Hero: "Devril 'Devil' Black
Heroine:Mary Katherine 'Katie'
'Sullivan
New Mexico hasn't 'just' become a safe haven state for Breeds, it always has been, as 'Devil' Black can attest. Working with the Safe Haven Project, and the more international Breed Protection Project, which had begun decades before, he's not happy with his newest job right now.
Protect Mary Katherine O'Sullivan. As Irish as they come and the adopted 'breed' granddaughter of a former UK Genetics Council Breed Lab Overseer, Wallace O'Sullivan's only child, his son and daughter-in-law, Barrett and Kella O'Sullivan.
When Mary Katherine learned her beloved grand father had been part of the Genetics Council, it broke her heart. Coming to terms with it wasn't an easy battle. Because she's a breed herself, found as a child, rescued by the man she come to love as her 'Da', and nurtured by his wife, the only 'momma' she's ever known. Her Grandpa had never revealed his past. Not to her, and definitely not to the son who found his beloved daughter in the filth and savage conditions of the lab she was created in.
Because of her own creation, Mary Katherine has always been a believer in Breed rights. Even before her friendship with Khileen Gallagher, the step-daughter of a breed as dark and stern looking as any she had ever seen, and as gentle as anyone she had ever known, Lobo Reever.
Her best friends mother, Josephine Langer Gallagher had been married to a man who fought alongside Mary Katherine's father, and died for Breed Rights. Jorn Langer and Barrett O'Sullivan had been the best of friends since their toddler years, and all through their lives, until Jorn's death during the first harrowing battle to free the breeds in one of the largest UK labs to have been found.
Even before meeting and marrying Lobo, Josephine had accepted the wild child the O'Sullivan's adopted and after the marriage, grew to care even more for her. While Mary Katherine's best friend, Khileen Gallagher adores her step-father, and his brother, Tiberian, the quiet, uber-alpha she jokingly calls 'uncle' and secretly had a horrible crush on before he left one night, breaking Khileen's young sixteen year old heart.
Seeking someplace where she won't have to deal with the reporters camped out on her parents doorstep and outside her apartment, or the pure blood groups making threats to kill her, while breed supporters plead with her to tell her story, Mary Katherine asks her supervisor with the Breed Protection Project to help find her a place to hide until it blows over.
Help comes from from none other than Lobo Reever, Khileen's step-father. Once Mary Katherine agrees to hide in America, Lobo sends one of his Breed team commanders to Ireland to pick her up and she's slipped out of the country where her father's post of Assistant Chief Constable, made her and her family an immediate political target for both blood purity groups and breed proponents, even if Mary Katherine herself hadn't been a wolf breed.
Escaping to America and the Reever's New Mexico estate, the last thing Mary Katherine expected to find was a breed to interest her. Let alone a breed as dark, brooding and inherently secretive as Devril 'Devil' Black.
Even in Ireland, as part of the Breed Protection Project, of which Mary Katherine has been a member of since she began training at sixteen, she'd heard of Devil Black, the Wolf Breed known for his swift and often bloody reprisals against former Council Soldiers who had hunted and brutalized escaped breeds in the first decade of Breed Freedom.
Now, nearing the fifteenth anniversary of the first multi-national strike against a breed lab, and the subsequent freeing of the breeds held there, Mary Katherine is face to face with one of the walking legends of Breed survival and independence. A Wolf Breed associated with one of the labs her grandfather had overseen and one feared by both Breeds and human's alike when he sets out to 'hunt'.
A Breed who longs to just be invisible
A Breed that longs to romance a woman, find some laughter with her, perhaps a night of passion, and not have to worry that it will turn up as fodder for the gossip mags as his last affair did.
A Breed still haunted by nightmares and the ghosts of those who died fighting to be free. A Breed who wakes sweating, certain freedom is a dream and all that waits him is another day of death.
Until Mary Katherine walks into his life.
A soldier with the Breed Protective Forces. A woman whose family name was linked to the Council for generations. A woman whose family now fights for Breed Freedom and who's searching for Breed protection now that her family's past is coming back to haunt her in more ways than one. Because wasn't it her grandfather that brutalized the breeds in the labs he'd overseen in the UK. One of which, Devil was confined in? The same man that raped and murdered two of the labs young females.
And now, he's not just ordered to protect the man's granddaughter, but now, he's beginning to suspect rumors of a 'mating heat' might be true. Because he's definitely hot as hell to mate this descendant of the most reviled man in the labs Devil was created in.
And now, it's the Devil's job to protect her.
It will be his pleasure to mate her.
But, can two hearts linked to such a blood filled past actually find that middle ground where love is possible and the true mating can save them both and finally give Devil his due, his mate, Mary Katherine.