The Werewolf's Captive Bride

Fiona MacTavish wrenches her arm out of a guard's grip in the middle of the MacLaren great hall and tells the laird's son what she thinks of marrying him. *I'd sooner gut ye like a trout and feed yer entrails to the ravens.*

Alistair MacLaren does not flinch. He observes that the entrails part is new, and then he says a name she has not spoken to anyone in this valley.

Ewan. Eleven years old. He took a loaf of bread from the magistrate's kitchen at Dalmally, and he is in the cold cell under the courthouse until the winter assizes. The magistrate is a MacLaren tenant. The magistrate answers to Alistair's father. And Alistair's father has given him until the Hunter's Moon to find a bride of pure heart, or the pack loses the moon forever.

Fiona came to the keep because the MacLarens own Glen Brae and her father always said that if trouble finds you, go to the laird. She did not expect a proposal inside the hour, or the arithmetic behind it: a treadwheel through the winter, then transportation to the colonies for seven years, if the fever does not take the boy first.

She does not believe in the curse. She has seen the laird at market, and he looked like a man who had taken too much whisky, not a man who turns into a beast.

What she believes does not matter. *Belief is not required. Only willingness.*

In the tower room she counts the days to the Hunter's Moon and gets to twenty-one. The healer who brings her a blanket has her own reading of the situation: Alistair is not a cruel man, he is a desperate one. Alistair's brother Callum, who wants the pack for himself, has been hunting a pure-hearted human of his own for months.

Then Fiona finds a lock of red hair in a box, bound with a frayed strip of blue wool tied in a bow she knows by heart, because she gave it to Ewan for his tenth birthday. Somebody has been to her brother. Somebody cut a piece of him away and kept it, carefully.

A dark shifter romance set in a Highland glen of rents, magistrates and a pack living on a fraying bargain - closed-door, with a heroine who bargains rather than swoons, a silver mine with a ledger in it, a handfast bound in green and grey ribbon, and a rider who arrives at the very end with three days' warning.