Girl who works at a brothal cleaning until she's bought. Sassy woman Rough dominant cowboy Monday updates Not set in current time Lila had one chance to escape her old life a train ticket and a handful of hidden coins. Instead, she found herself standing in a dusty frontier church, forced into marriage with Jace Harlan, the hard-eyed rancher who bought her to fill the empty rooms of his sprawling ranch house. From the moment the vows are spoken, Jace makes his intentions brutally clear: Lila is his wife now, and he intends to keep her. When she tries to run on their wedding night he catches her in the pitch-black scrubland bends her over his knee and teaches her the first of many painful lessons with his belt. Then he claims her completely against the barn wall rough, thorough, and without mercy marking her so deeply that no other man will ever want her. But Jace isn't just a brute. He's a man who builds for the future: a big house meant for children, a prosperous spread, and a wife he plans to tame and protect. Between stern discipline and surprising tenderness he slowly chips away at Lila's defiance. He tends her welts with gentle hands and wraps her in his clean shirts and offers her small tastes of freedom on the open range always on his terms. Lila fights him at every turn but each punishment leaves her sore and aching in more ways than one. As the days pass on the remote ranch, the line between hatred and unwanted desire begins to blur. Can a woman stolen into marriage find a way to breathe in the shadow of a possessive rancher... or will she ultimately surrender to the man who refuses to let her go?

BOOK 1 IN THE MORETTI SERIES A story about an oppressed young woman and a ruthless Mafia man arranged to be married in a world neither of them asked to be born in. *SLOWBURN ROMANCE* *Morally grey Male lead.* *Innocent Female lead.*

Can be read as a stand-alone. You can skip the First Part. Athena thought that she had found her happy ending with her family but her story was far from over. Thrust into an unknown world where her old nightmares and horrors are at every corner, will she manage to reunite with her family or she will lose the will to fight and remain stuck in this vicious cycle forever?