THE SAFEST LIE

Jorie Falk finds the number that doesn’t belong. It’s what she does — the transaction in a clean set of books that shouldn’t exist, the timing pattern that looks like operational variance until you run it twice. She is very good at this.

Then she finds one that belongs to a federal oversight official, and the DOJ shows up with two investigators instead of one.

Now she’s in a safehouse with a deputy marshal whose briefing file on her includes her coffee subscription from a Columbus roaster with no national distribution — which means someone researched her well past standard intake — and three weeks until a deposition she intends to give in full.

Before Jorie can finish the secondary audit she’s been running on the handler-issued laptop since Day 4, there’s a briefing document that uses “manage” four times and “protect” zero times, a compromised safehouse that gives them twelve minutes to run, a former partner spotted at a gas station on a federal transit route in a context with no legitimate explanation, and the moment he reads what the program’s operational directive actually says about why she was assigned him specifically.

She’s spent twelve years trusting the numbers more than her instincts about people, because the numbers never have a motive. He’s spent fifteen years protecting witnesses inside a system he believed deserved his loyalty, and he’s been wrong about the system for longer than he’s willing to calculate.

Romantic suspense where the danger is institutional and the trust is hard-won from both sides. The kind of book where the most dangerous thing either of them does is hand the other the working draft.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Protection/protector scores a Sales vs. Competition Index of 80 (second-highest in the entire RS genre set) with a +1 year-over-year trend — the highest-efficiency trope execution path in the category right now

→ Romance > Action & Adventure sits at 4.6 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 171 daily sales per top 20 title — the clean secondary stack that hedges the RS parent category’s -91% decline

→ Forensic accountant heroine is the only unused professional angle in the protection RS lane — law enforcement, military, and medical dominate; she discovers the crime through numbers; differentiated at the keyword level before any cover decision is made

→ Corrupt-institution plot solves the protection romance’s structural problem — the hero has genuine internal conflict when the system he works for is the threat; the “danger/dangerous” element (index 80, tied) is embedded in the premise without a manufactured antagonist

→ 4-book series with rotating witness/handler pairs and an overarching corruption thread positions this for RS series readthrough — the model that keeps Brittney Sahin’s Falcon Falls and Stealth Ops catalogues in the top 100

TROPES:
• Forced proximity
• Bodyguard/protectee
• Competence as foreplay
• Betrayal from within
• He underestimates her
• On the run
• She figures it out first
• Enemies to allies
• Secret she’s keeping for his protection

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / Steamy
*includes Dial the Heat™ guide to adjust heat level

Perfect for fans of: Brittney Sahin, Ana Huang, Kendra Elliot, and Tana French