Honor sighed again and reached up to turn the jets to a lower setting, no longer quite in the mood to be battered. At first, she had thought sending that letter to Graham Winters was the solution to her problems. The alpha of Manhattan’s legendary Silverback Clan commanded respect from just about every Lupine east of the Mississippi River, and, she suspected, from a few of those out West, too. She had only met him once, when she was nine, but she remembered him vividly. He’d been a handsome young man then, only a decade or so older than her, but worlds apart. He had known his place as alpha and lord over the Northeastern Clans. She’d heard he had a good heart, as well, and recently, rumors of his marriage to a human had circulated into her pack’s little corner of Connecticut. They said the regional alpha had a son now, another Winters cub to lead the Silverback Clan into the future.
Good thing
Honor made a face and turned the tap with her toes to let more hot water flow into the tub. The temperature had dropped below scalding while she brooded over Paul. If she made a habit of this, she’d need to get a second job just to pay her water bills. The way things looked, Paul wouldn’t be the last childhood friend to try their luck against the new, female alpha. Not unless the Silverback Clan finally got around to answering its frickin’ e-mail.
She growled.
“Honor? Are you okay in there?”
“I’m fine,” she called out. “Just enjoying a soak.”
“Oh.” A pause. “I brought you a supper tray. I made venison stew. And biscuits.”
Honor’s stomach launched a violent protest at the thought of food, reminding her exactly how badly she needed to brush her teeth. “Just leave it near the chair, Jo. I’m almost done in here.”
“Okay, then. Is there anything else I can get for you?”
“Nothing. Thank you.”
Grateful for her Lupine hearing that could pick out the sounds of Joey moving around the bedroom even over the roar of the tub jets, Honor listened until she heard retreating footsteps and the sound of the bedroom door opening and closing. Only when she was sure Joey had gone did she sit up in the tub and turn off the jets. Time to brush her teeth and flush that dinner down the toilet so Joey would think she’d eaten.
She dragged herself dripping from the tub and wrapped herself in a huge towel before padding over to the sink and the comfort of her toothbrush. The cinnamon flavor of the paste improved greatly on the lingering traces of blood and bile in her mouth. She scrubbed for several minutes, making sure to brush her tongue thoroughly before she rinsed out her mouth and reached out to unwind the towel from her hair. The long, dark strands, almost black with the weight of the water, fell down her back in ripples that would dry into semiwild curls. She ran a comb through them quickly then left her hair to dry and headed back into the bedroom.
As she had expected, Joey had turned down the bed, lit a couple of lamps, and touched a match to the fire laid in the hearth. The tray of stew, biscuits, and chilled dark beer sat next to her father’s overstuffed armchair. It looked like a room well prepared for the lord-of-the-manor routine, except that she didn’t feel a bit like a lord.
But the man staring at her from the door to the hallway certainly looked like he did.
Logan watched the slim, young brunette emerge from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, and placed an immediate stranglehold on his need to pounce. And sniff. And lick. And maybe taste. Even through the perfumy fragrance cloaking her natural scent—bath salts?—she smelled nearly good enough to eat. He inhaled deeply and considered whether or not to try a nibble. Suddenly she turned and noticed him standing in the door, and he revised his plans.
“How did you get in here?”
Logan tore his eyes from the plane of creamy, pale skin rising from the top of the woman’s towel and saw the weary suspicion in her gaze. He also made note of the long, fresh scratch across her forehead and the bite mark on her right shoulder. It looked as new as the scratch. Seeing the obvious wounds, he made a surreptitious inspection of the rest of the skin he could see—which was quite a lot, praise be—and noticed a good dozen bruises. Some looked a few days old, others just pale shadows, not yet fully formed. She also had one skinned knee and a slowly bleeding cut on her left shin. This would-be alpha had gone through an interesting couple of days.
“Your housekeeper let me in.” He looked her in the eye as he answered her question, curious to see how she would react to the aggressive action. It also helped him ignore the stirring of involuntary interest he had immediately felt in her. She met and held his gaze, her brown eyes steady and serious, but made no other show of force. Maybe alpha, but not stupid with it. “She also offered me dinner but I stopped in town and ate while I got directions up here. You aren’t exactly easy to find.”
“She’s my cousin, not my servant. Now, who the hell are you?”
Logan raised an eyebrow. “Some say they’re all servants to the alpha.”
She didn’t answer.
“My name is Logan Hunter.” He watched her face for a reaction. “I’m beta of the Silverback Clan. My alpha has requested that I offer you his condolences on the recent death of your father.”
“Beta. Sent to offer his condolences.” She blinked; her wide, chocolaty eyes seemed slow to focus, but her expression didn’t shift. “Right. Tell your alpha to shove them.”
Then she turned her back on him and walked to a closet.
Logan tore his eyes from the point where her towel dipped down far enough to threaten to reveal what looked like a truly luscious bottom. Before Missy, he’d never really been an ass man, but as Graham could tell you, that little human had an ass that could inspire men to poetry. It had inspired Logan to a thing or two over the last few months, but now the image of this stranger’s derriere had all but supplanted Missy’s from his mind.
The thought caught him by the scruff. Lately, part of Logan’s subconscious had compared any female he encountered with the Luna, because he couldn’t get the woman out of his head. Just because he knew he couldn’t have her didn’t stop his wolf from insisting that no other female was worth his trouble. Until now. When he looked at Honor Tate, his finicky beast made not a peep of protest.
Huh.
With all that going on in his head, it took Logan a few extra seconds to register what she had said.
“Excuse me?” he ventured.
“You heard me. Tell him he can shove his condolences up his ass with a pogo stick. I don’t want them, and I didn’t ask for them.”
Logan watched as she pulled some things from a drawer inside the closet and tried to keep his mind off the possibility of that towel coming loose and landing on the floor. And of him coming loose and landing on top of her.
“He knows that. He doesn’t offer you sympathy because you asked for it. It’s just the right thing to do.”
“No, the right thing to do would have been to come here himself instead of sending his lackey. And to have agreed to my very sensible request for a formal recognition of my new position as alpha of this pack. Since he has done neither, he can go take his pogo stick and have a little moment of privacy with his thoughts.”
She began pulling on clothes with that peculiar talent women have for dressing without undressing first. She pulled a pair of loose cotton pants on under the towel and topped them with a tank top that she managed to don without displaying one additional millimeter of skin.
Logan bit back the wave of disappointment and shoved his hands into his pockets while he attempted to wrestle his attention back to the question at hand. “The Silverback alpha hasn’t made up his mind about whether he’s going to agree to that request or not. That’s why I’m here. Before he makes a decision, he wants to hear an outside opinion of the workings of the White Paw Clan.”
“The White Paw Clan works just fine,” she growled, turning to face him and tossing aside the towel. “You can tell Graham Winters I said that. And you can tell him that if he will not honor the request of his fellow alpha,
