"I saw the only woman I ever loved almost destroyed by my secrets. But it was the telling of them, in the end, that brought her to ruin."From the journals of Matise DevoncroixHannah Braselton North has abandoned civilization to spend her life in the Alaskan wilderness. And now she holds in her hands the supposed "memoirs" of one Matise Devoncroix. It is a story of strange desires and forbidden love--the tale of a magnificent hidden race and a tortured, doomed relationship. And it is somehow connected to the critically injured male wolf Hannah pulled from the same airplane wreckage in which she discovered the diary.But the deeper she delves into Devoncroix's story--and the stronger her recovering "patient" becomes--the more the sad, reclusive scientist realizes that what she is reading is no mere fiction. The world's true rulers have been revealed to her: fierce, strong, beautiful, and sensual creatures who have long dominated civilization in secret. The burned and bloody wolf she has taken into her small cabin is one of them: a living relation of the tragic Matise, Nicholas Devoncroix. And as his broken body mends, his awesome powers of attraction strengthen as well--as do his memories and his rage...and his lust for vengeance.