Caught in a love triangle between her sister and the man she craves, Alyssa Chamberlain fights not only her passions but metamorphosis into a leopard woman as she battles a family curse to find love.

Chapter 1

After the slaying she hid in the cloakroom downstairs behind the entrance door in the redbrick Victorian mansion that was her sister’s residence, and crouching in the cramped dark space with her head in her hands, she thought about love and death.

Delivering the final blow was easy. Her incisor teeth sprang into fangs, and claws appeared. Half-woman half-leopard she did what she did best. "It wasn’t that I didn’t like him. He was charming in his way. But he longed for peace. And peace is what I gave him."

Lively sounds from the floor above reminded her the slaying had made her late for the evening’s occasion. She was still in a state of dishevelment. At her arrival the head butler Oldham, as old as the house, noted with horror her stockinged feet in the absence of footwear. The protocols of late-nineteenth century London abhorred such impropriety, and the young woman was hurriedly furnished with a pair of her sister’s shoes. It was not the first time she failed to conceal aberrant behaviour in a decorous setting. She steeled herself for the ordeal ahead. She would smile and pretend with the guests on joining the festivities on the upper floor, while he who coveted her hand in marriage would press his case in her ear. She would hear him, but she would not see him. Her gaze would remain distracted until she locked eyes with the one she needed. Then anxiety and pretence and everything else would give way to her happiness and joy.

She pulled back the partition. She stepped out from the cloakroom. She had trouble walking in the replacement shoes. She climbed the stairs and strode along the upper hallway. She patted down her hair on her way to the double doors and smoothed the forest-green satin of her evening gown. She pushed the doors in. All eyes turned to her, and all sound and activity ceased.

And in walked Alyssa Chamberlain. Her head was high, her posture poised. Auburn tresses feathered her ivory features. Jewels gleamed on her earlobes under the chandeliers. The cast of her eye had such an intensity of expression that gasps fluttered round the room. She was of the room, yet not of the room. She gave an impression of having walked to the occasion from another climate, from lands represented by veils and barefoot dancers and tambourines. She moved through the hush, and a path was cleared for her as if the guests laid down a red carpet. In a corner, the lead violinist of a string quartet turned back to his players, counting them back in with his bow . . .