Kept Under Him

I wasn't supposed to see anything. Wrong bar, wrong booth, wrong night to duck out the back door of my own bakery's supply entrance because the walk-in freezer was broken and I needed air.

I saw a dead man's shoes before I saw the man who killed him.

Rhys Kane doesn't do mercy. He does math — bodies, debts, silence, and what it costs to keep his family's name out of the papers. I should have been a line item. Instead, he put me in the back of a car, took my phone, and told me I belonged to him now, whether I wanted to or not.

He calls it protection. I call it a cage with better lighting.

But cages don't usually have a man in them who looks at you like he's the one under threat — like every locked door between us is the only thing keeping him from something he wants worse than my silence. And I hate how much I notice the way his hands go gentle right after they've gone lethal. I hate how safe I feel in the house of a man everyone else is terrified of.

The people hunting me don't care that I never meant to see what I saw. Rhys's own family doesn't care that keeping me alive is a liability. And I don't know anymore if the thing I need to survive is a way out of this house — or him.

This is a high-heat, fully explicit dark romance with a possessive, morally gray hero, forced proximity, and a heroine who refuses to be anyone's quiet victim. Intended for readers 18+.

Tropes: Mafia Romance / Forced Proximity / Possessive Alpha / Protective Captor / Witness-in-Hiding / Guaranteed HEA