A Rose for Vengeance

ROSALIE

Forty-seven contracts. Forty-seven bodies. Forty-seven black roses left behind for the men who paid to have someone buried.

I have never missed.

Cesare Orsini is supposed to be number forty-eight.

A wealthy, calculating mafia boss with a private army, a reputation that precedes him, and enough enemies to keep me employed for years.

I enter his bedroom with a loaded gun and a black rose.

He is sitting in a chair, waiting for me.

He knows my name. He knows how I work. And when I pull the trigger, nothing happens.

Now I am bleeding on the floor of his house, surrounded by men who want me dead, while the man I came to kill offers me a glass of water.

Cesare wants something from me.

I intend to find out what it is before I put a bullet between his eyes.

The problem is that he has started giving me things I have never had. A room with an unlocked door. A place at his table. The freedom to tell him no.

And when he looks at me, I find myself wondering what those careful hands would feel like against my bare skin.

I was trained to kill men like Cesare Orsini. Nobody taught me what to do when I wanted one of them in my bed.

CESARE

I spent three years looking for a woman whose employers have made certain she does not exist.

No photograph. No address. No real name.

Only a trail of dead men and black roses.

When I finally find her, I arrange for her to come to me.

She arrives through my bedroom window with a gun in her hand and blood on her clothes. She is smaller than I expected, considerably more dangerous, and furious when she discovers I have been expecting her.

I have every reason to keep her close.

The people who trained her have information I need, and Rosalie is the only person who can lead me to them.

But she watches every door. Counts every step I take toward her. Sleeps with a weapon close enough to reach.

And I am discovering that I enjoy the moments when she forgets to be afraid of me.

I paid a fortune to bring an assassin into my house. I had not anticipated wanting her to stay after the job was done.

Especially when she starts looking at my mouth instead of my hands.

I know what she is capable of.

I know what will happen if she discovers how much I arranged before the night we met.

For now, she is sleeping in my house, eating at my table, and learning precisely how much trouble she can cause me.

And I have never enjoyed being in danger quite so much.

This is the first book in the A Rose Full of Thorns Series.

Reading order:

A Rose for Vengeance

A Rose for Blood

A Rose for Burial

308 pages. Kindle edition.