Stagnation wouldn’t be the way they got to extinction under Darin Major, the other most vocal of Honor’s detractors. Darin would herd the pack toward oblivion while running behind them with a whip just to keep them moving. The man was arrogant, chauvinistic, cruel, selfish, and no more intelligent than your average dung beetle. With him, leading the pack was all about setting himself up as king of his own little universe. He wanted the power and the glory, and he could care less about what it cost the pack. The only place he would lead the White Paw was straight to hell.
The pack needed a leader with vision. Someone who could see the future and lead them to it. And failing that, they needed someone who would at least keep them from regressing into the past or standing stock-still as the world progressed around them. Honor didn’t delude herself into thinking she knew best for every member of the clan, or even that she knew best for the clan as a whole, but she thought she had a good idea of what would be worst.
The pack desperately needed to move forward. They needed to learn how to survive in an increasingly urban world. Their little compound in the forests of Connecticut provided them with a momentary oasis, but every day, developers moved a little bit closer to their retreat, and every day, they got one step closer to the sprawling metropolis of Manhattan, less than a hundred and fifty miles to the south. If the White Paw didn’t learn how to function in the society of the modern human city, they could kiss their lives and their sanity good-bye. Progress would not be stopping for them.
Honor wanted to see her pack move from a culture of reclusion to one of integration. She wanted pack members to become computer geeks and businesswomen and police officers and engineers. And if the pack continued to wallow in its stagnation, none of those things would ever happen. The world wouldn’t just pass them by; it would bulldoze over them and plow them under.
Now if only she could manage to convince the rest of her pack of this. And quickly, before Mr. Snooper-Sexy decided to support another Lupine’s bid for her job.
The recollection of Logan Hunter made Honor groan. He was the absolute last thing she needed in her life. Perhaps tied with a frontal lobotomy and Chinese foot binding. All three promised to cause her intense pain, considerable inconvenience, and no few worries while accomplishing nothing useful.
In fact, while she was having fun with analogies, the man reminded her of French fries, one of her biggest weaknesses. Like the junk food, the Silverback offered no nutritional value and promised to do little more than weigh her down and leave her hungry for more a few hours later. And also like French fries, her craving for him came out of nowhere and refused to be pushed from her mind no matter how hard she struggled.
Damn him.
Honor kicked off the light cotton blanket, suddenly way too hot to tolerate even the minimal covering. Unlike some of the Lupines she knew, Honor didn’t just keep a blanket on her bed, she even used it on occasion; but not tonight. Not while she was obsessing over a sexy stranger, and definitely not three days before she was due to go into heat.
Of all the rotten luck. Her father couldn’t have died immediately after her heat when her hormones would settle down and make her life and her interactions with every male on the planet a hell of a lot easier. No, he had to time it so that her alpha challenges were just as likely to turn into attempted rapes as attempted murders.
Gee, thanks, Dad.
To add insult to the injury of her past few days, she’d been forced to start using the scented bath salts, which gave off a fragrance way too heavy for her sensitive nose, to try and mask the beginning of the changes to her body chemistry that any Lupine worth his salt would have known indicated her approaching heat.
And while she was at it, she thought she’d throw in a few menstrual cramps and a case of boils. That sounded like fun.
Right. Sitting up in the bed, Honor ran her hands over her face and groaned. She figured she could either sit here till dawn and brood, or she could get up, go downstairs and make up for the dinner she’d never eaten. Now that the taste of blood had finally faded from her mouth, her Lupine metabolism had reared its head to let her know just how wildly it disagreed with the notion of her skipping a meal.
She swung her feet over the edge of the bed and onto the floor, ignoring the chill of the boards. Her stomach overruled her soles. She paused long enough to pull on the pajamas she’d never intended to sleep in and made her way down the hallway to the stairs.
The house sat silent around her. It always seemed silent since Ethan’s death, but especially at night. With just her and Joey there now, silence almost came with a guarantee. Joey barely made noise when shouting at the top of her lungs, and Honor only seemed to get into the house just long enough to fall unconscious for three or four hours a night. Since she didn’t snore, that meant things stayed pretty quiet.
She heard little more than the sound of her own breathing and the rattling of the bare tree branches in the yard as she made her way through the house. The glow of moonlight silvered the floor in front of the windows, making it look almost as cool as it felt against her bare feet. She ignored the chill as she headed for the kitchen. If she was lucky, Joey had left a snack or two in the fridge. A half calf or twelve would go down fairly smoothly right about now.
If she hadn’t been so hungry and so tired, she probably would have heard the soft sound of breathing coming from inside the kitchen. She knew she would have noticed the smell—that musky, woodsy smell she’d detected earlier in her father’s bedroom when she’d emerged from her bath.
The smell of the stranger.
But she didn’t notice a thing, not until she turned on the overhead kitchen lights and found her eyes focusing on the half-naked male form standing beside the center island.
“Care for a snack?”
Logan wanted to make a snack out of her.
He stifled the urge to bare his teeth and inhale deeply, since it wasn’t precisely the polite thing to do, but damn, he wanted to. There was something about her scent, hidden under the too heavy perfume of whatever she’d added to her bath … something indefinable and elusive.
Either that, or he had a cold.
“What are you doing here?”
Okay, not exactly the hey-sailor-buy-me-a-drink he’d been hoping for, but he figured that might be pushing things a tad.
“I got hungry. The diner in town’s not bad, but their idea of all you can eat and mine aren’t precisely the same.” He held up a chunk of the sirloin he’d been munching. “Your housekeeper told me to help myself.”
“She’s my cousin. And she should have told you to help yourself to the opposite side of the front door.”
He watched her cross her arms over her chest, figuring it gave him the perfect excuse to stare at her breasts without being caught staring at her breasts. How was that for smooth?
“Ironically enough, she decided to go with the whole polite thing. She put me in a guest room overlooking the woods. Private bath. Pretty homey.”
“Really, and did she leave a mint on your pillow?”
“Chocolate. I had it before I came downstairs.”
She rolled her eyes and stalked past him toward the refrigerator. “I’m surprised you didn’t just call up for room service.”
Logan seized the opportunity to reevaluate the ass he’d been so struck by earlier. He almost choked on the beef. Lord, but it looked even better than the last time he’d seen it.
He quickly finished swallowing and shook his head in amazement. He still didn’t quite get why he found this woman so compelling. She pretty much defined “not his type.” Dark-haired and dark-eyed, she should have had dusky, tanned, or olive skin. Instead, her complexion looked pale and milky and perfect, especially in the silver light of the waxing moon that had illuminated the kitchen before she’d turned on the lights.
She’d looked like a shadow as she slipped through the dark house. Her form, slender and tallish, seemed almost too delicate to be Lupine. He was used to women of his species being sturdy and athletic, but this girl looked as if a good strong handshake might do her an injury. Her cousin had certainly seemed convinced that Honor could hold her own as alpha, but Logan found himself even more skeptical after meeting her. Somehow, he could not picture this woman facing an alpha challenge, let alone winning one. Or three, as Joey had told him. Just this week. It boggled his mind.
