a son unseated his own father for the alpha position, it was usually more of a show than a real battle. Graham and his father had nearly laughed themselves silly at their ceremonial challenge. The elder Winters had been more than ready to hand over his position, but most important, he had loved his son.
How had Ethan Tate felt about Honor? If that was how he demonstrated it, Logan hated to even speculate.
“So, you’re trying to tell me that Honor has already paid her dues, and I need to just rubber-stamp her turn as alpha. Is that what the pie was about? Usually when someone is trying to tell me what to do, they find threats more effective than desserts.”
“No, the pie was because you looked so sour when Honor walked out on you, I thought you could use sweetening up.” MacDuff laughed. “I’m not threatening you, Hunter, or telling you how to do your job. I don’t know you, but you strike me as the sort of man that even if I tried, you’d still go ahead and do things exactly the way you intended all along. I don’t believe in wasting my breath that way. I imagine you plan to take the next couple of days to check this pack out for yourself. You’ll probably talk to the females and the pups to see what they think of the new alpha, and then you’ll likely go check out each of our males in the prime age group and see whether you believe any of them looks like he’d make a better alpha than my niece.”
It was like having someone read Logan the contents of his own day planner. That was exactly what he planned to do between now and the Howl. It was the logical course of action. So why did Hamish MacDuff manage to make it sound like such a mindless exercise in futility?
“You seem to know just what I have planned, MacDuff,” he managed, carefully keeping his voice level and lacking in snarl. “Would you also like to tell me what I’m going to find?”
“What? And spoil all your fun?” The elder laughed and rose from his chair. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Hunter. You’ll find what you find, after all. I don’t claim to be a mind reader, but I do know a thing or two about being a young, unmated male, and I do know my niece. Which means I also know that it looks like it’s going to be a long, chilly night for you, son. You might want to raid the linen closet at the top of the stairs for an extra blanket before bed. Seems to me, you’re going to need it.”
Eight
The winter sunlight reflected off the snow shortly after dawn the following morning and pierced straight through Logan’s closed eyelids. Cursing the end of a night of precious little sleep, he snarled and threw back his purloined blanket. Damn Hamish MacDuff, anyway. It was like the man was some sort of prophet of doom who had cursed Logan with the long, lonely night of his prediction. A night spent without his cranky, contrary erstwhile mate.
The bastard.
Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, Logan sat up and scrubbed his hands over his face. He really had slept for shit, and the hours of tossing and turning—after quite a long and exhausting search of the grounds around the meeting hall and the main house for the elusive Honor Tate—had left him with a piss-poor attitude and the nagging shadow of a headache behind his brow. Nice way to start the morning, right?
Good thing he had plenty to do. Maybe concentrating on his job and sticking to his plan to interview members of the pack today would keep his mind sufficiently occupied. Otherwise, he predicted he would see himself spending every waking minute obsessing over his mate.
Cursing, he stumbled into the shower and cranked the water up high and hot. The pounding stream washed away the remaining fog of sleep, but it did little to turn his mind in another direction. He had mate brain, and for the first time, he felt a surge of sympathy for all the friends and pack mates he had harassed over the years for turning into salivating idiots the moment they scented the female that fate had picked out for them. Unfortunately, he now knew exactly how they felt. The part that astonished him was how different the experience was from what he’d expected.
Mating had taken him by surprise.
Oh, he supposed that was how it always worked. After all, among his kind, men and women didn’t meet at a bar or a party or off an Internet site, date for a while, and gradually develop feelings for each other. He knew that was what humans expected, but he was Lupine. He’d always known that one day he’d be at a bar or a party or meeting another Lupine in person for the first time, her scent would hit him, and he would recognize his mate. That was just the way it happened, but he’d be damned if he’d expected it to happen here.
First off, he’d still been hung up on Missy, or so he’d thought. He wanted to laugh about it now, but just a couple of days ago, he hadn’t been able to imagine any woman smelling as good to him as Missy Winters. Every time he’d caught the honey-and-vanilla scent of her, he’d felt his dick twitch, and when she’d started to scent of warm milk as well, he’d thought he’d go out of his mind. Intellectually, he’d known she couldn’t be his mate because she’d already mated with Graham, and he didn’t believe the Goddess could be so cruel as to make the one perfect woman for him belong to another male, not when Lupines mated once and remained mated to the same partner for life. The Moon would never curse him like that; but he’d still wondered. He’d still thought Missy smelled better than any woman on earth.
Until he’d gotten close enough to Honor Tate to detect the true scent of her beneath those cloying bath salts. Now, he realized that she must have used the fragrance in her bath to camouflage the smell of her heat. It might have worked with the members of her pack, especially if she didn’t allow anyone close enough to scent her skin directly, but they hadn’t been able to fool her mate. He’d recognized her through the distraction, sweet pea and clover spiced with the exotic musk of her coming heat. Just the memory of it affected him in a way the biggest snoutful of Missy’s scent never had. Honor’s fragrance was like a drug for him, addicting him, making him crave another breath, another taste, another chance to feel her smooth skin and taut curves pressing hard against him.
Goddamn it! If he didn’t get ahold of himself, he was going to come right here in the shower, without so much as the pump of his own fist around his cock. That was how his mate affected him, and it went so far beyond what he’d felt for his friend’s mate, he finally understood why she had disappeared from his mind so quickly after his arrival in Connecticut. She had never been right for him at all. The only woman he could ever be content with was Honor Tate, but how in the name of the blue Moon was he supposed to make that happen?
The only things haunting him more persistently than Honor’s scent were her words from the previous evening. The picture she had painted of their future was starkly engraved on his mind. She had predicted that the only possible outcomes of his presence in her territory were their permanent separation, her death, or a life of intolerable indignity for him. How was he supposed to make that kind of choice? Every one of his instincts told him he couldn’t live without her. Even though he hadn’t bitten her—nor she him—to formalize their mate bond, he already knew it would send him over the edge to lose her. If she died, he would kill every single Lupine who had touched her, and every single Lupine who had stood aside and let it happen. He would wipe out the entire White Paw Clan, if that was what it took to avenge her, so the idea of him just turning his back and trotting merrily back to New York without her didn’t even merit consideration. No way was he going anywhere without his mate.
But could he honestly stay here and pretend that every moment as a powerless pack mascot didn’t twist a double-edged knife through his gut? Logan accepted being Graham’s beta because he loved his pack mate like a brother, and even then, there were times when it grated to defer to the other Lupine. If he were relegated to the role of Honor’s Sol, how long would it be before he resented the very thought of her? He knew his strengths and his weaknesses, and his dominance tendencies, in this case, ranked at the top of both lists.
So, what was he going to do? Cut off his left hand, or his right? Because that was what the choices felt like to him. Either way, he’d walk away from this situation half a man. Which half did he want to lose first?
Logan twisted the water off with a sharp jerk of his hand and reached for a towel. Unless he wanted to turn the dial all the way to cold, the shower had done him as much good as it was able. Hadn’t his plan for the day been
Leaping to a decision now wouldn’t do him any good. He didn’t have enough information to know if Honor’s assessment of the situation was the right one. Maybe all his choices
