He knows exactly who she is. She has no idea what he’s done.
Detective Nero Lucente left Ohio twenty years ago after a police raid ended in tragedy. Now he’s back with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Sadie, and investigating a string of murders connected to the powerful Casamassima family.
Lina Casamassima was born the night her mother died. Raised inside a prominent family surrounded by wealth, loyalty, and danger, she is being prepared for a future in the family business while trying to build a life of her own.
After Lina saves Sadie from a deliberate hit-and-run, Nero goes to the hospital to thank her. He is a detective, an outsider, and exactly the kind of man Lina’s family would warn her to avoid. That should make it easy to keep her distance.
It doesn’t.
Gratitude turns into attraction, and attraction becomes something neither of them can keep at a safe distance. But Lina doesn’t know that Nero is investigating murders connected to her family. She doesn’t know he has been carrying a secret since the night her mother died.
Nero knows the truth from the moment he sees her. Lina is Teresina Casamassima’s daughter, the baby delivered after Nero shot her mother twenty years ago.
When Lina finally learns what Nero did, the relationship they’ve begun is thrown into doubt. Before either of them can decide what comes next, Sadie is kidnapped.
With no other option, Nero asks Lina’s family for help. They may be his only chance of finding his daughter in time, but accepting their assistance brings Lina directly into the danger surrounding him. And despite everything she now knows, Lina can't walk away from either of them.
The Darling and the Detective is a steamy mafia romantic suspense featuring a forbidden age-gap romance, a protective single father, a determined heroine, a dangerous family legacy, high-stakes secrets, a kidnapping rescue, and a love story tested by betrayal.
