Understand?”
Nine
Silence fell between them, brief, tense, and marked by the meeting of two gazes, one brown and chill, one green and maddened. But it ended abruptly when the door to the office opened again and another male voice rang out in the now crowded room.
“If I were you, I would do what the lady says, Major. Somehow I doubt she’s joking.”
Honor never broke her stare with Darin, but her jaw shifted and clenched. “The next one to walk into my office without knocking will find himself decorating the floor in front of my fireplace.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Logan’s lip twitching. “That sounds kind of nasty, Darin. I think I’d back off if I were you.”
“That promise wasn’t made exclusively to Darin.”
“Maybe not, but he’s the one who’s going to have to defend himself from both sides in about thirty seconds, if he doesn’t back off.”
What started in a reasonable and slightly amused voice had become decidedly serious by the end of that statement. Honor clenched her teeth to keep herself from screaming. If she’d been human, she probably would have screamed a split second later when Darin obeyed orders by removing his hands from her desk, but then ruined the moment of sanity by swinging around and launching himself straight for Logan’s throat.
The force of Darin’s attack pushed Logan back through the door of the office and down the front steps of the small cabin that housed it. The two figures landed on the ground in the snow-covered front yard, teeth snapping and hands clawing. The flakes barely had time to settle before Darin made the stupidest decision of his life and howled a challenge at a man who was not only stronger and faster than him, but also a hell of a lot smarter. As evidenced by the fact that Darin had attacked him to begin with.
Instead of screaming, Honor roared and leaped out of her chair and over her desk to launch herself after the two combatants. By the time she found herself in the yard with them, she could already see blood—though she couldn’t be sure whose it was—and the sounds of vicious growls and snarls seemed to echo in the air around them. If she’d had a water hose, she’d have turned it on the two of them, but as it was, all she could do was stand on the sidelines and recite every curse she’d ever heard and a few new ones she had just made up herself. Necessity being the mother of invention and all.
She heard the sound of Max thundering outside right behind her and braced herself for impact just before he skidded to a halt at her side.
“Holy shit! They’re totally throwing down! Right here!”
“This is not WWE, Max.” She figured if she clenched her jaw any harder her teeth would shatter, but hey, she could still get the words out. “And I’m going to kill one of them if they don’t cut this out in the next ten seconds.”
“Gotcha. One. Two. Three—”
Honor howled then for herself—not a happy sound—and leaped for the struggling figures. She landed on top of Darin’s back and tried to yank the two men apart. When she couldn’t do that, she sank her teeth deep into Darin’s side and tugged. That at least got his attention. He snarled something obscene, but mostly unintelligible, and backhanded her across the face with casual force. A human might have been killed by the power of the blow snapping her fragile little neck, but Honor was neither human nor fragile. All the smack did to her was piss her off. Royally.
Rearing back, she let the reins of her beast slip just a little and felt a set of razor-sharp claws springing from the tips of her fingers. Sturdy as metal and sharp as glass, they ripped through Darin’s muscular flesh like a jackhammer through tissue paper, leaving deep, bloody furrows behind them. Darin jerked and screamed in pain, momentarily losing his concentration and giving Logan the advantage. The Silverback didn’t even hesitate. He grabbed Darin by the throat, lifted him off the ground and threw him into a tree forty feet away from where he stood.
She turned on him with a growl and snapped her teeth in his direction. “My fight. Mine.”
Logan’s hand shot out, wrapping around Honor’s neck this time. But instead of squeezing and lifting, it curled around the back of her neck and yanked her forward until her breasts flattened against his chest. He stared down at her with glowing golden eyes and growled possessively.
“Mine.”
Logan saw the way his statement sent Honor’s temper into overdrive, but he really didn’t give a shit. This was his mate, and every hour that passed brought her closer and closer to the peak of her heat and to ovulation. The changes in her scent maddened him, and after searching for her—unsuccessfully—for hours the day before, he didn’t intend to let her get away.
And if she thought that he would just stand aside while she was verbally abused and physically threatened by another male? Well, she wasn’t half as intelligent as she’d led him to believe.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the lanky young man who’d rushed out of Honor’s office behind them hurrying to the now unconscious Darin. If the youth had looked to be tending to the fallen challenger, Logan would have stopped him, but all he did was grab the moron by the ankles and begin dragging him away from the small cabin out of which Honor reportedly ran her father’s business. Dismissing them from his mind, he shifted the struggling burden in his arms and growled in pleasure at the way her squirming rubbed all her softest parts against his most appreciative ones.
“Let. Me. Go!” Honor herself sounded less appreciative. “Hands off, Fang.”
“No.” He ignored her fighting, except that he grabbed her flailing hands in one of his and pinned them behind her back. Then he began backing her up toward the cabin they’d just left, his hips bumping against hers as they walked. “Told you. Mine.”
She snarled. “Told you! No!”
He didn’t intend to take that for an answer. He could smell the heat rolling off her in heady waves, making his heart race and his cock stand at attention. If he didn’t have her soon, he’d explode. In more ways than one.
Ignoring her demands, he continued backing her to the cabin, one step at a time. He almost had her there, too, and was already imagining the things he would do to her once he had her bent over her daddy’s desk, when she got sneaky. Going suddenly limp, as in falling completely boneless in his arms like dead weight, she forced him to hesitate and look down at her to see what had happened.
That split second of inattention nearly cost him all his grand plans for fathering cubs with this woman. As soon as his hold loosened a fraction, she brought her knee up hard between his legs. She might have damaged him permanently if he had moved a fraction of a second slower. As it was, he ended up with a baseball-sized bruise high on his thigh and a howling bundle of rage and frustration in his arms.
She yanked so hard at the arms he had pinned behind her that he started to fear she’d break her own wrist struggling to get away from him. He shifted his grip to take one hand in each of his, and she fought even harder. She threw herself bodily against him, disrupting his balance until the two of them went crashing to the ground not three feet from the cabin steps. Snarling like a she-wolf guarding her den, Honor launched another attack, surprising Logan. He had thought she must be nearly done. She went for his eyes with her curving claws, but she got a shoulder instead, tearing several wide strips through his thick hide. She threw herself forward, trying to get her teeth around his throat, but found herself flat on her back instead.