Hungry Like a Wolf (13 page)

It was like having someone read Logan the contents of his own day planner. That was exactly what he planned to do between now and the Howl. It was the logical course of action. So why did Hamish MacDuff manage to make it sound like such a mindless exercise in futility?

“You seem to know just what I have planned, MacDuff,” he managed, carefully keeping his voice level and lacking in snarl. “Would you also like to tell me what I’m going to find?”

“What? And spoil all your fun?” The elder laughed and rose from his chair. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Hunter. You’ll find what you find, after all. I don’t claim to be a mind reader, but I do know a thing or two about being a young, unmated male, and I do know my niece. Which means I also know that it looks like it’s going to be a long, chilly night for you, son. You might want to raid the linen closet at the top of the stairs for an extra blanket before bed. Seems to me, you’re going to need it.”

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.