Christine Warren: Hungry Like a Wolf

Secondly, she truly did believe she would make a better alpha than any of them ever could. Her father had raised her to be just that. He had taught her not only about the pack and how its members related to each other, but also about the business that kept it financially afloat. She’d learned to do all that at her father’s side; no one else had that training or that experience.

Honor’s personal relationship with her father had been rocky and even tumultuous at times, but their working relationship had functioned as if it had been designed by a Swiss watchmaker. Ethan Tate had given the orders, and Honor had seen them fulfilled. She had guarded his back, his pack, and his privacy, and she’d done a damned good job of it, too. She had helped keep the White Paw Clan running smoothly and fluidly, but she’d still had time for her own pursuits. She had been on call twenty-four hours, true, but in a well-managed pack, those calls had come rarely.

Over the years, Honor had taken up kayaking and snorkeling. She had studied Native-American and Lupine mythology and taught herself how to throw pots. She had earned a degree in business administration with a minor in environmental management and spent most of her spare time in the studio, spinning her wheel and stoking the fires in the brick kiln she had built with her own hands. In other words, before her father had died, Honor had been a normal woman with a life of her own. Now she began to understand that as alpha, the pack would become her life.

She didn’t want that. Her sense of duty to the pack ran just as deep as any Lupine’s, but the need to serve it did not consume her. She had the willingness to give, but not the willingness to give up that which the position of alpha required.

Why then was she fighting to stay alpha of the White Paw Clan?

Good question, and one she had begun asking herself almost hourly.

Gods knew it wasn’t for the glory of it. Honor snorted at the thought. There was very little glory these days in being alpha of any clan, and even less in one of the small, subordinate clans like this one. Being the Silverback alpha might float Graham Winters’s boat, but the Silverback was the overpack to the entire Northeast. All the packs from Maine to D.C. said their pleases and thank-yous to the Silverback. The White Paw Clan had less than a hundred and fifty members, and that generous estimate included the pups and the elders. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of glory to be found in “ruling” a group the size of the local high school’s graduating class when most of them could run their own lives just fine without any interference from her.

To be honest, the only answer that had come to her had been that she wanted to lead the clan by default. Hardly a rousing answer, but a truthful one. It wasn’t that Honor wanted to lead the pack; it was that she didn’t want anyone else to do it.

She didn’t think it was a power trip. After all, given the lack of glory, one could rightly assume that the power of the position didn’t exactly shake the earth. So, not a dog-in-the-manger routine. She just honestly didn’t see how any member of the pack could make a decent White Paw alpha.

It hurt her to think it, actually. She hated thinking so badly of her family and friends, the group of people she’d grown up with, that she knew and loved. Or at least tolerated out of a sense of familial loyalty. She wanted to believe every one of those people had the strength and intelligence and fortitude to lead the pack into prosperity, but the sad truth told her none of them did.

If there was anyone, it might have been Paul. Paul was smart. At least, she’d always thought so, before he decided to challenge her earlier that afternoon. He had a good head on his shoulders, and a sense of humor that had seen him out of more than one scrape in his life. But he also had a temper that could get out of hand if he wasn’t careful, and for all his considerable intelligence, the man couldn’t devise a long-term strategy if it came with illustrated instructions. He could barely manage to plan what his next meal would be, and often didn’t even bother with that. The pack just couldn’t afford that sort of leader. This was a critical time for them, and if they didn’t have an alpha who could lead the pack in a new direction, Honor felt certain they would stagnate themselves into extinction.

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.