Vows of Black Velvet

Every marriage is a contract. Hers had a clause she didn't read.

Celia Vale can date a canvas by the way its varnish has yellowed. Four hours in a shuttered house on the coast, one lamp, and a painting nobody has seen in ninety years: The Mourning Bride, a woman in black silk with the sea at her back and one glove already off.

It is the finest thing she has ever put her hands on.

It is also wrong.

The man who summoned her is Luca Vetrano, and he does not want an appraisal. He wants a signature. Celia's name on a certificate of provenance is worth more than the painting itself, and he has spent a year working out exactly what it would cost to buy it. Not in money, which she would refuse. In the one currency she has never learned to price.

So he offers a marriage. Twelve months, terms in writing, an ending already agreed. She reads every line before she signs, because reading is what she is for.

She still misses the one that matters.

What follows is an auction, a lie four generations deep, and the slow unmaking of the only rule Celia has ever kept: never fall for the thing you are being paid to believe in.

Luca is patient, exacting, and entirely honest about what he is. That is the problem. A liar she could catalogue. A man who tells her the truth and takes her anyway is something she has no test for.

By the time the hammer falls on lot two-one-nine, one of them will have forged something that cannot be undone.

VOWS OF BLACK VELVET is a standalone contemporary dark romance. Obsessive antihero, marriage of convenience, enemies to lovers, and a heroine who is nobody's victim. No cheating, and no cliffhanger between the leads: they end the book together and the story between them is finished. But it is a happy ever after they both go on paying for, and the last page opens a door rather than closing one.

Content note: explicit sexual content, on-page violence, coercion within a negotiated relationship, surveillance, organised crime, and a parent living with dementia. Intended for readers 18+. Coldharrow Press prints a full content list at the front of every book.