The Devil You Marry: A Dark Mafia Romance (The Vales of Ashford Harbor Book 1)

They killed my father. Then they sent a car to make me one of them.

For years my father kept the Vale family's secrets — in a locked ledger and a closed mouth — and it kept us both breathing. Until the night they ran his car off the Blackwater bridge and called it ice. There was no ice. There was only a crime family that decided he knew too much, and a daughter left holding his stopped watch and a debt no one else would ever come to collect.

So when the Vales came looking for a peace offering — a bride to end their war and bind two mafia families in blood — I did the one thing the grieving daughter of a murdered man is never supposed to do.

I said yes.

I walked up the long drive of Halloway House with hate for a heart and my father's last secret sewn into the lining of my coat, and I let them marry me to Kieran Vale — the cold, beautiful heir to the deadliest family on the coast. A man with a cliffside mansion full of ghosts, a smile like a locked door, and eyes that see everything in the world except the knife I carried in with me.

He thinks he married a hostage. A pawn. A quiet, convenient wife who'll learn to be grateful.

He has no idea he married the one person alive who came to burn his family to the ground.

But Halloway House keeps its secrets the way it keeps its brides — close, and cold, and buried. And the deeper I dig into what really happened to my father, the more the tidy little story I was handed comes apart in my hands. The man I married is more prisoner than prince. The war between our families was never really theirs to fight. And the true danger in this house was never the devil I married.

It's the hand behind him. The one that's been moving both families like pieces on a board for longer than either of us has been alive. The one that murdered my father to keep a secret worth a war — and is not finished collecting.

I came here to destroy Kieran Vale.

Instead I'm going to have to trust him — because falling for the devil you married is the most dangerous thing I've ever done, and it may be the only thing that keeps us both alive.

He was supposed to be my revenge.

He was never supposed to be the one thing worth walking out of the fire to keep.

The Devil You Marry is a scorching, slow-burn dark mafia romance — Book One of The Vales of Ashford Harbor. Each book follows a new couple and ends in a guaranteed happily-ever-after. Kieran and Wren's story is complete. No cliffhanger.

- Arranged marriage / marriage of convenience
- Enemies to lovers, ice-cold hero, vengeful heroine
- A crime family with a buried, deadly secret
- Forced proximity in a gothic cliffside mansion
- Slow burn to scorching
- She married him for revenge — and stayed for love

For readers 18+. Contains dark themes and violence.