Free Fixed: Fur Play by Christine Warren Page A

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    Ever since that incident in the stoneyard yesterday, she’d devoted all her energy to being wherever Logan Hunter was not. Well, there had been that forty-five minutes she’d spent leaning up against a tree, trying to remember how her legs worked immediately after stalking away from him. But she wasn’t counting that. Or the way it had taken a good two hours for the pleasant ache between her legs to fade to the point where she wasn’t constantly having to press them together to ease the fluttering there.
    She wasn’t counting that either.
    Instead, she concentrated on the monotony of the responsibilities she’d inherited from her father. She sent several boys back to the stoneyard to finish off the fire pit before settling into her father’s office and dragging out his dog-eared old appointment calendar. He’d been meticulous about his business, and every scheduled task and due invoice had been neatly noted in the pages of the calendar.
    Honor looked over the notes for this week and sighed. The chores and bills weren’t onerous by any means, but she just didn’t want to deal with them. The land had been her father’s passion, not hers, and the cabins they rented to pack members, along with the commercial properties in town struck her more as a burden than a vocation. If she had her druthers, she’d be spending her time at a pottery wheel, not a computer. It was just one more sign to her that the fate she’d ended up with was not the fate she would have chosen for herself.
    63

    Christine Warren
    She looked around the office to be sure no one had entered to talk to her.
    Even so, she still took the precaution of closing the door and pulling down the shades before she gave in to her desire to lay her head down on the cool wooden surface and close her eyes.
    What had she gotten herself into?
    Intellectually, she had known this day was coming, but she’d had no idea it would be this soon. She had thought she had years yet. Maybe a decade or two before she’d have to think of a way to tell her father she didn’t want to take his place when he died. But before she could get the words out, he’d been gone, leaving her with a mass of problems and no conceivable way out of them. Lucky her.
    When she’d been a child, all the way up through her teenaged years, Honor had longed to please her demanding father. She’d done everything she could to get his attention. She’d tried being the obedient daughter, but he barely noticed.
    Then she’d tried being the top student in her classes, but that failed as well.
    Nothing had made any impact on Ethan Tate, not when she excelled and not when she rebelled. Nothing had seemed to make any difference to him until she’d begun to move up in the pack.
    Her first challenge had been more of a lark than anything intentional. She’d refused to follow the orders of a slightly older male pack member—not surprising since he’d been trying to order her to let him grope her breasts—and had been faced with the decision to either challenge him for his rank or follow his orders. Honor had gone with the challenge. She had won, leaving the fight slightly bloody, but satisfied that the boy she’d beaten wouldn’t be giving her any more grief any time soon.
    That first challenge had earned her barely a passing glance, but the next one had merited a raised eyebrow. The next, a pat on the back. By the time she’d won her first challenge against an adult pack member, the day after her fourteenth 64

    Fixed: Fur Play
    birthday, she had found the path to her father’s heart—straight through his ego.
    Every time she won a rank challenge, it reflected well on her father and on the line of Lupines from whom she and he were descended. That was the only act he respected and so Honor had fought the battle over and over until finally it had won her a place at his side.
    It took her a few years as beta before she realized how unhappy the title made her. While she now received her