Wicked Acquisition

She was taken as collateral. She stayed by choice.<BR>When Valentina Greco's father can't pay his debt, Damien Rowe doesn't take the restaurant.<BR>He takes her.<BR>No negotiation. No apology. Just a black car, a penthouse on the forty-third floor, and a man who says you can't leave with the same flat certainty he uses for everything else - like it's simply the way things are and she should probably accept that.<BR>She doesn't accept it.<BR>What she does instead is pay attention.<BR>She maps the building. She learns the hierarchy. She finds the edges of every rule he gives her and tests every single one. She watches the most dangerous man she's ever met eat everything on his plate at midnight and say thank you like it means something, and she starts to understand that the man the world sees and the man who comes to her kitchen at midnight are not entirely the same person.<BR>Damien Rowe built his empire from nothing so that no one could ever take anything from him again. He took Valentina because she stood in a burning restaurant and looked at him like she wasn't afraid, and he needed to know if that was real.<BR>It was real.<BR>What he didn't plan for was everything that came after.<BR>Wicked Acquisition is an intensely steamy dark mafia romance about a dangerous man who takes what he wants and slowly, painstakingly, learns to hold it without destroying it. And a woman who arrived as collateral and became, by her own deliberate choice, something else entirely.<BR>