Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
He’s utterly gorgeous. Completely ruthless. The Russian mafia boss everyone’s afraid of.
I shouldn’t be attracted to this man. But then he buys the building so my bookstore doesn’t have to close. Kills any man who touches me. And looks at me with a gaze that melts the clothes from my body. He growls in my ear that he’s a monster I should run from, but neither of us can resist. We give in for one crazy night….
Then I see too much and Radimir has to choose: kill me, or force a ring onto my finger.
Now I’m living in his penthouse and the calendar’s counting down the days to our wedding. I start to see a side of him no one else does. This monster has a heart…and I’m falling for him.
Now we’re trapped in a web of lies with his enemies closing in. No one thinks a curvy, bookish woman like me can survive in the brutal world of the Bratva. But I’ve been underestimated my entire life. I’ll do whatever it takes, become the mafia queen he needs me to be. This is my story and I’m fighting for my happy-ever-after.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
BRONWYN
I still remember the exact moment Radimir Aristov marched into my bookstore. I had no idea who he was. What he was. Or that, eight weeks later, we’d be married.
I just sold him a book. And then everything just kind of...spun out of control.
It was past seven in the evening and outside the store’s big glass windows a blizzard was raging. A real Midwest special, the kind you only really get in Chicago, where the wind screeching between the buildings makes your ears ache, the cold slices straight through your clothes and the snow forms deep, crunchy drifts that soak the ankles of your jeans.
But inside All You Need Is Books it was warm and snug. I cannot let it get cold because cold means damp, and damp turns books into swollen, misshapen monsters no one wants to buy. That’s my excuse for running the heating full blast, despite the bills...and okay, yes, also I hate being cold. And my customers appreciated it, as they quietly wandered the aisles, reading blurbs and piling up books to bring to the register.
It’s not a big store. And if you look too closely at where the vanilla-milkshake walls meet the sky-blue ceiling, you’ll see the edges are messy because I was balancing on a stepladder to paint it. But it’s mine.
I looked around and smiled to myself. I was beyond exhausted: the store was losing money, so I’d started opening for twelve hours a day, eight till eight. Sometimes, my best friend Jen works a shift to help out but today I’d been on my own the whole time. Between serving customers, I’d sorted and shelved new stock, swept and tidied and fixed a leaking pipe that could have turned the romance section into papier mâché. I still needed to make a costume for the kid’s story time session I’d organized and bundle up some books for a local reading charity. I’d been on my feet all day and my joints had thrown a hissy fit: it felt like someone had poured burning hot sand into my knees and ankles. But in calm, quiet moments like this, when I could look around at all the readers engrossed in their new read, or hunting for their next one, it was worth it.
Then the door opened, and my life changed forever.
The howl of the wind shattered the silence. Freezing air flooded the store, making people shiver and curse and sending snowflakes all the way to the Biographies section in the back. Everyone looked up.
A man was standing in the doorway, scowling. His eyes flicked over the wooden shelves, the books, the people, and his jaw tightened in suspicion. The wind was shrieking around him so fiercely it made me hunch my shoulders in sympathy, but the cold didn’t seem to bother him. It was our strange world of warmth and comfort that he didn’t trust.
He stepped into the light, and I got my first good look at him. Big, well over six feet, with shoulders that almost brushed the doorframe and a broad, hulking chest. He had the build of a firefighter, but he was wearing a three-piece suit and an overcoat, like he’d come from a board meeting. He was looking down, dusting snow from his waistcoat, so all I could see was soft curls of glossy black hair. Then he looked up and—
Oh God, he was gorgeous. People talk about classic looks, and suddenly I knew what they meant: he was like a statue of some ancient leader brought to life. He had high, sculpted cheekbones that made me think of somewhere distant and cold: I could imagine him standing on a frozen battlefield, commanding thousands of troops. That hard, dispassionate upper lip: that was made for snapping out orders. And that soft, sensuous lower one...that was made for kissing willful barbarian queens into submission.