Page 31 of A Lady’s Guide to Werewolves

“Not your business,” her captor, apparently named Brutus, replied without inflection. “Sod off, Lorcan.”

Lorcan was tall, with black hair and the kind of smirk that spoke of too many people telling him too often that he was handsome. “I don’t know. I could make it my business.”

“You could try. But I smell my daughter on her. I smell my Orla.”

Sorcha recognized the name from the stables at the Cauldron and the wolves she had freed. The white wolf? There was no time to say anything about it, as the temperature changed instantly. It lowered, cold as a haunted forest. Dozens of eyes pinned her in place, seething. Sorcha would have been more confident if faced with regular wolves. She knew monsters and beasts. She knew claws and teeth and fear. But she did not know Lycan etiquette when it came to being abducted. Or if it would even have mattered.

There was simply nowhere to go.

She tried to catch the eye of an old man, a woman with a baby in her arms—anyone who might have sympathy for her, who might help. But the wolves were turning away, leaving Brutus and Lorcan and a few other shifters who did not look inclined to help her, one of them a blonde woman who watched them with a small frown. As well as four wolves, prowling a circle around them, sniffing the air and snarling.

Sniffing her and snarling.

Sorcha froze. Her crow fluttered in her chest, like a second frantic heartbeat. Her witch knot flared.

“You’re about to learn what happens to people who hurt a wolf,” Brutus promised. “Who hurt my daughter.”

It wasn’t that she wasn’t terrified, because she was. But she was also insulted. Deeply. To her very core. “I would never harm a wolf!” she said hotly. Hadn’t she just faced down Winterwell because he’d bullied his son?

“No use,” Lorcan said. “I can smell her on you too.”

“Is Simon here?” she asked. What about the wolves she had freed from the stables? Only she didn’t know their names. Abduction was a very frustrating business.

“Never mind the Winterwell pup. I found you—you’re mine to deal with.”

“Don’t be daft,” the woman with long blonde hair in plaits said. “If she’s crossed the wolves, she belongs to the Alphas. To the Luna.”

“Jolan’s still not been found either,” someone else said. “They’ll tear her insides out.”

He didn’t have to sound so eager.

“Serves the bitch right. She talks or she dies.” Brutus reached for Sorcha.

But he never touched her.

A huge gray wolf soared out of the shadows and landed between them with a deep, menacing growl. His jaws clamped down on Brutus’s arm with a savage bite. Sorcha stumbled back, her backside hitting the ground.

Brutus yelled, his blood running between his fingers.

Another growl, deeper, more menacing. Furious.

Brutus went for his dagger.

The gray wolf twisted so that he was protecting Sorcha. Fur rippled on powerful haunches as he swiped with a huge paw, claws slicing through Brutus’s shirt.

“I tracked her,” Brutus grunted. “She belongs to me.”

The wolf crouched over Sorcha protectively, lips lifted off brutal teeth.

Between one blink and the next, the wolf became a man. He stayed crouched over Sorcha, weight on his knee, arms on either side of her. Pain and magic rippled under his flesh, turning claws to fingers, fur to warm skin and tousled hair.

He was naked.

Very naked.

And not just any naked man.

The very proper and extremely naked Aidan Carnahan, the eleventh Earl of Coventry.

His head hung as he caught his breath. His eyes pinned her, still caught between witch and wolf, curator and creature. He shoved to his feet, stepping in front of her. His voice was hoarse though no less powerful. A growl ripped through the declaration.

“Mine.”