His Sweetest Ruin

Della Vance has spent six years keeping the accounts of her own survival, and the numbers finally balance. A job she's good at. An apartment that's hers. A six-year-old nephew asleep down the hall who trusts her, completely, to have the rest of everything handled. She learned a long time ago what it costs to let a man decide who she gets to be, and she has one unbreakable rule now: no chair left out at her table. No invitations. No risk.

Then her car dies on Route 9 in the Tennessee dark, and three motorcycles pull off behind her.

Colt doesn't get involved. For seven years he's kept his life narrow on purpose, running the same quiet ledger of a debt that doesn't close, putting every person he can into the credit column and wanting nothing for himself. But a woman who squares up in the dark to make herself a wall between three strangers and a sleeping kid is a woman he can't file away and forget. He notices everything about her. He gets one fact right and hands it back to her like she's worth the accuracy. And when he learns the man circling her building is the same polished, patient predator tied to the worst night of Colt's life, staying away stops being an option.

He won't crowd her. He won't take what she hasn't handed him. He'll just quietly make her safer and never once mention the debt.

But her ex builds his cruelty out of soft things, and he's timing every move to detonate the one good thing she's let herself have.

She's done making herself smaller. He's done believing he isn't allowed to want. And a brotherhood that moves the moment someone says there's a woman, a kid, and a problem isn't going anywhere.

Some ruins are the best thing that ever happened to you.

If you love a possessive protector who falls first, a curvy heroine who refuses to shrink, a found family that feeds you twice and calls you home, and a slow burn that earns every degree of its heat — start reading tonight.