“And I don’t have a problem with putting you in your place, White Paw.” She saw his golden eyes snapping and felt her stomach knot at the knowledge that he spoke the truth. “I came here as an impartial observer, but if you want to make this personal between us, feel free. No one dismisses me but my alpha. Understand?”
She growled at him. “Oh, I understand perfectly well, beta.” She spat the title like a curse. “But you need to understand that no one gives me orders in my own territory. I don’t care how big, bad, and wolfie you might think you are. I am alpha here, and I don’t take insults lightly.”
“You might be alpha of this pack, but you still answer to the Silverback Clan. Don’t forget that.”
“I respect the Silverback Clan, beta. I answer to no one.”
Their gazes clashed for a long moment, a heavy silence weighted with rapid pulses and the sharp smell of temper. Neither of them blinked. Then the Silverback beta’s hand slid from her arm to the back of her neck, and he hauled her forward, mouth descending on hers for a rough, violent kiss.
It lasted no more than a handful of seconds, but it seared her senses with lips, tongue, teeth, and hunger. She tasted the thick, spicy flavor of him, smelled the musky, woodsy scent that clung to his skin, and felt the sharp edge of his strong, white teeth. When he pulled back, she blinked up at him, silent.
“We’ll see, honey. We’ll see what happens once I get around to asking the right question.”
Then he turned on his heel and strode out of her bedroom, closing the door softly behind him.
Honor stared at the white wooden panels for a long time before her knees unlocked enough for her to sink to the bed, where she sat for a while longer, trembling.
Three
Damn him and the horse he rode in on.
Honor lay in her father’s huge sleigh bed and stared at the ceiling in frustration. The clock on the bedside table gave off an eerie green glow announcing three A.M. and Honor’s fifth unsuccessful hour of attempted sleep. She blamed it all on her unexpected visitor from Manhattan.
Next, she planned to blame the instability in the Middle East on him as well.
She really could kill him for … well, for nothing that was actually his fault. But far be it from her to buck the long-standing and honorable tradition of killing the messenger. In reality, her father was the one to blame, but he was inconveniently dead, and therefore a much less satisfying target than the arrogant, sexy beta from the Silverback Clan.
Sexy?
Shit.
Honor groaned and rolled onto her side. The second to last thing she needed in her life was to develop a mad crush on any man, let alone the beta of another pack sent to evaluate her leadership capabilities in the first week of her rule. Because no matter how politely Logan Hunter had phrased it, that was exactly why he’d come to this remote corner of northwestern Connecticut to mingle with the White Paw Clan.
He’d come to grade her like a teacher on report card day, and Honor didn’t like it one bit. She didn’t like it because no alpha’s earned position in a pack should ever be called into question, especially not in any way so transparent to subordinate pack members. She doubly didn’t like it because she really wasn’t all that confident she would be given a passing grade.
She didn’t doubt her ability to lead the pack, to make decisions that would benefit them as a whole and help ease them into the twenty-first century in a way her father had never been willing to attempt. She didn’t doubt her ability to hold her own among the international council of packs, where decisions affecting Lupine society as a whole were discussed and debated and voted upon once every five years. Honor didn’t even doubt her ability to win any alpha challenge that presented itself to her. Lord knew she’d won three since the moment her father had drawn his last breath, and she knew in that sick place in her gut that’d she’d face even more; but she also knew the wolves in her pack. She knew their strengths and weaknesses, and unless a new, stronger wolf tried to come in from outside the pack, she didn’t fear for her position. No, Honor didn’t doubt for a second that she had the ability to become as confident and capable an alpha as the White Paw Clan had ever seen.
What she doubted was her desire.
“I was happier being beta.”
She whispered the words to the ceiling and heard the truth of them ringing all the way down into her soul. It felt like a sin to speak them, but the good kind of sin; one of the ones involving lust and gluttony and sloth, like staying in bed on a Sunday morning to make love and sleep and nibble on decadent pieces of dark, rich chocolate. Possibly all at the same damned time. She knew that if any of her pack could hear her words, they’d assume she’d lost her mind. Hell, if any nonsubmissive wolf in the whole damned world could hear, they’d think the same damned thing. Dominant wolves always wanted to lead. Period. The end. Happily ever after, and all those old clichés.
So, maybe Honor wasn’t so dominant after all?
She thought about that, mulled it over, tested out the taste and feel of it while the sounds of weighted tree branches settling and night critters scurrying drifted in through her open window.
It was a more complicated question than it seemed, but then, among Lupines, dominance was a complicated issue. No matter what their furry instincts might tell them at times, Lupines were not wolves. Not entirely. They could take the shape of wolves, they shared some physical, some psychological, and even some emotional characteristics with wolves, but they had their human sides, too. They might have the instincts to rip out the throats of any people who angered them, but they had the ability to reason through why that might not be a good idea. They might understand that one of the best ways to get to know someone was to take a good whiff of their scent, but they still knew better than to greet newcomers by sticking their noses into other people’s crotches.
Like wolves, but not wolves; like humans, but not humans.
Among wolves, packs really amounted to little more than families, and in those families, the oldest—and therefore most often the strongest—male led the way. It was, if not simple, then at least a fairly straightforward and logical method of organization among animals, but when you factored in the human side of a Lupine’s nature, any thoughts of logic and straightforwardness flew right out the nearest window.
Lupine packs were definitely not family groups. They contained families, but because of their integration into wider human society, they needed to become more than that. Instead, wolf shapeshifters grouped in territorial packs, with all of the Lupines in a designated geographical area falling under the authority of the alpha of that area. In the beginning, it had probably started as a security measure, allowing all the Lupines in a community to keep an eye on each other and protect each other against threats from hunters, witch hunters, werewolf hunters, and the like. Over the centuries, it had become a political measure, maintained in order to keep the peace among groups of Lupines with no relationship to each other, to temper their natural instincts to get to the top of the food chain. Lupine alphas spent less time making sure everyone in the pack was fed and more time making sure they didn’t eat each other, to be blunt, something that required managing not only wolfish instincts, but human egos, emotions, and psychodramas. Frankly, Honor would rather lead an actual wolf pack any day of the week. At least wolves didn’t lie to each other.
Honor rolled onto her side and punched her pillow into shape, ignoring the twinge in her aching knuckles. With her Lupine metabolism, such a small discomfort would be gone by morning, but it was the only one of her problems that would be. When the sun rose, she might feel physically better, but she’d still be the reluctant alpha of an endangered pack, with a meddlesome stranger breathing down her neck and half of her childhood friends gunning for her blood. Her only real choice was what to do about it.