Bane is solid, dependable, jaded, and painfully lonely. He is also a bear shifter, hot, sexy, dominant and panty-dropping gorgeous. He’s spent his entire life protecting his older brother from the cruelty of others, including their own parents. He’s never thought he was worthy of anything, much less a Mate. Then he sees her working in the only grocery in their small backwoods town, and he’s stunned. She calms him, gives him joy, makes him hope. His heart comes alive. But she’s young, and she’s quiet; he fears she’ll run from his obvious dominance. He decides to move slowly, earning her trust one day at a time. Then, just as he thinks things are falling into place, she crushes his soul, and disappears. Janie has spent her entire life protecting herself and her mother from the terror that is her father. She’s always been made to believe that she was less than. She has accepted that her life will be spent alone, plain ole’ Janie, working her young life away in the local grocery. Then one day a beautiful, sexy, confident man comes into her store. She knows she’ll never be able to do more than admire him from a distance, until he smiles at her and makes her feel like the sun. But her father notices her interest in Bane, and demands that she cut him out of her life. He has other plans, and they don’t include a man in Janie’s life. He needs her submissive, and untouched. Ricky is a small town hood and drug dealer. He’s surrounded himself with what he thinks is a powerful and imposing gang. But they made one mistake; the woman they agreed to take as settlement on a debt is Mate to a shifter. Never take a shifters Mate and expect to live! When Janie is traded to the drug dealer as payment for her father’s debt, it brings the wrath of an entire clan of shifters down upon the heads of Ricky and his gang. Will Bane be able to save his Janie? Will Janie be able to accept Bane’s true nature? Can they forgive each other and find the happiness that every shifter prays for? This book is the second in a new series, Avaleigh’s Boys, about a group of shifters who make their home in the backwoods and bayous of South Louisiana. Their clan consists of a mix-matched group of five shifters who depend on one another and are loyal to no end. These are their stories.