Cujo Brown owed no one anything. He had been a lone wolf for 40 plus years, and he liked it that way. No strings attached. Not to a pack. Not to a woman. Not even to his employer — most certainly not to his old employer. He had an NDA that didn't even allow him to speak their name. And he was fine with that.
Back before he'd been banished from his home pack in Hayden Lake, Cujo Brown had attended a Boys Scout camp at Hat Island. And there, he'd formed some of the only bonds he has ever really known. When he retired from the agency-not-to-be named, something tugged him back to Wolf Harbor on Hat Island.
Dr. Stefan Lebenev, also one of those teen-aged scouts from long ago, had figured out a serum that would help young shifter girls get through their first shift. He had a grant to finish out the details, and he needed a security chief. Well, that was most certainly within Cujo's skill set. And so Cujo took on a new identity — security chief and fitness coach.
Lebenev was a brilliant researcher. But he wasn't any good with people. If he had been, well, maybe he would have vetted his grant funder better. Maybe, he would have listened when people tried to tell him what was happening to his test subjects — post-menopause human women — wasn't right.
But the stakes were so high. The survival of the shifter species was at stake. And everyone swallowed their objections and concerns. Even Cujo. It wasn't like he had a lot of morals or ethics to start with, he told himself. Why flinch now? He'd done worse for less gains. Much worse.
But then an elderly woman named Olivia Trainer came to the island. And Cujo was bewitched. Mate, his wolf said.
Lone wolves can't have mates, Cujo told his wolf.
Mate, the wolf insisted.
It didn't matter. Stefan Lebenev traded Olivia for continued funding just as he had all the other test subjects. Wolf Harbor didn't have the resources to counsel new wolves, he insisted. The grant funder did.
But that wasn't what the grant funder was doing.
Mate, his wolf howled. They're torturing our mate!
A fitness coach wasn't going to be able to rescue Olivia Trainer. Not even a security chief for a fitness resort could do that. But Cujo Brown had other skills at his disposal. And he is going after his mate.
First in a new spin-off series of Wolf Harbor. The series features Cujo Brown, the bad boy readers crush on, and his mission to rescue the women who were test subjects at Wolf Harbor — starting with his mate. Follows immediately after the prequel, Woman of Hat Island, and parallels the main Wolf Harbor series!
L.J. Breedlove is a former journalist writing mysteries and thrillers about what she knows: complicated people, small towns, big cities, cops, reporters, politicians, assorted bad guys.
L.J. grew up on a cattle ranch and then went to college to be an oceanographer. She decided getting seasick was not a good trait for any oceanographer to have, and discovered journalism instead — a field that liked people who asked questions!
As a reporter and editor, she worked in Alaska, Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and Washington, D. C. — places that have become the sites for her books. She got homesick for the Pacific Northwest and came home to work with college newspapers and teach journalism.
She is an over-educated, bleeding-heart liberal with a penchant for heroes such as Jack Reacher. She isn't particularly bothered by the inconsistency. Some of her thrillers have werewolves in them — that doesn’t faze her either.
You can follow her on Facebook at ljbreedlove. Best place to find her — besides a local coffee shop — is at ljbreedlove.com. You can sign up for her email newsletter there!