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?