He can read everyone in the room. She's the one person he can't.
Garrett Walsh has been the institutional memory of Rowe Capital for eleven years - the one man who knows exactly what the firm was, and stayed anyway. Now the firm is cooperating, the feds want to depose him first, and a widower who's been quietly dead for three years is about to be asked the one thing he built his whole self to avoid: the truth, out loud, on the record.
Then his counsel walks in.
Nora Castellan is independent, unimpeachable, and supposed to have no stake in any of it - which is the entire point of her, and a lie she can disclose to no one. She didn't take this case. She hunted it. Because the man across her table is the only person alive who sat opposite her father's silence, and her father is dead, and the truth about who he became is buried somewhere in eleven years of transactions only Garrett can read.
He clocks her secret on the third day. He chooses not to use it.
What grows between them - late nights, two sandwiches, a kiss neither can afford - is the most alive either has been since the worst thing that ever happened to them. But Garrett is sitting on a buried page he hasn't shown her, Nora is pulling a thread she hasn't shown him, and both threads run to the same place: a second crime family, a vacuum two officials left when they resigned, and a name that will cost them everything to say aloud.
They swore an eyes-open love - the kind where you know exactly what the other person is, and stay anyway. They just forgot to keep their own eyes open.
QUIET MONEY is a slow-burn, high-heat, morally grey contemporary romance between two established adults who already survived their first lives - and have to decide whether they're brave enough to risk a second. Book Two of the Rowe Capital Series. Complete standalone. Guaranteed HEA.
- High heat - explicit on the page
- Slow burn - widower hero - age-equal "reverse age gap" of two grown adults
- Grief romance - healing through competence - forced-proximity, workplace-adjacent
