He never touched her. He just let me believe he did.

Juliet Arceneaux was the price of a debt. Four hundred and eighty thousand dollars, settled with her father's signature and a wedding at St. Louis Cathedral. The groom: Adrian Fabbri, eldest son and underboss of the most powerful crime family in New Orleans. The man she'd fallen for before anyone bothered to ask her.

On their wedding night, he left her alone in the bridal suite. He has never once come to her bed.

Two years later, Juliet lives in his grand house on Prytania Street like a woman made of glass. She plays her cello. She smiles at family parties. At night, she counts the church bells. Behind her back, the family calls her the replacement, the girl who took the place of Noelle Theriot, the woman Adrian was supposed to marry first. And Noelle is back. She sits at his bar four nights a week, wearing his cufflinks as earrings.

On Twelfth Night, Juliet gets the baby in the king cake. That night she calls her husband. A woman answers.

Juliet gives herself until Mardi Gras. Then she's gone.

But Adrian has his reasons, and he shares them with no one. He stays away because he refuses to become his father. And the woman at his bar isn't there for him. A war is coming up the river, and Adrian is playing his part so well that even his own wife believes it.

Five weeks of Carnival. Parades, masked balls, king cake and bullets. A man who never learned how to ask. A woman who will never be bought again.

And a truth that might come too late.

The Replacement Bride is a dark, dual-POV mafia romance with a slow burn two years in the making and an antihero who has to learn, on his knees, the difference between asking and taking.

Tropes: arranged marriage · misunderstanding and perceived infidelity · grovel · possessive antihero · married strangers · New Orleans at Mardi Gras · high spice

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