting me know that most of the pack usually eats here at the hall on Wednesday nights.” Logan offered the explanation easily, almost as easily as he slid into the chair next to Honor and reached across her for the heaping basket of corn bread and garlic toast. “And, thank you, Joey, I’d love a bowl. If it tastes half as good as it smells, I could probably be persuaded to beg for one.”

Honor’s wolf snarled at the flirtatious tone and the way Logan smiled at her cousin, which made Honor want to punch herself. Despite their mistake of this afternoon and her horny animal instincts, it was none of Honor’s business who the visitor flirted with. In fact, she should thank Joey for taking the annoyance off her hands. She certainly shouldn’t be growling possessively over the man, even if he had tried to mate her just a few hours before. That had been about nothing more than her intensifying heat pheromones and the heat of a particularly passionate moment. She hadn’t taken it seriously, so there was no reason she should expect him to do so. Besides which, she currently needed a mate slightly less than she needed a full frontal lobotomy.

A spoonful of chili shoveled into her own mouth concealed her instinctive growl.

“Coming right up.” Joey offered a blush-pink smile of her own and bounded off to the kitchen. Honor choked down more chili.

“Sweet kid, your cousin,” Logan commented, breaking off a chunk of corn bread and raising it to his mouth. “Friendly, too. She’s been real helpful since I got here.”

Honor’s wolf snarled viciously. Possessively. Honor smacked her down, and mustered a passable smirk. “Yeah, well, she’s still unmated, and with the lack of selection around here, it’s easy for a girl to lower her standards.”

“Of course, she doesn’t make my dick hard every time I look at her, so I guess it’s a good thing she wasn’t the one I got naked with a few hours ago, huh?”

This time, Honor choked on more chili. Her gaze flew to his face and narrowed on the gleeful spark in his eyes. The bastard enjoyed throwing her off balance. She wondered how much he’d enjoy it when she threw him out a window. What was she supposed to say to something like that? She wasn’t an idiot, and she knew that in the time he’d been posing his muzzle into her business—Goddess, had it only been one day!—she likely hadn’t made a great impression, at least not in terms of rationality and a cool head for command. Maybe pissing her off was part of his strategy to prove her unfit to lead her pack? Whatever his motive, he seemed to get a real charge out of yanking her tail, and she’d had enough of giving him the satisfaction.

Ignoring him, she set down her spoon and took a swallow of cold beer. It cut through the spicy burn of the chili but did little to cool the heat of the bitch inside her. It whined every time she inhaled and got a whiff of Logan’s musky scent, prompting Honor to wonder how difficult it would be to get her hands on some ketamine. The horse tranquilizer sounded about right at the moment, provided it would actually do the job and knock her out. With her Lupine metabolism, drugs tended to burn off faster than they were administered. She couldn’t even get a good drunk on without resorting to multiple bottles of the hard stuff. Sometimes, there was no justice.

“How are you feeling, Honor?” He leaned closer, his voice rumbling against her ear in an insidious tickle of heat and smoke. “You ran away before I got a chance to look you over. You’re not … hurting, are you?”

The question must have been directed straight between her thighs, because that was the only part of her to answer, and she wasn’t about to mention the ache she felt there. Not when it had nothing to do with injury and everything to do with renewed hunger. If she could call it renewed. If she were being honest, she’d have to admit it had never really gone away to begin with. Her wolf whispered evilly that it would take days and days of privacy before that need had a hope of being assuaged.

She forced the bitch to step back and gathered her sanity for a withering glare. “You might think of yourself as the Big Bad Wolf, Hunter, but I’m no Little Red. You can’t hurt me with a little ordinary sex, so don’t flatter yourself.”

His dark eyes lit with gold, then narrowed. His voice dropped. “’Ordinary’?”

She shrugged. “What would you call it?”

He growled his response through clenched teeth. “If you hadn’t been such a slippery little devil, I’d have called it claiming my mate.”

“You’d have been wrong.”

Honor was so done with this discussion. Bracing her hands on the top of the table, she shoved to her feet. Well, she tried to. A very large and very heavy hand on her shoulder kept her in place.

She growled. “When I say, ‘Move it, or lose it,’ understand very clearly that I will bite your hand off at the wrist. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done it. This week, even.”

“You aren’t going anywhere until we’ve gotten a few things clear between us. Mate.”

“I am not your mate.”

He ignored her bared teeth and laughed, but the sound held little amusement. “Deny it all you like, sweetheart, but you and I both know the truth. You think I wouldn’t have known the first minute I scented you? You think I’m a fool?”

“You really want me to answer that?”

“I want you to stop behaving like a brat and admit the truth about a few things. No matter what you keep telling yourself, I didn’t come here to ruin your life, and I don’t have to be your enemy. Why can’t you let me help you?”

It was Honor’s turn to laugh at that.

“Help me.” She studied the expression of grim determination on his face and shook her head. Maybe he actually believed what he was saying, but someone needed to set the man straight. Apparently, that had just gotten added to her little to-do list. “I already told you how you can help me, Hunter. You can go back to New York, back to Graham Winters and tell him that the White Paw Clan has an alpha and it needs nothing from him but that he acknowledge the change in leadership and then leave us the hell alone. That’s the only help I need from you, or from the Silverbacks. Is that straight enough for you?”

“We’ve had this discussion before, Honor, at least twice now. Do you really want to have it again?”

“If it means I’ll finally get through that thick male skull of yours, we can have it three more times tonight and seven times tomorrow.”

A muscle ticked above his cheekbone. “And I thought Missy was stubborn,” he muttered.

Honor beat back her wolf’s displeasure at hearing him speak another female’s name. She really did need him to understand the situation, so maybe it was time to lay it all out for him, to spread every single ugly card in her hand on the table and see if he still wanted to place his bets.

Leaning forward, she caught his gaze and held it, watching the gold lights of his angry wolf play across his brown, human irises. “Look, Hunter, maybe you really do think you’re here to help me. I don’t know if you’re honestly that stupid, but just for a second consider what it is that you think your presence here is going to solve. You’re going to walk around my pack for a couple of days and then decide if you think I’m fit to lead it, right? Well, let me ask you something. If you only have two choices—I’m fit or I’m unfit—what do you think is going to happen here?”

She didn’t give him time to answer. “Let me tell you. I know this pack a lot better than you do, so I think you can give me some credit for an educated guess. I’ve been beta of this pack since I was fifteen. For well over ten years, I’ve been the one supporting the previous alpha and handling both the problems too small to bother him with, and the ones he just didn’t want to be bothered with, and let me tell you; Ethan Tate may have been my father, but he wasn’t a man to go easy on someone just because they shared his name. He treated me just the same as he treated any subordinate member of this pack, and I had to prove myself to him to earn my position beside him. He didn’t go easy on me and he trained me to be able to lead this pack in his absence, whether that was when he went away for the weekend, or when he dropped dead from cancer. Me. Just me. No one else in this pack has the training or experience that I do, so who else do you think is a better choice to lead it?”

Honor saw his expression tighten and fought back the urge to smack him upside the head. She’d had a lot of years to come to the understanding that some men needed to have the truth beaten into them with a blunt object. She’d hoped Logan was smarter than that.

“Being an alpha is about a lot more than just making sure no one runs amok through the local human population, or convincing young males not to kill each other over some female’s first heat,” he argued.

“Oh, really? How nice of you to tell me that. Because as a young female pack beta, I didn’t ever have to fight a grown male to make him submit to my dominant position in the pack. And I’ve never stood at my father’s side while he negotiated a territory dispute with the Riverside Clan to the north of our territory. And I’ve never had to help figure out if the businesses my dad ran were going to provide enough meat to feed the males, females, and cubs in the pack who couldn’t find jobs out here in Northeast Bumblefuck to sufficiently feed themselves. Thanks so much for pointing out all the other jobs that I’ve been doing or helping to do here for … oh … my entire life.”

“Do you need a napkin, sweetheart? I think you drooled some sarcasm onto your chin.”

“Fuck you.”

His hand slid from her shoulder to her wrist and gripped firmly. “Been there, done that. And trust me, mate, we’ll get to it again real soon.”

She saw the promise in his eyes and really wished her brain would talk some sense into her other parts and let them know that this was the time to be angry and disdainful and offended, not horny.

“Look, I’m not trying to dismiss what you’ve accomplished in the past, or the status you’ve held in this pack as its beta,” he said, obviously struggling to keep his tone reasonable. “But the fact that you saw your father run this pack for your whole life should tell you that stepping from beta to alpha isn’t like moving up a year in high school. Not every beta is cut out to be alpha. You don’t get there just by being stronger or more experienced than everyone else. You have to be the strongest. Wolves don’t become alpha; they’re born that way.”

“You think I don’t know that?” She waved her free hand at the rows and rows of pack members ranged about the room in front of them. The ones currently pretending they weren’t straining to listen to the conversation between their leader and the strange Lupine who had invaded their territory. “You said you were going to take a look around and talk to the members of my pack before you made a decision about me. You go right ahead and do that. You go try to find someone in this pack you think can lead it better than I can. Then you come back and tell me what you find. Or let me save you the trouble. If you’re looking for a male among the White Paw who you think can be a better alpha than I can, you won’t find him. This is my pack, Hunter. I know my pack.”

“Stop acting like I’m just looking for an excuse to unseat you,” he hissed, never bothering to look at anyone else. “Yes, that could happen, but I didn’t come here with my mind made up. There are any number of ways this could go, Honor. If you’d climb down off your pile of righteous indignation, maybe you could see that.”

Wow, was he really that naïve? She shook her head. “No, this is a true or false question, Hunter, so there are only two possible answers.

“Option one: you take your time looking around, poking your nose into my business and feeling out all the members of my pack, and it finally sinks in that I was right and this was all just a big waste of time. You’ll decide that I am the alpha of my pack, and you’ll go back to New York and tell your boss exactly what I told you in the beginning: Honor Tate holds the White Paw Clan. True.”

He growled at that, and the deep rumble tickled the hairs at the back of her neck. “If you think I’m going anywhere without my mate, you’re operating under some serious delusions, Honor Tate. You can’t get rid of me that easily. You can’t get rid of me at all.”

“Which brings us to answer number two.” She wanted to believe him. Hell, part of her did believe him. Her wolf knew Logan wasn’t lying when he said he was her mate. Her nose wasn’t broken. She could smell the truth for herself. What she couldn’t do was see any possible way in which the two of them could end up with a happily ever after. Some things just weren’t meant to be, and she’d given up on happy a long, long time ago.

“Two A goes like this,” she continued, shoving back a pang of grief she had no right to feel. “You decide I’m not fit to be alpha of this pack. If that happens, you undermine everything I’ve spent the last decade of my life establishing. You tell the males in my pack that you think one of them can challenge me and win, which means they will likely all challenge me. One at a time, I can defeat any male in this pack. I’ve already done it with two of the strongest, and I’m not going to back down from any of the rest. But, if they all come after me at once, there’s no way I can win. Even if they come at me one after the other in honorable challenges, eventually I’ll exhaust myself, and one of them will be able to get through my guard. Either way, I’m dead, so the White Paw Clan really would get itself a new alpha. I just wish I’d be around to tell you I told you so when that new alpha leads the pack down the road to hell within the first three months. Maybe I’ll get lucky and be able to haunt you.”

She saw the roar building up behind his expression and raised a hand. She needed to make him understand what she was saying. She didn’t have time for knee-jerk denials or macho possessive-mate bullshit. This was too important.

“Two B is the one where I don’t die, but listen for a second and then tell me if you really think it’s a better choice. Listen carefully.”

She leaned in close, so close she could see tiny pinpricks of silver in the brown of his eyes where the gold had not completely taken over. Even as she watched, they disappeared, his wolf steadily eroding his control and rising to the surface.

“This is the one where you get your wish.” She twisted the arm he still grasped until her own fingers could curl around his wrist, clasping him in return until his eyes flared an even brighter gold. “In this one, I admit you’re my mate. In fact, I proclaim it in front of my whole pack. Anyone who steps up to challenge me is forced to realize that they can’t try to harm me without my mate stepping in to defend me. Since I would only agree to call a male my mate if he supported me in everything I do, I’d still be alpha of this pack, because even though you had called me unfit, your presence at my side would keep me in the position simply because no one would be willing to challenge both of us together. Which would make you, as the mate of a female alpha, not the beta of the Silverback Clan, but the White Paw Clan’s Sol.”

She paused and watched the truth begin to dawn on this stubborn, arrogant man. Her lips quirked in a bitter half smile.

“So that’s false, Hunter. Now which one is it going to be?”