The Hidden Alpha's Bride

The specialist in Edinburgh wants eight hundred pounds for the consultation alone. The treatment runs into the thousands. The waiting list is six months, and the doctors have started using words like aggressive and progressive, which Fia MacLeod has learned to translate as they do not know what is wrong with her brother.

Hamish is eight. He has been out of school for a week.

So when Connor McRae walks into her bookshop after closing, asking for a green leather ledger from the old McRae estate that was left for rebinding forty years ago, Fia knows he is not there for a book. He proves it quickly. He knows she takes the six-fifteen bus to Inverness. He knows about the hematology unit at Raigmore. He knows she buys tea at the café with the blue awning and never drinks it. *Nothing in Glenmorrow is private.*

Fia plays the only card she has left. She pulls out her mother's locket, the silver oval she has worn every day since Iona MacLeod walked into the glen and never walked out, and shows him what is etched into it: a crescent moon with a star inside, the same mark cut into the ring on his right hand. Her mother's last instruction was to go to Connor McRae if Hamish ever got truly sick. So Fia offers the locket for the Moon Herb. One heirloom for her brother's life.

Connor tells her the herb is pack property and cannot be given to a human. Then he hands her a silver-edged card - *Feast of the Silver Moon* - tells her to wear something silver, and says one more thing about her mother that knocks the shop sideways.

What the pack remembers is different. Iona was their keeper, the one trusted with the herb, and she ran to the human world, married a human and bore human children. Morag Sinclair will say all of it out loud in front of the fire, and add thief, and spy, and dead blood.

To get the herb, Fia will have to stop being a guest and start being pack: a stone box with a seven-pointed star that has not been opened in a decade, a trial by combat against a young wolf named Duncan, and a binding she cannot take back.

A shifter romance set in the glen above a Highland village, with an alpha who has been watching her for months, an elder council that has not forgiven her mother, and a woman who came to barter for a cure and finds out what she is. The romance is closed-door.