Her Second Love

James Green has been blind since the night violence marked her, and she learned to live by scent, by sound, and by the arm of Gary Green, the Beta who loved her and called it an honor. Then the rouges come at last, the pack burns, and she kneels in the smoke holding Gary while his heart goes quiet. His last order is simple: run.

She runs, straight across an Alpha's border.

Captured as a rogue and dragged before Ryder Moon, the Alpha king whose kill count is legend, the man rumored to have murdered his own brother, she expects death. What she gets is worse: the mate bond, flaring to life for a second time she never asked for. Fate has decided Gary's place can be filled. James would rather die than let it.

Ryder wants no weakness either. He hides her, starves her of kindness, calls her prisoner, and lies to everyone, including himself. But the bond does not care about his father's lessons, and neither, slowly, does he. Out of cruelty and necessity grows a tenderness neither of them names, and their second love is built entirely in the dark, because she cannot see the man she is falling for.

Then the trap springs. The rogue who took her sight years ago, her own stepfather, drowns her at the docks, and Ryder arrives too late. James dies. The Moon Goddess disagrees. Sent back from the white, she wakes at her own funeral with no memory, a stolen glimpse of the future, and a pack that just watched her corpse breathe.

The memories return. So does the danger, wearing a family face. Ryder's brother Ramon is not dead. He is something a vampire coven rebuilt, and everything wrong in James's life bends back to him: the attack that killed Gary, the scars, the darkness itself. When her captivity leaves her carrying Ramon's child, Ryder makes the choice no Alpha should have to make. He will raise the hybrid as his own, because losing the baby would kill her.

Ramon wants the boy. A black note slides out of the celebration gifts with a single word on it: Mine. What follows is an ambush buried in the snow, a stolen baby, a ritual in an old mill that feeds on a child's fear, and a blind woman who is finished being hunted. Her new eyes, paid for in months of pain, see what no one else can. Her voice, and one lullaby, do the rest.

Her Second Love is a story about the shape of grief, about a heart that is not a cup that fills up but a house that keeps adding rooms. Ryder was never her second choice. He was the choice she made after learning what loss costs, and it takes more courage to love again than it does to love first. She survived the dark once. She does not intend to live there again.