He was sent to protect her. He wasn't supposed to feel the pull.

Stephanie Mercer doesn't do distractions. She's the sharpest biotech dealmaker in Portland, and she keeps her life locked down tight. Then a quiet man at the corner diner starts asking questions no stranger should know to ask. She tells herself he's nothing. Her body, inexplicably, disagrees.

Danny Cruz has spent five months at that table, sent by her own pack to guard a woman who doesn't know she's being hunted, or that she's a wolf who hasn't yet shifted. He's memorized how she takes her coffee, the set of her shoulders, the moment she almost catches him. The assignment was surveillance.

Wanting her was never supposed to be part of it.

When the danger finally closes in, Stephanie has to run home to the pack that exiled her, straight into the truth about what she is, and a bond that's pulled at them both since the first cup of coffee.

The slow burn is over. What comes next will either save them or break them both.

Will she let herself claim the man who's watched over her from across a room-or lose him the moment she finally understands what she was born to be?