A Wild Kind of Fate - The Wolves of Blackpine, #1

Sloane Avery has spent her whole life learning not to need anyone. Aged out of foster care, worn down by a man who called control love, she drives north to the one thing she has left, a mountain cabin willed to her by a grandmother she barely remembers, meaning to fix it up, sell it, and disappear somewhere no one can find her.

Blackpine has other plans. The little town at the end of the road watches her too closely, warns her off the woods, and is run, more or less, by Ronan Cross, a maddening, quietly furious man who keeps turning up wherever she is and looking at her like she is a problem he cannot afford. Then Sloane sees something in the trees that should not be possible, and the ground under her whole life gives way.

Ronan is the alpha of the Blackpine wolves, and he has held his pack together for fifteen hard years by refusing himself exactly one thing: a mate. A mate is a weakness an enemy can use. He has the grief to prove it. So when a human woman moves into the old Avery cabin and his wolf will not stop pulling toward her, he tells himself he can outlast it. He is wrong.

Because Sloane is not as human as she thinks, a rival pack and a hunter who kills their kind are both closing on Blackpine, and the secret her grandmother died hiding makes Sloane the thing everyone wants. To survive it, an alpha who confuses protecting with deciding and a woman who confuses running with safety will have to do the one thing neither of them knows how to do: trust, and choose, and be chosen.

A Wild Kind of Fate is the first book in The Wolves of Blackpine, a fated-mates wolf-shifter romance with a hard-won slow burn, a fierce heroine who saves herself, found-family pack warmth, and real danger with real stakes. Behind-closed-doors heat (steamy tension, fade to black). Series-length trouble is only getting started.