The Alpha's Forbidden Mate

The torrential autumn rain of the Pacific Northwest hammered against the ancient cedar canopy of the Olympic National Forest with deafening fury.

Maya Lin slipped down the steep, moss-slick embankment, her boots skidding across wet ferns and decayed river stone. Her waterproof field jacket was soaked through, her dark hair plastered to her neck, and her hands were trembling with cold. Yet in her canvas specimen bag, securely wrapped in damp moss, lay the prize she had spent three months hunting: three pristine cuttings of the *Cypripedium lunare*—the legendary Moon-Lady Orchid, a rare nocturnal flower reputed to bloom only under overcast skies in the deepest, most remote old-growth groves of the peninsula.

At twenty-two, Maya was a gifted graduate researcher in ethnobotany at the University of Washington. She was brilliant, fiercely independent, with almond-shaped hazel-green eyes, honey-tanned skin, and an intuitive, almost supernatural connection to plant life that had baffled her professors. Where other researchers relied on satellite sensors, Maya could simply touch the bark of a five-hundred-year-old red cedar and feel the subtle hum of life pulsing beneath the timber.

A low, guttural growl rose from the misty ferns twenty feet behind her, freezing the blood in her veins.

Maya went completely motionless. The hairs on the back of her neck stood straight up.

Stepping from the shadowed veil of dripping hemlocks was a creature that should not have existed. It was a wolf—but of monstrous, nightmarish proportions. It stood over four feet tall at the shoulder, its matted gray coat caked in dried mud and old blood, yellow feral eyes burning with ravenous hunger. Foam dripped from its yellowed fangs, and the scent of rotting meat and iron washed over the damp air.