He is the coldest man in three states. She is the one number he cannot make come out even.
Gabriella Ricci was raised on three lessons: read the ledger, find the exit, and never mistake a cage for a home. So when her father sells her to the Rinaldi family to erase a debt she never made, she walks into the most dangerous house on the coast with her eyes open and her terms already written.
Lorenzo Enzo Rinaldi is the heir to a New Jersey empire built on loyalty and blood, brilliant and lethal and frozen solid by a father who taught him that feeling is how they get inside a man. He agreed to a marriage of convenience to seal an alliance. He did not agree to lie awake a wall away from a wife who reads him like a column of figures that refuses to add up.
Gia sets the terms on their wedding night. Separate rooms. Her own money. No one touches her until she says so. And no lies, ever. Enzo signs every one, and then, slowly and ruinously, begins to fall.
But the alliance their marriage was meant to protect is bleeding from the inside. Someone at the family's own table is feeding their enemies, and when the trap finally springs it closes around Gia, in her own handwriting. To clear her name, Enzo will have to break the one rule carved into him over four graves: never let them see the thing you would burn the world to keep.
In this house, love is the single weapon no one thought to guard. And the traitor has been counting on it all along.
THE CRUELEST VOW is Book One of the House of Rinaldi trilogy: three brothers, one bloodline, and the women who bring an empire to its knees. A standalone love story with a happily ever after, and a betrayal that will burn across all three books.
This book features:
- Arranged marriage / marriage of convenience
- A cold, possessive antihero who falls first
- A brilliant heroine who was never anyone's pawn
- Forced proximity and an agonizing slow burn
- A man who is a danger to everyone except her
- Italian-American crime family, found family, and betrayal
- Dual POV, steamy open-door heat, and a guaranteed HEA
18+. Contains explicit content and on-page violence. The hero's darkness is aimed at his enemies, never the heroine.