When Marisa Halley’s brother leaves their pack to start one of his own, she’s frankly a little jealous. Children might be the last thing Ray wants, but Marisa has recently received confirmation she will never have her own.
 
But as Ray’s life rapidly descends into chaos, Marisa cannot do anything but offer her support by moving in with him to help bring up his children. But what’s the price of giving everything you have to those you love?

Irina Lupu is adrift. She’d always wanted to travel and England is far away from her parent’s expectations. But her new English pack comes with a lot more rules than she assumed, and as a beta with no important relatives, she has very little say in what those are. When her cousin asks if she’d like to cross the river and join his new pack, Irina doesn’t hesitate. After all, after crossing an ocean, what’s the big deal about a river?

Marisa is young and ready to change her new pack into her perfect image. Irina is old enough to know that the best she can hope for is to find a place where she mostly fits… But no matter how different they are, they are newcomers to a pack recovering from an unimaginable tragedy and about to be struck by lightning for a second time.
 
Can they band together to protect them? And can they go through it without seeing a lot more in each other than two women more than a decade apart in age should?

"Betas Aside" is a low angst f/f romance between two betas with an age gap but no real power differentials. Expect tough ladies, sweet babies and the ocassionally oblivious man.
 
SAMPLE:
 
Prologue: Irina
 
The Gosden pack had plenty of problems, but they also had plenty of land.
Land they had never sold no matter how much human investors offered. Land they were willing to share. It was a luxury Irina’s own birth pack hadn’t been able to afford and that had ended with several families leaving for greener pastures. Or wetter ones, in her case.
She glanced out her bedroom window and felt her shoulders loosen like she’d inhaled something a lot stronger than oxygen. To think she almost hadn’t come.
Not across the river, that had been easy.
What was a river after an ocean?
She hadn’t been forced to leave Romania; it wasn’t anything tragic like that. Their territory had been cramped and the full moon had been getting more stressful, but she could have stayed and put up with it for a bit. For maybe the first time in decades, the pack had been large enough that her parents didn’t mind that she was a beta and wanted to remain one—loved kids but wanted none of her own. Her brother had been more than happy to make up for the deficit with his young wife, so for the pack, Irina’s role as a beta was as vital as it was meant to be.
But once Sorina’s parents had announced they were going to England… it had been like a cord had been struck. She’d always talked of travelling. She’d closed her eyes at night and imagined just transforming and taking off in a random direction, seeing where she ended up. And coming back; she’d wanted to go back home, always, but she’d wanted to get somewhere else first.
It’d felt inevitable. What would have home been without half her family? Without her best friend? Sorina was technically an adult, but she wasn’t going to let her parents and little brothers go abroad without her—she was the eldest and she took it seriously.
Sorina wouldn’t stay, and there wasn’t space to run, and so Irina had gone with them.
They had flown, of course, since having hands and pockets was handy to carry things like passports and money, but despite the plane and the absolutely revolting feeling of being off the ground and disconnected from not just her land but all land, it hadn’t felt like her path back was cut off.
She could go back any time she wanted.
She’d told her parents the same thing every time they had asked when she was coming back. She'd repeated it when they'd started asking her to visit instead. She’d looked at tickets: plane and boat and long-distance buses that took the ferry across the channel. She’d looked at maps and planned the journey in four feet and two.
And she hadn’t gone. Not even once. Maybe it was just impossible to imagine going back home and not staying. And, in any case, her parents had agreed to visit to meet Sorina’s children, and her brothers came every summer to work and send extra money back home.
She missed that land—her wolf howled for things it didn’t even remember and only a small handful of the packmates howling back understood what those things were—but she loved this land too. It was fresh and new and strangely untouched, protected by human laws from humans themselves. It wasn’t hers, but it welcomed her anyway; an endless expanse for running after prey that wasn’t half-starved and half-domesticated, water that rushed free and wild and dangerous, a moon that shone pure, unhindered by the smoke of civilization.
Their adopted pack accepted them gladly, happy for the new blood and the extra bodies to protect what was theirs from human greed.
But they didn’t truly belong, Irina could feel it. They all could. And then Sorina had presented as omega six months after their arrival and things had changed—because when she chose an alpha, she’d become pack. By blood. Not her own, but her children’s. It was more than good enough.
Even though it had been her aunt's idea to come to England, she'd taken Sorina's engagement to William—and the promise of permanence it implied—quite hard. Irina got it: it was different to know for certain.
It hadn't taken long for Sorina to get pregnant—it never seemed to with omegas—and that had distracted her mother from her nostalgia. The future was bright, safe, green, and full of life; wild and domestic both.
Sorina had been distracted enough with a mate, and soon enough she had a baby as well. If Irina had been planning to leave at all, that would have been the moment to do it.
Except that, as a beta, Irina was expected to help with childcare, and she loved Andrei to bits. She missed being Sorina's main companion, but Codrin and little Iesu were around to play football—one of the few things her rudimentary English didn't make awkward with the local pack.
Her wolf relished the great expanses to run in, and so did her human side—finally free of the rather more antiquated expectations her original pack had had of a woman and her level of interest in sport past a certain age.
She couldn't say it had been easy not to leave, but it had been easy to stay too. So stay she had, until she'd made herself sit down with an English textbook and then attend the lessons at the local college for six torturous months, where she was reminded of every single reason she had ever hated school and discovered a few more the English had invented.
But at the end of it, she'd been okay. Okay enough she got the job when she applied to the local Decathlon, which was as okay as she was interested in getting. And after a day where the new sounds left her head buzzing and she learned she'd studied American English vocabulary and nobody actually knew what a ‘monkey wrench’ was, she'd got to go home, to the simple music of her language and her people, to the familiar scent of Andrei’s baby skin and her aunt's cooking.
She was okay with staying, and then she'd met Alisha and she'd been a little more than okay.