The Hermit

Grace Devlin entered an arranged marriage so that her sister, Ciara, could marry for love. Three years later she is a widow, and her father has arranged for Ciara to marry Dominik Varga — an assassin and arms dealer who is as dangerous as he is quiet, which is the part that unnerves her most.

A deal was a deal, and Grace kept her end of it. She has no intention of sitting back and smiling like a good girl while her sister is handed the same life she was forced to survive, so she sets out to fight for Ciara's freedom. Dominik makes that difficult. He is determined to get his hands on half of her father's empire, and when he moves into the family home, every routine Grace has built to keep herself steady falls apart around him.

She refuses to admit she is drawn to his darkness. Admitting it would mean finding out whether either of them survives the fire between them — and Grace is no longer only fighting for her sister.

The Hermit is a standalone full-length mafia romance and the first book in Michelle Heard's Mafia Empire series; the books are interconnected, and each follows a different couple to its own ending.