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Christine Warren

He heard a shuffling sound as the receiver was passed from one had to the other, then a rough growl replaced Missy’s light, feminine voice in his ear.

“What’s up?”

Logan felt his eyebrow arching. “Nice to talk to you, too. I’m fine, thanks.

Didn’t sleep that well last night, but somehow I’m not feeling all that many ill effects. Must be the water up here.”

“Can it, Hunter. It’s been a lousy day.”

“I heard. Ava paid a visit, huh? Having the place fumigated?”

“Not yet. Maybe when Missy takes Roarke to the park later. So what’s the news?”

“I’m here.”

Pause.

“That’s it? That’s the news?”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“Yeah, but they could at least say, ‘we’re here and we put down some rocks,’

right?”

“Okay. I’m here, and I’ve met Tate’s daughter.” Another pause.

“And?”

“There’s not much else to tell. I’ve only been here,” he glanced at his watch,

“fifteen hours, and most people around here were asleep for a good eight or nine of those.” He and Honor hadn’t, but he saw no need to bog the conversation down with details.

“Yeah, but you’ve had time to form a first impression, haven’t you?” Logan paused, reluctant to say anything. On the one hand, he didn’t want to hurt Honor’s chance to prove herself, but on the other, he couldn’t lie to his 60

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alpha. “Yeah. She’s pretty together, considering what she’s just been through. I think she has potential.”

“Potential or ability?”

“It’s really too soon to make that kind of call.”

“What about the pack? Have they settled in to the idea of having a female alpha, especially such a young one?”

“I’m going to start talking to them once I’m off with you. So far I’ve only met a couple of them, and I doubt that’s much to go by.”

“It’s a start. What did they have to say?”

Logan gritted his teeth for a second before answering. “There have been three challenges since she took the title Alpha.”

“Really? Well, she’s alive, so I guess that means she can handle herself in a fight. How is she taking the deaths?”

“I don’t think her father’s death has had a chance to sink in yet. She’s been too busy keeping things running to shed any tears over him.”

“Understandable. But what about the challenge deaths? Is she holding up after those?”

Shit
. “There haven’t been any deaths.” Again, Graham paused. “What does that mean? If there were challenges…”

“She chose to end them without slaying her opponents. The first showed her his throat, and the other two she crippled. But she hasn’t killed anyone.”

“And you still think she has the potential to lead that pack?”

“I think it’s possible. She’s strong enough. Two of those challenges came from grown men, and she defeated both of them, death or no. She’s also damned smart from what I can tell. True, she’s got a bit of a feminine notion of mercy, but I believe she would do what needed to be done if it came to that kind of situation.”

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“She doesn’t believe an alpha challenge is that kind of situation?” Logan felt the need to defend her, which was weird enough in itself, but coupled with the fact that his hackles were raising to his alpha, it crossed the line into surreal. “She did what she had to do, and she walked away from the challenges a clear winner. The last one was her closest childhood friend. Imagine how you would feel if you were faced with a choice to let me live or die. How easy would that death stroke be for you?”

“Whoa. We’re not talking about you and me, brother. We’re talking about Ethan Tate’s daughter. Aren’t we?”

Logan forced down his growl. “Yes. We are. And I think we need to give her the benefit of the doubt. The first howl since Ethan’s death will be this weekend.

The day after tomorrow. The whole pack will be gathered and according to Pack Law, any outstanding challenges will have to be answered then or held ‘til the next Clans Moot.”

“Which is still three more years away. And it’s scheduled to be hosted in Silverback territory this time. So she and her clan will have to come here.” He was silent for a moment, and Logan could almost hear him thinking. “I won’t say I’m not concerned over what you’ve told me, but I trust your judgment. Stay through the howl. If you think she’s capable of leading the pack after what you see then, I’ll accept your word and leave her in power until the next Clans Moot.

Then I’ll take a look for myself and make a final decision.” Oh right. Honor would just love that little plan. Of course, he didn’t plan to tell Honor about it. “Agreed.”

“Good. Now get back to work. I’m thinking about trying to give Missy a new baby for her birthday.”

Logan rolled his eyes at the shriek he heard just before the phone disconnected. He flipped the cell phone closed and shoved it into his pocket. Let Graham have fun with his little blonde mate. Logan had a darker fish to fry.

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Honor couldn’t remember a more exhausting day in her life. Who knew eluding one determined Lupine could take so much out of a girl?

Ever since that incident in the stoneyard yesterday, she’d devoted all her energy to being wherever Logan Hunter was not. Well, there had been that forty-five minutes she’d spent leaning up against a tree, trying to remember how her legs worked immediately after stalking away from him. But she wasn’t counting that. Or the way it had taken a good two hours for the pleasant ache between her legs to fade to the point where she wasn’t constantly having to press them together to ease the fluttering there.

She wasn’t counting that either.

Instead, she concentrated on the monotony of the responsibilities she’d inherited from her father. She sent several boys back to the stoneyard to finish off the fire pit before settling into her father’s office and dragging out his dog-eared old appointment calendar. He’d been meticulous about his business, and every scheduled task and due invoice had been neatly noted in the pages of the calendar.

Honor looked over the notes for this week and sighed. The chores and bills weren’t onerous by any means, but she just didn’t want to deal with them. The land had been her father’s passion, not hers, and the cabins they rented to pack members, along with the commercial properties in town struck her more as a burden than a vocation. If she had her druthers, she’d be spending her time at a pottery wheel, not a computer. It was just one more sign to her that the fate she’d ended up with was not the fate she would have chosen for herself.

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She looked around the office to be sure no one had entered to talk to her.

Even so, she still took the precaution of closing the door and pulling down the shades before she gave in to her desire to lay her head down on the cool wooden surface and close her eyes.

What had she gotten herself into?

Intellectually, she had known this day was coming, but she’d had no idea it would be this soon. She had thought she had years yet. Maybe a decade or two before she’d have to think of a way to tell her father she didn’t want to take his place when he died. But before she could get the words out, he’d been gone, leaving her with a mass of problems and no conceivable way out of them. Lucky her.

When she’d been a child, all the way up through her teenaged years, Honor had longed to please her demanding father. She’d done everything she could to get his attention. She’d tried being the obedient daughter, but he barely noticed.

Then she’d tried being the top student in her classes, but that failed as well.

Nothing had made any impact on Ethan Tate, not when she excelled and not when she rebelled. Nothing had seemed to make any difference to him until she’d begun to move up in the pack.

Her first challenge had been more of a lark than anything intentional. She’d refused to follow the orders of a slightly older male pack member—not surprising since he’d been trying to order her to let him grope her breasts—and had been faced with the decision to either challenge him for his rank or follow his orders. Honor had gone with the challenge. She had won, leaving the fight slightly bloody, but satisfied that the boy she’d beaten wouldn’t be giving her any more grief any time soon.

That first challenge had earned her barely a passing glance, but the next one had merited a raised eyebrow. The next, a pat on the back. By the time she’d won her first challenge against an adult pack member, the day after her fourteenth 64

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birthday, she had found the path to her father’s heart—straight through his ego.

Every time she won a rank challenge, it reflected well on her father and on the line of Lupines from whom she and he were descended. That was the only act he respected and so Honor had fought the battle over and over until finally it had won her a place at his side.

It took her a few years as beta before she realized how unhappy the title made her. While she now received her father’s attention, and even his grudging respect, she had no love for the chores that accompanied the position. She took no joy in settling disputes between rivals, nor in enforcing the laws of her father’s rule. She knew she had the ability and the respect of the pack, but she got no pleasure from it. She didn’t relish the power of her station, just lived with it.

Not that she wanted to be omega by any means. She couldn’t imagine being the lowest rung in the pack hierarchy, nor even being lost in the middle with the majority of the pack. She didn’t want to drop in rank, she just wanted to not have so much of the responsibility that went with being in charge. And that really wasn’t one of her options. So now look at her. Probably the world’s only reluctant alpha.

She groaned and raised her head from the desk just far enough to prop it up in her hands. The real problem now was that her future stretched before her like a trap. The longer she spent here, doing the thing that made her unhappy, the tougher it would be to ever get herself out of it. The more the pack accepted her, the less chance she had to leave. So here she was, stuck in a place she didn’t want to be, doing something she didn’t want to do and telling everyone who tried to talk her out of it to take a flying leap. Not to mention maiming anyone who tried to force her out of the martyrdom she’d stepped into. Sure, that was sane.

The easiest way out would have been to just lose a challenge. It happened to most Lupines at some point. She could throw a rank challenge and let one of the members of her pack take over her position as leader of the White Paw Clan. The 65

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plan had a few disadvantages, though, chief among them, the inability to control whether or not her opponent would let her live after the challenge. Traditionally, alpha challenges ended in death, and just because she had been lenient with her challengers did not mean that anyone else would offer her the same option. The second problem had to do with the fact that she could see no current member of the pack who was capable of taking on the role of alpha with any success. No one else had any experience or even enough good common sense to made a decent showing.

She sighed and tried to figure out a way to convey that idea without making herself sound like the world’s biggest snob, and there really wasn’t one. It wasn’t that she believed every single one of her pack members was an idiot, just that none of them would be able to step into her shoes without disrupting the life of the pack to a fairly significant degree. While Honor had been trained for her current position since the age of fifteen, no one else had. It might be a harsh truth, but it was still the truth.

Honor had a vision. She had plans for how she wanted to see the pack join the twenty-first century. She wanted to see them integrating with the modern world, becoming familiar with technology and engineering and science and all the fields that made humans such a threat to the continued survival of the human species. Only by understanding how the human world worked could the Lupines hope to survive the ever-growing encroachment into their territory, but so few pack members had even begun to comprehend that. Most of them had gone reactionary and preached a policy of isolation, cutting the Lupine world completely off from the human one. They saw it as the only way to preserve their culture. Honor saw it as suicide.

The more isolated they became, the more people would choose to isolate them. And that’s the sort of thing that led to witch trials and hangings and stonings and such things. Honor would prefer the stonings not happen, so the 66

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Lupines would need to learn to live with the humans and to accept that sometimes, change became necessary. Already, their races were beginning to mingle, and she had heard rumors that the big wigs across the country (especially the Council of Others in Manhattan) had begun to discuss plans for revealing the existence of their kind to the human world. It posed a big risk, but Honor saw the necessity behind it. It now felt almost inevitable, so why not work to ensure it happened on Lupine terms?

Honor just couldn’t risk allowing a new alpha to regress and take the pack with them. It wasn’t an option.

The final reason why she couldn’t bring herself to lose any of her challenges didn’t exactly qualify as noble, but it was honest. Her pride wouldn’t allow it.

Period. End of story. After all these years of proving herself to her father and the world, she simply couldn’t fathom the idea of losing a fight. It went against every fiber of her being. She fought to win, and to lose would not only be to lose her position—and potentially her life—it would be to lose face in front of the entire pack. If she did that, how would she ever be able to look at their faces again?

She couldn’t. Therefore, she couldn’t lose the challenge.

“Welcome back to square one,” she muttered under her breath.

She also couldn’t afford the distraction presented by her Silverback guest.

Somewhere, she figured, the gods must be laughing at her. She couldn’t think of how she might have pissed them off, and that was the only possible explanation for why this must be happening to her now. Why else would the powers of the universe have sent her mate in the middle of the most complicated period of her life? Could they find worse timing? Not only did she not have the time for a mate, or the energy to dedicate to one, but how the hell was she supposed to stop fighting to save her pack so she could show her belly to the new dog sniffing around her?