Fixed: Fur Play by Christine Warren Read Free Book Online Page B

earthy and still bore the faint trace of flowers.
    44

    Fixed: Fur Play
    Honeysuckle, he thought. And clover. But even the scent of flowers couldn’t mask the trace of her approaching heat. Now that he had tasted her, he knew what that trace of spice to her scent had signified, and it made the fit of his jeans tighten uncomfortably.
    He swore under his breath and kept walking. Speaking of complications he didn’t need, this had to be the biggest. Adjudicating the right of an alpha to lead his—or in this case, her—pack was a touchy subject to begin with. Not many people appreciated an outsider settling pack business. Heaven knew he’d have bitten the face off anyone who tried it with the Silverback Clan. Yet here he stood, ready to do it to the White Paw. He didn’t blame Honor for being a bit miffed with him.
    From the little bit of information he’d managed to pry out of her cousin, Honor’s brief tenure as alpha had not been a peaceful one. At the pack meeting she’d called to announce her father’s death, she’d received her first challenge from a young male who thought a female beta could be overlooked, but a female alpha should be overstepped.
    Honor taught him the error of his ways, fairly bloodlessly, by accepting the alpha challenge and pinning him by the throat in less than ten minutes of combat. She had thought a swift display of strength would cement her position and demonstrate to the pack that she intended to keep the position that had come to her. No such luck.
    Two days later, the second challenger had stepped forward. According to Joey, Honor had almost welcomed it. The Lupine who called her leadership into question was a bad apple in the pack. Less intelligent than he was brawny, Chet had needed to be taken down a peg or two, and if Honor had to be the one to do it, so be it.
    The fight hadn’t been a quick one. While Honor had been fighting to the surrender, Chet had been fighting to the death. They had wrestled across the 45

    Christine Warren
    pack ceremonial grounds, the stoneyard, for almost three hours before Honor had given in to the fact that Chet would not surrender unless forced. She had applied that force to his hind legs, slicing through his hamstrings with razor-sharp teeth and leaving him alive, but crippled. The injuries would heal, but not quickly, and Chet would remember the bite of alpha and humiliation for a long time to come.
    The final challenge had apparently been the worst for Honor, and it was the one about which Joey had said the least. It had occurred just the night before, only a few hours prior to Logan’s arrival on White Paw lands. The challenger, he gathered, had been one of Honor’s childhood friends, and his bid for alpha had shocked her. Even more shocking to her had been Paul’s insistence on turning their challenge into a death match.
    She hadn’t killed him, Logan knew. Joey hadn’t given him any specifics, but it sounded as if Honor had again gone for a crippling wound instead of taking her challenger’s life. It didn’t speak well for her in terms of her ability to lead the pack. Logan admired compassion from a theoretical point of view, but he knew it had little place in the hierarchy of a Lupine pack.
    For all the veneer of civilization their human forms lent them, at their core, a Lupine pack functioned in much the same way as a wolf pack. The strongest led, the others followed, and the weakest either made themselves useful or they didn’t live to see another winter. To humans it sounded brutal; to Lupines it was the way things worked. They didn’t make the rules out of cruelty. They simply knew that the survival of the pack was more important than the survival of any one pack member, and a hell of a lot more important than manners.
    He made no effort to silence his footsteps as he strode toward the stoneyard, and he wasn’t surprised to break through the tree line into the clearing to find Honor and two teenaged males staring at