Description

About The Assassin’s Alibi

Someone put us in the same bar. Nobody put us in the same bed.

I fix problems for the Marlow family. I don’t ask what the rooms are for, and I never keep the names.

So when a client stands me up at a hotel bar, I set terms for the stranger two stools down. No names. No kissing. Gone by one.

He’s enormous. He says about four words an hour. He asks before he touches me, and then he takes me apart. I leave at a quarter past one with his teeth marks under my collar.

By morning a crime boss is dead on the other side of the city. By Sunday night my employer has slid a photograph across his desk.

Mikhail Orlov. Contract killer. My one-night stand.

There’s a contract with my signature on it that says I hired him. There’s a picture of the two of us at that bar. And at eleven-forty, the minute the shot was fired, he was inside me and I was looking at the clock.

He’s the only proof I didn’t do it. I’m the only proof he didn’t.

Now two crime families want us in the same hole. My accounts are frozen, my own people shot at me through a restaurant window, and I’m hiding on a cliff in a glass house with one chair, one mattress, and a man nobody has ever asked what he wants.

We can’t tell anyone where we were that night.

We can’t seem to stop ending up there again.

The Assassin’s Alibi is a dark, high-heat MM romantic suspense with a silent hitman and the mob lawyer who never shuts up, a one-night stand that turns into an alibi, forced proximity, only one bed, terms negotiated out loud, a dark blue silk tie, on-page violence, a lot of on-page spice, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA. Dual first-person POV. Standalone.

Why readers will love it

A contract killer who says four words an hour and asks before every touch
A fixer in a thousand-dollar suit who sets three rules for a one-night stand, then breaks every one
“No names. No kissing. Gone by one.”
A glass house on a cliff with one chair, one mattress, and a man learning to want a table
A frame-up taken apart with a valet stub, a hotel lock log, and two hours and forty-eight minutes of a closed door
A vote on everything, including who gets to be the bait

Ebook edition details

Format: Digital EPUB ebook (not a paperback or audiobook). Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno. Audience: Adults 18+.

Content notes

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including rough sex, praise, edging, wrists restrained with a necktie, rimming, and both leads topping and bottoming; all on-page sex is consensual and negotiated), on-page violence (a shootout, deaths by gunshot, a man shot in the leg, a strangulation, a burn injury), the on-page killing of the antagonist by a lead character, a past contract killing by drowning recounted in detail (the victim was an innocent man; it is not excused), an implied off-page execution, organized crime, police corruption, a framing for murder, witness intimidation and coerced settlements in a lead’s past (recounted and reckoned with), financial coercion involving a character’s parents’ home, a threat of arson, alcohol, and strong language. No sexual violence, no dub-con, no cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

Read Chapter One free · Prefer audio? See the audiobook edition · More books by Rafe Calder