The heart of uldara

For years, Princess Rosalie Hawthorne has quietly run the kingdom of Everspring while her vain, careless parents take the credit — and her mother reminds her nightly that a woman her size will never be wanted. Then Rosalie learns the one secret they kept from her: they have buried the Crown in ruinous debt to Drakhar, the dragon kingdom. The price of forgiveness is Rosalie herself, married to King Paxton Bellroar, the Dragon King who killed his own father.

She arrives expecting a tyrant and an owner. Instead she finds a stoic, painfully controlled king who wants peace, whose dragon recognises her the instant they meet. Rosalie is his fated mate — and the only person alive who can calm his fire. Not everyone in Drakhar is pleased. Lady Koralyn Vapor, the brilliant councilwoman who always assumed she would be queen, hires an assassin to remove the human bride before the wedding.

The assassin is Bowen Crest, Frostveil's notorious Ghost, a man convinced fate would never give someone like him a mate. Standing over Rosalie's bed with his dagger drawn, he discovers he was wrong: she is his mate too. Spared to help unmask his employer, Bowen slowly earns Paxton's trust and Rosalie's heart, and uncovers a plot between Koralyn and the commander of the guard that nearly costs him his life. Soon after, Rion Howell — a former Thornmarsh army commander who walked away from everything to search for his mate — catches Rosalie's scent in a crowded Drakharian market and pledges her his sword. Later still comes Jade Lee, a gentle panda prince and healer from Kyo-Zhan, who cares for everyone but himself.

As her unlikely family grows — a dragon, an assassin, a wolf and a healer, each learning to love the others in their own way — Rosalie must survive court conspiracies, face the parents who sold her, and prove she is more than a debt repaid. The woman everyone overlooked may be the one person who can bind Nilgarde's five kingdoms into lasting peace, and finally believe that she is wanted, not just useful.