Roman Vows

To save her family's vineyard, Giulia Bellandi marries the one man she has been taught to hate.

Matteo Orsini is the ruthless heir of the house that ruined her father. He reads her the terms in a notary's studio in Via Giulia, cold as marble: separate wings of the palazzo, a driver for every journey, no dinners with his uncle, and one door in the courtyard she is forbidden ever to open. The family chapel.

She signs, because the alternative is losing the land her mother planted. She wears his ring. She sleeps under a ceiling of painted gods and eats her dinners at the far end of a very long table.

But the man who forbids her the chapel leaves a peach on a plate outside her door. He turns up at the harvest in work boots. He cooks carbonara at midnight and, for one unguarded minute, laughs. And when Giulia finds her father's handwriting in the Orsini archives, in a letter that should not exist, she begins to understand that her husband is not guarding her from his family's power. He is guarding her from the truth about the night her mother died.

Thirty years ago a fire took Lucia Bellandi. Two families have lied about it ever since. Now someone in the palazzo is reporting her every move, a car runs her off the Appian Way in the rain, and a court-appointed inspector is coming to count the toothbrushes in a marriage that was supposed to be a contract. One bed. One sofa. One kiss by the fire that neither of them can take back.

With a half-burned ledger, a key buried under a peach tree, and one memorial Mass on the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, Giulia and Matteo have a single chance to make the guilty say her mother's name.

A slow-burn, emotional romance with a guarded and devoted hero, a heroine who refuses to be managed, a warm cast of Roman eccentrics, a tuxedo cat who owns the loggia, and a love story that ripens, like the grape, only when the weather agrees.