The family burns basics. Trashes tropes. Their daughter isn't out for blood. She's out for the person who started the cliche that ended her. ✯ ✯ ✯ "Even though I dip your toothbrush in the toilet bowl, excessively steal your clothes, purposefully annoy the hell out of you, and wish at every 11:11 that you'd be in a body bag the next morning - you're still my sister. And we will always have one another's back." ✯ ✯ ✯ "You're a cute banana." "Excuse me?" "Yellow on the outside, white on the inside." He read my silence as confusion and added, "Your little brother there is an Oreo; black on the outside, white on the inside. Your pretty sister over there is a coconut; brown on the outside, white on-" "What the shit. That's how you want to hit on me?" +++ Wendzel Baxtard, a feminist killjoy armed with heavy loads of sarcasm and marinates herself in self-respect, is ready to destroy the ethnic slurs and derogatory terms that were brought on her because of the clothes she wore and her sexual behaviors.

Hope Montoya knows someone is poisoning her, but who? She suspects her mother was also poisoned and knows her father was murdered. Who wants her family eliminated? She vows to fight! She realizes she won’t last the eight months until she turns twenty-five and her uncle no longer controls her or her estate. Never will she be dominated by a man as she was by her father, as she has seen her mother and grandmothers dominated. If she marries, she gains control now, but only if she weds a man she can trust. Only one man meets her requirements. Can she trust him to protect her and capture the killer...but then to leave? Micah Stone has been in love with Hope since the first time he saw her. But he was accused of her father’s murder and surely would have hung if not for his two brothers’ aid. Most in the community still believe him guilty. But the drought has him too worried about water for his dying cattle to care about his neighbors’ opinions. When Hope proposes a paper marriage in exchange for land on the Brazos River and much needed cash, her offer rubs his pride raw. His name may be Stone, but he’s not made of it. He can’t refuse her for long, and so their adventure begins. He and Hope have to stay alive and discover the killer before they become victims in the deadly assaults.