him. Then his nail caught it in a wicked flick, and she yelped.
He flashed her a feral grin, raising his glistening fingers to his mouth before he growled, “So do I.”
Honor watched as he licked her moisture from his hand. She saw the way his eyes narrowed as he tasted her, saw the knowledge light them, and she swore.
“Heat.”
She had rolled out of his grasp before the word cleared his lips. Seeing the flare of dominance and possession in his eyes poured a bucketful of icy cold common sense all over her enflamed skin. Damn it, she should have known all the bath salts in the world couldn’t disguise the flavor of her heat from a mature male Lupine. He’d known the minute he lifted his fingers to his lips that the new White Paw alpha was just hours from the start of her heat cycle. It was irresistible to any male Lupine, but to one with as many dominance tendencies as her Silverback visitor, it was like the proverbial red flag in front of the bull. She might as well have tattooed “Come and get me, big boy” across her forehead.
“Here,” he snarled, even as she sprang to her feet and looked for a clear path to the door. “Come. Here.”
She growled in response, baring her teeth at him, body coiling in preparation for flight. If she could make it around him and out of the kitchen, she might have a chance of outrunning him. If not, then she could definitely lose him in the woods. He wasn’t familiar with them like she was, and there were ways she could mask her scent at least well enough to confuse him.
“Now.”
She shook her head and crouched. She wished she still had her tank top on, or that she dared to take the seconds it would cost her to shift to her wolf form. Running bare breasted through the woods at three-thirty in the morning hadn’t made her top ten list this year, but it looked just about inevitable.
“Here.”
She opened her mouth to defy him again, but she never got the chance. Before she could speak, Joey stepped into the room, wide-eyed with concern. “Honor? What’s going on here? Is everything all right?”
Honor nearly burst out laughing. She might have, if the tension weren’t thick enough to choke the sound out of her, and if she weren’t keeping her gaze glued to Logan’s face in anticipation of his next move.
“Get out.”
Logan barked the order as if he had every right, but what pissed Honor off was that Joey actually started to obey.
“I didn’t say leave, Joey. And you still take your orders from me. Don’t you.”
It wasn’t a question, and Honor didn’t bother to look in Joey’s direction to gauge her answer. She refused to so much as blink. She didn’t trust the Silverback visitor not to use the slip to his advantage.
Logan snarled. “You’ll take them from me.”
“I’ll take them from no one.” All the days of tension and struggle and uncertainty suddenly overwhelmed Honor, and she struck out where she could. At Logan. “I am the White Paw alpha. Not you. Not Winters. No one but me. And the alpha does. Not. Answer.”
They stared at each other, teeth bared, eyes narrowed. Honor could feel the skin between her shoulder blades shift and tighten, raising the hackles she didn’t actually have in her human form. She’d bet Logan could feel the same subtle crawling beneath his skin. She almost said a prayer of gratitude for it, since if they’d been in their were or wolf forms, they’d likely have already been locked together, either ripping out each other’s throats, or mating furiously on the kitchen tile. Which one it would have been was entirely up for debate.
“Can I get anyone anything? A cup of tea? Or I could make cocoa…”
Honor snorted. If the tension had been any less thick, she might have laughed. Instead, she straightened her spine and reached out a hand to her cousin, never taking her eyes off Logan’s. “No. We’re done. Give me your robe.”
Joey didn’t hesitate, but untied the thick, terry-cloth robe she wore and shrugged out of it, laying it over Honor’s outstretched arm. She shivered a little in the thin cotton nightgown she wore, but she didn’t say a word.
Honor pulled the robe on and belted it closed, concealing her bare breasts from the two people in the room she felt really didn’t need to be seeing them right now. “I’m going to bed. Because the White Paw Clan is an honorable one, I won’t ask you to leave tonight, Mr. Hunter, but I expect your bags to be packed in the morning.”
Then she did what she never would have done if Joey hadn’t been there. She turned her back on Logan Hunter and walked out of the room.
Four
Like he needed this to get any more complicated.
Logan rounded the corner into the kitchen still brooding over the incident the previous night. Developing a severe case of the hots for the alpha he had come here to evaluate did not sit well on his shoulders. Doing the evaluation promised to be complex enough as it was. He didn’t need the added complication of a constant erection. Nor did it help much to find out that the alpha he had the hots for, the one he was here to evaluate, tasted like she’d be hitting her heat on the night of the next full moon.
Could you say, “Shit hitting the fan,” maybe?
“Good morning, Mr. Hunter. Can I get you some breakfast before you leave?”
Logan glanced in the direction of the question and saw Honor’s cousin, the small, quiet one who had interrupted them last night, backed up into a corner where two sides of counter converged. She held a pair of tongs before her like a weapon and shifted nervously when his gaze fixed on her.
“I’m making bacon, but there’s some sausage as well, and plenty of eggs. Steak, too, if you prefer.”
Logan could practically see the nerves vibrating beneath the woman’s skin. He almost expected to see her nose twitch, because to his mind, Joey Tate looked more like a scared little rabbit then a grown Lupine. If he hadn’t already been told she and Honor were cousins, he never would have guessed the relationship. Where Honor had creamy skin and hair the color of dark chocolate, her cousin appeared almost colorless, the pale skin giving way to hazel eyes of muddied gray and hair the color of a field mouse, a brown so ashen it looked almost silvery where the light hit it. Given the way she currently eyed him as if expecting him to demand her entrails on his breakfast plate, she appeared not to have inherited any of her cousin’s strength or passion, either.
“What makes you think I’m leaving?” he asked, pulling a chair out from the small table and taking a seat.
She shifted again, her eyes darting nervously about the room. “Well, Honor said. She said Greg would be taking you into town as soon as you finished eating. How do you like your eggs?”
“Sunny side up. With bacon. But I’m not leaving today.”
“But Honor said—”
“Honor is mistaken.”
Joey didn’t say anything else, just placed a mug of steaming coffee on the table in front of him and turned back to her frying pan, but he could feel the way she kept shooting him suspicious glances while he ate. Needless to say, he didn’t linger over the meal.
He took the last slice of bacon with him, munching as he left the house and followed Joey’s nervously worded directions about where to find her cousin.
Logan disagreed. He knew that if Honor Tate had half the intelligence he credited her with, surprise would not be her first response to seeing him again.
And he should have been less surprised when a voice called out behind him.
“Morning!”
The greeting came from the direction of the gravel road that Joey had mentioned led to some of the pack’s
