Chapter Four

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 form 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. And because she really wasn’t all that confident that 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 in to 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 an alpha challenge that presented itself to her. Lord knew she’d won three since the moment her father had drawn his last breath.

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.

Honor had been happier being beta. Though her personal relationship with her father had been rocky and even tumultuous at times, their working relationship had functioned as if it had been designed by a Swiss watchmaker. Ethan Tate had given the orders and Honor had seen them fulfilled. She had guarded his back, his pack and his privacy, and she’s done a damned good job of it, too. She had helped keep the White Paw Clan running smoothly and fluidly, but she’d still had time for her own pursuits. She had been on call twenty-four hours, true, but in a well-managed pack, those calls had come rarely.

Over the years, Honor had taken up kayaking and snorkeling. She had studied Native American and Lupine mythology and taught herself how to throw pots. She had earned a degree in business administration with a minor in environmental management and spent most of her spare time in the studio, spinning her wheel and stoking the fires in the brick kiln she had herself helped build. In other words, before her father had died, Honor had been a normal woman with a life of her own. Now she began to understand that as alpha, the pack would become her life.

She didn’t want that. Her sense of duty to the pack ran just as deep as any Lupine’s, but the need to serve it did not consume her. She had the willingness to give, but not the willingness to give up that which the position of alpha required.

Why then was she fighting to stay alpha of the White Paw Clan?

Good question, and one she had begun asking herself almost hourly.

Gods knew it wasn’t for the glory of it. Honor snorted at the very thought. There was very little glory these days in being alpha of any clan, and less in one of the small, subordinate clans like this one. Being the Silverback alpha might float Graham Winters’ boat, but the Silverback was the overpack to the entire Northeast. All the packs from Maine to New Jersey said their thank yous to the Silverback. The White Paw Clan had less than five hundred members, and that generous estimate included the pups and the elders. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of glory to be found in “ruling” a group the size of the local regional high school’s graduating class when most of them could run their own lives just fine without any interference from her.

To be honest, the only answer that had come to her had been that she wanted to lead the clan by default. Hardly a rousing answer, but a truthful one. It wasn’t that Honor wanted to lead the pack; it was that she didn’t want anyone else to do it.

She didn’t think it was a power trip. After all, given the lack of glory, one could rightly assume that the power of the position didn’t exactly shake the earth. So, not a dog in the manger routine. She just honestly didn’t see how any member of the pack could make a decent White Paw Alpha.

It hurt her to think it, actually. She hated thinking so badly of her family and friends, the group of people she’d grown up with, that she knew and loved. Or at least tolerated out of a sense of familial loyalty. She wanted to believe every one of those people had the strength and intelligence and fortitude to lead the pack into prosperity, but the sad truth told her none of them did.

If there had been anyone, it might have been Paul. Paul was smart. At least, she’d always thought so, before he decided to challenge her earlier that afternoon. He had a good head on his shoulders, and a sense of humor that had seen him out of more than one scrape in his life. But he also had a temper that could get out of hand if he wasn’t careful, and for all his considerable intelligence, the man couldn’t form a long-term strategy if it came with illustrated instructions. He could barely manage to plan what his next meal would be, and often didn’t even bother with that. The pack just couldn’t afford that sort of leader. This was a critical time for them, and if they didn’t have an alpha who could lead the pack in a new direction, Honor felt certain they would stagnate themselves into extinction.

The pack needed a leader with vision. Someone who could see the future and lead them to it. And failing that, they needed someone who would at least keep them from regressing into the past or standing stock-still as the world progressed around them. Honor didn’t delude herself into thinking she knew best for every member of the clan, or even that she knew best for the clan as a whole, but she thought she had a good idea of what would be worst.

The pack desperately needed to move forward. They needed to learn how to survive in an increasingly urban world. Their little compound in the forests of Connecticut provided them with a momentary oasis, but every day, developers moved a little bit closer to their retreat, and every day, they got one step closer to the sprawling metropolis of Manhattan, less than a hundred and fifty miles to the south. If the White Paw didn’t learn how to function in the society of the modern human city, they could kiss their lives and their sanity goodbye. Progress would not be stopping for them.

Honor wanted to see her pack move from a culture of reclusion to one of integration. She wanted pack members to become computer geeks and businesswomen and police officers and engineers. And if the pack continued to wallow in its stagnation, none of those things would ever happen. The world wouldn’t just pass them by; it would bulldoze over them and plow them under.

Now if only she could manage to convince the rest of her pack of this. And quickly, before Mr. Snooper-Sexy decided to support another Lupine’s bid for her job.

The recollection of Logan Hunter made Honor groan. He was the absolute last thing she needed in her life. Perhaps tied with a frontal lobotomy and Chinese foot binding. All three promised to cause her intense pain, considerable inconvenience and no few worries while accomplishing nothing useful.

In fact, while she was having fun with analogies, the man reminded her of French fries, one of her biggest weaknesses. Like the junk food, the Silverback offered no nutritional value and promised to do little more than weigh her down and leave her hungry for more a few hours later. And also like French fries, her craving for him came out of nowhere and refused to be pushed from her mind no matter how hard she struggled.

Damn him.

Honor kicked off the light cotton blanket, suddenly way too hot to tolerate even the minimal covering. Unlike some of the Lupines she knew, Honor didn’t just keep a blanket on her bed, she even used it on occasion, just not tonight. Not while she was obsessing over a sexy stranger, and definitely not three days before she was due to go into heat.

Of all the rotten luck. Her father couldn’t have died immediately after her heat when her hormones would settle down and make her life and her interactions with every male on the planet a hell of a lot easier. No, he had to time it so that her alpha challenges were just as likely to turn into attempted rapes as attempted murders. Gee, thanks, Dad. To add insult to the injury of her past few days, she’d been forced to start using the scented bath salts, which gave off a scent way too heavy for her sensitive nose, to try and mask the beginning of the changes to her body chemistry any Lupine worth his salt would have known indicated her approaching heat.

And while she was at it, she thought she’d throw in a few menstrual cramps and a case of boils. That sounded like fun.

Right. Sitting up in the bed, Honor ran her hands over her face and groaned. She figured she could either sit here ‘til dawn and brood, or she could get up, go downstairs and make up for the dinner she’d never eaten. Now that the taste of blood had finally faded from her mouth, her Lupine metabolism had reared its head to let her know just how wildly it disagreed with the notion of her skipping a meal.

She swung her feet over the edge of the bed and onto the floor, ignoring the chill of the boards. Her stomach overruled her soles. She paused long enough to pull on the pajamas she’d never intended to sleep in and made her way down the hallway to the stairs.

The house sat silent around her. It always seemed silent since Ethan’s death, but especially at night. With just her and Joey there now, silence almost came with a guarantee. Joey barely made noise when shouting at the top of her lungs, and Honor only seemed to get into the house just long enough to fall unconscious for three or four hours a night. Since she didn’t snore, that meant things stayed pretty quiet.

She heard little more than the sound of her own breathing and the rattling of the bare tree branches in the yard as she made her way through the house. The glow of moonlight silvered the floor in front of the windows, making it look almost as cool as it felt against her bare feet. She ignored the chill as she headed for the kitchen. If she was lucky, Joey had left a snack or two in the fridge. A half calf or twelve would go down fairly smoothly right about now.

If she hadn’t been so hungry and so tired, she probably would have heard the soft sound of breathing coming from inside the kitchen. She knew she would have noticed the smell; that musky, woodsy smell she’d detected earlier in her father’s bedroom when she’d emerged from her bath. The smell of the stranger.

But she didn’t notice a thing, not until she turned on the overhead kitchen lights and found her eyes focusing on the half-naked male form standing beside the center island.

“Care for a snack? ”

Logan wanted to make a snack out of her.

He stifled the urge to bare his teeth and inhale deeply, since it wasn’t precisely the polite thing to do, but damn he wanted to. There was something about her scent…something indefinable and elusive.

Either that, or he had a cold.

“What are you doing here? ”

Okay, not exactly the hey-sailor-buy-me-a-drink he’d been hoping for, but he figured that might be pushing things a tad.

“I got hungry. The diner in town’s not bad, but their idea of all you can eat and mine aren’t precisely the same. ” He held up a chunk of the sirloin he’d been munching. “Your housekeeper told me to help myself. ”

“She’s my cousin. And she should have told you to help yourself to the opposite side of the front door. ”

He watched her cross her arms over her chest, figuring it gave him the prefect excuse to stare at her breasts without being caught staring at her breasts. How was that for smooth? “Ironically enough, she decided to go with the whole polite thing. She put me in a guestroom overlooking the woods. Private bath. Pretty homey. ”

“Really, and did she leave a mint on your pillow? ”

“Chocolate. I had it before I came downstairs. ”

She rolled her eyes and stalked past him toward the refrigerator. “I’m surprised you didn’t just call up for room service. ”

Logan seized the opportunity to reevaluate the ass he’d been so struck by earlier. He almost choked on the beef. Lord, but it looked even better than the last time he’d seen it.

He quickly finished swallowing and shook his head in amazement. He still didn’t quite get why he found this woman so compelling. She pretty much defined “not his type. ” Dark-haired and dark-eyed, she should have had dusky, tanned or olive skin. Instead, her complexion looked pale and milky and perfect, especially in the silver light of the waxing moon that had illuminated the kitchen before she’d turned on the lights.

She’d looked like a shadow as she slipped through the dark house. Her form, slender and tallish, looked almost too delicate to be Lupine. He was used to woman of his species being sturdy and athletic, but this girl looked as if a good strong handshake might do her an injury. Her cousin had certainly seemed convinced that Honor could hold her own as alpha, but Logan found himself even more skeptical after meeting her. Somehow, he could not picture this woman facing an alpha challenge, let alone winning one. Or three, as Joey had told him. Just this week. It boggled his mind.

Of course, part of that might have had something to do with the fact that he could picture a whole lot more appealing things to do with her than fight, once he got his hands on her.

She slapped a plastic container down on the island and peeled off the lid, reaching inside for a bite-sized piece of pork. “So what time are you leaving in the morning? ”

The pointed question made him smile. He had to give her points for effort. “About a week from next Tuesday, I figure. If everything goes smoothly. ”

“Perhaps I’m not making myself clear, but you really aren’t welcome here. I want you gone. Now. ”

“No, I actually think that’s pretty clear. The problem is that what you want really isn’t the issue. For the past three hundred years, the White Paw Clan has been swearing fealty to the Silverback alpha. That makes your clan his responsibility, and from where Graham Winters stands, there are two things that could happen here. ” He ignored her glare and stole a piece of her pork, more to keep his hands occupied with something other than her breasts than because he was still hungry. “Either way, the White Paw alpha will need to renew that vow of fealty at the next Silverback howl. The only remaining question is whether the White Paw alpha will be you, or someone else. ”

He watched her while he spoke, so he saw the muscles in her jaw clench and her eyes narrow when he made that statement. He tried to ignore the way the spark in her gaze made his jeans fit a little too tightly.

“I am the White Paw alpha. And I will remain the White Paw alpha for a very long time to come. ”

“That’s what I’m here to determine. Maybe you will hold the title, maybe you won’t. The Silverback is not so much concerned with who keeps your pack as with the knowledge that the pack is well kept. ”

He could almost see her hackles rise. “I. Will. Hold. My. Pack. Did you get that? Or do I need to use smaller words? ”

Logan clenched his teeth to hold back the growl he could feel reverberating in his chest. “You need to watch your mouth. ”

“Make me. ”