Hungry Like a Wolf

Eleven

Logan left Honor alone in her office and ran. He entered the woods in a blind fury, his heart pounding in his ears, rage burning through his veins like poison. He paid no attention to the snow that crunched icily under the callused pads of his feet, or to the scent of more snow coming in on the ozone-sharpened breeze. None of it mattered, and none of it could penetrate the red haze that fogged his mind and kept him operating on pure instinct, the instinct to run or to kill. Preferably both.

He ran for hours, zigzagging through the dense New England woods, letting his sense of smell inform him whenever he got close to the edges of the White Paw Clan’s territory. The first time the scent hit him, it only increased his fury. He should have smelled his mate at those borders, because the edge of a Lupine territory was always scent-marked by the alpha of the pack. Instead, all Logan could smell was an unfamiliar dominant male who must have been Honor’s father. The fact that his mate’s position was still too tenuous for her to go out and mark her own lands made him seethe inside, but gradually, as he expended the adrenaline that drove his rage, he began to take comfort in the lingering traces of her scent he picked up here and there around the forest. Honor might not have scented her borders quite yet, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t left her mark on this territory. She had become part of the land here, just as it had become part of her.

Shortly after sunset, the last of the driving anger burned up in the relentless pounding of his paws against the earth, and Logan collapsed, panting, under a towering pine tree. The dry needles piled beneath it crunched under his weight, exposed where the thick forest cover had shielded the ground from the last light snowfall. Ears back, tongue lolling, Logan took a moment to catch his breath and let the sounds and scents of the forest soothe and calm him.

He had needed that run. Badly. The tension of the last couple of days had piled on top of his already deep sense of restlessness and discontent until he’d come within inches of losing control completely and going on the kind of rampage that made humans write stories about mindless, bloodthirsty werewolves who could only be stopped by the impact of a silver bullet. Logan had always wondered where that thing about the silver had come from. As far as he knew, if you put any kind of a bullet into the dead center of something coming at you, it was pretty much done. Choice of metal really just boiled down to semantics.

Now, with night closing in on the forest, Logan reluctantly began to pad back toward the Tate house and a set of dry clothes. Goddess knew what had happened to the ones he’d been wearing earlier. They had most likely been shredded during his shift, but he needed to shift back to his human form and work through a few things. The humans might be off base with that “mindless beast” crap, but it was easier to think wearing skin as opposed to fur. When the fur was on, the accompanying instincts could get in the way and cloud his thinking.

He was guessing he’d need every human brain cell he could muster to find a way out of the mess he and his mate now found themselves in.

Thinking about his mate—or, more specifically, thinking of Honor as his mate—sent a surge of primitive satisfaction jolting through him, enough of one that he almost wore a smile when he shifted back after slipping through the dog door located off the kitchen in the main house. No one seemed to be around, so he padded naked up to his room and took the time for a quick rinse-off in the shower before dressing in fresh clothes.

Finding his mate was about the only bright spot he could come up with in an otherwise totally FUBARed situation. If he’d ever seen a mess that was fucked up beyond all recognition, this was it. Logan had finally found the woman of his dreams, the one fate had destined that he would live happily with for the rest of his life, and who did she turn out to be? A potentially outclassed female wannabe alpha of a pack that appeared to have needed a serious makeover well before she had been forced to take over.

Yeah. Fun times.

The morning he had spent talking to the members of the White Paw pack had opened his eyes to a few things he hadn’t expected. From everything Graham had told him before he left for Connecticut, Logan had painted a picture of Ethan Tate as an old-school alpha, the kind who ran a tight pack, who knew all of his wolves and commanded if not their love and devotion, then certainly their respect. The stories he had heard hadn’t mentioned any uneasy rumblings coming from this small, somewhat remote clan, so he—and Graham, he was certain—had assumed that this pack ran just as smoothly and seamlessly as the Silverbacks. You know, discounting for insane cousins who attempted to incite coup d’états.

That wasn’t quite what he had found. The stories Logan had heard from the pack members he had spoken to implied that Ethan Tate had earned more fear from his pack than he had respect. No one had ever thought to make a move against him, but their restraint stemmed from the certainty that even the smallest rebellion earned a death sentence under Tate’s harsh rule. No one complained because no one wanted to end up with a permanent limp or the kind of scar that even a Lupine metabolism couldn’t heal, not because they didn’t have things to complain about. Bringing a grievance to the alpha had long been seen as a quick road to retribution. If a member of the pack hoped for anything like actual help with a problem, they went to the beta.

They went to Honor.

Honor—his mate—he had learned, had been the one who really kept the White Paws running. She made sure the families with sick babies got seen by a doctor, even when neither parent had a job that offered health insurance. She organized hunts during the lean months of winter and had instituted the twice-weekly communal meals as part of her efforts to make sure no one in the pack had to truly go hungry. When the nearby lumber mill, the pack’s largest employer for generations, had closed, she had set up van pools to take pack members to the Native-American casino forty miles outside pack territory, because that had been the only place hiring new workers. The reason the White Paw Clan had not died out a decade ago, Logan had learned, was because of Honor.

The knowledge should have made his job easier. Hearing all those stories told him that Honor already possessed one of the most important qualities of a pack alpha—a fierce and unyielding determination to protect her pack and to do whatever she could to ensure their survival. If being alpha were all about organization and people skills, ingenuity and hard work, he would confirm Honor in the position without so much as a blink of hesitation—but being alpha meant more.

The alpha was the strongest wolf in the pack. Period, end of sentence. Sure, strength came in a lot of forms, from moral strength to emotional resilience to sheer dogged determination, but not one of those qualities was enough to take down an opponent who was bigger, stronger, faster, and more experienced. Honor was probably the best beta her pack could have had; she had kept order, maintained the peace, and had done what she could to ensure that no one in her charge had suffered unduly under the thumb of what sounded like an increasingly unstable alpha. The problem was that if Honor had been meant for the alpha position, she already would have taken it. Knowing what her father’s tyranny cost her and the rest of the pack, a natural-born alpha would have challenged and overthrown an aging and increasingly infirm leader. If that had happened, none of this would be in question. An alpha who took her title by force wasn’t one anyone questioned, not even Graham. If Honor had overthrown her father, Logan would never have come.

Wasn’t that just a boot in the ass, he acknowledged silently as he left the house and headed for a small group of cabins Honor’s cousin Joey had told him about shortly after his arrival. If Honor had been born to be alpha, he never would have met her, but because he had met her, he had to find a way to fix her pack—one where, as far as he could see, there was no one who fit the requirements of the position. Somehow, no matter what decision he came to, he knew he’d be screwed.

Pushing the worries aside for the moment, Logan focused on the path to the cabins. According to Joey, the cluster served as a sort of community center for the Lupines who lived on the White Paw land. There were almost always people there, he’d heard, and if you wanted to learn the latest gossip or locate someone in a hurry, it was the place to go. At the moment, what he wanted was to deal with a certain outstanding issue left over from this afternoon. It involved a very stupid Lupine who was lucky Logan had been more interested in claiming his mate the last time they’d met than in claiming his pound of flesh.

Make that ten pounds, he thought, snarling. Inflation and all.

If he couldn’t solve the alpha problem tonight, at least he could solve the problem of exactly how badly he wanted to knock out a few of Darin Major’s teeth.

A group of teenagers talking and tussling around a barrel fire in front of the house stopped what they were doing when he approached, and the women chattering away on the front porch fell silent. He ignored the scrutiny and prepared to ask his question when the door to the cabin opened and the young man who’d dragged Darin Major away earlier walked outside.

Max was exactly the Lupine Logan had hoped to see. The kid had kept his head during the fight back at the office, even though he still had some growing up to do before Logan could comfortably call him much more than a pup. He looked like a college kid, but he smelled like he’d turn into a powerful wolf one day. He had the makings of a beta, or maybe even an alpha, once he’d finished maturing. Either way, he could definitely prove useful at the moment.

“Max.” At Logan’s deep rumble, the women all followed his gaze and turned curiously toward the young man still poised in the doorway. “I’d like to talk to you, please.”

Max hesitated, and one of the women on the porch shot Logan a suspicious glare. “He’s busy. And he doesn’t have to go anywhere he doesn’t want to.”

Logan didn’t bother to acknowledge the rudeness.

Max quickly brushed the protective woman away. “It’s all right, Cindy. Hunter’s cool. I’ll be back later on.” He jogged down the porch steps to join Logan in the yard, shoving his hands into his pockets and hunching his shoulders as he looked up at the much larger man. “What’s up?”

Logan jerked his head away from the house and steered them onto the path leading back to Honor’s house. They didn’t go far, but Logan wanted privacy, and with the full moon barely two days away, there was plenty of light to see by, even under the cover of the trees. “I wanted to ask you a question.”

Max’s eyes widened. “Dude, I swear there’s nothing going on between us. Honor is like a big sister to me. I mean, sure she’s beautiful and all, but I would never—”

One look at the kid’s earnest and slightly panicked expression, and Logan burst out laughing. He laughed so long and hard that he had to stop walking to bend over and catch his breath. It was a good thing they were already in the thick of the trees and out of sight, or it could have gotten really embarrassing. As it was, it took him a good minute or two to calm down. By the time he could stand up straight and look Max in the eyes, the younger man had his arms crossed over his chest and a truly irritated expression on his face.

“It’s not that funny a concept,” Max snapped. “Sure, she’s a few years older than me, but I’m not exactly repulsive, you know. I’ve had more than a couple of older women find me very appealing over the last few years, if you know what I mean.”

Logan sobered abruptly and scowled at the young man. “Watch it, kid. Believe me when I tell you, it’s better for you if I find the whole thing funny, okay?”

Max smiled sheepishly and let his arms drop back to his sides. “Right. So, then … um, if it’s not about Honor, what did you want to talk to me about?”

Logan’s eyes narrowed, his jaw set, and his mouth curved into a smile that probably would have scared women and small children. It certainly made Max’s eyes widen in the silvery moonlight. “Darin Major. Where is he?”

“Dude, I swear, he’s okay. I dragged him back to his cabin and got him into bed. He had a knot the size of a golf ball on the back of his head, but his head is harder than most tree trunks. He probably slept it off and was as good and as obnoxious as new when he woke up. I haven’t seen him tonight, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that was because he decided to stay in and sulk. He always was a sore loser.”

“Where is his cabin? I’d like to talk to him.”

Again. Apparently Logan hadn’t made things quite clear to the man at their first meeting, and now he had to add in the advice that touching Honor had recently become a very unhealthy move.

“Um, yeah. So, um … d’you really think that’s such a good idea? I mean, him being a member of Honor’s pack, and you looking like you want to kill him and all? ’Cause I can see her giving you all sorts of noise over it if you, like, ripped out his spleen or something.”

“Where is he?”

“All right, fine. It’s your lecture. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. Darin’s place isn’t far from the big house. This way. I’ll show you.”

Shaking his head, Max turned and led Logan to a fork in the path and then east for a while until they came to the old logging road that ran through much of the property. They walked another quarter of a mile or so, past a couple of the small cabins Honor’s father had rented to members of his pack, until Max stopped in front of one of the buildings and pointed.

“That one’s Darin’s. I gotta tell you, though, the headache he’s gotta have after he woke up is going to look like a stubbed toe compared to the one Honor’s gonna give you when she finds out you came out here and hassled him some more. And if you rip him open or something, then she’s going to get really steamed.”

Logan turned to his companion and asked very, very quietly, “Are you telling me what to do, Maxwell?”

Max jerked back and raised his hands, palms out in the universal gesture for “don’t hurt me.” He shook his head. “Dude, maybe you need to get a pair of glasses or something, ’cause do I look that stupid to you? I’m just offering a little friendly advice, is all, and I’m even done with that. See you later.”

The young man turned and loped off down the forest path, still shaking his head. Logan watched until Max faded from sight before he put his hand on the railing and began to climb the front steps of Darin’s cabin. He paused to knock at the front door and a flash of movement from inside caught his attention through one of the windows. There were no lights on in the small building and the reflection of the moon on the glass made it difficult to see anything, but he could have sworn he’d seen something.

He stared for a few moments, then raised his hand and knocked again. Getting no answer, he reached for the knob and let himself in. One distinct advantage to this place over Manhattan, he thought as he stepped inside, was that here no one bothered to lock their doors.

The cabin lay quiet and empty. And surprisingly clean for an uneducated man who lived alone and seemed to have been raised in the Stone Age. Somehow Logan couldn’t picture Darin doing his own laundry or washing his own dishes or even just picking up after himself. Maybe he paid a local female to come in and do it for him. The jerk probably pinched her ass and called her “baby” while she did it, too.

He couldn’t keep his lip from curling as he made his way through the darkened house. Logan might be an old-fashioned kind of guy—he believed in opening a woman’s door for her, paying for their dates, and always treating her with respect—but he had no patience for those who called themselves “men” and yet treated women like objects or emotionless dolls. Logan himself was possessive, but he always remembered that the women he felt possessive toward had their own thoughts and feelings and opinions and brains, and that sometimes their brains reached more intelligent conclusions than his own did. He’d seen the way Darin had tried to treat Honor, and he hadn’t liked it.

It wasn’t just that Honor had become his mate, it was that she deserved better simply because she was a better person than Darin. Hell, Logan suspected she was a better person than him. Still, even cats didn’t deserve the lack of respect Darin had shown to Honor. And so, Logan thought it might be like a gift to the world at large if someone taught the flaming idiot a thing or two about manners. Luckily, Logan believed he just might be able to work that into his schedule.

He moved quietly down the cabin’s short hall to the master bedroom. He could tell where Darin spent most of his time by the scents permeating the small building, and since he wasn’t in the stinking recliner in front of the battered television, Logan thought it a pretty good bet that the next strongest pool of scent would be the man’s bedroom.

The door swung open with a minimal squeak, but from what Logan could see, it could have made the sound of a dying antelope without doing much damage. The figure stretched out on the rumpled excuse for a bed remained solidly unconscious, slack-jawed and drooling. An unmistakable haze of cheap whiskey hovered over him like a poison-gas cloud.

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?