Belrose Press

Junie Barlow came home from nursing school to bury her brother. The Lost Hounds Motorcycle Club paid for the coffin. Their president, Alaric Draeger, forty-eight years old, stood in the church doorway with a bruise on his jaw and never came in. She takes the only job in town that will have her - bartending at the club's bar - and spends six months listening to drunk men tell her two different stories about how her brother died. The truth is worse than either. He was selling club routes to pay her tuition. Alaric let him. Alaric didn't get there in time. In January she moves into the clubhouse to keep the books. Alaric tells her to leave four times. She stops counting. In April the rival crew comes for the clubhouse, and Junie is the one on the roof with a rifle. And Alaric is the one who carries her brother's dog out of the fire and takes a bullet doing it.

Ein gestrichener Flug. Ein Mietwagen. Vierzehnhundert Meilen von Vancouver nach Columbus. Anton Vasko und Kade Moreau sind seit drei Saisons das beste Verteidigerpaar der Coastal League - und die einzigen beiden Menschen, die jemals in die Wohnung des jeweils anderen durften. Sebastian Oduya ist einundzwanzig, gerade erst hochgezogen und trägt einen Ordner mit Videomaterial bei sich, um den jede Mannschaft der Division kämpft. Vier Tage auf der Straße, kein Empfang, keine Privatsphäre und ein Motel nach dem anderen. In Nebraska hat einer von ihnen es laut ausgesprochen. In Iowa hat der nächste zugegeben, es seit Jahren gewusst zu haben. In Ohio hat der dritte entschieden, für welches Team er wirklich spielen will. Es ist kein Verein. Eine dunkle MMM-Hockey-Romanze über den Raum zwischen zwei Männern - und den Dritten, der genau hineinpasst.

Romy Delgado has run the only bakery in Cardinal Falls since she was twenty-two, and since she was fifteen she has not once asked Kade Brennan why he walked her to her quinceañera like it was an escort job. Kade is forty-eight, the Hollow Kings' road captain, and twenty years sober. He comes in at five in the morning, sits on the curb, and waits for the club's business to be over before he walks inside. He has kept that line for nine years. Then someone firebombs Romy's back door, and Kade stops keeping lines. Ten days in Bakersfield with his sister. No club, no back room, no reason to stay on opposite sides of a counter. Just a man who cannot bake and a woman who has been in love with him since she was old enough to know better. Coming home will cost him the patch. He's already decided. An age gap MC romance with sugar, diesel, and a very bad apprentice baker.

Senator Sellers' chief of staff has survived four years of politics without blinking. Then a package arrives with her home address on it, and the office assigns her a shadow: Marcus Rivas, ex-Rangers, half-Dominican, all silence, and completely unmoved by her schedule. He moves in, takes her keys, and starts running drills she didn't agree to. Nadia Sellers does not get scared. She does not get distracted. She absolutely does not fall for the man who confiscated her own front door. Then the threat turns out to be someone she hired, someone she defended, someone who knows every move she makes. Marcus wants to pull her out. Nadia has a vote to win. A taut, steamy BWWM interracial bodyguard romance about two people who spend their lives protecting everything except themselves.

Delia Vance came to Hemlock Bend to bury her grandmother and empty a print shop. She was not planning to inherit a locked drawer. Inside it: thirty years of letters between her grandmother and the retired sheriff, describing three deaths that were never called murders. The only person in town who will read them seriously is Sheriff Judd Calloway, who was the deputy back then, and who has been carrying the same three names in silence ever since. He tells her to hand the letters to the state. Someone breaks in and steals them anyway. Now Delia and Judd are rebuilding the evidence letter by letter in the back room of a print shop, and the trail leads to the family that built the town's clinic and never asked for thanks. Somebody in Hemlock Bend wants Delia gone, and Judd, fifty-four and careful to a fault, is running out of careful. A small town age gap romantic suspense with ink on its hands.

Simone Adeyemi is the engineer behind Halcyon's most important product. Adrian Voss is the man brought in to sell the company. He's forty-three, impossible, and the only person who has ever read her code closely enough to disagree with it. They fight for three weeks. Then the lights go out, and so do both of them. He's her boss. She's about to be his director. The board wants her team gone. He has a choice: take the deal, or take her side. He chooses her. A sizzling hot age gap billionaire boss romance about code, ambition, and the man who gave up the corner office for the server room.

Calla Brennan has three days, forty thousand dollars of debt, and a courier job offer that smells wrong. She takes it anyway. She wakes up in a holding cell above a gas giant, is sold at market to a man in a grey coat, and decides within the hour that she is not going to be a victim of anything, including her own bad decisions. Torvun runs the Emberpalace, the biggest fight arena on the station, and he needs a physician who will not report him. What he gets is a woman who negotiates her own purchase contract and then starts auditing his supply closet. She patches his fighters, catches his quartermaster stealing, and slowly works out that the list of Earth deportees he keeps in a drawer has her name on it. When the people who sold her come back for their property, Torvun sets fire to the only home he has ever had. Calla has the burns to nurse and passage to book, and she is not leaving anyone behind.

Nova Pratt buries her father on a Tuesday and inherits a shop she can't afford to keep. On Wednesday, three Reyes brothers ride in and offer to buy it. Diego, Mateo, and Cruz don't look like billionaires. They look like trouble with a fleet of bikes and a clean-energy empire behind them. The deal is simple: take the money, sign the NDA, never ask why. Nova asks why. What she finds ties her father's name to theirs and sets three very dangerous men on her side of the fight. Now she rides with them, sleeps in their clubhouse ranch, and helps them settle a blood debt that started before she was born. A billionaire boss why-choose romance with engines, leather, and three men who share the ride.

I was never meant to be anything but a debt. Anya Kovalenko has spent her whole life being her father's collateral. When he loses one hand of cards too many, she becomes the Bratva's - handed to Dmitri Sokolov, the enforcer they call the Butcher, as collateral on a debt that will never be paid. Dmitri doesn't want a wife. He wants the ledger her father stole, and Anya is the only lever that opens her father's mouth. But when the old man vanishes with the codes and the Sicilians come looking, Anya becomes the one thing Dmitri never expected to want to keep alive. He locks her in his penthouse. He teaches her the numbers. He starts calling her *zhena* like it means something. When her father surfaces, Dmitri doesn't hand her a choice in words. He hands her a gun. I shot the only family I had and I did not look away. Now I sit at the table, wearing a dead man's name, and the Butcher is looking at me like I'm the most dangerous thing in the room. He's right.

Sera Voss was a hydroponics tech until the Vhal took her station. Now she's lot 44 on a war moon, and three warlords have pooled their credits to buy her. Kaelith wants the schematics in her head. Vorr wants a translator for his slave crews. Thane wants an heir for a clan line that's already dead - he just doesn't know it yet. Sera bargains instead: one season of work, then a ship and her freedom. The triptych agrees, each certain the others will break her first. They don't. She learns their language, their politics, their beds. She finds the gene vaults and the lie the whole moon is built on. And when the council comes, she's offered her freedom papers - and burns them. Because the war moon needs a consort who chose it. And Sera Voss chooses all three.

Liv Marchetti has been married to a rider, buried him, and sworn off the whole thing. She fixes broken men for a living and sends them home. Then Rhys came in with a bad break and a bad attitude and she told him he'd be back in two weeks. He came back in nine days. He comes back again the week after that. Liv knows exactly who he is. She also knows exactly how this ends, because she has been here before, at the cemetery, at the funeral, in the black dress. The only thing she doesn't know yet is whether Rhys can be the exception. A biker romance with a mountain town and a slow ride. Halloway Creek, book nine.

Nell Carver buried her father on a Tuesday and lost the ranch by Friday. Dante Vescari bought the Silver Spur with cash in a duffel bag and a name the county whispers about. He needs a wife to hold the land. She needs his protection to find out who killed her father. It's a contract, not a marriage - until the first night he takes her against the tack room wall and neither of them remembers whose name is on the deed. But Dante's family didn't send him west to ranch. They sent him to bury something, and Nell is standing on top of it. When his cousin comes to collect, Dante has to choose between the blood he was born to and the woman he branded with his hands. Some secrets burn clean. This one leaves a scar.

Vera Korsakova's brother died owing the Sokolov brothers sixty thousand dollars and a card room they now want. At his funeral, Dmitri Sokolov offers her a deal: the room, or the family. Vera offers a third option. She keeps the room. She keeps the books. And she keeps all three brothers-the boss, the knife, and the accountant-as husbands the borough of Brighton Beach will never officially acknowledge. It works until the Kagan family firebombs the door and the FBI starts asking about a ledger her brother left behind. Now Vera has to run a war, a card room, and a household of three dangerous men who are only well-behaved when she is in the room. She is going to fix the Kagans, the feds, and her marriage, in that order, before Christmas.

Salt Creek Academy is a boarding school for the children of wealth and the children of the people who move wealth. Kira Alcántara is the second kind. She's there on a family scholarship, riding the best horses on campus, keeping the wrong books like a secret she has to keep breathing. Then a man named Calder Reign shows up as the new groundskeeper. He's twenty-eight, an enforcer for the syndicate that pays her tuition, and she is not supposed to look at him twice. The dean is skimming. There's a courier on campus. There's a fire in the south barn and a copied ledger under a mattress. Kira is about to find out exactly how much her scholarship is worth - and to whom. The rules here were never meant to protect her.

Teagan Hollis has coached Olympic lifters and one Olympic cheat. This is not going to be the hard part. Three players on her list, all of them forced into a season of supervised mentorship after an incident nobody has been allowed to read about. Dax, who is the captain and would like everyone to forget that. Owen, who doesn't talk. Matty, who does, constantly, at the wrong moments, to reporters. One rule. Nothing off the ice. Nothing on the record. They break it three times, on three road trips, in three cities that are not on the schedule. Then a photograph lands in her personal inbox, and the general manager gives her the usual choice: resign quietly, or name a name. Teagan does neither. She opens a file in her own paperwork that was never meant to be there - and takes it to the people who can actually do something about it.

Amara Sato has been someone else since she was fourteen. She's good at it. Then a stranger recognises her at a bar, the Marshals move her overnight, and she wakes up in a Blue Ridge estate with a man called Kade Rourke who took her phone before he took her name. He says it's protection. The rules say otherwise: locked gates, dead air, no leaving. For three months Amara studies the house the way she once studied her father's enemies - and finds the thing she was never meant to see. The order to kill her has already been signed. It's waiting for a verdict that hasn't happened yet. Kade has been stalling it. Now the only way out of the estate is through the man keeping her in it - and the only way to stay alive is to burn down the senator who built the house in the first place.

Three seconds. That is how long Imani Cole stood at her own wedding while her groom checked his phone. Somebody filmed it. It trended. It is still trending five years later, in three languages, and Imani has spent every one of those years as the secret wife of the CEO. No public announcement, ever - the marriage contract terminates if either of them is acknowledged without notice. So Imani built a division he never noticed, quietly, profitably, from Lisbon, and filed for divorce the morning the clip trended again. Renner finds out from a Bloomberg terminal. What he finds next in discovery is worse: two years of his own company turning a profit under a name he never asked about. Both of them built something. Neither of them said anything.

Jolene Hart hasn't been back to Kenmore since her mother's funeral. Karl's will brings her back: one house, one service bay, one condition - both signatures required. Her stepbrother Deacon has been paying the property tax for eleven years and running couriers out of the bay, and he will not sign. Neither will she. So they move back into a house with thin walls and one very old story, and they start finding out what happened in the year Jolene was thirteen, when Deacon was sent away at seventeen and nobody said why. He never wrote. He never missed a tax payment. He is exactly as steady and immovable as she remembers, and considerably more dangerous, and the line between them is a decision they make together at the end of chapter eight. A slow, adult, dark stepbrother MC romance about buried houses, unpaid debts, and two names on one sign.

Jolene Hart war seit der Beerdigung ihrer Mutter nicht mehr in Kenmore. Karls Testament bringt sie zurück: ein Haus, eine Werkstatt, eine Bedingung - beide Unterschriften erforderlich. Ihr Stiefbruder Deacon zahlt seit elf Jahren die Grundsteuer und betreibt Kurierfahrten aus der Werkstatt, und er wird nicht unterschreiben. Sie auch nicht. Also ziehen sie zurück in ein Haus mit dünnen Wänden und einer sehr alten Geschichte, und sie beginnen herauszufinden, was in dem Jahr geschah, als Jolene dreizehn war, als Deacon mit siebzehn weggeschickt wurde und niemand sagte, warum. Er hat nie geschrieben. Er hat nie eine Steuerzahlung versäumt. Er ist genau so beständig und unerschütterlich, wie sie ihn in Erinnerung hat, und deutlich gefährlicher, und die Grenze zwischen ihnen ist eine Entscheidung, die sie gemeinsam am Ende von Kapitel acht treffen. Eine langsame, erwachsene, dunkle Stiefbruder-MC-Romanze über begrabene Häuser, unbezahlte Schulden und zwei Namen auf einem Schild.

New Mexico, 1919. Marisol Armendariz has kept her uncle's ledgers for six years - every bribe, every body, every mile of the Vermejo route between Socorro and the Colorado line. Then her uncle decides she knows too much, and the man he sends to kill her is the only one who doesn't. Elias Cain came back from France with a limp, a talent for quiet work, and a family who doesn't say his name. He was paid to bury her in the desert. He rides her north instead. Now two outlaws and one stolen horse are paying off a syndicate one bad debt at a time, with twenty men behind them and a wedding license in front of them they only meant as a legal shield. When you rob the family that raised you, you burn the road home.

Six years ago, Elena Marsh told a courtroom the truth about Kiril Volkov, and he went away for it. Now she is back for her mother's funeral, and the boy she testified against owns this town - the docks, the cops, and every door she needs to walk through to bury her mother and leave. He does not want her gone. He wants her enrolled at Thornbury U, living in a house he pays for, in a debt he says she will never finish paying. She plans to hate him until she can escape him. Then she finds her mother's things in his garage, and a forged signature on a death certificate, and a boy under the monster who has been keeping a promise for six years that nobody ever asked him to make. He is going to burn everything he built to keep her safe. She is going to let him.

Her father's liquor license, her brother's scholarship, and the shop's counter all run through the Moretti family's marker. They do not want the money. They want a wife. Alessio Moretti is forty-three, a billionaire, the family's quietest man, and the reason four hundred pharmacies across two states belong to the Morettis on paper. He has not been seen in public in five years. Vera Ochoa is twenty-five, and she cuts meat for a living. She reads the contract twice. She signs once. What nobody told either of them is that the marriage is a leash - and leashes pull both directions. A mafia billionaire age gap romance about a purchase, a spreadsheet, and a woman who handles the second visit herself.

Sofia Ferrante makes the best bread in Palermo and wants nothing to do with the family name she was born under. Then the family needs her. Six months in a farmhouse above Cefalù with Marco Giordano - the man who took her brother's seat, and now her ring. No wedding, no guests, no love. Just a locked study, a silent husband, and a marriage designed to keep the peace. Sofia shouldn't be able to bake in that kitchen. She shouldn't be able to make the man in the study come out for the smell of it. And she absolutely shouldn't find the file on her brother in a room she wasn't supposed to enter. Marco took the seat to save her brother's life. Sofia is about to hand the evidence to the consiglieri and burn her marriage down to save her husband's name. One of them can survive this. She is planning for both.

Rosalind Vaccaro came to Collevere to sell her grandmother's bakery, not to solve a murder. But when a regular customer dies at the corner table with a silver sugar spoon in her hand, the constable calls it natural causes and Rosalind calls it a lie. Maddalena was her grandmother's oldest friend. Maddalena was holding a receipt Rosalind never printed. And every question Rosalind asks leads her closer to the town's quiet capo, Tommaso Ferraro, who owns half the storefronts and, it turns out, has been paying her grandmother's taxes for eleven years. Someone in Collevere wants the past left alone. Rosalind has a bakery, a notebook, and the whole piazza behind her. She intends to find out who - before the ovens go cold for good.

Cassia Brooks works nights. She knows the sound of a bad call from six streets away and she has never once needed a doctor to tell her when she is right. Until Hollis Adeyemi-Briggs shows up at her hospital with new protocols, a Nairobi accent, and fifty-two years of being right about everything. She files a complaint against him in her first week. He accepts it with the expression of a man who is used to this. They should hate each other. They do. Then a bus comes apart on the A13 and Cassia, off shift, in her own clothes, does not leave the resus floor for fourteen hours. Neither does he. Everyone on night shift has already bet on them. Hollis's ex-wife still calls at three in the morning. His daughter has opinions. The inquiry panel wants someone's head. Cassia has been underestimated by men like Hollis for her entire career. She is not planning to start making exceptions now.

Lila Morgan's dream job comes with a catch: pretend to be married to Noah Kessler, the most notorious billionaire in Los Angeles. It's supposed to be temporary-a year of holding hands for cameras and smiling at galas. But Noah isn't the arrogant playboy she expected. He's kind, funny, and surprisingly insecure about his humble roots. As their fake marriage starts to feel real, Lila must decide if she's willing to risk her career for a love that was never part of the contract. A charming, witty marriage of convenience.

Lila Morgans Traumjob hat einen Haken: Sie soll sich als Ehefrau von Noah Kessler ausgeben, dem berüchtigtsten Milliardär von Los Angeles. Ein Jahr lang Händchenhalten für die Kameras, Lächeln auf Galas - dann ist der Spuk vorbei. Doch Noah ist nicht der arrogante Playboy, den sie erwartet hat. Er ist freundlich, witzig und überraschend unsicher wegen seiner einfachen Herkunft. Als die Fake-Ehe sich echt anfühlt, muss Lila sich entscheiden: Karriere oder Liebe - eine Liebe, die nie im Vertrag stand. Eine charmante, witzige Ehe-auf-Zeit-Romanze.

Simone Adeyemi ist die Ingenieurin hinter Halcyons wichtigstem Produkt. Adrian Voss ist der Mann, der die Firma verkaufen soll. Er ist dreiundvierzig, unmglich und der Einzige, der ihren Code je so genau gelesen hat, dass er widersprechen konnte. Drei Wochen lang kämpfen sie. Dann fällt der Strom aus und bei ihnen beiden ebenfalls. Er ist ihr Boss. Sie steht kurz davor, seine Direktorin zu werden. Der Vorstand will ihr Team loswerden. Er hat die Wahl: den Deal annehmen oder ihre Seite wählen. Er wählt sie. Eine heiße Boss-Romance mit Altersunterschied und Milliardär über Code, Ehrgeiz und den Mann, der das Eckbüro für den Serverraum aufgab.

I broke the only rule I had. One night with the president of the Devil's Fork MC, and by morning I was gone - pregnant, terrified, and certain he'd never want us. Three years later, my son needs his father's medical history, and I have no choice but to walk back through those doors. Baz Mercer doesn't do second chances. He does orders, loyalty, and silence. But when he sees the boy - his boy - something in him breaks open. He wants us. The club doesn't. The feds are watching. And the only way out is the one thing I swore I'd never do again: trust him. This time, though, he's not letting me run.

Calla Boone moved to Pember Hollow for a small life: her daughter, a kitchen with a window, and a driveway of her own. Her neighbor owns the white house at the end of the lane and waves but never says hello. In November Calla hears knocking through the shared well pipe, and when the state police are four days out, she lets herself into a house she was invited to water plants in. A cozy single-mom autumn romance with a dark captive neigbor next door, a pie on the mailbox, and a daughter who has already picked out her new best friend.

I have one rule as a wedding planner: never take a job from the Varela family. Then a deposit hit my account with my signature already on the contract, and I had nine days to stage the wedding of the year for the most dangerous family on the border. Mateo Varela signed it. He runs the legitimate half and pretends not to know about the rest, and he doesn't negotiate with people he's already bought. Then a rival crew shot up my rehearsal dinner, and we spent the next nine days sealed inside a hacienda with a guest list containing four people who want us dead. The wedding has to happen on schedule. It's the only thing holding the truce together. And the only two people who can pull it off are the bride's brother and the planner he trapped into it. We built it together. Seating charts. Menus. A lie about us, to keep the guests from asking questions. On the day, the bride walked out. The truce still needed a marriage. It just didn't say whose.

The last nurse left in a body bag. I found her notebook in a supply closet on my first day. Three brothers own this surgical center. They are brilliant, they are rich, and all three of them are lying. Julien says it was a complication. Bastien says it was his father. Loïc says nothing and follows me home. Every page I turn gets me closer to the truth - and closer to the one man who can make all of this stop. Whether that's an arrest or a funeral depends on which brother gets to him first. A why choose doctor thriller: three surgeons, one dead nurse, and a romance you won't survive politely.