Rejected Mail-Order Bride is Rescued by a Lonely Sheriff – She Has No Idea He’s a Shifter

Chapter 1

The bones cracked in the moonlight long before the first howl. Margaret Whitfield had come to the clearing to dig up the truth behind her brother’s imprisonment — she had not come to watch the sheriff of Wolf Hollow drop to his knees and unmake himself into fur and fang. She pressed a hand over her mouth. A twig snapped beneath her boot. The wolf’s amber head whipped toward her, and she ran. Ran through branches that lashed her cheeks and tore at her skirts, ran until three coyotes cut her off with bared teeth and shining ribs, and she thought — so this is how it ends.

Then the wolf struck.

He came out of the dark like a thrown cloak of silver, hit the nearest coyote mid-spring, and the sound of it — bone meeting bone, a wet snap — rang through the frozen air. The other two circled, snarling, and he met them with a fury Margaret had no words for. Jaws closed on fur and flesh. Claws raked. Blood darkened his coat until he gleamed black in the moonlight, and still he fought, because behind him stood a woman who had no business being in those woods.

She grabbed a fallen branch and swung at the flanker that tried to circle behind him. The branch connected with a yelp, and the animal skittered back, giving the wolf the half-second he needed to finish what he’d started.

The pack broke. They fled into the pines, and the wolf chased them to the edge of the clearing, snarling, then turned.

He limped toward her, staggered, and went down on his forelegs.

“Sheriff?” she whispered, absurdly, to a beast that stood shoulder-high to a horse.

The wolf’s ears twitched. He understood. Those amber eyes — Gideon Cross’s eyes, the eyes that had looked at her across a snowy street on her first night in this town — fixed on her with something that was not beast. Knowing. And then the great body folded, and he lay still.

Margaret found his clothes folded on a fallen log, the way a fastidious man folds laundry. His shirt, his trousers, his boots. And on top of the pile, his sheriff’s badge, catching the moon. She picked it up. The metal was cold and warm at once. The badge that turned a monster into a sheriff.

The horse stood where he’d left it, calm, as if this were routine. She had to drag the wolf’s body over the saddle — God, he was heavy, all that muscle and length — and she had to dress him in the dark with her teeth chattering, whispering apologies to his unconscious form. A man, again. A man bleeding from a gash in his shoulder and a wound in his thigh.

His cabin sat behind the jail, two rooms of tidy loneliness. A bed. A stove. A shelf of books. She got him inside, got him out of the ruined clothes, cleaned the wounds with whiskey and clean linen until her hands stopped shaking. His skin burned with fever. She pressed a cloth to his brow and sat beside him as the eastern sky turned gray.

He had saved her. Wounded, bleeding, at the risk of every secret he’d spent a lifetime guarding — he had saved her.

And she had seen what he was.

When his eyes opened, she was still sitting there, her hand resting near his on the blanket. He stared at her for a long moment, and she watched the man rebuild himself behind his own eyes — the walls, the distance, the careful mask of the sheriff.

“You’re awake,” she managed.

“Bloody hell,” he said, his voice rough as gravel. “You should have run.”

“You saved my life.”

“I’d have let the whole pack have you before I’d have let you see—” He stopped. Swallowed. “You saw.”

“I saw everything.”

Silence stretched between them, thick as the snow on his windowsill. He looked past her, toward the table where she’d set his badge, and something in his face cracked open.

“Margaret.” Her name in his mouth was a wound. “Henry Whitfield is not in the territorial prison for theft.”

Her blood turned to ice.

“He’s in there because of me,” the wolf said. “And now, so are you.”