He’s a bad man and she knows it. But sometimes the bad ones are the hardest to resist.

Penny Miller is lonely and bored. By day she works at a library; by night she mixes cocktails in a seedy neighbourhood bar. At twenty-two she’s given up her dreams of college and lives with her grandmother on the miserable outskirts of the city, longing for the kind of romance she reads about in books—love with a capital L.

Then Marcus Drake moves into the apartment upstairs. He’s nothing like the charming man of Penny’s dreams: he’s rude, covered in tattoos, and out on parole. He’s also sexy, and very, very dangerous.

There’s instant hostility between them, but when Penny has to turn to Marcus for help they come to an arrangement—and soon she’s struggling to keep it professional. Because with her traumatic memories and his dark past, her innocence and his passion, getting involved with Marcus might be what breaks her heart for good.

Amabile Giusti lives in Calabria, Italy. She’s a lawyer but doesn’t feel like one. She has been writing novels since 2009 and is always working out how best to start or finish a story, even when she’s at work. She loves reading Jane Austen novels as well as Japanese mangas, collecting blue china and tending to her collection of cacti—the thornier the better. She hopes to age as slowly as possible, because she wants to live to one hundred but always stay young inside. She’s a great listener but not very chatty, although when she starts writing she just can’t stop.

This is her ninth novel, and the second to be translated into English. She has ideas for many, many more.

A resident of New York City, Hillary Locke studied Spanish and Italian literature and translates from the Romance languages into English. When she’s not running along the East River or reading in Tomkins Square Park, she likes to travel around the world and listen to beautiful languages she doesn’t understand.