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softly behind him.
    Honor stared at the white wooden panel for a long time before her knees unlocked enough for her to sink to the bed, where she sat for a while longer, trembling.
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Chapter Four
    Damn him and the horse he rode in on .
    Honor lay in her father’s huge sleigh bed and stared at the ceiling in frustration. The clock on the bedside table gave off an eerie green glow announcing three a.m. and Honor’s fifth unsuccessful hour of attempted sleep.
    She blamed it all on her unexpected visitor from Manhattan.
    Next, she planned to blame the instability in the Middle East on him as well.
    She really could kill him for…well, for nothing that was actually his fault.
    But far be it from her to buck the long-standing and honorable tradition of killing the messenger. In reality, her father was the one to blame, but he was inconveniently dead, and therefore a much less satisfying target than the arrogant, sexy beta from the Silverback Clan.
    Sexy? Shit .
    Honor groaned and rolled onto her side. The second to last thing she needed in her life was to form a mad crush on any man, let alone the beta of another pack sent to evaluate her leadership capabilities in the first week of her rule.
    Because no matter how politely Logan Hunter had phrased it, that was exactly why he’d come to this remote corner of northwestern Connecticut to mingle with the White Paw Clan. He’d come to grade her like a teacher on report card day, and Honor didn’t like it one bit. She didn’t like it because no alpha’s earned position in a pack should ever be called into question, especially not in any way so transparent to subordinate pack members. And because she really wasn’t all that confident that she would be given a passing grade.
    She didn’t doubt her ability to lead the pack, to make decisions that would benefit them as a whole and help ease them in to the twenty-first century in a 27

    Christine Warren
    way her father had never been willing to attempt. She didn’t doubt her ability to hold her own among the international council of packs, where decisions affecting Lupine society as a whole were discussed and debated and voted upon once every five years. Honor didn’t even doubt her ability to win an alpha challenge that presented itself to her. Lord knew she’d won three since the moment her father had drawn his last breath.
    No, Honor didn’t doubt for a second that she had the ability to become as confident and capable an alpha as the White Paw Clan had ever seen. What she doubted was her desire.
    Honor had been happier being beta. Though her personal relationship with her father had been rocky and even tumultuous at times, 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’s 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 herself helped build. 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.
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