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The Cheat: A Dark Historical Mafia Romance
Paperback
Series: American Underworld, Book 3
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 23 2026
Pages: 174
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.40 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A dark, subversive reimagining of Cecil B. DeMille's notorious 1915 silent film.
Her husband gambled away her future. The man holding his debt offers to buy one night with her.
San Francisco, 1915.
Lavender Keller married Oliver because he promised to send her to medical college. Three years later, she is still waiting while he controls every dollar, invents new excuses, and quietly wagers away the tuition meant to make her a surgeon.
His final debt belongs to Beau Li Song.
A former hatchet man who now commands gaming rooms, brothels, and businesses throughout Chinatown, Beau has built an empire in a city determined to exclude men like him. He recognizes exactly what Oliver has squandered-including the brilliant woman trapped inside his Nob Hill home.
So Beau names his price.
He will erase $4,200 in gambling debt in exchange for one night with Lavender. Oliver must tell her the truth, and she must enter Beau's house by choice.
Lavender goes prepared to fulfill the bargain.
Instead, Beau feeds her, listens to her ambitions, gives her a room filled with surgical books, and refuses to touch what has not been freely offered.
For the first time in years, someone sees the life she was meant to have.
What begins later between them is no payment. It is a dangerous affair Lavender chooses for herself, one that crosses the boundaries of race, marriage, and respectability. Beau may be a criminal, but he understands her hunger for independence because he has spent his own life building power inside a country designed to deny it to him.
When Oliver discovers their secret, he will do anything to keep his wife, destroy her reputation, and mark her as his property.
But Beau was a hatchet man long before he became a gentleman.
And the cheat who stole Lavender's future has finally wagered something he cannot afford to lose.
Inspired by the infamous silent film and reversing its story of race, desire, and ownership, The Cheat is an explicit dark historical underworld romance featuring an aspiring woman surgeon, a Chinese American tong boss, a married heroine, forbidden desire, brutal revenge, and a hard-won HEA in 1915 San Francisco.
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