Crow's Sirocco (Coastline Kings MC #9)

Prologue

Isla

The lawyer said the word "married" the way other people said the word "terminal."

I made him say it twice.

"Married," Signor Bracco repeated, folding his hands on top of my grandmother's will like he was trying to keep it from flying open and biting someone. "Within the season, Signorina Moretti. That is the condition of the inheritance."

Outside the window behind him, the vineyard rolled down toward the cliff edge in green and silver rows, the same rows my grandmother had walked every morning of her life in a straw hat two sizes too big for her head.

I could see the villa's east wall from here, the shutters faded the color of sea glass, the bougainvillea eating the drainpipe alive.

I could also see, if I squinted, the little white survey flags planted along the cliff path like a row of surrender.

"She can't have meant that literally," I said. "She hated my ex-boyfriends. All four of them. She called Paolo 'the human participation trophy.'"

"She was very specific." Bracco slid a second document across the desk, and I recognized my grandmother's handwriting in the margins, cramped and slanted and utterly unapologetic. "Married, or engaged with a wedding date set within ninety days, or the estate transfers to the trust for liquidation."

"Liquidation," I repeated.

"The Ardente Group has already submitted an offer to the trust. Contingent, obviously, on the property becoming available."

Of course they had. The Ardente Group had been circling this stretch of coastline for two years, buying up clifftop parcels one heartbroken family at a time, turning three hundred years of lemon groves into "boutique wellness residences" with infinity pools that dumped straight into the sea like the sea needed the help.

They wanted my grandmother's villa the way a shark wants the last fish in the tank.

"I don't have a fiancé," I said, which felt like an understatement on the order of I don't currently have a lung.

"Ninety days is not nothing."

"It is when the last man I dated left me for my cousin's dermatologist."

Bracco had the decency not to comment on that.

I drove home along the coast road with the windows down, because the villa's ancient Fiat didn't have air conditioning and hadn't since the Clinton administration, and I let the hot wind do the thing hot wind does, which is make you feel like you're being slowly convinced of something you don't want to believe.

Ninety days.

Married, or engaged with a date, or gone.

I thought about my grandmother's hands, brown and strong, pruning the vines every June like she was disciplining children she loved.

I thought about the smell of lemon oil and salt that lived in the villa's stone walls no matter how many summers passed.

I thought about growing up on that clifftop with the whole gorgeous, terrifying Mediterranean stretched out below me like a dare.

I was not going to hand it to a man in a linen suit who'd never once stood in that vineyard at dawn and felt the whole coast holding its breath.

I just had no idea, yet, how I was going to stop him.

The villa came into view as I rounded the last curve, sun-bleached and stubborn against the cliff, and for one absurd second I swore the shutters looked back at me the way my grandmother used to — like they knew something I didn't.

They did.

His name was Roman. Everyone called him Crow.

I hadn't met him yet. I had ninety days.

I didn't know it, but the clock had already started.