The Broken Alpha's Captive : A Fake Engagement, Second Chance Shifter Romance, livre ebook

Tova is a tracker three weeks into hunting a brother who stopped answering his phone. Rurik is an alpha whose wolf has not made a sound since the day he carried his daughter out of the river.
She is three miles into the pines when the trail vanishes. She drops to a crouch and runs her fingers over the moss-crusted earth. Men's boots, size ten, a worn-down heel on the left, stopping mid-stride as though Erik had simply lifted his foot and never put it back down.
Cold. Damp. Pine needles and the faint tremor of water moving underground.
Twenty-one days since her brother texted from a gas station — *found something, Tove, I think I know what Dad was hiding* — and then nothing at all. Twenty-one days of calls ringing into dead air, of driving up in a rattling Honda, of knocking on doors in a town that has decided not to see her. The locals were polite. Polite and useless.
Douglas firs and western hemlocks close eighty feet overhead and turn the early evening grey and underwater, and the trap she walks into was not set for her.
Inside the compound she is a debt she did not choose and a disturbance he cannot explain away. The wolf in his chest has been mute since the recording: a small voice apologising for going down to the river to see the fish, a splash, and then nothing but the sound of moving water. He has been a man alone in his own skin ever since, and everyone in his pack has stopped mentioning it.
Norheim raiders cut through the western border that same season, took three young hunters and left two dead. Nothing along that line has settled since.
What follows: hands that heal and harm within the same hour, the story living underneath the scars, a leak in the dam, the cost of extending empathy to a man who has made himself deliberately unreachable, and a gesture that cannot be taken back.
*I'm serious.* *I know.* *So am I.*
He will not say what she is to him out loud. He does not need to. He has already decided that anyone who tries to take something of his out of these woods again will not be walking back out of them, and he has stopped pretending that decision has anything to do with pack law.