The Queen Of Raven County

She was the price of a deal she never agreed to.Clara Whitaker spent twenty-eight years learning how to walk into a room and make it believe she belonged. It's the one skill that might keep her alive now.Her father, the governor, needed money and cover. The Rourkes needed a name the county would fear standing beside. So they shook hands over her future, and three weeks later Clara found herself married into the most powerful family in Raven County, a family that holds an entire Appalachian mountain the way other people hold a grudge, quiet and total and for generations.Her husband, Lucas, tells her the truth from the first day: this is not a courtship. It's a transaction, and she is the terms.But Lucas Rourke is not what the county's careful whispers made him out to be. And Clara is not the soft, sheltered thing her own father sold up the mountain. As a rival family starts cutting fence lines in the dark and a threat with her name on it moves closer, Clara discovers that the man she was traded to may be the only person in either family who has never once lied to her.Then she overhears something that changes everything, and learns her marriage was never the deal she thought it was.To survive Raven County, Clara will have to become someone new. Someone hard enough to hold a mountain. Someone the whole county will one day call by a single, dangerous word.Queen.The Queen of Raven County is the first book in the Rourke Family Saga, a slow-burn Appalachian saga of arranged marriage, loyalty, betrayal, and a love forged where power and danger have been married so long nobody can tell where one stops. For readers who love brooding antiheroes, fierce heroines who refuse to break, and family empires with blood in the foundation.