A Cruel Arrangement

Easter Lanes is the narrator's place: her business, her home and the life she has built for herself. When a man comes in to rob it, she refuses to let anyone take it from her. She keeps to herself how she built that life, but one man may already know.

That man is Ashton Walden, someone she remembers from childhood. Even then she sensed he would turn dangerous. He now runs the Walden mafia family, and her father owes them so much that they practically own him. She and her father are estranged, and she wants no part of him or his debt.

The day after the attempted robbery, she does not wake up in a hospital. She wakes up in Ashton's home. He tells her that if she wants her livelihood back, she has to earn it back, and that sets the terms of the arrangement between them.

This is a romance with a mafia setting, told in first person by the woman. Ashton is a man trying to make amends, and she is the one who makes him want to keep his promises. The tone is intense and passionate, built on a forced bargain between two people with a shared past.