by Lilly Manning
Elena Varela built her career on reading people. Adrian West is the first one who reads her back.
As a crisis intelligence analyst newly recruited by the secretive Directorate, she's trained for difficult assignments. She isn't trained for Adrian West—controlled, severe, infuriatingly attractive, and convinced she has no business in his world of covert operations and lethal drawing rooms.
Their first mission together should be straightforward. Infiltrate an elite private auction at an English country estate, and pose as Mr. and Mrs. Blackwood. Locate a young woman believed to be under coercion before she disappears into a network of stolen art, forged provenance, and powerful people who prefer their crimes wrapped in silk and champagne.
But covers have a way of becoming complicated. In public, they stand close enough to convince a room full of watchers they belong together. In private, every correction, every touch, every near-miss turns the performance into something harder to dismiss. Adrian is all control and restraint—a man shaped by one failure he refuses to repeat. Elena is the one variable he can't manage, and the one woman he can't seem to keep at a safe distance.
When the mission moves from the estate to a luxury yacht on the Thames, the line between performance and desire finally breaks. To save the woman they came for, they'll have to trust each other with more than the operation.
By the time the cover falls, neither of them will be able to pretend it was ever only a lie. EARNED is a slow-burn romantic suspense novella featuring fake marriage, forced proximity, and an enemies-to-lovers dynamic set against the backdrop of London's most dangerous social circles. Book I of The Alias Series.
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