The family is forcing me to marry the one mobster I don’t want. Nobody (including him) knows that he’s my baby’s daddy. He rejected me years ago, because I’m half his age and too naïve for him. The problem is: If I refuse to marry him, my life will be like hell. I grew up in this family, and I know who I’m dealing with. I know that blood and murder are part of his job. And now he has a new job: to be my mate and a dad to our little boy. But I don’t think the red-hot, desirous look in his eyes is part of the job description.

He used to torture me mercilessly for being a geek. He shattered my heart by calling me names and comparing me to others. But I’m no longer the scrawny girl with the braces. I’m a curvaceous grown woman, and I want my revenge. Everyone in the pack has always joked that we would end up together. But I know how he uses women and runs away from them. I know that I could never give him my heart. Yet all that knowledge doesn’t stop my womanhood from reacting to him. Even in anger, he makes me feel something no man has ever made me feel.

Rule number one of Wall Street: don’t fall in love with your billionaire boss. I hate my boss. The Wall Street tycoon is a jerk. A world-class alpha-hole. Devastatingly handsome but terribly flawed. He goes through assistants like I go through vanilla lattes, and I need this job. But I went to school with bullies like him, so I’m not afraid. I hate my attraction to him. How sparks fly when we spar. The way he barks orders and dresses me down. I hate how I fantasize about him during and after work hours.

I keep my head down. In this backward pack, females rank low, and my bad leg makes me damaged goods. It doesn’t help that I’ve never shifted. I don’t mind the late-20s single life, though. No one’s paying any attention as I build an illicit farmer’s market empire. My roomies and I are doing it for ourselves, and if life under Killian Kelly is stifling, at least it’s predictable. We can deal. But when biology finally kicks in, I lose my mind. I claim our alpha as my mate. And he rejects me in front of the whole pack.

They say life begins at 40.... But when infertility led to my divorce, it seemed more like the end. When I’d rather be at home in my sweats binging '80s movies, my dad begs me to go to Carlton with him for moral support as he presents my much younger sister to their unmated Alpha.