A crime thriller romance for readers who like their heroes morally gray and their heroines armored. Content-forward. Slow burn. Not a soft romance.

Jade Monroe doesn't take risks. After the criminal underworld claimed her father, she built a fortress of a life: a respectable banking career, triple-locked doors, and rules she never breaks.

Then she meets Cristóbal "Crimson" De León, the Afro-Cuban head of a Brooklyn syndicate who runs his world without ever raising his voice.

He offers her a job. She knows exactly what he is. She takes it anyway.

What begins as a lucrative arrangement becomes something neither of them planned, an obsessive, disciplined, slow-burning pull that neither can outrun. But when an enemy from her father's past resurfaces, Crimson shatters his own rules to protect her. And when Jade discovers that her detective brother-in-law is leading a federal investigation into everything Crimson has built, she's forced toward an impossible choice: the family she swore to protect, or the dangerous man who finally made her feel safe.

CRIMSON is Book One of The De León Dynasty, a five-book crime romance series about what we inherit from our fathers, and what we refuse to. For readers of Beverly Jenkins, Brenda Jackson, and anyone who loves interconnected family sagas with ruthless men and unbreakable women.

READER EXPECTATIONS — PLEASE READ BEFORE REQUESTING:

This is a crime thriller romance with mature themes. It is a slow burn; the central relationship develops across the full arc, not in the first chapters. It ends on a cliffhanger that sets up Book Two.

Content includes: violence consistent with a crime setting; mature sexual content (on the page, not explicit); references to past abuse of a minor (not depicted in graphic real-time detail); parental death and grief; a power imbalance within the central relationship, examined rather than glossed over; and organized crime and drug trade as central plot elements.

If you read and review crime fiction, romantic suspense, dark romance, or morally gray romance, this book was written for you. If you prefer lighthearted or low-conflict romance, this may not be the right fit, and that's completely okay.