She forced the bitch to step back and gathered her sanity for a withering glare. “You might think of yourself as the Big Bad Wolf, Hunter, but I’m no Little Red. You can’t hurt me with a little ordinary sex, so don’t flatter yourself.”
His dark eyes lit with gold, then narrowed. His voice dropped. “’Ordinary’?”
She shrugged. “What would you call it?”
He growled his response through clenched teeth. “If you hadn’t been such a slippery little devil, I’d have called it claiming my mate.”
“You’d have been wrong.”
Honor was so done with this discussion. Bracing her hands on the top of the table, she shoved to her feet. Well, she tried to. A very large and very heavy hand on her shoulder kept her in place.
She growled. “When I say, ‘Move it, or lose it,’ understand very clearly that I will bite your hand off at the wrist. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done it. This week, even.”
“You aren’t going anywhere until we’ve gotten a few things clear between us. Mate.”
“I am not your mate.”
He ignored her bared teeth and laughed, but the sound held little amusement. “Deny it all you like, sweetheart, but you and I both know the truth. You think I wouldn’t have known the first minute I scented you? You think I’m a fool?”
“You really want me to answer that?”
“I want you to stop behaving like a brat and admit the truth about a few things. No matter what you keep telling yourself, I didn’t come here to ruin your life, and I don’t have to be your enemy. Why can’t you let me help you?”
It was Honor’s turn to laugh at that.
“Help me.” She studied the expression of grim determination on his face and shook her head. Maybe he actually believed what he was saying, but someone needed to set the man straight. Apparently, that had just gotten added to her little to-do list. “I already told you how you can help me, Hunter. You can go back to New York, back to Graham Winters and tell him that the White Paw Clan has an alpha and it needs nothing from him but that he acknowledge the change in leadership and then leave us the hell alone. That’s the only help I need from you, or from the Silverbacks. Is that straight enough for you?”
“We’ve had this discussion before, Honor, at least twice now. Do you really want to have it again?”
“If it means I’ll finally get through that thick male skull of yours, we can have it three more times tonight and seven times tomorrow.”
A muscle ticked above his cheekbone. “And I thought Missy was stubborn,” he muttered.
Honor beat back her wolf’s displeasure at hearing him speak another female’s name. She really did need him to understand the situation, so maybe it was time to lay it all out for him, to spread every single ugly card in her hand on the table and see if he still wanted to place his bets.
Leaning forward, she caught his gaze and held it, watching the gold lights of his angry wolf play across his brown, human irises. “Look, Hunter, maybe you really do think you’re here to help me. I don’t know if you’re honestly that stupid, but just for a second consider what it is that you think your presence here is going to solve. You’re going to walk around my pack for a couple of days and then decide if you think I’m fit to lead it, right? Well, let me ask you something. If you only have two choices—I’m fit or I’m unfit—what do you think is going to happen here?”
She didn’t give him time to answer. “Let me tell you. I know this pack a lot better than you do, so I think you can give me some credit for an educated guess. I’ve been beta of this pack since I was fifteen. For well over ten years, I’ve been the one supporting the previous alpha and handling both the problems too small to bother him with, and the ones he just didn’t want to be bothered with, and let me tell you; Ethan Tate may have been my father, but he wasn’t a man to go easy on someone just because they shared his name. He treated me just the same as he treated any subordinate member of this pack, and I had to prove myself to him to earn my position beside him. He didn’t go easy on me and he trained me to be able to lead this pack in his absence, whether that was when he went away for the weekend, or when he dropped dead from cancer. Me. Just me. No one else in this pack has the training or experience that I do, so who else do you think is a better choice to lead it?”
Honor saw his expression tighten and fought back the urge to smack him upside the head. She’d had a lot of years to come to the understanding that some men needed to have the truth beaten into them with a blunt object. She’d hoped Logan was smarter than that.
“Being an alpha is about a lot more than just making sure no one runs amok through the local human population, or convincing young males not to kill each other over some female’s first heat,” he argued.
“Oh, really? How nice of you to tell me that. Because as a young female pack beta, I didn’t ever have to fight a grown male to make him submit to my dominant position in the pack. And I’ve never stood at my father’s side while he negotiated a territory dispute with the Riverside Clan to the north of our territory. And I’ve never had to help figure out if the businesses my dad ran were going to provide enough meat to feed the males, females, and cubs in the pack who couldn’t find jobs out here in Northeast Bumblefuck to sufficiently feed themselves. Thanks so much for pointing out all the other jobs that I’ve been doing or helping to do here for … oh … my entire life.”
“Do you need a napkin, sweetheart? I think you drooled some sarcasm onto your chin.”
“Fuck you.”
His hand slid from her shoulder to her wrist and gripped firmly. “Been there, done that. And trust me, mate, we’ll get to it again real soon.”
She saw the promise in his eyes and really wished her brain would talk some sense into her other parts and let them know that this was the time to be angry and disdainful and offended, not horny.
“Look, I’m not trying to dismiss what you’ve accomplished in the past, or the status you’ve held in this pack as its beta,” he said, obviously struggling to keep his tone reasonable. “But the fact that you saw your father run this pack for your whole life should tell you that stepping from beta to alpha isn’t like moving up a year in high school. Not every beta is cut out to be alpha. You don’t get there just by being stronger or more experienced than everyone else. You have to be the strongest. Wolves don’t become alpha; they’re born that way.”
“You think I don’t know that?” She waved her free hand at the rows and rows of pack members ranged about the room in front of them. The ones currently pretending they weren’t straining to listen to the conversation between their leader and the strange Lupine who had invaded their territory. “You said you were going to take a look around and talk to the members of my pack before you made a decision about me. You go right ahead and do that. You go try to find someone in this pack you think can lead it better than I can. Then you come back and tell me what you find. Or let me save you the trouble. If you’re looking for a male among the White Paw who you think can be a better alpha than I can, you won’t find him. This is my pack, Hunter. I know my pack.”
“Stop acting like I’m just looking for an excuse to unseat you,” he hissed, never bothering to look at anyone else. “Yes, that could happen, but I didn’t come here with my mind made up. There are any number of ways this could go, Honor. If you’d climb down off your pile of righteous indignation, maybe you could see that.”
Wow, was he really that naïve? She shook her head. “No, this is a true or false question, Hunter, so there are only two possible answers.