Hungry Like a Wolf (8 page)

Shit. Why the hell had he decided to wear button-fly jeans?

Dragging his mind off his crotch for a good five seconds, he imagined his feet nailed to the ground beneath him. And if that didn’t work, he’d have to try real nails. “I understand your feelings, Honor, but they don’t change the fact that I am not leaving until my job here is done.”

“Just what sort of job do you think you get to do on our land, city boy?”

The crunch of snow underfoot had both Honor and Logan turning instinctively toward the path to the main house even before the first words were spoken. Out of the corner of his eye, Logan could see the annoyance that tightened Honor’s features, but he kept most of his attention centered on the two men who entered the stone yard.

The one who had spoken stood an inch or two less than six feet tall, but he had the stocky, beefy look of a brawler and wore an expression just short of challenging on his bearded face. His clean-shaven friend was a little taller, but less muscular, and his face wore an impassive mask belied by the way his pale eyes darted around the clearing, cataloging every detail. Logan didn’t even bother to stiffen at their insulting entrance, but neither did he take his eyes off them. He hadn’t gotten to be beta without watching his back.

“Bill. Dave. I thought you two were working on fences today.” Honor’s tight tone and rigid expression made the male Lupines glance her way, but their gazes turned just as quickly back to Logan. The low rumble in her chest indicated the female alpha didn’t like that much.

“We are,” the burly one drawled, hooking his thumbs in the front pockets of his blue jeans. “But just before we headed out, we ran into Darin, and he told us there was some stranger come sniffing around the pack. We hadn’t heard nothing about it from you, so me and Dave figured we might come take a look.”

Huh. Major worked fast. And appeared not to be the only male in this pack with more testosterone than brains.

“Really. You figured.”

Logan might not have known Honor Tate for very long, but even he knew enough to recognize that her total lack of inflection boded ill for her pack mates. The question was, how would she handle them?
Could
she handle them?

He stood his ground, his hands hanging loose at his sides. If Honor couldn’t deal with the situation, Logan had no doubt that he could. He had even less doubt that if he felt it necessary to step in, the female would make him pay, one way or another.

But she wouldn’t be doing it as alpha of the White Paw clan. An alpha that weak couldn’t be allowed to stand.

“What’s your name, city?” the burly one asked, jerking his chin up and narrowing his eyes at Logan.

And that was about as close to a challenge as Logan had ever let slip past him, but before he could express his generosity, Honor shouldered him aside and planted herself in front of her obnoxious pack mates.

“His name is none of your business, Billy. And neither is what he might be doing here. So you ‘figured’ wrong.”

Her voice had deepened to a growling register that tightened Logan’s pants, not that she was paying any attention to him or his fly. Or would have appreciated the gesture if she had been. Her dark eyes had begun to glint with feral flecks of gold, and he could almost see her alpha energy seeping from her pores. He doubted the other men had missed it, either, but they weren’t backing down, not just yet. That wasn’t a good sign for Honor’s desire to keep her spot at the top of the pack.

“You know as well as we do that we got a right to defend our territory when a strange wolf come into it—”

“You don’t know shit, William Petrey. That right belongs to the alpha, and last time I looked, you were nowhere near being the alpha of this pack.”

Bill’s eyes narrowed, and he crossed his thick arms over his chest, mumbling, “Female ain’t all that near it, either.”

Uh-oh. Those were fighting words.

Under Logan’s watchful eye, Honor shifted her weight onto the balls of her feet and began to stretch. Or rather, her body began to stretch, growing a couple of inches taller, muscles beginning to thicken and layer on top of each other. It wasn’t quite a change, since her features remained human, and she didn’t seem to be sprouting any fur that he could see, but her wolf was definitely rising to the surface, and he could feel the air thicken with the almost magical wash of energy.

Honor’s lip curled in a snarl, revealing long, white canine fangs that looked more than capable of rearranging her pack mate’s vocal chords. From the inside out. “Would you care to repeat that, William?”

The force of an alpha’s authority began to press down on the atmosphere in the clearing, making both Bill and Dave fidget in distress. Logan could feel it like a weight in the air, but he withstood it easily, maybe because Honor wasn’t his alpha, and maybe because she just wasn’t alpha enough. Wasn’t that what he’d come here to decide?

Bill, though, had started to look uncomfortable. His mouth tightened and his chin dipped, and he broke his gaze away from Honor’s, fixing it instead on the ground near her feet. Dave had already stepped back and dropped to one knee. Bill stood his ground, but he said nothing.

Honor moved in a blur of aggressive intensity. One moment she stood just in front of Logan, and when his lids rose from a blink she had reached her challenger and wrapped a dainty, clawed hand around her pack mate’s throat.

“If you have something to say to me, say it,” she snarled, pressing close until Logan was sure Bill felt the heat of her breath on his face. Thin rivulets of blood trickled down the sides of the White Paw’s throat where her claws bit into his skin. “If you question my authority to lead this pack, then challenge me. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut and your muzzle out of things that don’t concern you.”

She punctuated the question with a rough shake of the throat she continued to grip. The rest of the man’s body followed along like the hand of a metronome. He had gone limp in her grasp, finally surrendering. His head dropped to the side, his gaze fixed firmly on the ground, and he bared his throat in submission to his alpha.

Honor accepted the victory with something less than enthusiasm in evidence. Logan could see her fingers flex in the flesh of her subordinate, could see new drops of blood well around her claws, and could hear the tenor of her rumbling growl. She sounded not satisfied but angry. Frustrated. As if she wanted to exact retribution from the Lupine who had defied her. Logan couldn’t let that happen. A cruel alpha would be just as unacceptable to the Silverbacks as a weak one. An alpha had to lead a pack with power and strength, mental as well as physical. A leader who ruled with fear could only foster instability in the pack, which was exactly what he’d come here to prevent.

An instant before he stepped forward, Honor released her grip and sent her erstwhile challenger crumpling to the ground at her feet.

“Get back to working fences,” she spat, clenching her fists at her sides and taking a measured step backward. “Next time you hear something you think concerns the security of the pack, you check with me. Understand?”

Both men nodded and scrambled hastily to their feet.

“Go.”

The men went.

Logan watched while the female alpha struggled to tamp down the wild aggression surging through her. Her entire body vibrated with that feral energy, and he was curious to see her contain it. The mark of an alpha often showed itself not in how he or she controlled others, but in how they controlled themselves.

She took a long, deep breath, and when she blew it out, her body had stilled. Well, all except for her hands. Her fingers still betrayed a fine tremor; at least until she clenched her fists and turned to face him. The golden light of the wolf still shone in her dark eyes, but her face was a mask of hard, cool marble.

“Enjoy the show?” she demanded.

He brushed aside the note of challenge in her tone, chalking it up to the aftermath of adrenaline. “That’s not quite the word I’d use, but it was interesting. I’ll say that.”

Her lip curled at the edge. “I’m surprised you didn’t take notes so you could report back to your boss on my obvious incompetence.”

“I’ve got a pretty good memory.”

“I’m less worried about your memory than your powers of deductive reasoning. You might be stupid enough to figure that one idiot with too much testosterone and not enough work to do constitutes evidence of my incompetence.”

“I never called you incompetent.”

“Then you’re admitting I can run this pack perfectly well without the interference of the Silverback alpha.”

“Nice try, but you’re not getting rid of me before this weekend. I won’t be making any final determinations before then.”

He saw the flash of annoyance flicker across her expression, but then, she didn’t exactly do much to disguise it. He figured she didn’t care if he knew he was pissing her off. She’d certainly told him enough times already.

“Whatever,” she growled, reaching for the shovel she had dropped when Bill and Dave had decided to ask for their asskicking. “At this point, I couldn’t give a shit. Like I said, it doesn’t make much difference what you decide. This is my pack, and the Silverback will put someone else in charge of it over my dead body.”

Logan’s wolf snarled at the idea of this woman lying in a pool of her own blood, a victim of her own stubbornness and another wolf’s teeth. “That is what I’m here to prevent. No one wants this to end with your death, Honor, least of all me or Graham.”

She snorted, but didn’t even bother to contradict him. Instead, she resumed her work on the huge fire pit, using the shovel to lever stones back into position along the edges and her hands to restack the ones that had fallen. The barrier they comprised was necessary to contain the flames of the enormous bonfire customary during a rural Howl. The Manhattan pack had long since been forced to abandon the tradition. Fires that size weren’t just illegal in Central Park; they were also pretty hard to miss and tended to attract the attention of humans at the most inopportune moments.

“Honor, look—”

She cut him off, straightening to glare at him and burying the blade of the shovel into the packed earth with an angry thrust. “No. You know what? I’ve already looked, and I sure as hell don’t like what I see. We’ve each laid our cards on the table. I have no intention of surrendering my pack to anyone, least of all someone appointed to the job by a wolf who can’t even be bothered to pay us a visit himself. That’s my hand. And you? You’re wedded to your little role of judge and jury and alpha’s errand boy, and you have no intention of doing the right thing and running back to your boss to tell him that the White Paw Clan is doing just fine without him. That’s your hand.”

He opened his mouth, but the little she wolf refused to let him get a word in edgewise. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had taken that tone with him, all bossy and pissy and arrogant. Not even Graham did such a good job of goading his wolf as this bundle of anger and oncoming heat. His eyes narrowed as her emotions intensified her scent.

“So, fine. We both know where we stand, and as far as I can see, continuing to bitch at each other isn’t likely to change either of our minds. Why waste the energy? Especially when I’ve got a thousand and one more important things to do in order to keep this pack running. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m getting back to work. I wish like hell that you’d get your ass out of my territory, but since I don’t see that happening any time before Sunday, I’m not going to bother worrying about it. All I ask is that you stay out of my way. Go do what you have to do, talk to whatever members of the pack you want to talk to, watch whatever you want to watch, but just stay the hell out of my way. All right?”

She skewered him with one last glare, wrenched the shovel out of the dirt, and turned her back to him. She actually
turned her back.
It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, only red was the color he pictured turning her ass, and the bull was the wolf inside him who figured spanking her could wait until he’d pinned her down and mated her a time or two. Or twenty.

His nostrils flared and he inhaled deeply. With every breath he took, he could feel the full moon drawing closer and smell her heat building. The fragrance filled his head like a mist, making his thoughts foggy and his dick hard. Goddess help them both.

“No.”

He barely understood himself. The denial came out as more of a growl than a word, a rumble pulled from a throat more inclined to form Lupine howls than human words. His wolf wanted out, and only the force of his will kept his change at bay. He liked to think that if he had been a weaker male, he’d already be sprouting fur. That was the effect this woman had on him.

“Well, that’s just sad for you, then.” She dropped the shovel and bent down to shift a particularly large stone. “Too bad I don’t give a shit. Now go away and leave me the fuck alone.”

“No.”

He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. Saliva pooled in his mouth as his beast imagined the taste of her; his palms itched as he pictured the feel of her smooth skin under his hands. His control hung by a thread, and with every insulting word she uttered, it was as if she sawed at that thread with a tiny, diamond-edged knife. A few more strokes, and not even the Moon herself could stop him.

“Okay, you know what? I give up. I didn’t think it was possible, but you really are dumber than you look.” Honor threw up her hands and all but howled at him. “What part of ‘get the hell away from me’ do you not understand?”

Logan was on her before she got it out, the thread a distant, severed memory. “The part about ‘away,’” he growled, and closed his mouth over hers.

Five

Oh, shit. Not again.

Yes, please, thank you.

Honor couldn’t seem to make up her mind. Or rather, her hormones. Was Logan Hunter the best thing she’d ever tasted and the one thing she needed more than her next breath, or did she need to kill him and leave his carcass for scavengers to denude the flesh from his bones?

While she pondered, he gave a little roll of his hips against hers and threatened to turn the tide of the whole debate. Not to mention the planet.