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into a soft nest of hair and inhaled deeply to make sure he hadn’t just dreamed up this woman with her mind-blowing scent and her passionate responses. Now that he’d found this woman, he’d be damned if he’d let her get away.
    Unless he was very much mistaken, Graham Winters had just found his mate.
    Normally, a new mating, especially for a pack alpha, was a cause for celebration.
    When your entire culture was based on the pack mentality, anything that lead to the perpetuation of the pack won praise and respect, so he ought to be feeling just terrific at the idea that he’d finally found the one woman he could be happy with for the rest of his life. He just had two problems.
    The significance of the first slammed into the back of his head like an iron pipe with a grudge the minute he looked down at her. With her hair soft and rumpled on the pillow, her makeup worn away by time and exercise, she looked completely different from the way he remembered her. Instead of the brazen, blonde sexpot in the too-tight dress, she looked like a little girl, all fair skin and pink cheeks and child-like innocence.
    Her thick, brown eyelashes lay in soft arches against her cheeks, and her rosy lips were parted and slightly pouting. She looked like a china doll. A very human china doll.
    Interspecies dating wasn’t exactly verboten among Lupines, but it hardly represented the norm, either. His kind tended to view humans as amusing and occasionally useful, but hardly the sort of mates you brought home to mother. After all, Lupine instincts still dictated that the strongest, the fastest and the most dominant were the ones most likely to survive and most likely to reproduce. Humans, in contrast, could barely compete with newly whelped pups, let alone with mature wolves.
    Graham knew all that, but it didn’t seem to be doing him any good. Every time he tried to picture getting on with his life without Missy, his beast raised its furry head and growled, long and low and menacing. He expected to drool at any minute, but those instincts certainly made it clear that giving this woman up, human or no, was not an option.
    And that led him neatly to dilemma number two.

    Christine Warren
    Fur Factor
    25
    The woman lying unconscious in the middle of his bed wasn’t an anonymous and interchangeable human. She was Missy, Regina McNeill Vidâme’s best friend and pseudo little sister.
    He had just fucked Melissa Jane Roper, and the consequences already loomed large in his mind.
    First of all, Regina would try to kill him. He’d only known his friend’s new wife for a few weeks, but that was plenty of time for him to learn how protective she felt toward her quiet, wallflower friend. Melissa had been Regina’s maid of honor, and though she’d faded into the background for him until last night, Graham clearly remembered the things Regina had told him about her.
    “Missy is a sweetheart. Probably too sweet,” Regina had explained at the rehearsal dinner while he’d sat, politely bored, beside her. “Don’t be offended if she doesn’t talk to you much, even if you are the best man. She’s always been kind of quiet, especially around men. That doesn’t mean she’s some sort of Pollyanna or a nun or anything. It just means she’s more likely to listen than to talk. And she almost never says anything bad about anyone, but I just don’t want you to think she’s ignoring you or anything.” Graham hadn’t noticed the woman enough to know whether she was ignoring him or not. With her hair in a neat, subdued braid, and her body-camouflaging clothes, he’d paid her about as much attention as the flower arrangements on the tables at the restaurant. Even when he’d practiced escorting her away from the altar, he’d barely realized she was with him. Her grip on his sleeve had been so light, and she’d held herself so far away from him, that he might as well have been alone.
    “Ava is trying to corrupt her, though,” Regina had continued.