stone.
And one very determined Lupine male.
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?
After that incident in the stone yard yesterday, she’d devoted her entire afternoon 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.
No, what she counted were the hours she’d spent running errands in town that could have waited another week but that kept her off the pack’s property until it was time for supper. The meal itself, she was trying hard to forget. Neither the reaction of her inner wolf every time she got close to Logan Hunter, nor the hard truths she’d slapped him down with before running away from him—again—counted among her finer moments. She’d headed straight from the meeting hall to the house and up to her bedroom, but it had taken all of thirty seconds after she’d gotten there for her to realize it wouldn’t take her mate half that long to find her if that was where she stayed. She had thrown a toothbrush and a change of clothes into a duffel and retreated to the remotest empty cabin on the property—one she was almost certain no one would have thought to mention to their guest that it even existed. There she had spent a long, cold, restless night trying to persuade herself that maybe her hormones were lying to her and Logan Hunter wasn’t really the mate fate had destined for her.
When that had failed, she’d switched to persuading herself that while he might be her mate, she had survived without him for twenty-four years before now, and she could survive another fifty after he left. No problem.
That had failed, too.
Which pretty much left her right where she’d started—alone, angry, and trapped between a rock and a hard Lupine. Gee, would the fun ever start?
Her secret hideout had protected her from Logan for the night, but the chilly cabin and the lack of sleep had left her feeling stiff and cranky when she finally managed to drag herself into the office for a day of paperwork and monotony. Yes, she was hiding behind a desk, but only because she didn’t think anyone had showed Logan her office yet, and when they eventually did, at least she’d have gotten in a few hours with the coffeemaker before he found her. That might be enough to get her through their next confrontation.
That, plus a whip, a chair, and a tranquilizer gun.
Sighing, Honor banished her nemesis from her mind and forced herself to concentrate on the monotony of the responsibilities she’d inherited from her father. She needed to send several boys back to the stone yard to finish off the fire pit that she’d abandoned after the Incident yesterday (her mind seemed determined to refer to their sexual escapades in capital letters, and frankly, Honor couldn’t really find a reasonable argument against it).
Settling into her father’s chair with her third cup of coffee, Honor dragged out Ethan’s 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 grimaced. The chores and bills weren’t onerous by any means, but she just didn’t want to deal with them, especially not since she’d already taken care of everything that could possibly be handled away from the pack’s grounds. The business had been her father’s passion, not hers, and the cabins they rented to pack members and vacationing Others, 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, or hiking through the woods, not cooped up behind a computer. It was just one more sign to her that the life she’d ended up with was not the life she would have chosen for herself.
She looked around the office to be sure no one lurked in the corners, waiting to demand a moment of her time; and she knew it was ridiculous, but 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, and why the hell was she now exerting every last ounce of her considerable will and rapidly depleting energy to secure for herself a position she had never even wanted?
Intellectually, she had known this day was coming, the day when she would have to take over the pack, 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. He had trapped her in the surest way possible, with her own desire to please him.
Maybe if she had ever succeeded in doing that, she wouldn’t despise herself for what the attempt had stolen from 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 newly developed 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 anytime 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 birthday, she had found the path to her father’s approval—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, but it had never won her his love.
Honestly, she wasn’t even sure anymore whether he’d ever had any to give her. She’d known from her earliest memories that he would have preferred if she’d been a boy—the son he’d always wanted. She had even wondered for a while—especially when he’d tried to appoint other young males to take her uncle’s place as beta after the accident that had killed both Joseph and his mate, Marie—whether he might literally try to replace her by adopting a young male pack member as his foster son, but she needn’t have worried. Ethan Tate had had too much stubborn pride in his name and his heritage to take that route. “Tates rule the White Paw,” he had told her so many times she occasionally heard the words in her sleep. In Ethan’s mind, anything else was unthinkable.
That was the real reason why he’d eventually given in and accepted her challenge wins as proof of her ability to be his beta. Only she knew how close he had come to killing her instead. Only she knew that when he’d had her wolf bloodied and pinned to the ground of the challenge circle, she had prevented him from ripping out her throat by telepathically reminding him that if he killed her, she would never be able to have pups; and if she never had pups, there would be no chance that a grandson of his blood would be born to carry on Ethan’s legacy.
She had learned at fifteen that the only value she had to her father was as a means of ensuring his immortality. She’d never forgotten the lesson, but her greatest regret was that she’d never mustered up the nerve to tell him to take his pack and shove it. Until his dying day, she’d remained at his side, ruling the White Paw Clan as if she relished each moment.
It hadn’t taken her very long as beta before she realized how unhappy the title made her. While she now received her father’s attention, and even his grudging approval, there was none of the affection she had craved. Maybe if her elevation in the hierarchy had earned her what she’d struggled for so long to achieve, it would have made a difference in the way she viewed the job, but as it was, 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.
