Hungry Like a Wolf

Eight

The winter sunlight reflected off the snow shortly after dawn the following morning and pierced straight through Logan’s closed eyelids. Cursing the end of a night of precious little sleep, he snarled and threw back his purloined blanket. Damn Hamish MacDuff, anyway. It was like the man was some sort of prophet of doom who had cursed Logan with the long, lonely night of his prediction. A night spent without his cranky, contrary erstwhile mate.

The bastard.

Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, Logan sat up and scrubbed his hands over his face. He really had slept for shit, and the hours of tossing and turning—after quite a long and exhausting search of the grounds around the meeting hall and the main house for the elusive Honor Tate—had left him with a piss-poor attitude and the nagging shadow of a headache behind his brow. Nice way to start the morning, right?

Good thing he had plenty to do. Maybe concentrating on his job and sticking to his plan to interview members of the pack today would keep his mind sufficiently occupied. Otherwise, he predicted he would see himself spending every waking minute obsessing over his mate.

Cursing, he stumbled into the shower and cranked the water up high and hot. The pounding stream washed away the remaining fog of sleep, but it did little to turn his mind in another direction. He had mate brain, and for the first time, he felt a surge of sympathy for all the friends and pack mates he had harassed over the years for turning into salivating idiots the moment they scented the female that fate had picked out for them. Unfortunately, he now knew exactly how they felt. The part that astonished him was how different the experience was from what he’d expected.

Mating had taken him by surprise.

Oh, he supposed that was how it always worked. After all, among his kind, men and women didn’t meet at a bar or a party or off an Internet site, date for a while, and gradually develop feelings for each other. He knew that was what humans expected, but he was Lupine. He’d always known that one day he’d be at a bar or a party or meeting another Lupine in person for the first time, her scent would hit him, and he would recognize his mate. That was just the way it happened, but he’d be damned if he’d expected it to happen here.

First off, he’d still been hung up on Missy, or so he’d thought. He wanted to laugh about it now, but just a couple of days ago, he hadn’t been able to imagine any woman smelling as good to him as Missy Winters. Every time he’d caught the honey-and-vanilla scent of her, he’d felt his dick twitch, and when she’d started to scent of warm milk as well, he’d thought he’d go out of his mind. Intellectually, he’d known she couldn’t be his mate because she’d already mated with Graham, and he didn’t believe the Goddess could be so cruel as to make the one perfect woman for him belong to another male, not when Lupines mated once and remained mated to the same partner for life. The Moon would never curse him like that; but he’d still wondered. He’d still thought Missy smelled better than any woman on earth.

Until he’d gotten close enough to Honor Tate to detect the true scent of her beneath those cloying bath salts. Now, he realized that she must have used the fragrance in her bath to camouflage the smell of her heat. It might have worked with the members of her pack, especially if she didn’t allow anyone close enough to scent her skin directly, but they hadn’t been able to fool her mate. He’d recognized her through the distraction, sweet pea and clover spiced with the exotic musk of her coming heat. Just the memory of it affected him in a way the biggest snoutful of Missy’s scent never had. Honor’s fragrance was like a drug for him, addicting him, making him crave another breath, another taste, another chance to feel her smooth skin and taut curves pressing hard against him.

Goddamn it! If he didn’t get ahold of himself, he was going to come right here in the shower, without so much as the pump of his own fist around his cock. That was how his mate affected him, and it went so far beyond what he’d felt for his friend’s mate, he finally understood why she had disappeared from his mind so quickly after his arrival in Connecticut. She had never been right for him at all. The only woman he could ever be content with was Honor Tate, but how in the name of the blue Moon was he supposed to make that happen?

The only things haunting him more persistently than Honor’s scent were her words from the previous evening. The picture she had painted of their future was starkly engraved on his mind. She had predicted that the only possible outcomes of his presence in her territory were their permanent separation, her death, or a life of intolerable indignity for him. How was he supposed to make that kind of choice? Every one of his instincts told him he couldn’t live without her. Even though he hadn’t bitten her—nor she him—to formalize their mate bond, he already knew it would send him over the edge to lose her. If she died, he would kill every single Lupine who had touched her, and every single Lupine who had stood aside and let it happen. He would wipe out the entire White Paw Clan, if that was what it took to avenge her, so the idea of him just turning his back and trotting merrily back to New York without her didn’t even merit consideration. No way was he going anywhere without his mate.

But could he honestly stay here and pretend that every moment as a powerless pack mascot didn’t twist a double-edged knife through his gut? Logan accepted being Graham’s beta because he loved his pack mate like a brother, and even then, there were times when it grated to defer to the other Lupine. If he were relegated to the role of Honor’s Sol, how long would it be before he resented the very thought of her? He knew his strengths and his weaknesses, and his dominance tendencies, in this case, ranked at the top of both lists.

So, what was he going to do? Cut off his left hand, or his right? Because that was what the choices felt like to him. Either way, he’d walk away from this situation half a man. Which half did he want to lose first?

Logan twisted the water off with a sharp jerk of his hand and reached for a towel. Unless he wanted to turn the dial all the way to cold, the shower had done him as much good as it was able. Hadn’t his plan for the day been not to obsess over Honor Tate? Time to suit action to words.

Leaping to a decision now wouldn’t do him any good. He didn’t have enough information to know if Honor’s assessment of the situation was the right one. Maybe all his choices did suck like a brand-new vacuum, but if there was another option, any option that would allow him to have Honor and keep his pride, the only way to find it was to look. He’d start by looking into the pack, and go from there. Two birds, one stone.

And one very determined Lupine male.

Honor couldn’t remember a more exhausting day in her life. Who knew eluding one determined Lupine could take so much out of a girl?

After that incident in the stone yard yesterday, she’d devoted her entire afternoon to being wherever Logan Hunter was not. Well, there had been that forty-five minutes she’d spent leaning up against a tree, trying to remember how her legs worked, immediately after stalking away from him. But she wasn’t counting that. Or the way it had taken a good two hours for the pleasant ache between her legs to fade to the point where she wasn’t constantly having to press them together to ease the fluttering there.

She wasn’t counting that, either.

No, what she counted were the hours she’d spent running errands in town that could have waited another week but that kept her off the pack’s property until it was time for supper. The meal itself, she was trying hard to forget. Neither the reaction of her inner wolf every time she got close to Logan Hunter, nor the hard truths she’d slapped him down with before running away from him—again—counted among her finer moments. She’d headed straight from the meeting hall to the house and up to her bedroom, but it had taken all of thirty seconds after she’d gotten there for her to realize it wouldn’t take her mate half that long to find her if that was where she stayed. She had thrown a toothbrush and a change of clothes into a duffel and retreated to the remotest empty cabin on the property—one she was almost certain no one would have thought to mention to their guest that it even existed. There she had spent a long, cold, restless night trying to persuade herself that maybe her hormones were lying to her and Logan Hunter wasn’t really the mate fate had destined for her.

When that had failed, she’d switched to persuading herself that while he might be her mate, she had survived without him for twenty-four years before now, and she could survive another fifty after he left. No problem.

That had failed, too.

Which pretty much left her right where she’d started—alone, angry, and trapped between a rock and a hard Lupine. Gee, would the fun ever start?

Her secret hideout had protected her from Logan for the night, but the chilly cabin and the lack of sleep had left her feeling stiff and cranky when she finally managed to drag herself into the office for a day of paperwork and monotony. Yes, she was hiding behind a desk, but only because she didn’t think anyone had showed Logan her office yet, and when they eventually did, at least she’d have gotten in a few hours with the coffeemaker before he found her. That might be enough to get her through their next confrontation.

That, plus a whip, a chair, and a tranquilizer gun.

Sighing, Honor banished her nemesis from her mind and forced herself to concentrate on the monotony of the responsibilities she’d inherited from her father. She needed to send several boys back to the stone yard to finish off the fire pit that she’d abandoned after the Incident yesterday (her mind seemed determined to refer to their sexual escapades in capital letters, and frankly, Honor couldn’t really find a reasonable argument against it).

Settling into her father’s chair with her third cup of coffee, Honor dragged out Ethan’s dog-eared old appointment calendar. He’d been meticulous about his business, and every scheduled task and due invoice had been neatly noted in the pages of the calendar.

Honor looked over the notes for this week and grimaced. The chores and bills weren’t onerous by any means, but she just didn’t want to deal with them, especially not since she’d already taken care of everything that could possibly be handled away from the pack’s grounds. The business had been her father’s passion, not hers, and the cabins they rented to pack members and vacationing Others, along with the commercial properties in town, struck her more as a burden than a vocation. If she had her druthers, she’d be spending her time at a pottery wheel, or hiking through the woods, not cooped up behind a computer. It was just one more sign to her that the life she’d ended up with was not the life she would have chosen for herself.

She looked around the office to be sure no one lurked in the corners, waiting to demand a moment of her time; and she knew it was ridiculous, but she still took the precaution of closing the door and pulling down the shades before she gave in to her desire to lay her head down on the cool wooden surface and close her eyes.

What had she gotten herself into, and why the hell was she now exerting every last ounce of her considerable will and rapidly depleting energy to secure for herself a position she had never even wanted?

Intellectually, she had known this day was coming, the day when she would have to take over the pack, but she’d had no idea it would be this soon. She had thought she had years yet, maybe a decade or two, before she’d have to think of a way to tell her father she didn’t want to take his place when he died. But before she could get the words out, he’d been gone, leaving her with a mass of problems and no conceivable way out of them. He had trapped her in the surest way possible, with her own desire to please him.

Maybe if she had ever succeeded in doing that, she wouldn’t despise herself for what the attempt had stolen from her.

When she’d been a child, all the way up through her teenaged years, Honor had longed to please her demanding father. She’d done everything she could to get his attention. She’d tried being the obedient daughter, but he barely noticed. Then she’d tried being the top student in her classes, but that failed as well. Nothing had made any impact on Ethan Tate, not when she excelled and not when she rebelled. Nothing had seemed to make any difference to him until she’d begun to move up in the pack.

Her first challenge had been more of a lark than anything intentional. She’d refused to follow the orders of a slightly older male pack member—not surprising since he’d been trying to order her to let him grope her newly developed breasts—and had been faced with the decision to either challenge him for his rank or follow his orders. Honor had gone with the challenge. She had won, leaving the fight slightly bloody, but satisfied that the boy she’d beaten wouldn’t be giving her any more grief anytime soon.

That first challenge had earned her barely a passing glance, but the next one had merited a raised eyebrow. The next, a pat on the back. By the time she’d won her first challenge against an adult pack member, the day after her fourteenth birthday, she had found the path to her father’s approval—straight through his ego. Every time she won a rank challenge, it reflected well on her father and on the line of Lupines from whom she and he were descended. That was the only act he respected and so Honor had fought the battle over and over until finally it had won her a place at his side, but it had never won her his love.

Honestly, she wasn’t even sure anymore whether he’d ever had any to give her. She’d known from her earliest memories that he would have preferred if she’d been a boy—the son he’d always wanted. She had even wondered for a while—especially when he’d tried to appoint other young males to take her uncle’s place as beta after the accident that had killed both Joseph and his mate, Marie—whether he might literally try to replace her by adopting a young male pack member as his foster son, but she needn’t have worried. Ethan Tate had had too much stubborn pride in his name and his heritage to take that route. “Tates rule the White Paw,” he had told her so many times she occasionally heard the words in her sleep. In Ethan’s mind, anything else was unthinkable.

That was the real reason why he’d eventually given in and accepted her challenge wins as proof of her ability to be his beta. Only she knew how close he had come to killing her instead. Only she knew that when he’d had her wolf bloodied and pinned to the ground of the challenge circle, she had prevented him from ripping out her throat by telepathically reminding him that if he killed her, she would never be able to have pups; and if she never had pups, there would be no chance that a grandson of his blood would be born to carry on Ethan’s legacy.

She had learned at fifteen that the only value she had to her father was as a means of ensuring his immortality. She’d never forgotten the lesson, but her greatest regret was that she’d never mustered up the nerve to tell him to take his pack and shove it. Until his dying day, she’d remained at his side, ruling the White Paw Clan as if she relished each moment.

It hadn’t taken her very long as beta before she realized how unhappy the title made her. While she now received her father’s attention, and even his grudging approval, there was none of the affection she had craved. Maybe if her elevation in the hierarchy had earned her what she’d struggled for so long to achieve, it would have made a difference in the way she viewed the job, but as it was, she had no love for the chores that accompanied the position. She took no joy in settling disputes between rivals, nor in enforcing the laws of her father’s rule. Obviously, she had the ability to do the job and had gained the respect of the pack, but she got no pleasure from it. She didn’t relish the power of her station, just lived with it.

Not that she wanted to be omega by any means. She couldn’t imagine being the lowest rung in the pack hierarchy, nor even being lost in the middle with the majority of members. She didn’t want to drop in rank, she just wanted to not have so much of the responsibility that went with being in charge. And that really wasn’t one of her options. So now look at her. Probably the world’s only reluctant alpha, and who was currently engaged in an entrenched battle for her position.

Honor groaned and raised her head from the desk just far enough to prop it up in her hands. Viewed through clear eyes, her future stretched before her like a trap. The longer she spent here, doing the things that made her unhappy, the tougher it would be to ever get herself out of it. The more the pack accepted her, the less chance she had to leave. The harder she fought to prove herself to her followers, to Logan Hunter, and to the Silverback Clan, the deeper she dug her own grave. If she won the battle with her mate, the man she had argued with so passionately to acknowledge her claim and leave her in peace, she condemned herself to a life she hated with every fiber of her being.

So here she was, stuck in a place she didn’t want to be, doing something she didn’t want to do, and telling everyone who tried to talk her out of it to take a flying leap. Not to mention maiming anyone who tried to force her out of the martyrdom she’d stepped into. Sure, that was sane.

If things had been different, the easiest way out would have been to just lose a challenge. It happened to most Lupines at some point. She could throw a rank challenge and let one of the members of her pack take over her position as leader of the White Paw Clan. The plan had a few disadvantages, though, chief among them, the inability to control whether or not her opponent would let her live after the challenge. Traditionally, alpha challenges ended in death, and just because she had been lenient with her challengers did not mean that anyone else would offer her the same option. The second problem had to do with the fact that she could see no current member of the pack who was capable of taking on the role of alpha with any success. No one else had any experience or even enough good common sense to make a decent showing. Just look at who had challenged her so far—a whelp, a wuss, and a would-have-been friend. None of them had had the strength to beat her, and none of the ones still making noises did, either. Like Darin Major. Hell, his main claim to fame was that he ranked as the biggest asshole between here and Bangor. He talked a good game, but the word “blowhard” had been invented to describe him. The only thing Honor would have to worry about from him would be the very real chance that he would try to cheat his way to a challenge victory. Since she’d be expecting it, though, not even that would get him the win. She’d still take him down, and for the first time, she might just be able to stomach the thought of ripping the throat out of her challenger. Darin really was just that offensive.

She sighed and tried to figure out a way to reframe the idea that she led a pack full of nonentities without making herself sound like the world’s biggest snob, and there really wasn’t one. It wasn’t that she believed every single one of her pack members was an idiot, just that none of them would be able to step into her shoes without disrupting the life of the pack to a fairly significant degree. While Honor had been trained for her current position since the age of fifteen, no one else had. It might be a harsh truth, but it was still the truth.

Honor had a vision. She had plans for how she wanted to see the pack join the twenty-first century. She wanted to see them integrating with the modern world, becoming familiar with technology and engineering and science and all the fields that made humans such a threat to the continued survival of the human species. Only by understanding how the human world worked could the Lupines hope to survive the ever-growing encroachment into their territory, but so few pack members had even begun to comprehend that. Most of them had gone reactionary and preached a policy of isolation, cutting the Lupine world completely off from the human one. They saw it as the only way to preserve their culture. Honor saw it as suicide.

The more isolated they became, the more people would choose to isolate them. And that’s the sort of thing that led to witch trials and hangings and stonings and such things. Honor would prefer that the stonings did not happen, so the Lupines would need to learn to live with the humans and to accept that sometimes change became necessary. Already, their races were beginning to mingle, and she had heard rumors that the bigwigs across the country (especially the Council of Others in Manhattan) had begun to discuss plans for revealing the existence of their kind to the human world. It posed a big risk, but Honor saw the necessity behind it. It now felt almost inevitable, so why not work to ensure it happened on Lupine terms?

Honor just couldn’t risk allowing a new alpha to regress and take the pack with them. It wasn’t an option. If she had to fight to the death, turn her back on her mate, and go to war with the Silverback Clan to save her pack from a future of chaos and destruction, that was the only thing she could do. Her very genetic fiber had been programmed to leave her no other option. In spite of everything, she was still her father’s daughter.

The final reason why she couldn’t bring herself to lose any of her challenges didn’t exactly qualify as noble, but it was honest. Her pride wouldn’t allow it. Period. End of story. After all these years of proving herself to her father and the world, she simply couldn’t fathom the idea of losing a fight. It went against every fiber of her being. She fought to win, and to lose would not only be to lose her position—and potentially her life—it would be to lose face in front of the entire pack, in front of the entire Lupine world. If she did that, how would she ever be able to look at herself in the mirror again?

She couldn’t. Therefore, she couldn’t lose the battle.

“Welcome back to square one,” she muttered under her breath.

She also couldn’t afford the distraction presented by her Silverback guest.

Somewhere, she figured, the gods must be laughing at her. She couldn’t think of how she might have pissed them off, but that was the only possible explanation for why this was happening to her now. Why else throw a mating into the middle of the most complicated period of her life? Could they find worse timing? Not only did she not have the time for a mate, or the energy to dedicate to one, but how the hell was she supposed to stop fighting to save her pack so she could show her belly to the new dog sniffing around her?

How was she supposed to reconcile the fact that her predestined mate was also the one person who could destroy not just her, but her pack as well?

This just was not going to work. She knew that. It didn’t matter that the man made her heart race and her blood heat and her body clench. It didn’t matter that he left her with rapid breath and damp panties. She couldn’t have a mate right now, and she especially couldn’t have him.

The really inconvenient part, though, was that she didn’t think Logan had read that memo. He seemed determined to take what he wanted, when he wanted it, and damn the consequences. It was a pretty predictable Lupine response, especially coming from a man as dominant as Logan Hunter, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with, given their circumstances. Honor had a hard enough time keeping her own raging hormones under control, without having to deal with the source of those hormones doing his damnedest to incite further raging. It just wasn’t going to work.

Yeah, and if she kept telling that to herself often enough, she just might end up brain-damaged enough to believe it.

Swearing, Honor flipped her calendar open and began leafing through the pages once more. Time to stop brooding and concentrate on some real work. She got as far as opening to the proper page before a loud knock on her door called her attention.

“Come in,” she snarled.

She looked up to see a tousled brown head poking through the slightly open door. It wore Max’s puppy-dog expression and just below it dangled a bag containing the local bakery’s chocolate frosted doughnuts. “Is it safe?”

Honor checked the side of her mouth for drool. “It might be. Provided you throw those doughnuts in first.”

Theobromine be damned. She wanted those chocolate doughnuts. Besides, the amount of chocolate an adult werewolf would have to eat to get a bellyache from the toxic chemical defied comprehension. It defied Honor’s comprehension, at least. Chocolate was one of her biggest vices.

She caught the bag as it sailed toward her head and had swallowed half of the first doughnut before Max even managed to park his butt in the chair in front of her desk. She’d skipped lunch again to avoid running into Logan and skipping meals was not a good idea for a Lupine.

“So,” Max said, lounging back in his chair, one ankle crossed negligently over the other knee, “what’s up with the Silverback dude?”

Honor bit into doughnut number two and felt her eyes narrow. She barely forced herself to chew before she replied. “What do you mean, ‘What’s up’? He’s here because his alpha sent him here. You were at dinner last night. You heard what I said.”

“Well, duh, but despite all rumors to the contrary, I am not, in fact, either a clueless pup or a babbling idiot. You told everyone that he came to pay his respects at the passing of the alpha, but if that was all this was about, why would he be poking his nose into everyone’s business and asking questions about how the pack operates? What’s he trying to find out? And don’t tell me he’s on vacation, or something. That would hold about as much water as calling it a courtesy visit. Dude is damned sure asking way too many questions for courtesy.”

The younger werewolf met Honor’s gaze with raised eyebrows, his foot bouncing up and down where it dangled off the edge of his knee. At twenty, Max had energy to burn and yet was in that awkward stage between adult, when he would take his final place in the pack hierarchy, and child, when he could run around the territory free of responsibilities. She would need to find a constructive way to use all that energy, especially since her instincts told her that she was looking at a very high-ranking future wolf, potentially even her next beta. But right now, other priorities occupied her mind.

“Asking questions?” Her stomach clenched. She had known that was what Logan must be planning, but it still galled her to hear about him doing it. “Asking who? And what does he want to know?”

“It’s not polite to answer a question with a question.”

“It isn’t when you do it but I’m the alpha. I don’t have to be polite.”

“That is so not fair.”

“Deal.” She snagged a third doughnut and used it to punctuate her point. “Now tell me. Where is the Silverback poking his nose, and what has he been asking about?”

“Everywhere and lots of things.” The sneakered foot bounced, and Honor chewed in an attempt to keep her mouth too occupied to betray the true extent of her interest. “He’s talked to a good sampling of the present pack. Elders, males, females. He even visited Molly Stevens’s day care and talked to some of the little ones. Whatever he wants to know, he wants a pretty diverse perspective on it.”

“Have you asked any of the people he talked to what he wanted?”

“Well. No.”

“So, in other words, you have no idea what I’m asking you.”

“You could say that.”

“I just did.”

“True. But you could also say that you just didn’t ask the right question.”

Honor growled. “Max…”

“Hey, all I’m saying is, I don’t know exactly what he’s been asking people about, but I do know that there are some rumors flying around that something big is going to be happening at the Howl this weekend.” He leaned forward in his chair, blue eyes glowing. “Something bigger than an alpha declaration and a challenge or two.”

That made Honor pause. “What does that mean? What’s bigger? And just what challenges are you talking about?”

“Don’t try to distract me, Honor. We both know exactly what males in this pack are still dumb enough to want to challenge you to be alpha. You won’t change the subject with that. And if I knew what was bigger than the asskickings you’ll be handing out on Saturday, I’d know what the Silverback was asking people about. Which I clearly don’t.”

“Don’t be smart with me, Maxwell Clarke.”

He held up his hands. “I’m not being smart, Honor. I promise. I mean, I’m just as curious as you are. If something big is going down, it would sure be nice to be prepared for it.”

She scowled and leaned back in her chair, mumbling, “You’re telling me.”

“Then I guess it would be pretty useless for me to ask if you had any theories about what that all means?”

She just looked at him.

“Right. That’s what I thought.”

Max opened his mouth to speak, but before he got the chance to utter a single additional syllable, the door to Honor’s office slammed open and a clearly belligerent man shoved his way inside. He flew to Honor’s desk, slapped his meaty hands down on the surface, and inhaled deeply.

“I want to know if it’s true, you little slut.” His growl was deep and menacing and Honor didn’t even blink. “Half the pack is talking about it, but I want to hear it from you. Did you really let that stranger paw you like a bitch in heat? He hasn’t even been here for forty-eight hours, and you let him touch what’s mine?”

One eyebrow arched up, and when she spoke, Honor knew she could have added several inches to the polar ice caps with her tone of voice. She’d practiced often enough. “Yours? I must be having trouble with my hearing, because I am certain that there is nothing in this room that belongs to you, Darin Major. And the next time you call me a bitch, by the way, I will lunch on your liver. Now would you care to rephrase?”

“You heard me fine the first time, and I meant what I said. I heard three different people today say you let that Silverback cur bend you over like a cheap whore. They’re laughing about it. And now I’m going to picture that in my head every time I look at you. When the call to mate the alpha comes, you’re going to be mine, and I’m going to wipe that image from my head by replacing it with the sight of you on your knees in front of me.”

Honor raised her left hand, curled into a fist with the back of her hand facing Max and Darin. Coolly and very quietly she ticked off her points on her fingers as she replied. “One, let me repeat, nothing in this room can be called yours, least of all me. Two, what I do and with whom I do it is not, and never shall be, any of your goddamned business. Three, there will be no alpha mating at the next Howl, because I do not choose to mate right now, and I’ll be damned to hell and back before I let some antiquated, misogynistic, dumbassed excuse for a tradition dictate who I have to screw.” She ignored the protest between her legs and continued. “And four, remove your hands from my desk before I remove them from you.

Understand?”