His Contemptuous Bride

Bianca Ferrante is her family's entire negotiating strategy. When her father needs to end a two-year war with the O'Malleys, he offers her in marriage to the oldest son. Ardan O'Malley runs his family's legitimate business and most of the illegitimate ones, and has no intention of marrying the daughter of the man who shot his mother. He takes the deal because his father gave him no choice and because some humiliated part of him wants her in the house where he can see her. She arrives in November with one suitcase and her grandmother's recipe book. Six months across a hallway. Separate dinners. One conversation a week that is really a treaty. She learns the household, the staff, the way his hands shake only when he's still. Then she finds a file in her father's forwarded papers that rearranges everything she was told, and she brings it to the man who has been trained not to believe her. He leaves for three days. When he comes back, he sits at the foot of her bed and asks her to start from the beginning.