I downloaded a copy of Man and the Beast, by J. Ashburn, from the Amazon free list. At the time of posting it was still free.

Description from Goodreads:
Alec Ashcroft is afraid. Afraid of himself, the black outs, the hunger, and of what he might be capable of doing. See, Alec is a shifter, a wolf and he doesn’t know how to control his extraordinary power. Refusing to put his boyfriend Matt or his family at risk, Alec runs away from everything. He must protect others from his dark side and hopefully find the answers he’s been seeking all of his life.

The town of Redfern seemed the perfect escape, lots of forest land and animals to hunt, until Alec met Luca. Dark, seductive, sexy, Luca is like Alec and the scent of him drives Alec wild. He shows Alec how to control and use his power to his advantage and soon Luca exerts his allure over him. The two become entwined in a passionate and wild relationship with Luca even inviting him to join his pack high up in the mountains above town. Is this enigmatic new stranger to be trusted or is there something more sinister going on? All Alec wants to believe is that he’s finally found someone to calm the Beast Within.

Review:
Meh. Not wholly bad, but clumsy and uninspiring. Nothing is particularly well fleshed out. For example, the book starts with Alec in a longterm, committed relationship. He has lived with his boyfriend for years and loves him. However, he leaves when he fears he’ll hurt him. He is attracted to the first man he sees in his new town, then immediately falls in lust with the first other werewolf he meets and then when he discovers he is evil, he immediately falls in love with another (and I mean IMMEDIATELY). They have sex once and suddenly it’s ‘baby’ this and “I love you” and “I’m coming with you forever.” The original love of his life was long forgotten. So, as you can imagine, even though these emotions are supposed to be important, they don’t feel very deep. Correction, they’re not deep. Nothing in the book is.

There also isn’t any character development or worldbuilding. I have no idea what the details of the werewolves’ physique, society, etc are. Heck, I’m not even sure if these are supposed to have always been wolfmen or four-legged wolves. There is some mention of ‘pure bloods,’ which presumably are more powerful than the standard wolf, maybe higher in a hierarchy but I don’t know for sure.

The writing itself was OK. There was a slight tendency to use names and titles in dialogue too often and the editing started to fall apart toward the end. But it was perfectly readable. It’s just that the story was shallow and pretty predictable.