City of Eden

Carmen was born inside a secret.

Hidden in an endless summer forest, the city of Eden has kept the last forest nymphs safe for centuries. The elders call it paradise: no winter, no war, no choices. Every life is planned — the work, the marriage, the quiet death, all without ever seeing the sky beyond the trees. Carmen tells herself the tattered romance novels Marcy smuggles home are enough. Then her reckless best friend Pamela talks her into slipping out to see the human town's Christmas lights — one night, one look, and back before dawn.

One night is all it takes.

In the town of Littlewood, Carmen steps onto a Ferris wheel and locks eyes with a stranger whose golden gaze never leaves her. Alpha Garfield of the Willowcreek pack has searched the whole country for his fated mate — and the scent of wild lilac and morning grass has just led him to her. Before he can even learn her name, vampires flood the town, and Carmen's split-second choice — to pour her forbidden healing light into the alpha as he lies dying — costs her everything. She wakes locked in a vampire mansion, claimed by a master who is patient, charming, and utterly inhuman, sharing the house with broken humans and one furious captured werewolf who might become her only ally.

What follows is an escape built on wit instead of muscle: a borrowed name, an uneasy friendship, and a message carried by wild birds to the alpha who refuses to stop hunting for her. But freedom comes at a price. To spare a hostage town, Carmen walks into the square and surrenders to the vampire who has decided she belongs to him — and the rescue that follows will take from her the one person she cannot bear to lose.

Grieving and uprooted, mated to a man she fled from on sight, Carmen must decide what she wants when nobody is choosing for her. Garfield is nothing like the possessive beasts in her books — he waits, he asks, he gives her room to rage and heal — but he is also hiding pieces of a past that come back with red hair and sharp words, a she-wolf who believes the Luna seat was promised to her. Trust, once cracked, has to be rebuilt inch by inch: burnt pancakes, first kisses, long-overdue confessions under a waterfall.

And behind it all waits the question that started everything: why did Carmen's mother walk out of Eden years ago and never come back? The answer is waiting in a little crystal shop, among a secret society of nymphs Carmen was taught did not exist, and on the floor of a supernatural court — where the truth about her family will decide the fate of every nymph still locked inside paradise.

City of Eden is a fated-mates werewolf romance about a girl raised in a golden cage who teaches herself to open it — with a protective alpha hero who takes no for an answer, a gentle heroine with a spine of steel, vampires you will love to hate, pack politics, a dangerous rival, and a proposal beneath the lights of the Eiffel Tower. Intimacy stays high in tension and fades to black; the real stakes are freedom, family, and a love worth burning down every wall for.