When She Tempts

Martina De Rossi is eighteen years old and entirely forbidden. Her brother, Damiano, is about to become Don, and there is no version of the world in which the men around him are allowed to look at her. Giorgio Girardi looks anyway.

When Giorgio agrees to keep Martina safe while Damiano wages a brutal war, he tells himself it is loyalty. It is not only loyalty. Martina is the perfect pawn in a game of revenge he has been building for years, and he is a man who has never once lost control of a plan. But protecting her means keeping her inside the walls of his remote Italian castle, and living alongside someone is a different discipline than watching them from a distance. His gaze starts to drift. His touch starts to linger. The game he was so sure of begins to look like one he may not win.

When She Tempts is the second book in Gabrielle Sands's The Fallen — a dark mafia romance built on an age gap, a bodyguard's professional silence, forced proximity and a burn slow enough to hurt. It is a complete romance in itself, though the wider Garzolo and De Rossi story runs through all four books. The author lists content warnings for violence, choking, spanking, explicit scenes, mentions of rape (not concerning the heroine, nothing on the page) and mentions of suicide.