The Alpha Who Stayed Sober

Isla Kerr, twenty-nine, is a quiet records specialist who loves maps because they stay where you put them. She drives north to a job in the Highlands, checking her car twice in a Perth car park because her friend Mairi told her to. In the glen of Arraidh she meets Ruaridh MacLeod, the Alpha of the local pack, a man in his sixties who has been sober for thirty-three days and has spent his whole life treating the one thing he wanted most as a debt. The bond that snaps into place between them is as sudden as a rock fall, and Ruaridh, who has refused every offer of happiness for decades, offers her a way to undo it. Isla does not take it.

Then her friend Skye, a mountain leader who was meant to meet her, goes missing on the hill road, and the glen's secrets start to unravel: a man with a pocket of pear drops, a ford at night, a missing sling clip and an envelope of names that only Isla can read. Ruaridh's brothers (the police sergeant, the roofer, the mountain-rescue leader) close ranks around her. As the search closes in on a lodge on the moor and a man who believes he is owed something, Isla has to decide whether she is a guest in the glen or part of the pack.

A slow-burn, age-gap fated-mates romance with a found family, a sober hero, a mystery that tightens through the middle and a quiet, earned ending in the spring.