She came to look at the paintings. She stayed for everything else.
Nora Patrick is an art conservator who has spent eight years understanding other people's places. She moves between jobs — country houses, private collections, crumbling murals — with the focused eye of someone who has trained herself to see exactly what's there, not what she expects. She is very good at this. She is considerably less good at knowing what would hold her.
The commission is straightforward: assess a collection of forty watercolours in the Scottish Highlands. The painter is Ùna MacNeil, who has been documenting the Locharron territory for thirty-nine years. The collection is extraordinary. The foxing on the 1987 piece is manageable. The north light in the study is perfect.
The Alpha is not part of the commission.
Fearghus MacNeil is twenty-six, four years into the role he inherited young, and still learning the difference between when to act and when to wait. The Locharron territory is six generations deep — younger than its neighbours, still becoming. He has been holding it carefully since his father died and doing it, he thinks, adequately. The bond declares itself in the study doorway on the first morning while the conservator is saying oh, you're extraordinary to his mother's paintings.
He is going to be very professional about this.
He makes excellent temperature checks.
Meanwhile: the Brannigan clan is testing the Locharron's northern boundary. Markers moved. Then removed. A declaration, not a test. Fearghus needs to hold six generations of territory against a clan that has been patient and is now not. And the conservator — who has been looking at his mother's paintings and understanding what they say about the territory's emotional life — keeps handing him frameworks for understanding what's happening in the language of things she's actually qualified to talk about.
She calls it conservation principle. He calls it useful. It amounts to the same thing.
Wild North is the fifth book in the Wild Keep Series — a full-length standalone wolf shifter romance following Fearghus MacNeil and Nora Patrick. It features a twenty-six-year-old Alpha who is still finding his edges and a conservator who has spent eight years finding everyone else's, a collection of forty watercolours that hold thirty-nine years of one woman's relationship with a territory, a foxing treatment that takes six hours and requires someone to check the temperature every two, a seventeen-year-old who learns to talk to paintings, a pack elder who has been in correspondence with Fiona for two years without telling anyone, and an HEA that arrives via the outside eye finding the right position, both figures finally still.
Dual POV. Explicit heat. Fated mates. The 1995 painting holds a four-year-old's fingerprint. The conservator finds it. The territory has been waiting.
Nora Patrick is an art conservator who has spent eight years understanding other people's places. She moves between jobs — country houses, private collections, crumbling murals — with the focused eye of someone who has trained herself to see exactly what's there, not what she expects. She is very good at this. She is considerably less good at knowing what would hold her.
The commission is straightforward: assess a collection of forty watercolours in the Scottish Highlands. The painter is Ùna MacNeil, who has been documenting the Locharron territory for thirty-nine years. The collection is extraordinary. The foxing on the 1987 piece is manageable. The north light in the study is perfect.
The Alpha is not part of the commission.
Fearghus MacNeil is twenty-six, four years into the role he inherited young, and still learning the difference between when to act and when to wait. The Locharron territory is six generations deep — younger than its neighbours, still becoming. He has been holding it carefully since his father died and doing it, he thinks, adequately. The bond declares itself in the study doorway on the first morning while the conservator is saying oh, you're extraordinary to his mother's paintings.
He is going to be very professional about this.
He makes excellent temperature checks.
Meanwhile: the Brannigan clan is testing the Locharron's northern boundary. Markers moved. Then removed. A declaration, not a test. Fearghus needs to hold six generations of territory against a clan that has been patient and is now not. And the conservator — who has been looking at his mother's paintings and understanding what they say about the territory's emotional life — keeps handing him frameworks for understanding what's happening in the language of things she's actually qualified to talk about.
She calls it conservation principle. He calls it useful. It amounts to the same thing.
Wild North is the fifth book in the Wild Keep Series — a full-length standalone wolf shifter romance following Fearghus MacNeil and Nora Patrick. It features a twenty-six-year-old Alpha who is still finding his edges and a conservator who has spent eight years finding everyone else's, a collection of forty watercolours that hold thirty-nine years of one woman's relationship with a territory, a foxing treatment that takes six hours and requires someone to check the temperature every two, a seventeen-year-old who learns to talk to paintings, a pack elder who has been in correspondence with Fiona for two years without telling anyone, and an HEA that arrives via the outside eye finding the right position, both figures finally still.
Dual POV. Explicit heat. Fated mates. The 1995 painting holds a four-year-old's fingerprint. The conservator finds it. The territory has been waiting.
Used availability for C J Blackwood's Wild North