AllFreeNovel
Share Us
For updates on new releases and when part 2 of Stolen Bride is available, join my newsletter: https://sendfox.com/lp/19l8lv
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melverna McFarlane loves love stories with Happily Ever Afters. After years of characters taunting her imagination with their potential, she decided it was time to write her own scorching hot romances. She moved to America from Jamaica at a young age, and has lived up and down the east coast most of her life. The bitterly cold winter of 2013 was the last straw, driving her back to island life—this time to Hawaii. When not writing, she is reading romance, YA, and Fantasy, country hopping, or vicariously obsessing over other people’s cats, because she can’t have one. She loves to hear from readers.
Join her on:
Website - www.MelvernaMcFarlane.com
Drop her a line, or tease her with pics and stories of your cat’s antics. She might feature them in her next book.
DARE YOU
QUINN MARLOWE
Copyright © 2023 by Spitfire Press
All rights reserved.
Spitfire Press and colophon are property of Glass House Press, LLC, and may not be reproduced.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any names of characters, business, places, events, or incidents are fictitious or have been used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.
Cover: JS designs
1
BROOKS
“Your husband,” I told my best friend in the whole world, “is a complete asshole.” I dropped into the seat across the table from her, reached for one of the margaritas she'd mixed, and took an enormous swallow.
“That’s true,” Sloane agreed calmly. “But what are we actually going to do about him?”
God, I fucking loved that girl. I knew a lot of people in this town--a lot of people who depended on me for a lot of shit and were, for the most part, pretty open to whatever I had to say. But I didn’t think any of them would have let me insult their significant other without blinking an eye.
Of course, I’d known Sloane Brennan-Rossi--and her husband, Joseph--since we were too young to realize that the three of us shouldn’t have been friends at all. The princess of the Irish mob, the heir of the biggest Italian family in the city, and the...
Well, me. The girl who didn’t have anything to do with the mafia. Technically.
Even though I could have been running the entire fucking city when I was about ten years old, and doing a better job of it than some of the biggest guys out there.
The thought made me grin, and I leaned my elbows on the table and turned my eyes to my friends. Sloane was married to Joseph now, and you would have thought that’d give us some freedom to actually do things. Our families--the Rossis and the Brennans--were currently embroiled in an enormous war with enemies we still hadn’t named, and Those In Charge had yet to make any big breakthroughs in terms of what the hell was going on.
You’d think they would have been glad to accept some help. Instead, they shut Sloane and me down every time we opened our mouths. And don’t even get me started on Penny. She might be Michael’s new little pet but he and Joseph seemed absolutely committed to thinking she didn’t have anything in her head aside from bubble gum and hearts.
And I was getting really tired of it. Sloane was one of the top lawyers in the city, Penny could run circles around anyone else when it came to numbers, and I was... well, let’s just call me a ‘fixer,’ and leave it at that. We had good contacts. We had information the menfolk would never have had access to. We had brains that could put them to shame.
And yet.
I took another sip of my margarita, slower this time, and called the meeting to order. “What are we going to do about him? I’ve got some ideas. But if Joseph and Michael found out about them...”
I made a face. I could imagine exactly what Joseph would do if he knew the plans that were running through my head. He’d never been good at letting us girls do anything he thought was ‘risky,’ and his brother was even worse.
Control freaks, both of them.
Not that I’d ever cared much.
