joined to her flesh, making them one in a way even him buried inside her hadn’t been able to accomplish. As the tension of arousal and climax began to fade, they remained locked together, shivering with the faint ripples of aftershock. She bowed her head, feeling with acute awareness that faint trickle of blood against her skin, and she shivered again. This was joining, in the truest Lupine sense of the word. Logan had become her mate, and she had become his.
And what fresh kind of hell had she just sentenced herself to?
Ten
She still hadn’t figured that out an hour later, when they were separated, cleaned, and clothed, and sitting in her father’s office, eyeing each other warily. Well, her gaze remained wary. Logan’s had gone all wicked and focused again as he stared intently at her neck, waiting for her to turn her head so he could admire his handiwork.
Silence stretched between them for several long moments. Logan looked too self-satisfied to speak, and Honor wasn’t quite sure what to say. Were there rules of etiquette for handling this type of situation? Did Emily Post have a chapter on Postcoital Small Talk for the Modern Werewolf? If she didn’t, she really should.
Honor shifted in her seat and tried to ignore the raw, liquid feeling between her legs. As hard as he’d just taken her, she ought to be screaming at him to never lay another hand on her as long as he lived, and here she was trying to keep him from noticing how damned horny she still felt. Was
“You can relax, you know.” His drawling tone sounded sleepy and rough and sexy in the small cabin. Honor couldn’t suppress a shiver of reaction. “I’ll give you a couple of hours before I attack you again. I’m not entirely uncivilized.”
She drew a deep breath. “See … about that ‘again’ thing…”
He raised an eyebrow and settled into a deeper slouch. “You surely don’t intend to tell me, your mate, that I can’t touch you again, do you? You couldn’t be quite that foolish, honey. Tell me.”
She scowled. “You know, I really hate those casual endearments. Ones like ‘honey.’ It always makes me wonder if you just can’t remember my name.”
“Oh, I remember it. It just don’t think ‘Honor’ is something I can hear myself yelling out in a heated moment. It would be like yelling ‘Mother Teresa’ or something.”
She rolled her eyes. “Now that’s just nasty.”
“That’s what I thought. So you have two choices. You can have ‘honey,’ or you can have ‘Nora.’ Up to you.”
“Those are my only choices?”
He shrugged. “They are if ‘Honor’ is your only name.”
She grumbled and crossed her arms over her chest.
Logan cupped his hand to his ear and cocked his head to the side. “Sorry, what was that? I couldn’t quite catch it.”
“Honor Strength.” She bit it out like a particularly vile curse and then glared, as if it were his fault. It was actually her father’s, but if she could have a few minutes to think, she’d find a way to make it Logan’s fault. She’d put it on his tab.
He blinked. “Right. Those are your only choices.”
She opened her mouth to protest, then caught herself and shook her head. “And that is so not important right now. We have other things we need to discuss at the moment.”
“Not if those discussions are anything like the one you were about to start where you tell me I can’t touch my own mate anymore.”
“Do you honestly think that what we just did has changed anything?”
“I honestly do,” he snapped, eyes flashing gold. “I think it’s changed your status from my potential mate to my actual mate. You’re mine now, Honor, and don’t try to say anything different, because you gave yourself to me. If you’re feeling forgetful, try touching the back of your neck. It might jog your memory.”
Honor tried not to flinch at the vicious sarcasm of that remark. As if she needed to touch the mating mark to remember it was there. She damned well couldn’t forget it, and she damned well couldn’t stop calling herself ten kinds of fool for giving in to the instinct that had prompted her to let him put it there. She could chalk it up to the heat of the moment, or to her own heat, which was getting harder to control with every passing moment, but blaming either of those things wouldn’t change the fact that she’d allowed him to mark her. Just like it wouldn’t change the fact that the question still hanging over their heads remained a choice between true or false. A hot fuck and a mating mark hadn’t miraculously opened door number three.
Goddess, how she wished that it had, though. The wolf inside her had already begun to pace and whine in grief. It wanted to return the mating, to mark Logan as hers as surely and as visibly as she’d been marked by him. It wanted them to do whatever they had to, to run off to the woods, live in a cave, and get down to the serious business of making love and pups and a future together. Her human brain, though, knew that was impossible. She still had a pack to lead, or to die trying. Having a mate made not one iota of difference to that fact.
She steeled her expression and erected a wall around her cracking heart, all while the sounds of her wolf’s howl of despair echoed in her mind.
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” she told him, keeping her voice even and emotionless. She had practiced that a lot lately. “I haven’t forgotten your mark, just like I haven’t forgotten that I haven’t marked you in turn, or that I have no plans to do so. I also haven’t forgotten that I have a pack to run, and that you have a decision to make. Mate or no mate.”
His lip curled as he glared at her. “You insult me if you think that being my mate doesn’t mean that I would do anything and everything in my power to ensure your safety and your happiness. Damn you for thinking that poorly of me.”
“Oh, so you’ve made your decision, then?” Her tone taunted him, the impulse to share a little of her own pain impossible to deny. “You’ve suddenly developed a burning desire to go from being the second most powerful wolf in one of the most powerful packs in the country to being my hunky piece of arm candy? Terrific. You can start by taking off your shirt. If I’m going to keep you as my little boy toy, I’ll want everyone to see exactly what you’re good for.”
He crossed the desk in a single leap, spinning her chair to face him and bracing his hands on the arms, surrounding her with a looming shroud of furious, feral male. Honor choked back a gasp, but she couldn’t control the way her heartbeat took off like a scared rabbit in the face of a hunting wolf. For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to be prey.
“Don’t push me, little alpha.” The words came out like a spray of heated gravel, dark and rough and potentially damaging. “If I go over the edge, I’ll take you with me.”
“And where will we go, Hunter, hm? Straight to hell?” Her fight-or-flight response had broken days ago. She had only one reaction left to threats now, the one that made her lip curl and her chin lift and her gaze lock defiantly with his. “I got here last week. Welcome to the neighborhood.”
For a long moment he continued to stare at her, and she watched as his eyes shifted until all traces of brown disappeared behind the glow of liquid gold. Part of her was hypnotized by the visible signs of his internal battle, recognizing his struggle for control in his changing eyes and the sound of the fabric of the chair ripping where his claws lengthened and sliced into the cloth-covered arms.
With a howl he tore his gaze from hers and jerked away, throwing his head back and howling at the ceiling, the sound echoing with fury and frustration in the small room. Hairs rose on her arms and the back of her neck, the skin there tingling and throbbing where his teeth had cut into flesh. Her throat clenched as she bit back the cry welling in her own chest. Her wolf would always respond to his this way. She knew it, and that made it even more important that she make sure she crushed any illusions he had of a future they could share. She needed him gone so she could mourn for their lost chances and learn to live with the pain of losing her mate, not to death, but to circumstance, whose deceptive blade cut even deeper.
Honor watched, bleeding inside, while her mate—the mate she could never claim—struggled for control.
