Into the Shadow by Christina Dodd

Karen Sonnet is in Nepal to build her father a hotel. Her father specializes in building "Adventure Destinations", and Karen is his best, and hardest, worker. But the conditions here are unusual, even for her: the workers say the mountain is haunted by evil spirits, her second in command would rather sleep around and drink rather than do his job, and she is being visited by a "dream lover" who she doesn't know, but who is always gone in the morning when she wakes.

Then, a blast on the mountain unearths a small mummy in the rubble, a girl who somehow clutches a religious icon and opens her eyes when Karen touches her. They share the same color eyes, and she hands the icon to Karen before her body disintegrates. But then the mountain awakens, burying her second-in-command, and she is saved from dying by the man who has been her dream lover, a man she comes only to know as Warlord. Warlord carries her off, makes love to her, and will not let her go. She tries to escape, only to be caught by Warlord, who manacles her with cuffs of solid gold that cannot be removed except by cutting them off.

Karen hates him, and even fears him, but never gives up trying to escape. Until the day when Warlord and his forces are attacked by many other groups, and he lets her go to escape while he and his men go to fight the invaders. She returns home, battered and heartsick from her captivity and returns to his father, who only has words of scorn for her. It seems her second-in-command survived and told her father that she was at fault for not building the hotel and had run off to be with her leather-jacketed biker lover.

In his anger, her father lets slip that he is only her adoptive father, that her mother had slept with his best friend, an American Indian, and run off to be with him when she became pregnant. Later, they died in an Avalanche, and she begged her former husband to raise her daughter... and so he had, but without love or feeling. Faced with the truth, Karen walks away from Jackson Sonnet and tells him she won't be back. She has plenty of money, so she doesn't need him any more. She plans to do all the things she wanted to do, but never had the time before. He tells her she'll come crawling back to him, scornfully, but she just walks out.

She spends a year travelling through Europe, having adventures and experiencing life, before taking a job as an Entertainment Director at a posh and expensive Spa. Then, another year later, she meets a man who reminds her of Warlord, a software Engineer named Rick Wilder. At first, she is ready to flee everything, but a friend of hers convinces her to stay, and she begins to think that maybe Rick is nothing like Warlord. They flirt with each other, and on the last night of his stay, he kisses her, and she realizes the truth. Rick Wilder *is* the man she knew as Warlord.

Rick, or to give his full name, Adrik, is the descendant of a man who sold his own and his family's souls to the Devil in exchange for health and power. Each member of the family has the ability to change into animal form, but the more they do so, the more they are drawn to the dark side. Adrik's father, Leo Varinski, met a woman named Zorana and fell so deeply in love with her that he gave up the family business of being mercenaries and assassins and moved with her to America, changing their surname to Wilder. But there was a prophecy associated with Zorana, that her four sons would find the Icon that Satan had broken into four pieces and hid all over the world, buried in spots where no one would ever find them. If her sons met a woman who had a piece of the Icon, they would not only find their true mates, but break the curse forever.

Adrik, however, has been tracked by the Varinskis, who do not want to end the curse and lose their power. There are signs that the curse is going away on its own, as the Varinskis are already losing their unnatural good health. So when a Varinski who becomes a cobra sneaks in to Karen's room to try and kill her before Adrik can get the icon, Adrik must save her, and take her to his family and win her over before the Varinski's find them and kill them both?

I didn't find the first part of the book, when Adrik was Warlord, as he embodies all the worst traits of an Alpha hero, but he certainly gets better when he shows up at the spa where Karen works and we discover what has been happening to him since he and Karen parted. And it isn't good. And that's good for the reader, because he has a long way to go to redeem himself

But he certainly manages it. Choosing Karen over vengeance goes a long way towards making him warm and believeable and sympathetic to the reader, and the fact that he asks Karen to forgive him is very good as well. Realizing that he did wrong by her and now he wants to atone also won my sympathy. And his relationship with his mother, and his father, and the way he apologizes to them for running off and causing them pain made me cross the line and support him.

Karen, on the other hand, always had my support. She's in a hard position, but goes all out in both love and war, and I can understand why she wants to get away from Warlord when she finally realizes he is her nighttime lover and is repelled by the way he treats her when he isn't making love to her. But even she can see how much he has changed when she gets to know him after meeting him again. I could also believe why she fell in love with him.

Despite a rough start, this book did suck me in, and while I didn't find it so compelling that I would buy it, I did eventually find it enjoyable, though more towards the end than at the beginning. Would I recommend this book to others? Yes, but I'd warn them about the beginning and tell them to keep reading.