Bitter Bloom

The truce between the Leinster pack and the surrounding towns was renewed in 1911 by a marriage. It's due again, and I applied by accident. They gave me a stone house on a hill, three rooms, a kitchen with a cold tap, and a husband who sleeps four hours and doesn't cast a reflection in the east window. I'm a botanist. I observe. I took notes. For three months, the notes were empty. In the fourth, I found the greenhouse — full of a flowering hybrid I published a decade ago, growing in a climate it has no business surviving. He planted it from a cutting I gave a stranger at a conference, before I knew the pack existed. When the renewal council arrived, they hadn't come to confirm the marriage. They had come to read me a second condition. I read the dissolution clause aloud, with my hand on his arm, and refused to sign. A forced marriage lycan romance about a truce and the woman who declined to be one of its terms.