Hungry Like a Wolf

“Oh, it’s just chili. Would you like me to get you a bowl? I meant it when I said in the note that I’d be happy to fix you something back at the house if you’d rather not eat with everyone else.”

“Note?” Honor growled, wondering when her cousin and their uninvited guest had gotten cozy enough with each other to start exchanging notes.

“Your cousin thoughtfully left me a note in the kitchen up at the house letting me know that most of the pack usually eats here at the hall on Wednesday nights.” Logan offered the explanation easily, almost as easily as he slid into the chair next to Honor and reached across her for the heaping basket of corn bread and garlic toast. “And, thank you, Joey, I’d love a bowl. If it tastes half as good as it smells, I could probably be persuaded to beg for one.”

Honor’s wolf snarled at the flirtatious tone and the way Logan smiled at her cousin, which made Honor want to punch herself. Despite their mistake of this afternoon and her horny animal instincts, it was none of Honor’s business who the visitor flirted with. In fact, she should thank Joey for taking the annoyance off her hands. She certainly shouldn’t be growling possessively over the man, even if he had tried to mate her just a few hours before. That had been about nothing more than her intensifying heat pheromones and the heat of a particularly passionate moment. She hadn’t taken it seriously, so there was no reason she should expect him to do so. Besides which, she currently needed a mate slightly less than she needed a full frontal lobotomy.

A spoonful of chili shoveled into her own mouth concealed her instinctive growl.

“Coming right up.” Joey offered a blush-pink smile of her own and bounded off to the kitchen. Honor choked down more chili.

“Sweet kid, your cousin,” Logan commented, breaking off a chunk of corn bread and raising it to his mouth. “Friendly, too. She’s been real helpful since I got here.”

Honor’s wolf snarled viciously. Possessively. Honor smacked her down, and mustered a passable smirk. “Yeah, well, she’s still unmated, and with the lack of selection around here, it’s easy for a girl to lower her standards.”

“Of course, she doesn’t make my dick hard every time I look at her, so I guess it’s a good thing she wasn’t the one I got naked with a few hours ago, huh?”

This time, Honor choked on more chili. Her gaze flew to his face and narrowed on the gleeful spark in his eyes. The bastard enjoyed throwing her off balance. She wondered how much he’d enjoy it when she threw him out a window. What was she supposed to say to something like that? She wasn’t an idiot, and she knew that in the time he’d been posing his muzzle into her business—Goddess, had it only been one day!—she likely hadn’t made a great impression, at least not in terms of rationality and a cool head for command. Maybe pissing her off was part of his strategy to prove her unfit to lead her pack? Whatever his motive, he seemed to get a real charge out of yanking her tail, and she’d had enough of giving him the satisfaction.

Ignoring him, she set down her spoon and took a swallow of cold beer. It cut through the spicy burn of the chili but did little to cool the heat of the bitch inside her. It whined every time she inhaled and got a whiff of Logan’s musky scent, prompting Honor to wonder how difficult it would be to get her hands on some ketamine. The horse tranquilizer sounded about right at the moment, provided it would actually do the job and knock her out. With her Lupine metabolism, drugs tended to burn off faster than they were administered. She couldn’t even get a good drunk on without resorting to multiple bottles of the hard stuff. Sometimes, there was no justice.

“How are you feeling, Honor?” He leaned closer, his voice rumbling against her ear in an insidious tickle of heat and smoke. “You ran away before I got a chance to look you over. You’re not … hurting, are you?”

The question must have been directed straight between her thighs, because that was the only part of her to answer, and she wasn’t about to mention the ache she felt there. Not when it had nothing to do with injury and everything to do with renewed hunger. If she could call it renewed. If she were being honest, she’d have to admit it had never really gone away to begin with. Her wolf whispered evilly that it would take days and days of privacy before that need had a hope of being assuaged.

She forced the bitch to step back and gathered her sanity for a withering glare. “You might think of yourself as the Big Bad Wolf, Hunter, but I’m no Little Red. You can’t hurt me with a little ordinary sex, so don’t flatter yourself.”

His dark eyes lit with gold, then narrowed. His voice dropped. “’Ordinary’?”

She shrugged. “What would you call it?”

He growled his response through clenched teeth. “If you hadn’t been such a slippery little devil, I’d have called it claiming my mate.”

“You’d have been wrong.”

Honor was so done with this discussion. Bracing her hands on the top of the table, she shoved to her feet. Well, she tried to. A very large and very heavy hand on her shoulder kept her in place.

She growled. “When I say, ‘Move it, or lose it,’ understand very clearly that I will bite your hand off at the wrist. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done it. This week, even.”

“You aren’t going anywhere until we’ve gotten a few things clear between us. Mate.”

“I am not your mate.”

He ignored her bared teeth and laughed, but the sound held little amusement. “Deny it all you like, sweetheart, but you and I both know the truth. You think I wouldn’t have known the first minute I scented you? You think I’m a fool?”

“You really want me to answer that?”

“I want you to stop behaving like a brat and admit the truth about a few things. No matter what you keep telling yourself, I didn’t come here to ruin your life, and I don’t have to be your enemy. Why can’t you let me help you?”

It was Honor’s turn to laugh at that.

“Help me.” She studied the expression of grim determination on his face and shook her head. Maybe he actually believed what he was saying, but someone needed to set the man straight. Apparently, that had just gotten added to her little to-do list. “I already told you how you can help me, Hunter. You can go back to New York, back to Graham Winters and tell him that the White Paw Clan has an alpha and it needs nothing from him but that he acknowledge the change in leadership and then leave us the hell alone. That’s the only help I need from you, or from the Silverbacks. Is that straight enough for you?”

“We’ve had this discussion before, Honor, at least twice now. Do you really want to have it again?”

“If it means I’ll finally get through that thick male skull of yours, we can have it three more times tonight and seven times tomorrow.”

A muscle ticked above his cheekbone. “And I thought Missy was stubborn,” he muttered.

Honor beat back her wolf’s displeasure at hearing him speak another female’s name. She really did need him to understand the situation, so maybe it was time to lay it all out for him, to spread every single ugly card in her hand on the table and see if he still wanted to place his bets.

Leaning forward, she caught his gaze and held it, watching the gold lights of his angry wolf play across his brown, human irises. “Look, Hunter, maybe you really do think you’re here to help me. I don’t know if you’re honestly that stupid, but just for a second consider what it is that you think your presence here is going to solve. You’re going to walk around my pack for a couple of days and then decide if you think I’m fit to lead it, right? Well, let me ask you something. If you only have two choices—I’m fit or I’m unfit—what do you think is going to happen here?”

She didn’t give him time to answer. “Let me tell you. I know this pack a lot better than you do, so I think you can give me some credit for an educated guess. I’ve been beta of this pack since I was fifteen. For well over ten years, I’ve been the one supporting the previous alpha and handling both the problems too small to bother him with, and the ones he just didn’t want to be bothered with, and let me tell you; Ethan Tate may have been my father, but he wasn’t a man to go easy on someone just because they shared his name. He treated me just the same as he treated any subordinate member of this pack, and I had to prove myself to him to earn my position beside him. He didn’t go easy on me and he trained me to be able to lead this pack in his absence, whether that was when he went away for the weekend, or when he dropped dead from cancer. Me. Just me. No one else in this pack has the training or experience that I do, so who else do you think is a better choice to lead it?”

Honor saw his expression tighten and fought back the urge to smack him upside the head. She’d had a lot of