The Lone Alpha's Claim

The scent is wrong for the inner boundary. *Not deer, not fox, not any of the half-dozen game trails he could name by smell alone.* Soap. Something floral. Lavender. Graham Munro tracks it downhill through pines planted generations back for some landlord's shooting estate, and finds a trampled fern, a woman's boot print with a worn heel, and a torn piece of waxed jacket, olive green, snagged on a thorn at waist height and still holding her body heat, with one blue thread off a scarf caught in the stitching. She has come three miles past the village, past the cairn, into the middle of a werewolf war, and she has lit a fire in the abandoned bothy, which sits *directly in the path of the ridge Lachlan's wolves used for their southern patrols.* Graham weighs the options on the walk down. *Drag her back to the village. Or kill her and dump the body where Lachlan couldn't use it.* He has killed before. He was there the night Lachlan's wolves came through Glen Lyon with fire and iron and left his father's body hanging from the old bridge. Instead he opens the door. Mhairi is a veterinarian, up on a train from Glasgow, small and freckled and entirely unimpressed by a large stranger informing her she is on private land. She has a contract, three months of veterinary work for the Clachan crofters, and she is not being run off a hill by a man warning her about dogs. *I've been charged by a bull, bitten by a badger, kicked by a horse.* What neither of them asks for is the pull that starts anyway. Graham has been carrying this war alone for years, with silver from an old wolf trap still singing in the scar on his left hand every time he shifts. And when his enemy works out what the incomer is worth to him, Lachlan takes the sister who raised Graham after their parents died, and sends a note. *The woman for your sister. Tomorrow at midnight. The old bothy at the head of the glen. Come alone.* A Highland shifter romance about a lone alpha running a war of one and the outsider who treats what is wounded whether or not it wants her to, ending with a rebuilt pack and a foundling pup. The romance is closed-door.