Nails scraped the wooden floor as the wolf entered the cabin and crossed over to me. A natural wolf, canis lupus, stood thirty inches tall at the shoulders and weighed 150 pounds. Canis Monère, on the other hand, was much bigger. Or at least the one before me was. His weight was closer to 250 pounds. And his shoulders topped a natural wolf’s height by more than half a foot. No wonder the timber wolf that I’d encountered at High Court, a wolf that had looked upon me as food, had backed away beneath Dontaine’s growling threat.

A shimmer of light, a pulse of power, and Dontaine stood before me naked and unadorned, breathtakingly handsome with hair as blindingly bright as sunshine, and eyes a lush and deep verdant green in his human form. He was tall, and what I would have called of average build. But average was not a word you used with Dontaine. With broad shoulders, arms roped with sinewy strength, a chest sculpted with rippling muscles that flowed like flesh-silk beneath his pale, flawless skin, he was more heavily muscled than Gryphon, my beautiful, dark, departed angel, and much less massive than my towering Amber, my Warrior Lord, my other love.

Dontaine’s hand reached out and I felt that electric, jolting dance upon my skin, a sensation that came from him alone. He touched me. And his touch was not like that of a guard but of a new lover—my new lover.

“Mona Lisa.” He whispered my name and title both. The emotions that crossed my face when I looked at him, truly looked at him and saw him—not just the surface beauty but the generous, valiant heart that lay beneath it—made his eyes swirl a deeper green.

He was achingly handsome with bold and noble features, like a blond sun god. And like most men blessed with fair face and exquisite form, he had the confidence, the touch of arrogance that usually came with the looks.