Brazen Bratva Daddy: An Age Gap Enemies-to-Lovers Investigative Romance

He has one rule. It has kept his gallery clean and his conscience conveniently unexamined for eleven years. \Never let anyone see past the paintings. Roman Karpov runs the most respected gallery in the city, and underneath its white walls, a laundering operation for the man who built him from nothing when he was nineteen and barely old enough to bury his own father. He adjusts his cufflink whenever he is lying, though nobody has gotten close enough to notice in years. He does his homework on strangers before they can do theirs on him. He has never once let an opening night become anything but a performance, and he has no intention of letting tonight be the exception. Then a woman in a stolen catering badge crashes through the wrong door, drenches him in a tray's worth of stolen champagne, and looks at him like she has already decided he is hiding something worth finding. Penny Monroe does not fall for the men she investigates. She built an entire career on staying separate from every story, camera between herself and the world so nothing could reach her without her permission first. She is only at Roman Karpov's gallery to prove what she already suspects, that his empire is built on something considerably dirtier than provenance paperwork. She is definitely not supposed to notice how carefully he watches her when he thinks she isn't looking, or how much she wants him to be exactly the man he pretends to be at every single opening. But the closer she gets to the truth, the closer she gets to a man who has spent eleven years protecting a secret with other people's lives, a mentor who will not let go quietly, and a mechanism built to survive exactly the kind of woman who might finally take it apart. Now she knows too much to walk away clean, and the only man who might actually keep her safe is the one who lied to her first. He built an entire life around never being fully known. He never planned on the one woman who would find him anyway, and stay.