AFTERHOURS | Adult romance by Sable Marchetti

The velvet rope

House rules

Adults onlyEvery lead is a grown-up. So is every reader.
Consent on the pageAsked out loud. Answered out loud. Every time.
The ending lands happyGuaranteed. That is the whole point of the house.
Heat without apologyThe door does not close. You were warned at the rope.

Scene 22 · Dark revenant romance

Low Water

“He has walked a drowned town every night for sixty-five years, and I am the first living person who can see him.”

Heat: scorching · revenant · he falls first

Greer Hale surveys drowned towns for a living. When the worst drought in a century pulls Colter’s Ferry back out of the reservoir that swallowed it in 1961, the state sends her down alone to record every street and silt-sealed house before the water comes back to claim it.

On her second night a man is standing on the front step of a house that has been underwater since before her mother was born. He is solid. He is warm. His name is Asa Rook, he was murdered the night the dam closed its gates, and he has walked that ground unseen every night for sixty-five years, unable to cross the old town line and unable to die.

The water keeps what it takes and lets go of what is freely given. Proving what was done to Asa, the forged survey, the stolen valley, the body in the churchyard mud, is the one thing that can set him loose from the lake. It is also the one thing that will end him. Greer is good enough at her job to do it, and she understands that with half the survey still ahead of her. She keeps working anyway.

Garrett Amory wants her gone and the valley back under the water before she can prove his family built its fortune on a lie. The drought is breaking. The refill is coming. And every hour Greer steals with a dead man is one she counts down off a clock she winds with her own two hands. So she is going to find a third door, give the water back what it is owed on his terms and not theirs, and keep him anyway.

Low Water is a standalone dark revenant romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.

StandaloneHEA guaranteed18+

Arriving soon Be first at the door Read the full page

Scene 21 · Dark fallen-angel romance

The Fallen Hour

“I was raised to hand the fallen over to the Choir, not to hide one in my clock-tower and fall for him.”

Heat: scorching · forbidden · he falls first

Liora Ashcombe keeps the great clock that weighs the city’s soul. She was raised to know one thing above all others, that the fallen are damned. Then one fell burning out of the broken sky, straight through her roof, and nothing she believed survived the night.

Azrahel weighed souls before the Choir had a name for grace. He fell for telling a truth no one wanted spoken: that for twelve years the man who rules the city has been rigging the scales, marking the innocent into debt and bleeding the poor of their grace so that at the Long Dark he can pour it all into himself and rise a god. He has the proof. He has none of the craft to use it.

She has the machine, and every reason to fear him. But the longer they work in the dark of her tower, the harder it is to remember that he is the monster, and not the only person who ever looked at her and saw more than a pair of hands.

They believe the poor are theirs to spend. They believe a fallen thing cannot be loved. They are about to learn exactly what a keeper will burn down to keep him.

The Fallen Hour is a standalone dark fallen-angel romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.

StandaloneHEA guaranteed18+

Arriving soon Be first at the door Read the full page

EVERY DOOR IN THE HOUSE