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them? Honor’s very soul rebelled at the idea. First, because she’d be damned if she’d let any male tell her what a female was or wasn’t capable of doing. An alpha might need strength to lead a pack, but she also needed intelligence, cunning, an open mind, and an eye on the future. Testicles, as far as she could tell, counted as entirely optional.
    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