Hungry Like a Wolf (20 page)

And this slob thought he had what it took to be alpha of a Lupine pack.

Logan felt his lip curl in distaste and decided to make use of his visit here for something. If he couldn’t take his frustration out on Darin’s motionless body, he might as well accomplish something worthwhile.

As places to snoop went, the small cabin left much to be desired. As he could have predicted, the refrigerator didn’t hold much more than half a case of beer and an opened Styrofoam tray of ground beef, beginning to turn gray at the edges. The thought of meat made Logan’s stomach rumble. The couple of rabbits he’d munched on in the forest that afternoon had long since worked off, but he promised himself he’d get dinner up at the house when he finished here. Closing the door, he turned away and kept searching. The cabinets were all but bare, but again, neatly tended and relatively dust free.

The small living room looked tidy, for all of its shabby furniture. Someone must come in to dust fairly regularly, because the coating of powdery dirt he’d expected to see didn’t seem to be there. The
TV Guide
and remote had been stacked neatly on a battered end table beside the easy chair, along with a coaster and a half-empty tin of peanuts. The presence of a beer coaster settled it. No way was the man who lived here worried about water rings on the cheap wood. This cabin definitely saw the presence of a woman more often than he supposed Darin the Dapper could manage to get lucky at the local bar.

Making his way back into the bedroom, Logan glanced wistfully at the still unconscious object of his frustrated anger and sighed. He turned back to searching and had checked under the bed and in all the dresser drawers before he actually found something interesting in the man’s closet. Women’s clothing.

Judging by the sizes—all 6 petites—Darin didn’t have a guilty little secret, nor a desire to be a certain kind of lumberjack. There was no way the man could fit his beer-bellied bulk into those dresses. But the fact that they hung in his closet to begin with shot Logan’s theory about an occasional housekeeper totally out of the water. This was no maid who endured the games of slap and tickle in exchange for a measly paycheck. This was a relationship, or at least evidence of one.

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 came, 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.