A Deal with the Devil

Tali takes a six-week job as a personal assistant to steady her own stalled life. She has a novel nobody would buy and a decade-long relationship she is still getting over. The man she is working for makes no effort to be pleasant about it.

Hayes Flynn is a British plastic surgeon. His Hollywood reputation runs on good scotch and women he never sees twice. He treats Tali's help as barely worth his attention at first. But running his house and his calendar puts her close enough to see what the charm is covering: a heartbreak he has carried, unaddressed, for ten years.

Told from Tali's side alone, the book lets the banter between them stay sharp even as the ground shifts under it, from employer and hire toward something neither one signed up for. It builds slowly rather than quickly. The tenderness that surfaces once the sniping drops is where the story does its real work, before it turns explicit.

A Deal with the Devil opens O'Roark's four-book Grumpy Devils series. It keeps its scope small: one house, two people learning what the other is actually like underneath.