for you if I find the whole thing funny, okay?”
Max smiled sheepishly and let his arms drop back to his sides. “Right. So, then … um, if it’s not about Honor, what did you want to talk to me about?”
Logan’s eyes narrowed, his jaw set, and his mouth curved into a smile that probably would have scared women and small children. It certainly made Max’s eyes widen in the silvery moonlight. “Darin Major. Where is he?”
“Dude, I swear, he’s okay. I dragged him back to his cabin and got him into bed. He had a knot the size of a golf ball on the back of his head, but his head is harder than most tree trunks. He probably slept it off and was as good and as obnoxious as new when he woke up. I haven’t seen him tonight, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that was because he decided to stay in and sulk. He always was a sore loser.”
“Where is his cabin? I’d like to talk to him.”
Again. Apparently Logan hadn’t made things quite clear to the man at their first meeting, and now he had to add in the advice that touching Honor had recently become a very unhealthy move.
“Um, yeah. So, um … d’you really think that’s such a good idea? I mean, him being a member of Honor’s pack, and you looking like you want to kill him and all? ’Cause I can see her giving you all sorts of noise over it if you, like, ripped out his spleen or something.”
“Where is he?”
“All right, fine. It’s your lecture. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. Darin’s place isn’t far from the big house. This way. I’ll show you.”
Shaking his head, Max turned and led Logan to a fork in the path and then east for a while until they came to the old logging road that ran through much of the property. They walked another quarter of a mile or so, past a couple of the small cabins Honor’s father had rented to members of his pack, until Max stopped in front of one of the buildings and pointed.
“That one’s Darin’s. I gotta tell you, though, the headache he’s gotta have after he woke up is going to look like a stubbed toe compared to the one Honor’s gonna give you when she finds out you came out here and hassled him some more. And if you rip him open or something, then she’s going to get really steamed.”
Logan turned to his companion and asked very, very quietly, “Are you telling me what to do, Maxwell?”
Max jerked back and raised his hands, palms out in the universal gesture for “don’t hurt me.” He shook his head. “Dude, maybe you need to get a pair of glasses or something, ’cause do I look that stupid to you? I’m just offering a little friendly advice, is all, and I’m even done with that. See you later.”
The young man turned and loped off down the forest path, still shaking his head. Logan watched until Max faded from sight before he put his hand on the railing and began to climb the front steps of Darin’s cabin. He paused to knock at the front door and a flash of movement from inside caught his attention through one of the windows. There were no lights on in the small building and the reflection of the moon on the glass made it difficult to see anything, but he could have sworn he’d seen something.
He stared for a few moments, then raised his hand and knocked again. Getting no answer, he reached for the knob and let himself in. One distinct advantage to this place over Manhattan, he thought as he stepped inside, was that here no one bothered to lock their doors.
The cabin lay quiet and empty. And surprisingly clean for an uneducated man who lived alone and seemed to have been raised in the Stone Age. Somehow Logan couldn’t picture Darin doing his own laundry or washing his own dishes or even just picking up after himself. Maybe he paid a local female to come in and do it for him. The jerk probably pinched her ass and called her “baby” while she did it, too.
He couldn’t keep his lip from curling as he made his way through the darkened house. Logan might be an old-fashioned kind of guy—he believed in opening a woman’s door for her, paying for their dates, and always treating her with respect—but he had no patience for those who called themselves “men” and yet treated women like objects or emotionless dolls. Logan himself was possessive, but he always remembered that the women he felt possessive toward had their own thoughts and feelings and opinions and brains, and that sometimes their brains reached more intelligent conclusions than his own did. He’d seen the way Darin had tried to treat Honor, and he hadn’t liked it.
It wasn’t just that Honor had become his mate, it was that she deserved better simply because she was a better person than Darin. Hell, Logan suspected she was a better person than him. Still, even cats didn’t deserve the lack of respect Darin had shown to Honor. And so, Logan thought it might be like a gift to the world at large if someone taught the flaming idiot a thing or two about manners. Luckily, Logan believed he just might be able to work that into his schedule.
He moved quietly down the cabin’s short hall to the master bedroom. He could tell where Darin spent most of his time by the scents permeating the small building, and since he wasn’t in the stinking recliner in front of the battered television, Logan thought it a pretty good bet that the next strongest pool of scent would be the man’s bedroom.
The door swung open with a minimal squeak, but from what Logan could see, it could have made the sound of a dying antelope without doing much damage. The figure stretched out on the rumpled excuse for a bed remained solidly unconscious, slack-jawed and drooling. An unmistakable haze of cheap whiskey hovered over him like a poison-gas cloud.
And this slob thought he had what it took to be alpha of a Lupine pack.
Logan felt his lip curl in distaste and decided to make use of his visit here for something. If he couldn’t take his frustration out on Darin’s motionless body, he might as well accomplish something worthwhile.
As places to snoop went, the small cabin left much to be desired. As he could have predicted, the refrigerator didn’t hold much more than half a case of beer and an opened Styrofoam tray of ground beef, beginning to turn gray at the edges. The thought of meat made Logan’s stomach rumble. The couple of rabbits he’d munched on in the forest that afternoon had long since worked off, but he promised himself he’d get dinner up at the house when he finished here. Closing the door, he turned away and kept searching. The cabinets were all but bare, but again, neatly tended and relatively dust free.
The small living room looked tidy, for all of its shabby furniture. Someone must come in to dust fairly regularly, because the coating of powdery dirt he’d expected to see didn’t seem to be there. The
Making his way back into the bedroom, Logan glanced wistfully at the still unconscious object of his frustrated anger and sighed. He turned back to searching and had checked under the bed and in all the dresser drawers before he actually found something interesting in the man’s closet. Women’s clothing.
Judging by the sizes—all 6 petites—Darin didn’t have a guilty little secret, nor a desire to be a certain kind of lumberjack. There was no way the man could fit his beer-bellied bulk into those dresses. But the fact that they hung in his closet to begin with shot Logan’s theory about an occasional housekeeper totally out of the water. This was no maid who endured the games of slap and tickle in exchange for a measly paycheck. This was a relationship, or at least evidence of one.
He felt his lip curl as he closed the closet door. What poor woman could be desperate enough for company that she chose to settle for the charms of Dull-Witted Darin?
Just as the door closed sufficiently to reveal the window that had been blocked by the open panels, Logan caught a glimpse of the dull, sandy-gray fur and bushy tail of a wolf disappearing into the woods behind the cabin. The last he had heard, there were no native wolf populations in Connecticut, and what he had seen had definitely not been a coyote, which meant a shifted Lupine had been lurking outside of the cabin while Logan snooped. Clearly, someone had been spying on the spy. Logan wondered if that might have been the flash of movement he’d seen through the window when he’d been standing on the front porch. It was possible a Lupine could have been in the house and let itself out through the back when Logan entered. Then it would have been a simple thing to shift in the woods or behind the house in order to keep an eye on what the stranger was up to.
Logan would have done the same. It was only smart. He’d been through more introductions since arriving in Connecticut than he’d done in most of the last five years, and he still hadn’t met every member of the White Paw Clan. Those he had met had all been introduced in human form. The best way to remain anonymous to him would be to take wolf form. It was hard enough to keep a hundred new faces straight, let alone a hundred furry muzzles.
