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The Mask and the Marriage Bed: Ravenscar Romances
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 15 2026
Pages: 334
Weight: 0.89
Height: 0.83 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Venice, at Carnival, becomes a city where anyone can disappear behind a mask, and become, for one stolen season, exactly who they choose to be.
Serafina Falconieri knows exactly what her marriage is worth, because she watched her father negotiate it like a shipping contract: her hand for a fortune large enough to save four generations of a family that can no longer afford to keep its palazzo, its name, or its pride. Ruggero Salvaricco is wealthy, correct, and utterly without curiosity about the woman he is about to own. Serafina has made her peace with it. She has ledgers to balance and a father too proud to admit how badly he needs saving.
Then Carnival begins, and for the first time in her life, no one can see her face.
Behind a moretta, the small black mask a woman must hold in her own teeth, silencing her as surely as it disguises her, Serafina meets a stranger in a loggia above a ballroom she was never meant to enjoy. He does not know her name. She could not tell him if she wanted to. And for a few stolen hours, she is not a Falconieri, not a bride, not a line in a ledger. She is simply a woman a clever, unhurried, devastatingly attentive man wants to know.
Dario Corsaro has spent fifteen years building a life out of cards, contraband, and the particular discipline of never wanting anything too badly, a necessary skill for a man Venetian law will never let past its closed gates. He is very good at wanting nothing. He is considerably less good at it once a masked stranger starts making him laugh in a stairwell, three nights running.
He does not know she is engaged. She does not know he is the one man in the entire Republic she is legally forbidden from ever marrying.
By the time they learn each other's names, it is too late for either of them to walk away cleanly, and Dario has found something else in the wreckage of an old smuggling investigation: proof that Salvaricco's fortune, the one propping up Serafina's entire family, was built on a fraud he can expose, if he is willing to burn down the one thing standing between Serafina and ruin.
Some doors in Venice do not open for love. The Libro d'Oro that decides who may marry whom has never once bent for anyone, and it is not going to start now, not for a smuggler's son and a patrician's daughter, no matter what either of them is willing to risk to prove it wrong.
But Carnival was never really about the mask. It was about who a person becomes underneath it, and what they are willing to keep, once the mask finally comes off for good.
A slow-burn, high-heat historical romance of secret identities, forbidden class lines, and one Venetian Carnival that changes everything, for readers who like their heroines capable, their heroes complicated, and their happy endings earned rather than handed over.
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