Under My Hands

She can keep a man alive with a steel table and a count.

Wren Calloway was a doctor until the board struck her off. Now she runs a back room behind a laundrette on the Cut. Cash only. She doesn't ask and she doesn't tell.

At two a.m. they carry in a man with a bullet under his shoulder blade. She takes it out. The wound says he was shot from behind, from close, by someone he trusted.

His driver is dead by dawn.

For three days he watches her hands. On the fourth he stands and tells her she is coming with him, because the man who shot him will come for her next. And because he wants her.

Bastian Oriol is the family's killer. He never asks her a question.

The Oriols own the sluice that decides which side of Ashport floods, and every shop that pays to stay open. Up at their house the old man is sick with what the house calls nerves.

Wren reads his pillow and knows better.

Every door in that house stands open. She could walk out any night.

A dark age-gap mafia romance. She's thirty-one, he's forty, and he is never a danger to her. Forced proximity, not captivity. No cheating, no rivals. Explicit, adult, open-door from chapter three. Standalone, HEA.

For readers who loved Promises and Pomegranates and Ruthless Creatures.

Content note: explicit sex between consenting adults, with an age gap; on-page violence and killings, including the murder of a friend; gunshot wounds and emergency surgery in medical detail; the slow poisoning of an elderly man; a staged death; drowning.