Book Title: Lone Wolf (Strength of the Pack 6)
Author: Joy Lynn Fielding
Publisher: Siren BookStrand
Cover Artist: Harris Channing
Release Date: May 5, 2023
Genre: Paranormal/Shifter M/M romance
Tropes: Enemies to lovers, hurt/comfort, fated mates
Themes: Learning tolerance, found family
Heat Rating: 5 flames (although the sex isn’t particularly plentiful)
Length: 48 000 words/154 pages
The story is standalone, though the book is part of a series. It does not end on a cliffhanger. It’s HEA.
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Bookstrand | Amazon US | Amazon UK
What happens in the wilderness stays in the wilderness. Until it doesn’t…
Blurb
When his alpha invites a bunch of cougar-shifters to visit, wolf-shifter Karl Griffin is not happy. All he wants is a quiet life protecting his pack and forgetting his past. Instead, the big cats arrive and disrupt everything.
Leon Fitzroy has never found anywhere he can belong. The only panther in a cougar pride, he’s fought to be accepted, but he doesn’t really fit in. And now he’s expected to spend time with a wolf pack. Wolf-shifters are infuriating. Even worse, the most annoying wolf is also ridiculously hot.
When Leon ambushes a member of Karl’s pack to prove a point, tensions between them threaten to boil over. Sparks continue to fly as they’re forced to work together. But out in the wilderness, they find there are worse dangers than bossy wolves and smug cats. Survival depends on learning to trust one another—if they can.
Some hours later, Karl drew to a halt. They had been gaining ground on their prey, the trail they were following growing steadily fresher, but he was aware the cat was beginning to struggle. It wasn’t lack of fitness—the thing was sleek and muscular—and it wasn’t lack of willingness. It was that he wasn’t a wolf. Wolves were designed to run for miles and for hours. Cats, it seemed, weren’t.
Karl was beginning to feel the effect of their long chase himself after a night patrolling and only a couple of mouthfuls of pancake and coffee before they’d raced out here.
“I’m pretty sure I know where they’re going,” he said, as soon as he shifted. “They’re heading for the old logging road. It’s the closest place they could have left a vehicle. They’re taking the easy way, though, which gives us longer to catch up with them.”
“Might say something about who it is we’re pursuing,” Leon said, tucking his hair behind his ear. Karl could practically see an actual cat in the movement, grooming itself.
Leon’s deductions reflected Karl’s thoughts. They’d gleaned instantly from the scent that they weren’t after shifters, but that left a lot of alternative possibilities. Super-fit hitmen, like Jax’s crew, wouldn’t have hesitated at rougher terrain.
“They don’t have to be fit to be dangerous,” he reminded them both, and thankfully it came out as a comment rather than correcting the cat again. The cat was trying. The cat was also more impressive than Karl had originally thought. He spent an inordinate amount of time preening, but he had a keen sense of smell and a level of situational awareness that Karl had tried in vain to inculcate in Dave and Jason.
“There a reason we’ve stopped?”
Karl nodded slightly. “Assuming they’re heading for where I think they are, the speed we’ve been catching them means we have time for a break and something to eat and drink.”
The cat’s eyes glowed at the prospect, till he looked around him and saw a complete lack of prey that might feed two hungry shifters.
“We keep a few stashes out here,” Karl said. “We come out every so often. Sometimes it’s for a longer run or a hunt or just to get away from everyone for a while—pack’s pack, but it’s pretty close quarters.” He wasn’t going to volunteer that he seemed to be the only one who needed to get away at times.
While he’d been talking, he’d led them to where trees advanced down the open hillside. Casting round for an instant, he spotted the right tree stump and removed the door that Christian had so carefully crafted that it looked like part of the tree. Inside the hollow stump was a plastic crate, lid locked down firmly to keep it watertight.
Karl took a couple of fleece-lined waterproof ponchos from the crate and passed one to Leon. They weren’t that much higher up than the ranch, so there must be a weather front moving in that made it so cold.
Leon pulled on his poncho, then carefully lifted his hair out from under it, making sure it was arranged to his satisfaction before he wrapped his arms around himself for further warmth. Vanity evidently trumped comfort, though Karl didn’t know who he was trying to impress out here. “You guys don’t mess around with this survival stuff, do you?” Leon asked.
“Never know where trouble might be coming from,” Karl said as he sorted out a couple of MREs and protein shakes. “It’s not unknown for youngsters to lose control on the full moon, running way farther than they intend, so it’s a backup for that too.” Not that Tristan, the only youngster the pack had ever had, had run far from Bryce, his unofficial foster dad and, for a time, his only security in the world.
Leon looked up from where he was laying out a couple of emergency blankets for them to sit on. “The moon’s a real thing with wolves, then?”
“It’s not with cats?” Karl felt as clueless as Leon looked. “I mean, yeah, we always know when it’s waxing, and there’s a kind of wildness that gets into you when it’s full. Not uncontrollable or anything, not unless you let it be, but it’s there.”
“Weird,” Leon said.
Karl bristled at the insult. Somehow he’d almost managed to forget that this supercilious cat was the one who had taken Tristan down, scaring the kid just to prove his supposed superiority.
They sat on separate blankets and ate in silence.
Joy Lynn Fielding lives in a small English market town, where she indulges her passions for vintage aircraft, horse riding and gardening (though not all at the same time).
Joy tends to wax lyrical about the fascinating facts she discovers during her research for books. Thankfully, she has a very patient Labrador who has a gift for looking interested in what she’s saying while he waits for the food to arrive.
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This sounds like a great read. Wolves and cats could be fun.
That is an awesome cover and this is a series that sizzles!